An Artist and a Magician Read online

  ‘Stop it stop it stop it—’

  ‘And you’ll never leave Rome, never. You’ll go on with a red rubber nose stuck on your face and laugh and perform as you’re pelted with rotten apples, and you’ll eat shit, all the shit in the world, and you’ll swear it tastes like nectar, and you’ll be my lackey, my servant, my slave. And I’ll live to be a hundred years old, and even when your liver’s given out and you’re crippled I’ll still drag you from your bed and make you dance for me, grovel for me, lie for me. And I’ll never free you, and I’ll never give you the money to leave. Never, never, never!’

  And finally Wilbur could take it no more. He had to stop it. And raising the magic wand that Bernard had thrust into his hand, and holding it against the huge hard belly looming over him, crushing him, he squeezed it….

  He didn’t know which was more shattering; the bang, or the silence that followed. The silence that was only broken by the slow, soft bump of Bernard crumpling backwards onto the floor, the whole of his old yellow shirt stained and splattered with blood….

  Wilbur didn’t move for almost a minute; simply staring at the smoking gun in his hand, and telling himself that he had killed someone. He had killed someone … And not by magic now. Now he had actually killed someone; actually, materially, murdered someone. He had taken a human life….

  But after a minute, though he was still too utterly stunned to know exactly what he was doing, he stood up; stood up and stared, now, at Bernard’s bleeding, shattered body. He stared at it not to see better the crime he had committed; but because that body, lying on the floor, was shaking. And it wasn’t—yet—shaking with death throes, nor even with pain. It was shaking—with laughter….

  And after he had stared at it for another few seconds, Wilbur suddenly, sickeningly, and without the slightest doubt, knew what the dying old man was laughing about.

  ‘Bernard,’ he whispered, his voice no more than the thinnest thread in that dark, gloomy room, ‘you did it on purpose.’

  ‘Well of course I did,’ his old friend cackled—with surprising strength. ‘Of course I did you ninny.’

  ‘Oh Bernard …’

  ‘But stop wasting time. Get a handkerchief and wipe your fingerprints off the gun and give it to me.’

  It was a dream. An awful dream. A nightmare….

  ‘Go on, do what I say. Quickly.’

  Slowly, in a dream, Wilbur did it; and Bernard took the gun in his right hand.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ the old man gasped, ‘I thought you might kill me right out. So I left instructions here for you, and an explanation.’ He indicated, with a twitch, the sheet of paper in his other hand. ‘Now take this, take it home and burn it.’

  In a dream, Wilbur stooped, and removed the sheet of paper from the little white hand, and put it in his pocket.

  ‘Now get out of here. And make sure no one sees you leaving. Go and tell everyone you spent the evening at home.’ Again, though agonizingly now, and with a dribble of blood from the corners of his little turned down mouth, Bernard cackled. ‘I’ve left a suicide note on the desk in my study. And as the doctor told me yesterday—though I knew it anyway—that I had a very serious heart condition, everyone’ll think that I had one last magnificent dinner with a friend—they need never know who, if you keep your mouth shut—and then decided not to wait for mother nature to do her work. I always was an impatient old bugger.’

  ‘But why?’ Wilbur moaned, beginning at last, however terrifyingly, to see some logic in the nightmare.

  ‘Why do you think?’ Bernard cackled, even more bloodily. ‘It was all just a joke. You always had this great thing about making art and life one. And when I refused you money—you killed me. So now they really are one. And now you’ll never be able to separate them again. It was all,’ he repeated, ‘just a joke.’

  ‘Oh Bernard …’

  ‘Now get out of here.’

  ‘You don’t want me to wait?’

  ‘Good God no. And anyway, it won’t be long now. It’s starting to hurt like hell.’

  ‘But I can’t just—’

  ‘Oh get out,’ Bernard hissed.

  And so, slowly, Wilbur bent over and kissed his old dying friend—who whispered, with a final cackle, ‘I told you I’d taken care of you in my will’—and then, even more slowly, started, with only one backward glance, to leave the room. And then to leave the apartment. And he was almost at the door before he heard Bernard, very weakly, call, ‘Wilbur?’

  ‘Yes, you old fool,’ he called softly back.

  ‘Take care.’

  What more?

  Two months later—two months which he spent just camping out in his apartment, writing and waiting for Bernard’s extremely generous legacy to come through—Wilbur, having put everything he possessed into storage, left Rome. He didn’t know precisely where he was going—having chosen a cargo boat that left Naples and made lots of different stops, all round the world; including, eventually, Naples again—nor did he really care. He simply—left. With a small suitcase in one hand, Philip in a cat-basket in another, the now almost completed manuscript of his novel in a shoulder bag—and oh, it was going to be good; he’d really done it this time; he’d really gone all the way—and an unease as cold and heavy as a head-stone in his heart.

  But though he did feel this unease, and knew, now, that it would never leave him, he didn’t—and this was perhaps the one thing that ensured it would never leave him—altogether regret it. Because in spite of all the events of the last year, in spite, even, of the fact that he was a murderer, he couldn’t help feeling and being aware that his life—and therefore his art—was, as a result, immeasurably richer. In fact, he told himself, his unease was only a sort of tax he would henceforth have to pay; a tax on the value that had been added to his life….

  And so saying, he set sail; just adding, as his small black ship moved out into the glorious, polluted, summer-blue bay of Naples, that since this story had started with a tax on added value, it was highly suitable that on this note it should end.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Hugh Fleetwood, 1977

  The right of Hugh Fleetwood to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–30476–9