Goya'S Dog (19 page)

Of course, that had all been a long time ago.

By February he was usually hungry, usually half-asleep. He owed money on the room and Mrs. Millen harangued him, uttering curses every time he passed by the welcome desk. She followed him, she nipped at his heels, she grabbed his lapels, whenever he went down to the beverage room or walked out through the lobby. So he stayed more and more in his room. He watched the colour of the wall change from cream to Naples yellow to a lifeless brown; he watched the weather being pulled northwest across the sky like notes on a pianola roll. He listened to his radio endlessly: he listened to the war news (which no longer worried him); he listened to Benny Goodman and Jimmy Durante (who no longer entertained him). He counted his fingers, he counted his toes; he pounded his skull with his open palms. He summoned and dispelled childhood memories. He summoned and dispelled sexual memories. Lucinda came and went.

End of February: the days were short. The sun didn't rise till after breakfast time, and the sky was mauve by four. All the world was asleep and frozen solid, except for the parts that were burning up with blood, far away. Dacres wondered if perhaps he had died, but everything was going on much as before. Hating in his bed, he blamed people for his current state in long speeches: he cursed Stanley Burner; he cursed the halfwits who had planted the Union Jack in this frozen swamp twenty years before, or whenever it was; he was very angry with Lake Ontario for not being the Thames. The wind beat against the window behind his head, shaking the windows in and out each
time with a pop. Snow accumulated in the alley, snow mixed with old bits of broom and cigarette ends and the excrement of homeless canines and felines.

He slept long hours, much of the day, like an old man. Long dreamless light sleeps from which he woke exhausted, and not entirely conscious. Then in the nights he thought he would die of awareness, die of memory, die of the voice that wouldn't stop.

Lucinda left a newspaper for him each morning and evening: the Finns really were dying in droves. He could barely read it. He'd wake to find her head buried in his belly; he'd wake again and she would have gone. He counted the cockroaches marching along the sideboard.

He walked through the National Gallery, paying particular attention to Velázquez, as ever. He stopped in front of Stubbs's
Whistlejacket
, and told his companion, a lovely young woman, what to think of it.

“I used to stand in front of this painting for hours.”

His voice echoed in the empty room at three in the morning.

“It isn't perfect, Darly, I don't think. It's an unusual mission, to imagine that a lower animal has a soul. But horses are horses and this is a portrait of a horse. Now the ridiculous tail is brushed out beyond all reason; and what's this shadow being cast at the hind feet?”

His hand out in front of him, tracing the form. Older men looking at his friend's tasty silhouette, but it was all for him. She has a magazine against one eye, to see only half the figure: his advice.

“But that's beside the point, Evie. Look at the satin. Stubbs made a long study of equine anatomy. He published books on the subject. Yes, he buttered up his patrons, and good for him. But I don't want to talk about technique, today. People think of it as an unfinished painting or an animal study. The brilliant racehorse rears up against a background George never got around to? Ridiculous. It's not unfinished: it is alone in the universe. Magnificent force, but the cosmos is still empty. No matter what you array against it.
Memento mori
.”

She would nod, bright mouth opening.

In early March Lucinda warned him that Mrs. Millen's patience was coming to an end. That spurred him. She told him that next time he left his room Mrs. Millen was going to lock him out. He filled the lock with plaster of Paris and gave Lucinda her orders: she brought him ten packets of dry crackers and a chamber pot. When she went into the next room to clean she smuggled across bottles of drink and the occasional pork chop from her window to his, covered in a shaving of snow. When she passed things to him she brushed her finger against his. He whispered that they oughtn't to hold hands—he'd catch his death. Oh, her too.

She was his intelligence service. The cockroaches were his infantry, the frozen ice on the sill his Baltic. Mrs. Millen took up twenty-fourhour residence at his door, in an armchair with her knitting.

Dacres girded his loins.

“Wake up, you devil!” Mrs. Millen said, and banged on the door.

So it begins, thought Dacres.

“Mr. Dacres, Mr. Dacres, Mr. Dacres.”

She rattled the doorknob.

“Mr. Dacres.”

He looked around for a soda cracker. He always let her call for a while before answering.

“Eight weeks. Eight weeks you owe me. For shame.”

The Nova Scotians next door joined in their crescendo. Such energy the young have, Dacres thought. Or they must really despise each other. Or he's paid her well.

“Mr. Dacres. For mercy's sake. Open the door.”

He knew that if he feigned sleep she wouldn't go away, but he wasn't going to join battle just yet. You must choose your moment, he thought, conducting with one hand the percussion section to his right. Bile dripped down into the tank, the floater gradually rose.

“Mr. Dacres. Oh, my Lord, what have I done to deserve this?”

You can probably think of a few sins, he thought. You don't serve me breakfast, for a start.

“Mr. Dacres,” rattling the door. “Mr. Dacres.”

The thickness she gave the
i
in
Mister
always astounded him: she made it into a
u
.

“Mr. Dacres.”

There was a solid clunk and the door shook in its frame. He assumed she was kicking it. Mrs. Millen was an Irish Catholic; she had bright, tight orange curls. She was a small mewling woman, but Dacres could imagine her toothless in the vanguard, brandishing a crossbow at Essex's men. Clonk and the door shook again.

“Mr. Dacres, that's eight weeks you owe me, for shame.”

Yes, yes.

“Mr. Dacres.”

“For God's sake,” he shouted at last, finally furious, from under the covers. “Do we have to have this same blasted conversation every day?”

“What did you say?”

“I mean it becomes so dull,” he muttered.

“What? What?” She rattled the doorknob.

“I said, woman, how am I supposed to think with you making all that damn racket?”

“Oh you're a terrible man, Mr. Dacres. A devil.”

He couldn't help smirking.

“And you're a vile woman Mrs. Millen and an enemy of culture to boot. History will pass its judgment.”

“And me with my four boys to feed.”

He snorted out loud at that.

“Let me in, for mercy's sake, let me in!”

“Shan't. Sovereign space. My castle.”

To use a cliché.

“I'm calling the police. Eight weeks!”

“Call them and be damned, you trollop.”

He turned over in bed and squeezed his face into the narrow ravine between mattress and wall. The couple next door were done. He knew
from Lucinda that the police was just an empty threat. Mrs. Millen had four sons, and though she described them as angels, they were burly, nasty young men, quick to anger, and usually involved in one criminal inquiry or another. Mrs. Millen had had her own problems with the authorities regarding her liquor licence. Moreover, she was no friend of the Ulstermen of the constabulary. Down in the beverage room one night Dacres had overheard her say it would be a cold day in hell before a Belfast policeman darkened the lobby of the Hotel Acton.

“What did I do to deserve you?” she moaned.

“I ask myself the same question,” he said into the dark.

“What did you say?”

He turned over and closed his eyes against the light.

“I said, ‘Go and hang yourself, you vicious old bat.'”

Dacres heard a groan, as if he'd stabbed her in the belly. Fifteen–love, he thought. He smiled.

In his first days at the Hotel Acton he'd found Mrs. Millen to be an accommodating hostess. Her husband was an acknowledged drunk, a salesman who was away from the city for weeks at a time. When he was in Toronto, he would drink away everything she'd tried to save. She was in her sixties and reminded Dacres of an old crofter; he'd thought he'd be able to sweep her aside. But she'd proved tougher than he'd expected. Days before the end of the period covered by his initial payment she'd become squirrelly; two weeks later she'd been viciously impatient. When Dacres told her he couldn't pay her in cash but would be delighted to do so in paintings, her skin had turned as orange as her hair, and she'd grimaced like a contortionist. He'd hurried away.

Now to press home his advantage, he said, “I'm a fucking artist, you know.”

“You told me you were a tie salesman,” she moaned.

“I do a bit of that on the side—”

“For shame,” said Mrs. Millen. “For shame, with the country at war.”

“What's the bloody war got to do with it?”

She whimpered like an animal in mourning. And his heart momentarily softened. But then she let loose a stream of invective so ugly that he listened, stunned and silent. It was like fouled water gushing out in a torrent from a sewage pipe. He lowered the covers.

More softly, he said, “Mrs. Millen, you know I can't let you into my studio. What happens here is sacred and evanescent.”

“Pay—me—what—you—owe.”

He licked his lips.

“Mrs. Millen?”

“What?”

“Mrs. Millen.”

“You're a thief, you devil. My boys are coming today. I'm calling the police.”

“Call them, you termagant. I'll have you clapped in irons for crimes against Art.”

She screamed like Don Giovanni pulled down into hell by the ghouls.

She couldn't have guessed how much he looked forward to their conversations. They were spice in a gruel-thin life. He hated her, of course, but he took such pleasure in hating her; hatred and pleasure were mixed, like the wine and honey the Greeks used to drink.

But there was a strange chasm, he reflected, between his tongue and his head. These inner thoughts, so despondent, so frustrated, versus this outer voice, so fluid and bitter. Or perhaps it was the one voice, turned in or out. A sword doesn't know which way it's pointing.

“Where was I?” said Mrs. Millen.

He knew what was coming next: she was filling her catapults full of rubbish and feces. She'd gathered her strength. Her arrows were lit. She cleared her throat and he trembled: he had better start boiling oil.

She had told him already, in the previous three days, about her childhood. She had told him about her youth and her seven sisters and her eight brothers, all of whom had died of smallpox, tuberculosis, and (surely he'd misheard) the clap. They'd had a diet of only
potatoes when there was even a diet to have, and she used to skip down to the outhouse of a morning and there was only a leaf for toilet paper, and what little joy there'd been in her tiny heart had been beaten out of her by the priests and the nuns and her father and her mother and her brothers and sisters and her neighbours and her friends and strangers passing on the street. She had married as soon as she could, to escape, and her husband had brought her to this country when she was still just a girl, in 1897, and she'd been terrified, and known nobody, and they'd lost everything in their first winter—coming from County Cork they'd had no thought what to expect. She'd been with child twice and both times lost the baby because they had so little even to eat, and how could she ever put that out of mind, but she'd tried, and they'd come down to the city at last because they were never meant to be snow farmers, and they'd had nothing and they'd eaten cabbages, cabbages, cabbages and cabbages, and her husband drank and drank and lost every job he'd had because of the drinking, and every chance they'd had had been whisked away from them because of the drinking, and she'd taken in sewing to raise her lads, they were four sons, good lads, good strong boys, and she'd raised them—he'd done nothing, being a man. And she'd washed clothes, and she'd found a job in the hotel as a chambermaid, and she'd saved every penny, and the Actons began to trust her, and after five years they made her the desk attendant because she worked hard and was diligent, they said, and honest, and that was all you wanted in your staff—she was the same way today—and after ten years she was running the place better than they ever had, Mrs. Acton used to say to her, and then on a glorious day they made her officially the manageress, and when they had retired they had sold her the Hotel Acton for a song, out of love.

Chambermaid? Dacres had thought.

Now she went on with her tale.

“Where was I?” she said, and even when he put his fingers in his ears her sharp accents broke through.

“All of my family is dead now,” she began.