Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt

dinner table. All the same I’m pleased she’s asked me early to give a hand because she’s one of the few women to appear regularly on Francis’s nightly round and although I’m amused and flattered to be part of it I sometimes find the homosexual atmosphere suffocating and I crave female company.
    I’ve found out quite a bit about Sonia from Francis, who often talks about her when she’s not there. He seems to be drawn to her mainly by her unhappiness. ‘She’s always been unhappy,’ he says. ‘I don’t really know why. Cyril Connolly once said to me, “The very idea of Sonia being happy is obscene.” She had two disastrous marriages. She married Orwell on his death bed when he had only weeks to live, and then she married Michael Pitt-Rivers, who had been charged with buggery during that whole Montagu affair. Sonia knew he was queer of course but decided she could change him or some nonsense, and of course that didn’twork. She was very beautiful and a lot of men have been in love with her. She had an affair with the philosopher Merleau-Ponty in Paris that lasted for a while, basically because he treated her just as a sort of English blonde. There’ve been all kinds of other people, but it’s never really worked. Most of her real friends are women, and I’ve often wondered whether she wasn’t
au fond
lesbian. She’s always wanted to be with artists and writers, you know she worked with Connolly on
Horizon
, and I think she wanted to write herself but it’s never worked either and so I suppose that’s also been a frustration. But she has found a kind of role by giving all these dinner parties where she brings English and French people together. That’s the rather marvellous, generous side to her. She’s created a kind of salon where people can meet and talk, and that is of course a very rare thing nowadays and a very valuable one.’
    There’s plenty of talk this evening. Sonia has been drinking all through the evening, and even when she was making her
boeuf bourguignon
she was pouring one glass into the stew and another for herself regularly, so now she’s a bit red-faced and bleary-eyed and argumentative. She keeps repeating things like ‘
Mais c’est fondamental!
 ’ or ‘
Il n’a rien compris
’ or ‘
C’est un faux problème
’ very emphatically, although it’s less and less clear what she’s referring to. Leiris is very courteous to her and that seems to calm her down a bit. Lucian is polite, too, but he looks abstracted and a little bored and he has already announced that he has to leave straight after dinner. Sylvester I find rather ponderous, but he’s made some good remarks, first about
Macbeth
, which is one of Francis’s favourite plays, then about the rue des Saints-Pères which is apparently where Francis stays when he goes to Paris. ‘I often wonder’, he booms, as Sonia ladles another helping of the
boeuf
on to his plate, ‘why there isn’t a rue des Impairs!’ I wish I’d been able to say that, but I reason it would sound more odd than witty coming from a student. I also wonder whether Sylvester hadn’t prepared the remark or heard it elsewhere, and I focus more on following the conversation rather than trying to joinin, even though I mentally prepare what I hope are a few fluent phrases in French. Whenever I do say something, however brief, Sonia rounds on me with a ‘
Soyez pas idiot!
 ’, so I decide simply to keep mum. I’m fascinated by Leiris’s face, which is inhabited by numerous tics, but I’m also fascinated by how formal he is, tightly buttoned up in his suit and speaking in long sentences full of subordinate clauses and a regular use of the present and even the past subjunctive. Somehow I had imagined a kind of Left Bank intellectual in black clothes and possibly even dark glasses,