Whos Julian? I asked absent-mindedly.
The boy-friend, of course. I told you. He painted the Coke bright yellow. Fauve[140], she added in a defiant way.
He paints, does he?
Thats why he thinks the Easts very important to him. You know, like Tahiti was for Gauguin. He wants to experience the East before he starts on his big project. Let me take the Coke.
There was less than an hours wait at Venice, but the dark was falling when we pulled out and I saw nothing at all I might have been leaving Clapham for Victoria. Tooley sat with me and drank one of her Cokes. I asked her what her boy-friends project was.
He wants to do a series of enormous pictures of Heinz soups in fabulous colours, so a rich man could have a different soup in each room in his apartment say fish soup in the bedroom, potato soup in the dining-room, leek soup in the drawing-room, like they used to have family portraits. There would be these fabulous colours, all fauve. And the cans would give a sort of unity do you see what I mean? It would be kind of intimate you wouldnt break the mood every time you changed rooms. Like you do now if you have de Stael[141] in one room and a Rouault[142] in another.
The memory of something I had seen in a Sunday supplement came back to me. I said, Surely somebody once did paint a Heinz soup tin?
Not Heinz, Campbells, Tooley said. That was Andy Warhol. I said the same thing to Julian when he first told me of the project. Of course, I said, Heinz and Campbell are not a bit the same shape. Heinz is sort of squat and Campbells are long like English pillar-boxes. I love your pillar-boxes. They are fabulous. But Julian said that wasnt the point. He said that there are certain subjects which belong to a certain period and culture. Like the Annunciation did. Botticelli wasnt put off because Piero della Francesca[143] had done the same thing. He wasnt an imitator. And think of all the Nativities. Well, Julian says, we sort of belong to the soup age only he didnt call it that. He said it was the Art of the Techno-Structure. In a way, you see, the more people who paint soups the better. It creates a culture. One Nativity wouldnt have been any use at all. It wouldnt have been noticed.
I was badly out of my depth with Tooley in terms of culture and of human experience. She was closer to my aunt: she would never, I felt sure, have criticized Mr. Visconti: she would have accepted him, as she accepted Julians project, a voyage to Istanbul, my company, her baby.
Where does your mother live?
I guess shes in Bonn at the moment. She married a man on Time-Life who covers West Germany and Eastern Europe, so they move around a lot. Like Father. Do you want a cigarette?
Not for me. And youd better wait till were past the next frontier.
It was nearly nine-thirty in the evening when we arrived at Sezana. A surly passport man looked at us as though we were Imperialist spies. Old women heavily laden with small parcels came down the unplatformed track, making for the third-class. They emerged from everywhere like a migration, even from between the goods trucks which stood uncoupled all along the line looking as though they would never be linked together. No one else joined the train: no one got off. There were no lights, no waiting-room in sight, it was cold and the heating had not been turned on. On the road beyond if there was a road no cars passed. No railway hotel offered a welcome.
Im cold, Tooley said. Im going to bed. She offered to leave me a cigarette, but I refused. I didnt want to be compromised on this cold frontier. Another uniformed man looked in and regarded my new suitcase on the rack with hatred.
At moments during the night I woke in Ljubljana, in Zagreb but there was nothing to be seen except the lines of stationary rolling-stock which looked abandoned, as though nothing was left anywhere to put in the trucks, no one had the energy any more to roll them, and it was only our train which steamed on impelled by a foolish driver who hadnt realized that the world had stopped and there was nowhere for us to go.
At Belgrade, Tooley and I had breakfast in the station hotel dry bread and jam and bad coffee, and we bought a bottle of sweet white wine for lunch, but they had no sandwiches. I let my aunt sleep on: it was not a meal worth waking her to share.
Why are you two going to Istanbul? Tooley asked, taking a spoonful of jam she had given up trying to crumble the bread.
She likes to travel, I said.
But why to Istanbul?
I havent asked her.
In the fields horses moved slowly along, dragging harrows. We were back in the pre-industrial age. Tooley and I were both depressed, yet it wasnt the lowest point of our journey; that came as evening fell in Sofia, and we tried to buy something to eat, but no one would take any money but Bulgarian except at an exorbitant rate[144], and even when I agreed to that, there were only tepid sausages on sale made of some coarse unrecognizable meat and chocolate cake made of a chocolate substitute and pink fizzy wine. I hadnt seen my aunt all day except once when she looked in on us and refused Tooleys last bar of chocolate and said sadly and unexpectedly, I loved chocolate once. I am growing old.