Goya'S Dog (13 page)

“Wait,” he said.

She opened her mouth wide, as if in an extended yawn, and then was motionless and pale. He watched her for a few moments; her eyelids fluttered and he could see white. Perhaps it was a light epileptic fit; a moment out of mind. He could ring the bell, he supposed. Instead he took a last sip of the Scotch. She seemed insensible and he enjoyed the respite: things had been raised in their talk that were better left in their prehistoric mud. His gaze slipped over the chest of drawers, to a closed white door, not the one he had come in through. A bathroom or dressing room, no doubt full of creams and medications. Perhaps she had been born in this house or perhaps it had been her husband's. He found himself very interested in her mode of life: he wondered if she ever left her bed.

After a few minutes of reflection he leaned in forward over his belly, avoiding the dog's single snap at his wrist, and stretched out two fingers to touch her cardiganed forearm. But then she started speaking in a metronomic, grating voice.

“You will suffer,” she said.

“What?”

“You will suffer, but you must remember your suffering is nothing compared to the suffering of others.”

“Mrs. Blackthorn—”

“You will fall farther than you have fallen thus far, much farther. Houses and hotels and never a switch of good luck. You'll somersault down, tumbling down with your hands out. But eventually you'll hit the cellar floor. Crash!”

The dog's eyes flickered from her to him and back again and then he jumped off the bed and was gone.

“Then: do you pull yourself up the ladder again? You may choose to sit in your own muck. You may have some help. There may be visitors, gentle words, arms wanting to raise you. But intercessions have to end somewhere. A man must act.”

All of a sudden her lips were shut tight.

“How do you know all this?” he asked eventually, disturbed.

But there wasn't any more. Her eyes opened and then she seemed to be in quite a different mood, and was surprised at his surprise. She asked him if anything was the matter. Making no sign that she was aware of what she'd just done, she asked him about some other minor British aristocrats, and families she knew here and there, Stewarts and Deeres and Pelhams. They spoke for several more minutes; he stumbled and hesitated; she was breezy and forgetful. Then she paused, and her lips fluttered, and she was asleep.

Dacres waited for her to wake but she did not. When he finally left the house, he was rather shaken; he forgot his envelope, abandoned unopened on Mrs. Blackthorn's bed, near her little feet.

Dom Federigo da Costa Lourinho Maroes da Silva: medical crisis Toronto Canada send emergency funds repay London arrival grateful apologies Dacres

The hotelier, Bowes, came to the house to try to intercede in the growing conflict between Dacres and Mrs. Bark. Bark and Bowes were both inherently weak and Christian, however: Bowes sat on Dacres's bed in mournful silence, looking at his hands in his lap. Dacres watched him, silent, eyes like bullets, waiting for any move. To his delight, he was no longer on speaking terms with his landlady. He tiptoed in after she had gone to bed and left the house in the early morning before she was awake. This left him so tired in the afternoon that he had to find a place where he could rest his head on a flat surface. A library was good because you didn't have to buy a coffee. Saliva would dribble out of his open mouth onto the table. But it was better than paying rent.

He caught a flash of the
Star
at his knee, a list of artists elected to the OSA: Ontario Society. So that's what it stood for. Dacres blinked:
Edward Davis was swimming back across the Atlantic for his show at the British Museum? The revolutionary tank shell he'd designed was to be named after him?

Bowes coughed, interrupting the vision.

“I've spoken to a few painters,” he told Bowes, who looked up hopefully. “I've met them, I've been introduced. They have studios on streets with lovely proper names, English names: Breadalbane, Grenville. Orde. Like boiled sweets in your mouth. But they have enough troubles of their own: they're hardly able to offer a man a hand. You have to do something to keep body and soul together, they say, even if you're well known. They told me to talk to professors at the university. Who looked at me as if I were mad. What everyone tells me, Bowes, is that I have to compromise: I have to illustrate, I have to get work with a local press. But I refuse to compromise. There's a courage to that, isn't there?”

“Lydia thinks you're a tie salesman,” said Bowes.

“Indeed. Noticed something else, Bowes: I call it the English question. You like your English at a distance here, don't you? You have a certain idea of what England is: you don't like the real thing stumbling about in your rosebushes. Not one bit of it.”

Dacres leaned away, into the spine of the chair. It was late at night, Bowes spoke quietly under the faltering amber light bulb and still wouldn't meet Dacres's gaze. The man's timorousness made Dacres feel charming and voluble, a pleasant holiday from his usual sense that he was a bottle on the ocean.

“Tell Lydia I've a lead, Bowes: there's war work and there's private tuition. I'm in touch with the highest echelons. But I've taught before and I can teach again. I'll waltz into some institution. In fact, I've already spoken by telephone to a Miss Lung at the art college. I'll be ensconced there presently and then Lydia will have her month's rent. Suitable?”

He was tired. He'd spent the day, like so many other days, unwelcome everywhere. He took the wind and snow as a personal affront, he swallowed back warm snot. He was wearing the same clothes day after day—Mrs. Bark wouldn't wash them if she wouldn't speak to
him—and as he walked he smelled Roquefort coming from his trousers. At least the smell kept him warm in the increasingly ungodly climate. He received no answer to his begging letters home or here. He wanted the Canadians to know he was better than they were, but they didn't seem keen to find out. At night, his skin on his chest itched; right now his lower back was asking him to rest. He didn't know what day it was.

“Don't you wish it were possible to buy a bottle of whisky in this town without having to make an appointment with a civil servant?” he asked Bowes while yawning. At the bedroom door Bowes shook his head palely; Dacres fancied Mrs. Bark had sent him in with an eviction notice he had failed to deliver. Another triumph.

“Wish me luck in the interview!” Dacres called out cheerfully.

For a teaching position at the college of art, Dacres needed a typed curriculum vitae, he told himself. So the next day he lifted his decrepit hat off the floor and slouched to the Lion Grill to ask for help. Relations there were somewhat frosty too: before, he'd slept when he could in Leo's back room, but these days he found himself met there with more and more hostile stares and shoulders and silence, and ever more burly creditors. “You say you are a painter,” Leo had said to him the last time, “but you do not paint. Think if I tell you I am a cook in my restaurant but I never cook, I never make a soda. Haha.”

Now he returned, full of forgiveness, hoping that they wouldn't know what a typewriter was so he would not be able to apply. Unfortunately, charitable Catholic Janusz, lips nicely healed now, said he could help. He had a meeting at the union hall that night. He wasn't meant to, but they could perhaps sneak up into the offices upstairs and use a machine there. It was the quickest thing. Thanks a lot, said Dacres, thinking there must be some way to avoid going back to Mrs. Bark's so soon.

The working men and women sat listening in their overcoats. There was a stove at the side of the auditorium. A heating pipe climbed the
wall, and then disappeared into it, next to a gaudy proscenium arch with an inept frieze of heroic labourers touched up in gold paint. The speakers were tiny, furious men, who linked rhetorical questions into endless strings. They gesticulated violently. They had difficult accents. They talked about equality, and exploitation, and police harassment. Dacres had never understood the political urge, the urge to dominate other men and make them do things. He tugged at Janusz's elbow.

“Do you think we could … now?”

Janusz looked disappointed but they made others stand up to let them through and peeled off to the doors at the back of the room, exiting past two spider plants in white pots. Quietly they went upstairs to the offices. Janusz had been lent the keys by a man named Pifko. While Janusz pulled the cover off a sleeping typewriter, Dacres looked through the desk drawers. Each step he took creaked. He found papers and chewed pencils (he took a couple) and no bottle of Scotch. Then Janusz turned on the lights.

“You fool,” said Dacres. “You'll give us away.”

“I have to see,” Janusz replied evenly.

The room was twelve feet by twelve feet. Against the walls, neatly boxed files awaited. There were two desks, each with a typewriter and each with chairs on both sides, partners' desks, so two men could work in a space built for one. And each keep an eye on the other. Janusz turned the lights off again and turned on the lights in the corridor, and left the door open. Meanwhile Dacres bent down to sniff one of the chairs. Satisfied, he turned it around and sat astride it, clomping it clumsily against the desk. He folded his arms and rested them on the wooden shoulders.

“Ready?” Dacres asked Janusz.

Janusz inspected a sheet of paper and looked back at the door. And then, hands raised above the typewriter keys, he nodded.

“Right. Edward Watswood Dacres. New line. Artist. New line. c/o The King Edward Hotel. New line. Toronto.” (Silently he cursed.) “Canada.”

How he wished he'd taken some letterhead from Edelweiss.

They heard a roar of applause from below but otherwise the hesitant tapping of the keys echoed in the room's empty air. In the half-light Janusz's features were elongated. He typed with two fingers, which was one more than Dacres could manage. And Dacres was not so far gone as to be untickled by the mild transgressiveness of what they were doing, like smoking behind the pavilion during a first innings' collapse.

Janusz looked up with a question.

“You don't use your title?”

“What?”

“Count Dacres.”

“Oh. No.” Dacres rubbed index finger against side of nose to indicate secrecy. “Incognito for the present, Janusz.”

Janusz said
incognito
to himself and then his eyes stood open wide, to show he was prepared to type again.

“Right. Say: left margin. Group exhibitions. New line. Royal College of Art. 1922. Right. Open brackets. Er … Lumbly Vere Graduation Prize. Close brackets. L-u-m …”

No one's going to check, Dacres thought, as he spelled it out. Not here.

“New line. Solo exhibitions. New line. Whitechapel Art Gallery. 1929.”

Dacres licked his lips and looked about for inspiration.

“New line. Hawkswold Gallery. H-a-w-k-s-w-o-l-d. New line. Retrospective. Oh for God's sake. Retrospective. Have you got that? 1936. New line.”

He stood up and circled the desk to stand behind Janusz. He leaned against a post painted red up to nipple height. A calendar pinned to it fell to the floor. Janusz smelled of cigarettes and horsehair.

“Really Janusz, your spelling is abysmal. You mustn't be such a peasant. Come on, roll it out. No don't. New line. Right. Commendations: RA. Royal Academician. New line, Honorary Fellow, Royal Society of Art. That'll teach them. Ungrateful bastards.”

Dacres pondered whether to give himself something in the Honours List but decided not to accept.

“
Finito
. Roll it out. Come on.”

Janusz did so and handed Dacres the document. It certainly needed more work.

“Let's try something else. Get a new sheet.” Dacres pom-pomped a tuba voluntary while he waited.

“All ready?
Bien
. Centre title: Letter of recommendation. New line. Left margin. Ref: Edward Dacres. New line. It has been my pleasure, no hold on. It has been my honour to know that consummate painter, Edward Dacres, since 1919. His genius was already pronounced at that tender age, when …”

They heard rhythmical cheering from the hall beneath them.

When they were downstairs again Dacres soon itched to leave, his work done, but Janusz wanted to stay and Dacres had promised him a drink of some kind at the Lion Grill (he planned to say he'd misplaced his wallet). The question-and-answer session was just ending, and a friend pulled Janusz down to the front of the auditorium, below the stage, to meet one of the speakers. Janusz had wanted to ask a question but the time had been taken up by the usual ranting egomaniacs. (Really, the worst thing you can do is give these idiots a soapbox, Dacres thought.) Dacres idled, sitting at the end of the front row, comparing the half-moons at the base of each fingernail. Janusz returned, and Dacres stood, and asked him the question that had been rolling around in his head like a marble.

“Janusz, how can you be a devout Christian and a devout Marxist? There's an inherent contradiction. Have you considered it?”

Janusz did not answer: he looked left and right first and thought before replying, Dacres noticed, admiringly. His experience was that most people thought only after speaking, if they thought at all.

“Well, what does your priest say?”

“What my union steward says, is the problem,” said Janusz shyly.

Dacres grinned. “I'm glad you can laugh about it. But I think God has the better sense of humour, if it comes to that.”

“I believe in men working together. I believe in men living happily
together. In this world and the next. I am working for happiness in both worlds.”

Janusz's voice was soft and clotted. Dacres's own was raspy and metallic. The melancholy and the anxious temperaments.

“If you say so Janusz. If you say so.”

A man had joined them and was conspicuously listening to their talk. He was taller than Dacres, and about ten years younger, and though he said nothing, he looked at them with arms crossed, apparently quite sure of himself. Janusz introduced him as Emil. Dacres recognized him: he'd given a particularly splenetic speech and was still flushed, like a boy, too young to be getting married, on his wedding day. He had a small n-shaped moustache and stood like a coiled wire.