Goya'S Dog (11 page)

“Then—” said Janusz.

Dacres pulled back to stand up.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing happened. Nothing at all. They turned their backs. This looked choreographed. She'd come down to humiliate them and they turned their backs to her, all of a piece, together. Three black backs and two white, making a wall. She stood looking for a way in, and I wanted to run and hold her up. She took a step left and right, there was no way in. Horrible. The priest looked down at the floor. It seemed that whatshername, the wife, was trying to physically shield the baby from any Evie influence. It was like a dance.”

Now there was silence.

“As long as nobody burns down the church,” said Janusz.

“Outside in the gardens, Bosie and Malcolm accosted me. Told me to bloody watch myself. I nodded seriously, very seriously. I was wondering where Evie was, in case she'd left and I'd have to find my way to the train station. Bosie and Malcolm with the same square heads, Bosie pale, and Malcolm all jaw, and bits of Evie in their hatred, the passionate expression.”

Were they listening? He was trailing off.

Leo was away at the end of the counter, whistling.

Is any of this right? Dacres wondered.

Janusz's eyes were blank.

“What am I saying, now,” said Dacres.

Suddenly, weeks had passed. He was dawdling outside the art gallery. There was nothing inside worth seeing—he knew that without having to look—but he liked the streetcar ride, the change of neighbourhood, the Chinese laundry, the absence of Slavs. He'd thought of asking if they were hiring curators, or cleaners, but hadn't summoned up the courage. Still, it was a place he knew. How strange it was not to be able to point one's arm around the city and say, Ten years ago I bought an antique Flemish clock on this street; I first exhibited watercolours over there when that hotel was Trestle's Art; I deflowered Hattie Whitcomb in the private rooms above the Flask, just around the corner.

He imagined what this city block would look like through a bomb sight. He wondered if even a tank cruising down the street would wake the burghers from their slumber. He half-wanted to go to a film, for the narcotic effect, but not enough to pay thirty cents for it. So he was walking up and down, heel before toe like a tightrope walker, dawdling, starting to get hungry, using his rolled-up newspaper as the balancing umbrella. Edward Davis was surely making a success of himself, Dacres thought. He was no doubt painting magazine covers and working as an illustrator for an advertising agency, as one did. Davis had a Canadian accent now, Davis was fitting in, he was squeezing every drop out of life, the bastard. Davis was painting murals. There was a limited amount of success in the world and the lower Dacres sank, the higher Davis flew. He was thinking all this, he was thinking about his callused toes, when he saw Darly Burner skip up the steps past him, in a beautiful hurry. She didn't see him. He followed, furiously tucking in his shirt, licking his fingers and smoothing down his eyebrows with them.

She went quickly through the galleries as if late and he had to walk quickly to keep up. And then he had to stop equally suddenly when she stopped, and try to look, from the doorway, at the painting she was looking at, to see what she could see. Otherwise he didn't consider the walls. In fact, he'd come here three days before with Janusz and walked around explaining why, in a Chardin, the blue of a padded-box
lid was green one day and pink the next. Rubens held open-house in his studio, he told Janusz as they looked at a banquet by someone in his workshop; Janusz gaped, open mouthed, at the nymphs' breasts firmed up by their covering arms. Janusz hadn't known either what
OSA
meant after the weak-wristed men's names. He'd said the high ceilings made him feel anty. But now Dacres had found something to see in these same rooms.

The need was to see her, to continue to look, but it was already becoming the urge to touch her long arms, her sharp cheek, and it was becoming the more difficult need to paint her also, to make the evanescence last. A yellow rose lay in her piled-up hair. He wanted to tell her he was alone, and lost, and suffering; if she turned her face to him, he would tell her, and she would save him. Something inside spat at his gangliness: for God's sake, if you want a woman, you go up to her and tell her as much. They're simple creatures after all. Yet he resisted, watching her in profile, taking one step closer, pausing, one step closer, as she moved her lips silently—mumbling or composing, he didn't know what. Tongue at her upper lip, thinly. Then she was looking in her purse for something. Was she meeting that bastard Davis? I don't know you at all, he thought, at all.

All I wanted from Evelyn was to look at her forever; that's all you really want. If Darly were his wife, he thought, he wouldn't let her out of his sight. He would lock her up, no eyes would be allowed to drain her. She had a small knobbled pencil now; she was making a note on an envelope. He approached.

“Darly?”

She turned in the other direction and reflexively he stepped back. As two men came from the left he brought his newspaper to his face, turned in a half circle, and walked back the way he'd come, through the doorway, out of the room.

He couldn't make out quite what they were saying, but over the horizon of the newspaper he saw the large figure of the fellow who had been with her at Lady Dunfield's reception, his name was Freddie or Chuck or some such … and another more sallow man
with Brylcreemed hair. They were so young, Dacres thought; they were smiling and laughing. They began to go away; the painting she'd been looking at was Spanish. A young girl who looked like a midget staring up at the painter. Angles and angels. He wondered at his reticence. Darly and the young men had stopped between the two galleries and, fearing she might look in his direction, Dacres doffed his hat and examined it intently. Caption: A man discovers that the answers to all life's mysteries lie in his fedora. And so when they went, he let them go.

These were large rooms, too dark.
En pointe
, he avoided the great grille in the floor, and superimposed paintings he knew onto these drab ones. So that a bland portrait of a Miss Iolanthe Stuart became Goya's half-sunk dog; over a sub-par
Adoration
he hung a Signorelli
Lamentation
. Still, there was no painting so bad that you couldn't take something from it, be it the curve of the eyebrow or a swathe of Turkey red. He had notebooks of “Dacres's Lessons from Bad Artists.” Perhaps one day, if he ever painted again, someone would make note of his mistakes.

“I can only hope,” he mumbled aloud.

A skylight: someone had to clean that; he was glad it wasn't his job.

All his senses were magnified, in part because of seeing the girl, in part because of being in a gallery, no matter how miserable. And he knew that when he left and went out into the world it would look barren by comparison.

Then feeling wistful he was in a new place. For a few minutes he was alone in the children's gallery, towering over a steam train made of papier mâché, a miniature carousel in rainbow colours that would never turn. But cats are giants to lice, he thought. What's so wonderful about youth? Why not an exhibition of old people's art? He had never kept his own juvenilia, had had no parents to gather it up into careful bundles for him. Later, several men in France had told him quietly, seriously, to burn his work. Once he'd drawn lines, curved lines, in charcoal on a huge scroll of parchment while wearing a blindfold, in order to have a child's liberty. He remained for a long time,
looking, in a kind of awe, at how poorly these children drew. By Edward Dacres, he thought, aged forty-one. Gold star.

Turning a corner he saw them again, three feet away, and retreated behind the wall, and then he could stand, pretend to look at a painting, and listen to them,
Telegram
at his nose. He'd seen that they were looking at a plaster cast of a soldier boy. Her big fellow stared up approvingly and was gesturing with one hand; Dacres thought he must be pointing out errors in the regimental insignia. Darly was looking at the marble floor, unhappy.

It was the black-haired chap who was talking now. Dacres didn't hear all they said. They were still and then they were walking, and he heard her heels but it was harder to make out her comments. If someone passed him, they'd think he was very interested in this oversized, underfinished forest, they'd think he was asking himself why the man had tried for a tapestry effect.

“Countries that never had revolutions are ill defined. In the States we had a lot of bloodletting—”

Darly said something he didn't make out.

“Okay, but look now—why is Canada fighting British wars?” “There's such a thing as loyalty,” said a thicker voice, this must be the big fellow, the one he'd met. Lorne, was it? “There's such a thing as loyalty, and decency, and there's such a thing as the honourable thing.”

The other one said something about being realistic.

Dacres could smell newsprint. He closed his eyes and listened to their different voices at once: wood shavings and then honeygreen.

And then Darly, he heard her now, her high voice cut through, “You talk about apron strings—what does that mean?” The others spoke but she went on, and then she was saying: “No, it isn't dependence, it's virtue. Of course it's for England, what else are we to do? But this is virtue too. Where's that in your independence? And what virtue is there in—”

The chap spoke back but Dacres didn't try to listen. What would I say? he thought. She'd leave me witless on the floor, it would be like a
wrestling match. Before he turned away he thought he heard one of the men say: “Darly was captain of her school debating team,” and they laughed at her. I know her name, he thought; I can track her down. They were saying more, but their voices were receding.

Leo was closing up. He was putting stale rolls away in the back room for tomorrow, but he didn't trust Dacres alone with the cash register—he had the door open behind him, and Dacres could see his huge rear end waft in and out of sight like an air balloon. Dacres was preparing himself for his aimless walk home. Do I have my wallet? Ha. Do I have my keys? Haha. Leo had a gift for whistling incredibly loud: some kind of polka.

As Dacres rose to go, Janusz pushed open the door of the grill and walked in with a bleeding mouth. Dacres held the
Telegram
tight at his side. It's the war, he thought, come to catch me, as Janusz stepped warily to a close-by table, and sat, bringing his hand to his mouth and then looking at the smudged red on the side of his fingers. It had spilled down over his collar; there were scuffs of it over his cheeks.

Leo appeared and leaned in to Janusz and berated him loudly and started to wipe away the blood with the rag he kept tied at his waist. Janusz said something calming, but his head lolled a little against Leo's hand, sleepily, and then he held himself upright. Leo told Dacres to get some ice.

“Where from?”

“Icebox.”

“Where's that?”

And told him again to go because Dacres had grown roots. He finally moved—he was staring at Janusz's black mouth in this new diagonal orientation, at his wan upset face and the shock in his eyes. He found the icebox under the counter, and leaning down to get a handful he thought he'd swoon. He'd never seen the grill from this angle. He wrapped ice in his dirty hankie and rushed back.

Janusz was shocked but not badly injured. All he had was a loose tooth, a swollen cheek, and a case of the jitters.

“They have clubs!” he said at last.

“Gestetner,” Leo harrumphed to Dacres.

“What?”

Some sort of Red leaflets, Dacres gathered: Janusz had been handing them out at a factory gate. Management didn't like that sort of thing.

Dacres said: “I thought he was a patriot.” But Leo didn't hear.

Janusz was leaning back against the window now, holding Dacres's handkerchief against his little moustache, but moving it away to talk. He was proud of himself: he said his mouth hurt. He'd thrown a rock. Leo told him not to bleed on his restaurant, and went to fetch them secret drinks.

Later on, tired out, fire spent, Janusz became philosophical again. It was nighttime and Leo had locked the door; all they needed was a roaring fire and it would be rueful heaven, an old college common room. Janusz's English words came out coated in varnish by his accent. He could speak quite easily now, without apparent pain.

“I said goodness but I meant perfection,” Janusz said.

“When? What?”

“When we talked, I meant the perfection of nature, not the goodness.”

“It's funny to say that now, isn't it?”

“We see God in the perfection of nature.”

“You've been speaking to your priest. In between getting the pulp beaten out of you. For handing out pacifist leaflets. Because you want to sign up. It makes no sense.”

But Janusz was calm.

“Well, tell him we certainly have a world where suffering has reached a level of perfection. Can't fault God for skimping there. Look at you.”

“No,” the boy said. “No: I have no news of my family in four months.”

Leaning closer, Dacres could see, even in the little light, countless small cuts on Janusz's fingers. The skin around his thumbnail was ruined and dried blood caught the rills like a rubbing. Dacres licked old schnapps off his teeth. Janusz was pointing at him.

“Men fight and die and you talk about suffering and you mock God.”

Dacres felt tired, as if he were the one the thugs had ambushed.

“God should pick on someone his own size,” he said to Janusz.

Janusz no longer had the hankie against his cheek. He was folding it up into a square on his thigh. Looking down at the floor, yawning, Dacres remembered van Gogh's love for his peasant boots. I should draw my peasant shoes, he thought. Why are you arguing with me?

“Were they big men?” Dacres asked.