Goya'S Dog (10 page)

Dacres moved onto his front to see if he would find any sleep in the crevice between the evil-smelling cot and the wall. There were shrieks up above and then a horse tried to gallop down the stairs and then outside his door one child was screaming and another laughing and then both were screaming. Mrs. Bark yelled at them to be quiet twice, three times, four.

Dacres smelled frying: fish. Kippers? A new title for the film of his life struck him:
Dacres, or The Generosity of Hoteliers
.

He shut his eyes, tight.

But I wonder: is it only since you are gone that my life has no shape. Would I be shapeless with you? I wonder: does the shape of the life come from within or without. Do you draw the form or the space around the form?

I think now I have had to live around the loss of you. Your loss like a black bruise or the knot in the wood. So what could I ever be, trying to grow around it, but crooked timber? But of course I never loved you well enough did I, Evelyn. Not as you deserved. Well perhaps.

God, this voice you provoke in me.

Enough sentimentalism. You said my self-pity was as wide as the Amazon. So you'd be angry with me now, you'd hit me with a handkerchief and I, I would smell the scent in the air.

My landlady is not you, Edelweiss is not you, Gorren is not you, Leo is not you, nor is Mr. Bowes. None of the hallucinations in the street are you, Evelyn. This is a long thin house lacking in purpose. Nor do I dream about you.

Soon it will be our anniversary: I will throw a jewelled ring into a lagoon and end it all.

Portrait of a man on a strange bed, writing a letter to his dead wife.

Beside one table at stage left at the Lion Grill there was a mirror, and Dacres made that table his own, staring at his own face, practising aristocratic grimaces.

He spent his mornings there reading the newspapers endlessly—the habit he had never shaken, no matter the quality of the newspaper—and they told him about the sugar situation; they told him that yes, a U-boat had sunk the
Royal Oak
, but Hitler was on the run. Though he was not affable, just by returning he became known to the men there, some of them brawny and gnarled, some of them young and pale. Mostly they worked at the milling supply company next door. And if he was not warmly welcomed then neither was he shunned. They enjoyed their few minutes of respite—caffeine and nicotine—before reporting in. Poles and Italians and Irish alike, they ceaselessly complained about their jobs, and Dacres rather envied them having something to do. They spoke of this man who had volunteered and was now in camp at the Exhibition grounds, that one
rejected because of asthma. Despite the mixture of races, they didn't fight about their nationalities, not here at least. They did sit together by ethnicity and he overheard rumours of tension and fights and even stabbings, but the Lion Grill abutted their workplace and convenience kept the peace. When they trooped out he was left alone with Leo and his potbelly.

He wandered through the city, losing his bearings on several occasions, but soon it became too cold for that, and he stopped in at the grill more often, there of an afternoon to murder time with gimpy aged former Englishmen talking about war strategy. In asides Leo would tell him about their tragic lives full of misery and poverty, but they never said a self-indulgent word themselves. He watched the bread men pass and the Lipton man too. Late at night the crowd was younger and happier and more Slavic, drinking from flasks hidden under the tables or from thermoses pressed between their knees and the counter. It was a masculine world: they had no families or they ignored their families. Some nights one or another of them would pass out in Leo's back room, as Dacres had done, though Leo grumbled.

Dacres told the men there he was a count. He told Leo he was a painter. They all agreed he was a lunatic and cheerily told him so. They challenged Dacres to games of chess, an activity to which he brought a fantastic, personal approach. He managed to lose each game in an unpredictable way within fifteen moves.

Dacres fought with Janusz, the gaunt young Pole, about the existence of God. Janusz adduced the goodness of creation as proof.

“By goodness what do you mean? Toothache? Athlete's foot? Stomach cancer? Famine? Incest? Animals eating their young? The goodness of nature.”

“Without faith we are lost,” Janusz said quietly. He was much concerned with his country's fate.

Dacres spared no one his own theory: “God does exist and I for one believe in him. Of course he does. Unfortunately, he's asleep, has been since long ago. Long before Adam was made, God nodded off. Our
garish, violent world is his nightmare. Life is senseless and in deeply poor taste, but it's foolish to try to explain it rationally because it is a dream. We are living through a jumble, a kaleidoscope; a dream of God.”

They shook their heads.

“Otherwise how do you account for octopi, mustard gas, dandruff?”

When you don't know anyone, when you are no one, you can say whatever you want, Dacres was discovering.

There was nothing on the dirty walls of the Lion Grill and Dacres thought if he were not so listless he might take the opportunity to mount a little exhibition. He would never sell anything to the working men but putting on a show might put him in contact with his life, mightn't it? The problem of course was that he had none of his work with him: it had all been ferried away to Windsor or Winnipeg or who knew where with Lady Dunfield. And he was in no condition, it went without saying, to create anything new. Not even sketches on napkins. When he began to, when he tried to, something in him shrivelled up. The idea of drafting even a series of sketches of the men he met here daily—their faces and gnarled moustaches, a natural enough idea—terrified him and he set it aside. He did not work, he did not paint, he did not thrive.

“A propos of God,” said Dacres, picking up where he'd left off.

He was drunk. Next to Dacres, Janusz dropped his chin on his forearms to listen. “We went down to the country once for a baptism. For my wife's niece's baptism.”

Leo was frying a meat patty and Dacres looked at the checked cloth on his shoulder. Gingham, he thought, and the pattern seemed terribly beautiful.

“You need a waitress, Leo,” Dacres told him. “Brighten up the place.”

Leo ignored him. He was looking into Lion Grill matchbooks.

“When. Honestly I don't remember. It's the one where you dip the sprat into the font. Is that baptism or christening? It doesn't really
matter, does it? Like a biscuit in tea. Evie was wearing a fantastic scarlet frock, the kind of colour you wear to a birthday party. Something you raise in the wilderness to be rescued.”

She laughed when I said so, he remembered. We were new to each other then.

“I just wanted to pull it off her.” He continued quietly, “We made love on the train. She insisted. I was worried about the guard coming, but she pulled me towards her. If he had found us she would have brazened it out. When bailiffs came to our flat, she'd lean one white arm up against the door, she'd be smoking, she'd settle them: portly little fellow licking his upper lip, unmanned. I remember.”

He was speaking with his eyes closed, he leaned his chin into his cup.

“How did she light on me? Well you see I had something then. I was in part a different man from the one I am today. We didn't go straight to the ceremony. She wanted to show me a church in the village by one of Hawksmoor's associates. She said she was going to burn it down if I thought it wasn't up to scratch. This is something you need to be able to do,” he reflected. “It's something she was better at than I am: you have to be able to destroy your drafts, without a second thought. It's the only way to move forward. Where was I? The outfit: she'd had her dressmaker create it from her drawings. Maybe she wore it to tell them something; it was a message to Malcolm and the parents. Although you see the contradiction: travelling all that way, in a red dress, to tell them she doesn't care—”

He stopped.

“The train. You are screwing on the train,” said Leo, over his shoulder, smoking, chopping a mouldy onion.

“Glad you're paying attention.”

“Come on,” said Leo. “Tell us the screwing on the train.”

Janusz looked away at the door.

“Did the guard come?” he asked shyly.

“It was the first time she was taking me down there and she wanted to show me things. The bench where she smoked her first cigarette.
They were standing by this rail in the iron fence when she first slapped a boy; she ran along beside it after with a stick, pat-pat-pat-pat-pat. It was a gleaming dewy wet day, March. Did I mention that? From the train we saw the patchwork fields. Grey-green, like the sea. I have the shade up here, stored.”

He tapped his temple.

Leo coughed.

“Janusz.” It sounded so different in his pronunciation. “A quarter to wash out these buckets,” he said, kicking, kerplunk. “Tonight.”

Janusz shook his head; he was listening to Dacres attentively. Leo cursed.

“Bosie, her father, was a banker in town, but he had an ancestral connection. His own father had ruined them, lost the house, drunk and a gambler, but Bosie made enough by himself to buy it back. This is the kind of man we're talking about. He wasn't much older then, when he did that, than I am now. Startling, really. Still a cretin. They were all there, Lavinia, Malcolm—it was his baby who was being washed in the blood—his wife, she put you in mind of something metallic, that's why he liked her. A woman like a tuning fork. Meanwhile Evie falling out of her dress, laughing at them.”

“In the baptism?”

“Is it a baptism or a christening?” Dacres asked Janusz. He replied but Dacres was talking too. “I never understood the difference. We argued about baptistery doors, about how much Brunelleschi hated Ghiberti. The feuds that direct your life. On our tour we went to the pub so I could see where she'd had her first drink, marched in and shocked the place into silence. Evie was happy, too happy, the whole afternoon. I hadn't wanted to come at all, I'd wanted to work. The Rutledges had no time for me and they never would and I had no time for them, but here we were in her little village, Evie in her red dress to burn the place down and me, following, watching, careless. The landlord recognized her; he gave her a certain look. I was ready to fight him but she calmed me. I was different then, Leo: I'd punch you in the face just for looking at me sideways.”

Leo laughed.

“Go ahead.”

“I boxed, I feinted. I stopped brawls in the street, pulled men apart.

What do you care. She wanted to show me the precise spot where she'd decided to escape from there for good and all, because that's what led to us. To her being in London in the first place. But she couldn't find it. Too many cocktails. She thought the cottage had been torn down perhaps. The white wall she was looking for was always around the next corner. I made little comments she didn't like, about nostalgia. I said that nothing ever changed in villages, that's the point of them. And then we heard the bells going, and it was two o'clock, and wasn't the ceremony at one-thirty? We didn't know.”

He grinned.

“We ran through the streets. Which is not easy, in that get up. We ran, to get somewhere we didn't even want to be.”

Leo was across from him now, leaning on the counter. His thick hairy arms and Janusz' navy sleeves.

“I was married, once,” said Leo.

“We were all married once.”

“What happened?” Janusz asked.

“We run giddily up the three steps. Storm into the church like Roundheads. The white faces and black ties swivel. Evie giggles, smoothes her dress down; I check my fly. Probably they can smell the alcohol and our eyes have to adjust. The baby starts off crying.”

He reflected.

“Of course, the odd aspect of all this is that I return to this place just a few years later and see all these hateful people again, the same church, same gardens, the same reverend father, Malcolm, the mummy and the daddy. But what a different tone.

“We sit, we try to sit up straight, you know, suppress our breathing. She holds my hand because in spite of all she loves babies. They're at the naming bit and they want to call it
Mucie
or
Passy
or something equally hideous and we can't hold it anymore, we can't help laughing. Then Evie says she ought to participate, like the second at a duel.
Wasn't she asked to participate? She hisses at me, half loses her balance getting out of the pew and my arm shoots out but she catches herself, clack. Evie walks up to the front, clack, clack, clack. I like that. Baby's still crying. I stood up too, I was waiting to see what she'd do, for not the only time, I'll tell you that.”

He stopped, thirsty. Whenever he'd told it in the past, it had been to ridicule her family. Playing for laughs, telling about the cow strident in their paths on the race to the church. Now it was coming out all wrong. In the train on the way back he'd drawn her face: biting her lip, not meeting his eyes. Rain again, the rain running sideways down the window.