Goya'S Dog (18 page)

It was March. It was March 15, he knew, a day that was always fringed in black in his head, the day of the crash, the day of her death. He definitely wasn't going to get out of bed today: no need to tempt fate. He wanted to be asleep again, sleeping was better than waking, but men were arguing in the corridor, he couldn't make out what about. He pulled the damp pillow out from under his head and stuffed it over his face, but the heavy clatter of the streetcar broke through. And then, somewhere behind, a sound like crates being lifted up to a great height, and dropped, deliberately, in order to pain him. It was impossible to sleep, even though he'd only found sleep two or three hours ago, after the usual lengthy terrified insomnia.

A fat pigeon landed on the windowsill behind his left shoulder, cooed throatily, and then flapped away. The pipe to his right throbbed with its usual arrhythmia. (It was a cylinder the diameter of a circus
strongman's arm, it was encrusted with decades of hospital-green paint, coat over coat. It was too hot to touch, and there was no way to regulate it, so that sleeping in that bed was like sleeping in a kiln—and yet somehow there was always a layer of ice on the windowpane. The last snows, Lucinda had told him, but he didn't believe her.) Parched, itchy, with all his sweating having made his scarlet pyjamas crinkly, Dacres listened, immobile, to his dawn chorus.

There were his two suitcases, near the door. There were yesterday's underpants, soon to become today's underpants. Next to the sideboard, a lighter patch on the discoloured walls where Mrs. Millen's one piece of artwork had been hanging, an oil of Cork at sunset that he'd thrown out of the window as his first act of ownership in the Hotel Acton. The Confederation Life calendar on the door—eight feet away—claiming it was still February. Nearer, two volcanic islands: his feet, under the emerald twill. Remnants of salted white crackers he'd been eating spotted the blanket. Behind his head, to the left, the window. All in all the room's décor constituted a criminal act. Threadbare beige curtains (he'd left them open), brown carpeting inlaid with a gold pattern, bleached bare in patches: it looked rather as if Goldilocks's friends had vomited out their picnic. He sighed. Looking left, he could see the studio: a tan table, both dining room and desk, and his work materials on a stool: a dried-up ruined palette and an untouched bottle of turpentine, a roll of newsprint, an Indian tablecloth. Things he had not touched in weeks.

Through the thin wall to his right, he began to hear noises: a cow being slapped with a spatula, a baby laughing. Yelps, grunts. The tiny couple from Halifax fornicating, as they did every morning at this time. He lifted the rough sheet back over his face. Like a boy, Dacres felt that if he could just stay in bed, nothing evil would come to him, whatever his dreams or hallucinations.

Though it was not much bigger than a sleeping compartment on a train this was not the cheapest room in the hotel. It helped that he hadn't paid his rent in eight weeks. Which was another reason not to get out of bed: Mrs. Millen, the hotel's owner and manager, had been
threatening to lock him out, to evict him, to impound his possessions. She had taken up residence outside his door three days previously, waiting for him to emerge. She told him about her life, to torture him.

“Wake up, you demon!” Mrs. Millen rasped gutturally through the door.

In January, after an abysmal Christmas, to mark the glorious new decade that promised so much, Dacres had made a decision: no more running around the city looking for work. No more of the life of a marble spinning down the rim of a vase. Enough of genuflecting to gallery owners and explaining himself to philistines and lumber barons. Enough interviews, meetings, telephone calls, receptions, chats. They'd borne exactly no fruit, after all. Not a commission, not a recognition. Nothing whatsoever. So enough.

He'd gotten off the train in the first place to live a hermit life, hadn't he? To start again, away from distraction, away from the threat of being blown up by the Nazis. But instead of turning into the cave and seeing what pulsing red thing he could bring out, he'd allowed himself to get distracted on the merry-go-round of money. Now nothing would distract him.

Using Darly's gift, he paid for a month in advance at the Hotel Acton. He was excited about his one-man Renaissance. He bought new brushes at the Art Metropole and hopped home through the snowdrifts, keen to test them out. He had ideas for collages. He was going to make history painting for our times, he decided. Nothing too programmatic, but he could already see a woman, sitting anxious by the radio, which was turning half into a grenade. He drank with the miners in the beverage room downstairs and warned them to be ready to be immortalized later that night. They were usually too mystified to be hostile.

A new leaf, he thought, a new leaf.

It took a while to get everything just so. He secured some crates from the foodeteria across the way and stole a tea tray from downstairs and used them to improvise an easel, though it took a lot of engineering work and twine to stabilize it. He needed a hand mirror the right size to double-check his angles. He found a stack of old newspapers, which would come in handy to wipe off brushes, in a macramé tray in the lobby. All these things took time. Madly, he bought a wireless on an instalment plan, thinking that would satiate him, but he was only satisfied for an hour or two. Because then he needed a captain's hat, to prove that he was in charge of this vessel. He spent days scouring local stores for one, without success.

Then at Yonge and King he had a vision. Darly was standing on the other side, waiting to cross. He thought of fifty different things to tell her, he wanted to tell her about all his plans, about all his successes. But he needed props for his work; he was on his way to buy props. There she is, he thought: there's a divinity that shapes our ends, cack-handed, muddy-minded. No it's a small town, he remembered, a village, people run into one another every day, the policeman's a baker and he puts eggs from the farmer's wife in his bicycle basket. But I have to have something to show her before I show her. Was it even Darly? She seemed to be turning away. He let her go. She'd be back here the same time next week, he decided: it was decided.

Finally he was ready.

But the time came and the desire was gone: a man enters a building through a revolving door, just as his brother leaves it. Frustrated with the preparation oil work would take, Dacres—so quicksilver these days—had decided to start in pastel: pastel had immediacy. He was looking at a stick of pink pastel limp in his palm. It was like a physical prohibition, and he slumped back, unable to lift it, and sat on the low green bed, incredulous, dazed. His fingers felt arthritic: he could feel every nerve and tendon tightening. He got up and stalked the room, back and forth, he sat at the table, he raised his fingers over the paper, ready to strike the first blow. Enough is enough, he said. And saddened, and anxious, retreated again. He shrank, he wilted. He
stalked the room, six paces back and forth, and it was like pacing about in his own skull.

He tried variety: that had worked in the past. He went for walks to observe nature; he sat in bed with a sketchpad on his knees. He altered the arrangement of the furniture to make it mock his London studio better. He took down his old photograph of Gauguin half-naked at the piano and replaced it with a Caillebotte he always carried: one of his unusual compositions, a view of mansard roofs almost from above, in the snow. He opened the curtains wide; he closed them tight. There were voices in his head. He wanted his head to be empty, but he was thinking about Darly, about Evelyn, about lorry tires. He was thinking that the lake in this town was its one natural wonder, but it was hard to get to. He kept as still as he could, carefully observing the alley beneath his window, pencil in hand. He spent hours cutting images out of picture news magazines and organizing them into piles by subject, and then by composition, and then by photographer. He put the ginger-ale bottle next to the mouldy apple, then he tried putting the blue-and-white tablecloth on top of them. There was no absence of subjects: he found himself cursing, if anything, the promiscuity of the world: anything could be a subject. Thought of that way, it suddenly seemed disgusting. He tried to draw himself in the bathroom, staring at his puffy face for minutes on end, at first trying to differentiate his moles from the spots on the mirror. Trying to ignore the banging on the door from the guests who wanted in. Yelling back at them crudely.

When he'd arrived at the Hotel Acton, the chambermaid had taken a shine to him. Chambermaids had been a problem in the past. He called her a chambermaid because he liked the visual associations—languorous round blonde from the outskirts of Paris; black stockings, white apron; lazy, lascivious, smoking Gitanes in the window; thighs and hands you still remember on your deathbed, decades later, pulling you back into life—but it wasn't quite right. Lucinda was a trembling woman, older than him, with withered breasts and knobbled skin and bruises on her legs. She was ignorant and cunning, and her straggly
hair reached down to her shoulders. She was quiet, she was shaped like a Christmas tree, she looked constantly abject; and yet she'd attached herself forcefully to Dacres and wouldn't let go.

She'd come to him in his first days in the hotel, standing silently in his doorway, telling him with clumsy mystery that he didn't have to leave while she aired out the room. He was excited then: when he came back with bundles wrapped in brown paper she was in his room, waiting; when he told her his plans she nodded silently, her large brown eyes fixed on his movements. A little manic at the time, he told her that working for others was invidious; she told him that she'd like to stop working too. Took a drag on her hand-rolled, soggy cigarette: her days were so tiring, she said. But it was nice to take a break, with him. He stared at her blankly.

When he woke he'd find her there, watching him sleep. With her skeleton key she had easy access to every room. She'd return after a few hours of cleaning (no doubt badly, Dacres assumed). In the first days he'd found her presence an irritant, another distraction, another speck of dust in his eye; she told him her husband had predeceased her, and he thought, lucky man. But when at the end of all his studio preparations he discovered that all he'd built was a brick wall six inches from his face, he had a moment of panic and asked her to model for him. He was thinking a living body might break him out of his slump; he was thinking of Tahiti. She threw off her clothes and raced into his surprised arms. The skin at her waist was riven and her hair smelled of old towel but she was warm, and she was affectionate, and eventually her hungry, scratchy touches had the expected effect. He let her get on with it. Afterwards, as she gnawed sleepily on his arm in the tiny bed, he planned the next bout of painting. But it never came. And as he found himself stuck again, in the next weeks, a secretive part of him felt that perhaps, if she ever did fail to visit, he might be disappointed.

Towards the end of January, time slowed. Dacres's field of action shrank. He no longer took the streetcar, he no longer explored the city. It was too cold and blowy for that nonsense, and there was
nothing to see anyway, he told himself. He even stayed away from the Lion Grill. He wrapped himself up in blankets against the appalling snow (how he loathed it against his feet) and crossed the street to the foodeteria, and bought long salamis and cigarettes using Darly's money, a shrinking wad he kept tied around his aged pistol on the grille under his mattress. He drank in the beverage room downstairs or in the beer parlour on Queen Street, which made things better, and then made things worse, and then made him tell aggressive stories to hulking strangers, fables about a man who reduced himself to nothing.

Historically, Dacres had never been one of those maniacs who work without sleep. Self-taught, always trying to ignore his contemporaries and their explosions and their fizzling-out in Spain or Rome, he had always just gone to the well each day and lowered the bucket. He would work until the light gave out, longer in summer, more briefly in autumn; two years he and Evelyn had gone south, to France, for the winter.

In their first summer together they'd lived in her cousin's flat overlooking Regent's Park. Annabel kept the secret from the rest of the family: whenever anyone came to visit they had to toss all his things in a linen basket and hide it in a wardrobe. There'd been no yes or no then: he woke up each morning with a question in his head. He'd look out over the waving branches and the leaves going into the sere prematurely, the grimy roads and the strange openness of the space. He'd decided to work sitting down all summer, though later on he couldn't recall why. He'd worked day after day on canvases split into thirds, working all day to understand the trees as the sun freshened them after rain. Getting it wrong, doing it again; getting it wrong, doing it again; getting it right, doing it again. Transparent jam jars full of varnish on a tray at right angles to the canvas. Leaning in, leaning out, sliding his chair forward and back on the red tiles, smoking, looking. Then lovely Evelyn would come back in the evening and he wouldn't even have eaten lunch and the light was only just starting to soften. Edward thinking she'd only just left, but
then turning his head into her French shirt as she studied what he'd done, and discovering he was exhausted. She'd go in to change; he'd stand, stretch his arms out flat, deciding not to critique until morning. Now more orange in the sky. Gentle traffic noises. The birds chatting in their branches before bed: I found some lovely worms over by the ponds, where are you roosting tonight do you think? Then arm-in-arm with Evie, on the way to Copak's or Jubilee for dinner. She would pay.