Goya'S Dog (20 page)

Oh Christ, he thought.

“And what can you expect? But they are all in heaven now with the Lord. He took them to Him. I have no one in the world now, no mother and father, no brother and sister, no one except my four good boys and my terrible husband and all my cousins at home of course and my nephews and nieces. They're fine lads, my boys, but they can be rowdy, and my husband is away, and here I am alone with no one to protect me but my four boys, and they will, they will. But when he's here of course what does he do except drink every penny I save and how can you go on that way? When he is here I wish he was away. When he's away I wish he was here. When Mrs. Acton sold up it was only by a miracle that I had enough—because I'd saved every penny, do you see? Kept it from him! There was no money to be made in anything in those days, they wanted to live with her sister in Orillia, they passed it on to me, they said, because they knew I would run it in the proper fashion, Mr. Dacres, do you see? That's what Mrs. Acton said, ‘In the proper fashion.' From where I came from, to be owning a hotel! If my ma could see me! Are you going to destroy me now, Mr. Dacres? Do you think? No no no no. Because if you won't pay you don't stay, and if you stay you pay, and otherwise how am I supposed to live? With a war on. But today I have had enough, Mr. Dacres, today I've had enough. Today all will be repaid.”

The problem with Mrs. Millen was that she never ran out of breath, and Dacres was cracking. For three days he'd listened to her go on like this, and now he heard her at all times, he heard her even when she wasn't speaking. Doré would have etched him with cheeks in shadow, with his head in the corner of the frame, black fingernails scratching at his pounding eyes. An eternity would pass, he knew. She would never, ever stop talking.

Now she talked about the habits of the ewes in the village in which she'd grown up. She talked about teaching her sons to read while heating beans for their dinner, and the difficulty of keeping them out of trouble when their own father tried to beat them with a belt buckle and stumbled and fell and they laughed at him. About the staff
thieving from her and cheating her and talking about her behind her back.

A full sentence came into his head:
On Christmas night the warring armies played association football across no man's land
.

“The heating expenses,” she said. “It is criminal. When you're not being paid on a room—do you know the price of coal? My Patrick delivers coal down the chutes. He comes back to his Mary every night black and dusty and covered in coal and does he complain? No, he doesn't complain, he's happy to have work, that's enough for him and no big talk. If he were a man in debt, if he drank away his substance, would anybody hold him dear? No, no, and right too. You should be on your knees, Mr. Dacres, thanking me for my great charity!”

He talked too, quietly at first, and then louder. At first, just in order not to hear her. He told her about the difference between a man's face seen up close, a splotched pastry, and a man's body observed from across the room, six ovals. He paused, not sure what to say next. He said that one thing novices forget is to consider the air between themselves and the distant forest in their landscape, to watch it, to paint it: especially important in summer. He told her about the uses of black as a base to ground colours that might otherwise burst out of a frame: he'd had to study black for about eighteen months, he told her, before he could use it properly.

“I was born in India,” he told her. “My father was a major in the army. They sent me back to England for school. Sometimes there are words that I don't recognize in my dreams: I think sometimes they may be Urdu. Or nonsense. Perhaps you speak Urdu and you could tell me, perhaps we could speak in Urdu together, perhaps we are speaking Urdu now. My parents died of malaria when I was six.
Mal aire
. What do I remember? They existed and then they no longer existed. The headmaster called me into his office. He told me the news and then he told me to run along. He called me back at the door and asked me if I was enjoying rugger.”

“My sons are coming!” said Mrs. Millen. “Coming to evict you for good and all, you beast. And the good Lord's vengeance will smite you
now, to be sure. Come out now, come out on your own two feet now, or they will beat you black and blue. They're good strong lads, and they look to their old mother, and they don't take after their father, and they won't want any nonsense from you, interrupting their Saturday, no, they won't like it. Will you tell me why it is impossible to find a good man in the world? A man who's like a shield? My sons are good lads, now they want to join up. They've no love for the king but they love
this
country. And they can use their fists too, if they have to.”

“Evelyn was a great reader,” said Dacres. “I did a series of her with her face lit by reading. That way she could sit for me but not be stuck still and bored. Nice of me. Her eyes on the page away from me—so no one looks out of the canvas. It risks uninvolvement. But the concentrated blankness in the reader's eyes, that's what I was interested in, her unawareness of her hands holding the book. She is there and not there. You can't paint somebody looking at a painting, I feel: it becomes silly. It was a great success, my series, it was shown—it received good notices. A merchant banker bought the entire set
in toto
. They're probably in some attic now where not even the rats deign to look at them.”

She spoke and he spoke; she spoke into the door and he spoke into the air.

She said, “Patrick is a coal deliverer and Liam is a baker and Rory is a builder and Ignatius is a coal deliverer also. They all have trades! They have work. They pay their way. They don't stand for any nonsense.”

He said, “I sometimes wonder, do you think I have sullied her memory with the way I've lived? Not the women, there weren't many. Quite the opposite. But she always wanted me to get on with things, that was her spirit. She knew this tendency in me to surrender at the first sign of resistance. Would she be proud of me, do you think? I like to sit in my despair, wash in it even. She didn't have any stomach for that silliness. I need someone with a firmness of spirit, a brightness like that, to be a splint. She was hard too, tough: the family fox hunted when she was a girl and she put a stop to it. Can you credit that?”
At the same time Mrs. Millen was saying, “My husband, he's a good man. I can say it. He was, when we met. Oh, he was very great with me in those days. Later on—it happens to a man, he grows down into himself. Still, sometimes he can be so gentle! What more do you want, once in a way, than a kind word? God sends the alcohol but He sends the temperance too; God sends us trials but He sends us the strength to bear them. I never wanted a drink myself, I have a gin fizz on my birthday, that's more than plenty. But he gave me four good sons, didn't he, and I miss him. I shouldn't, but when he is away I miss him. They like a drink too, my boys, they're like their father in that, but they're good working men, it's their only relief. They'll tear your arms out, Mr. Dacres. They'll pull your legs off! You'd better pay or go!”

He said, “It was a car accident. Eleven years ago. I was driving. New car. Today, eleven years ago. And I haven't had another thought in my head all day, have I. Though I've pretended to. And I do appreciate your efforts to revive me from this tomb that is my life, Mrs. Millen, I can see you're a good rustic soul in spite of everything, but there is really nothing to be done. Yes, you are supposed to put these things out of mind. Time is supposed to heal them. But in my experience—this may just be the way I am shaped—it's as if it is still that day. Not a minute has passed.”

He fancied she was drinking a glass of water. Maybe Lucinda had brought it to her.

“The time came to put her into the ground a week later and I'm afraid I made a bit of a scene. Her family was above me, socially, well above, and they'd always detested me. And now I'd killed her, according to them. They all seemed to see me at once, and they stopped at once, clung to one another. I was leaning against the stone wall, and all I could feel was the frost against the back of my thighs, and I watched them try to arrange themselves. I wished very hard that I could be in the courtyard outside the Duomo in Siena and when I opened my eyes nothing had happened. Malcolm strode over in his black scarf and told me without prelude that I had no right to
be there and I said she was my wife. He looked back at Lavinia and then he said, ‘I've no relation to you any longer, thank God.' The oddity was how well I could see her in Malcolm's face. The wisp of blonde and the pout in the upper lip. How her face changed over the course of the day. He told me not to make an exhibition of myself. Funny thing to say to a painter.”

“You'd say anything, I know, not to pay! Well there's a time to talk, Mr. Dacres, and there's a time to act, and the time has come. The time has come!”

“I was thirty,” he went on. “In my supposed prime. Too young to be a widower, too young for two years of weeping like a woman. I should have remarried perhaps but what would have been the purpose. Most men would have, if only to have someone organize their lives for them, but who would take me? In the first few years I tried to draw her, from photographs and memories. I drew and I painted—a kind of monument, you know—but I couldn't see her clearly. Never had that experience before. Maybe it was too soon. But I started doubting myself: nothing came out right. It was like losing her face. Burying by digging.”

Was she perhaps listening? he thought. He thought he heard the armchair being scraped away but he wasn't sure. He asked her if she could credit what had happened to him and she did not answer. He told her that he thought he'd been given one chance to work, and that the key to that one chance had lived in Evelyn's body. And when he saw that body destroyed in front of him it meant nothing could come to any good ever again. Getting older just means realizing you've been given your one chance and you've buggered it up, he told Mrs. Millen. You thought you were living, he told her, and all you were doing was buggering your life up. He told her it was talk, it was all talk. He said that if he were a painter, rather than a talker, he'd be painting, not talking. But he was a talker, nowadays. Nothing to be done.

“Didn't you say so, Mrs. Millen? Time for talk and time for action?”

Silence.

Jesus Mary and Joseph, he said to himself in her accent: I've killed her. She's blinded and drownded. To be sure.

Dacres sighed.

Four sets of heavy bootsteps on the three stairs that came up to the landing. And then a fifth pair, lighter, scurrying along behind.

Then silence.

Dacres lay perfectly still. Dear God protect me, he thought: my bed is so small, your hotel is so big. Then with no preliminaries, no offers, no ultimatums, there was a crash like a bull running into a wall. Splintered shards of shrapnel wood flew from the top set of hinges and sparked down into the bed. Dacres closed his eyes tight and hid under the covers, yelping in terror. Feet kicked the door out of the way and kicked over his cases and stomped on his work materials and Dacres's teeth chattered as he held on to the sheets for dear life.

“Move it!” said a hefty voice.

“Get out,” said another.

There wasn't space for everyone.

Dacres felt limbs through the sheet. They pulled at his hands and slapped at his head and scratched at his belly. Still he clung on. Then the top sheet was gone, but he turned over and clung to the mattress in sheer reflexive panic. They pulled at his wrists and ankles but he bit and spat and barked and held on. Quickly they lost patience and lifted the mattress clear off the black metal frame. They tilted it diagonally and the pillow fell away but Dacres still clung on. His feet touched the floor as they carried him through the doorway and scraped his hand against the wall: he saw giant pink arms covered in black hair, a torn trouser leg; he made out an eczema-ravaged jaw and a giant moustache; he saw the yellow wood of the doorjamb piercing the white paint like a femur sticking out through skin. He was horizontal again as they carried him down the three stairs, a man at each corner of the bed now like evangelists. They turned left around the top of the stairwell, and bore him down the stairs to the first floor, a magiccarpet ride. Mrs. Millen's sons didn't talk to one another as they worked. But in the lobby men stepped back, agape, and some of the
miners Dacres had tussled with cheered as he was thrown out. If he'd had a free hand he would have given them his benediction.

“Get him off the mattress!” shouted Mrs. Millen in falsetto. “I need the mattress!” One of her sons said no.

Are you never satisfied? Dacres wondered. They had stopped in the lobby. He called out, “Rita, it was a pleasure speaking with you at such length.”

“Shameless,” was all she said.

“Really—you're a surprisingly interesting lady. I mean it.”

He was horizontal, so it looked like she was the one perpendicular to where she should be.

She looked down at him.

“You should write a book,” he went on. “
My Hotel Life
by Mrs. Millen. I'll do the illustrations.”

At last she looked away.

“Throw him out,” she said icily.

Two men held open the double doors and the Millen boys carried Dacres out through the doors and tossed him, mattress and all, into the frozen street. He heard applause.

Shaking his fist, Dacres screamed a few choice curses back at the squat building that had been his home for almost four months but stopped when he saw one of Mrs. Millen's sons, in the doorway, cross his sausage arms significantly into an X. The Millens were disturbingly similar looking: they had squashed noses, shining hair, and rodent eyes. Those huge hands were no doubt used to violence. He swore and cursed until another moustache joined the first under the neon Hotel Acton sign, and then he left off, and began to feel the cold.