Francis let them in and satisfied himself that Minton had not returned that night - he was probably still out trawling for the sailors who had done Josh in. Bacon showed Josh the bathroom so he could clean himself up and walked up the stairs to the studio attached to the side of the house.

Bacon had already colonised this studio, as if his soul were a skip he had voided there. If Deakin’s studio was an analogue of creativity, Bacon’s nightmarish vaults of detritus were paradigms of genius. Diarrhoeic blatterings of paint covered walls, doors and curtains. On shelves and chairs, paintbrushes sprouted from old jam pots like masts in a marina and fifteen pairs of spectacles suffered from dusty glaucoma. Pathways did exist between the pagodas of newspaper, the old Daz boxes, the tins of turpentine and linseed oil, the international magazines, the gilt-edged invitations and empty claret bottles, the broken easels, the odd mournful looking tome of art theory or criticism; but, like a river pilot, you had to know the place in your bones, and only Francis could do that. Now, without turning on the lights, he stood in the midst of his domain as the first stirrings of day lightened the sky beyond the glass roof and, with one hand smoothing his hair back behind one ear and tugging at his collar, he contemplated a canvas propped on an easel in a corner.

It was a largish canvas, six-foot-six tall and four-foot-six wide, and it was largely blank, the natural, unpainted colour of parcel-paper-brown predominating. The only paint appeared slightly above the half-way point in a horizontal band: old-fashioned cars ran along what looked like a corniche, behind which was a single palm tree and a hesitant line of pale blue which the eye naturally saw as sea. Several times, Francis stepped up to then backed away from this scarcely started painting, narrowing his eyes and cocking his head on one side like a - well, like a dog hearing an unfamiliar sound. I have seen the completed version of this painting - it is owned by Tate Britain and periodically on display there - and so I know how he finished it. Though the painting is a minor work of Bacon’s there is something extremely unusual about it in terms of his canon: it offers a visual escape.

Almost all of Bacon’s subjects, be they popes or sides of meat, people he knew or hellish monsters, are locked into a proscribed world consisting variously of walls and ceilings, plinths, beds and even the suggestion of glass boxes, and rarely, if ever, doors. It is almost without exception a locked-in, indoors world featuring domestic but oddly solace-free touches such as bare lightbulbs, chairs, toilets, patterned carpets and striped mattresses. This is life and, for our brief spasm of consciousness between the void from which we spring and the void to which we return, there is no escaping the horror of it. Except that in the then unfinished painting propped on the easel in Apollo Place, the night that Josh came to stay, there is a way out. When things get too hairy in the foreground, as one knows they will, you can step into the back of the painting, cross the corniche and stand in the shade of that palm tree contemplating the ocean. You can even immerse yourself in that ocean. Is this the happiest painting that Bacon ever painted?

‘Where do I go?’ said Josh. He stood in the doorway to the studio, looking around in wonder at the clutter. His face was washed of blood, his nose was swollen and blue on the bridge.
Francis smiled. ‘Where would you like to go? There if you like.’ He pointed at the blank space on the canvas.