Читать книгу She May Not Leave - Fay Weldon - Страница 8

Sebastian is allowed two visitors once a week, if all goes smoothly at the Bijlmer prison, and so far it has. The authorities encourage him to paint. They changed his cell so that he could stand an easel up in it. They like their prisoners to be creative. They can hang his paintings on the walls of that bleak place. He is, after all, a Royal Academician. He cooks excellent curries for other prisoners in his block. No one has raped him or even sworn at him. The wardens address him as Mr Watt. Even so, the Bijlmer is a horrible, frightening, noisy, clanging, terrible place, but villains are villains only some of the time and if you are careful to be out of their way when they are in violent criminal mode, you can get by. So Sebastian tells us.

But I want him home where he’s safe, and can hear birdsong. I try not to think of him too much. He paints in oils: the house still smells of them, though the turps is drying up in the jam jars and the brushes stiffening: sometimes I catch a movement out of the corner of my eye and see what can only be his shadow through the open door of the attic. I never knew before now that the living could haunt a place. But Sebastian manages. It’s a kind of company but I would rather have the real thing. Sebastian became an RA twenty-five years ago; he had his name in the gossip columns and an exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery. He was once a member of the Arts Council, but no longer. He went on painting landscapes in frames long after everyone else had stopped. He is an idealist and a romantic. This is why he is in trouble.

Sebastian believes in the right of the artist to live in whatever state of mind they choose, natural or one that is chemically induced, drugs also being God-given. In the same way, he tells me, that women with pale lips choose to use lipstick to make them brighter. He denies the right of Government to deny choice to the individual. He is perfectly intelligent in other ways, and indeed charming, but he does not hear me when I say, in my mother Wanda’s voice, that a principle so convenient can hardly be counted as a principle, it is too laced with self-interest.

Sebastian, after the manner of men, tends to be deaf to uncomfortable truths. He believes himself to be a favourite of the God who gave him his artistic gift. His defence lawyer described him as paraphrenic – a person sane in all respects except one. His capacity for trust is pathological. He would meet up with his criminal associates in the Royal Academy restaurant, thinking that was perfect cover, though the ladies up from the provinces would look askance over their quiche and the white wine at the expensive, flashy suits and talk knowingly about ‘bling’. When he was in Holland and fingered by these friends of his, Sebastian was the only one surprised. That is my reading of the situation. He never told me the detail. He was ashamed.