Goya'S Dog (21 page)

Sitting on the mattress, he surveyed his surroundings. A woman walking a Yorkshire terrier with a leather collar passed him by; she pulled the animal as close to her as she could. Dacres was wearing red pyjamas and nothing else and the cold bit. His feet especially. There was one sheet left on the bed and so, resourceful as a boy scout, he pulled it off to use as a cape. While doing that he heard a voice.

“Mr. Dacres? You're turning blue.”

Dacres turned and looked up.

“Hello Darly,” he said, quite suave.

“What are you doing?”

“Oh, you know.” Dacres waved an airy hand.

She did not.

With his feet dancing on the freezing pavement, Dacres finished pulling off the sheet, put it over his shoulders, and stepped again onto the ragged mattress. From there he looked down at Darly. She wore a light-blue coat that reached down below her knees and a hat in the same colour and her eyes shone in the cold; she looked like Venus, come down to visit her helpless boy, Aeneas, in the sorry world. Was she real?

Gripped by something, he suddenly turned and started screaming epithets back at the hotel, its miserable décor, its porcine owner, her troglodyte race. He damned them all to the seventh generation, mumbling into incoherence. Then turned back to Darly, all charm.

After a pause she said, “Are you all right? I've been looking all over town for you.”

“You have? For goodness' sake, call me Edward. How many times do I have to—”

“Yes, well, Edward. You should put something on. You'll catch pneumonia.”

He demurred.

“Put my coat on.”

Something whizzed past them and exploded in white on the pavement.

“Bastard!” said Dacres, frenziedly getting on his knees and gathering up snow.

“Oh, it's just a child,” said Darly.

He hopped up on the mattress again and cocked his arm back but she put a soft gloved hand on his forearm and he lowered it. One of the Millen boys ruffled a waist-high lad's brown hair: future thug.

He looked at her again and sighed. She was less pudgy than Poussin would have done her, her skin shining less brightly, and where were
all the shields and swords and things she was supposed to bring? Well, perhaps even the gods and goddesses had to tighten their belts, for the duration.

Another snowball whizzed past; he tried to ignore it. In his peripheral vision he could see the dirty little scamp preparing one more.

He gathered that she was talking and he wasn't listening. He tried to listen. He tottered suddenly.

“So I went to that café. The grill. But the woman at your boarding house wouldn't help me find you. Then it was only pure chance I saw that Polish boy and he said I might find you here.”

“Eh?”

His teeth were chattering.

“I thought you might be able to do me a service, Mr. Dacres. Wait.”

In a quick gesture she took her furry animal scarf and put it around his neck and he smelled her delicate perfume all around him. He tried to shake her off but only half-heartedly. The earth is an orb, he thought, and money is coloured bits of paper. He slapped himself on the cheek. Listen!

A tiny snowball hit Dacres square in the side of the head. Nobly, he wiped the slush out of his hair and ear. Now he could hear the boy being called inside with a phlegmy “That's enough, Will.”

“Sorry, what?” said Dacres.

“Maybe we could go somewhere else?”

A cab was vibrating behind her, waiting.

“Really I'm fine, Darly, I wish you wouldn't worry so. Canadians are supposed to like the cold, aren't they?”

“I'm not in my pyjamas.”

“Tell me what I can do for you.” He tried to put his hands in his pockets but he had none.

“I'd rather tell you somewhere else. Somewhere warm? Perhaps you need to sort out your things a little, first.”

He waited, stoic.

She hesitated.

“Very well. Though I'm not sure that it's such a good idea, now.” She took a breath. With a radio tune in his head he shrugged, began to turn away, and then she spoke quickly: “I understand if you prefer not to. It's just that we've had someone pull out at the last second and I don't know where else to turn. So I was looking for you yesterday and all morning.”

Dacres tried very hard to understand.

“You could speak about anything you wanted.” She made controlled little gestures with her gloved hands that distracted him, as if she were making oriental paper arrangements as she spoke. “I thought we could give it the title, ‘The Arts in Canada'? It would be from your perspective. Of course, it could be painting in England, or painting in wartime, or the artist and war, or … The man from Columbia was going to talk about war and verse but his foot was crushed in an accident. So I'm stuck. If it were something similar in theme, it would make sense.”

“Lecture?” said Dacres.

“Yes, give a lecture. To my arts club. Our speaker had to cancel.”

“Oh, speak,” said Dacres, the light dawning. “Give a lecture to your arts club.”

The idea took shape somewhere behind his eyebrows. But for some reason it made him feel very sad.

“Oh Edward! You're shivering terribly. You don't even have socks on. I wish you'd come with me.”

She touched him again but he stood still.

“I know it's appallingly last-minute, but really it would be such a help. Please say you will.”

He couldn't control his face. Cheeks juttered left and right, jaw chopped up and down. He thought he heard a low whistle.

“Just give me a moment, would you, my dear?”

Dacres turned and walked down the alley abutting the hotel, keeping well clear of the front door. He looked up at each window as he passed, his feet aching. He wondered how many toes he would lose. He heard the whistle again.

“Ah,” he said.

Lucinda leaned out of the window above him and pressed a finger to her faded lips. She looked behind her and disappeared and then reappeared with one of his suitcases. It had been quickly packed and clothes bulged out of the seal. She leaned out of the window as far forward as she could and dropped the case gently down. Dacres caught it in both hands and kissed the rough cover material. She retrieved the second case. Then she put a hand to her ear and with the other hand dialled a telephone number. He nodded to say he would. Then she blew him a kiss, and he pretended to catch it on his cheek, and she waited, so he blew her one back. Then she heard something behind her, and quickly pulled down the window, and was gone, forever.

Humming, Dacres looked at his trousers, trying to understand how the holes worked. Then he happily put his legs, still clad in pyjamas, down into them, one by one. What was it exactly Darly had just asked him to do? Found a school? He wondered whether he'd make any money by it. Then there was a stray memory of walking out of a Worcester church into sunshine. He did his tie up in the ground floor window and smoothed back his hair. He tucked his shirt in. His tweed jacket had lost much of its shape and he had no hat. Other than that he looked marvellous. He picked up both suitcases and disappeared back down the alley towards the street.

When they got into the taxi Darly took her black leather gloves off and Dacres saw the giant diamond on her ring finger.

In a stall in the woody and tiled basement of Darly's father's club Dacres felt a still calm that he did not want to puncture. He sat on the toilet with his head clasped in his hands looking between his feet: lines like little fish were swimming along from tile to tile.

He was supposed to have started speaking at seven and it was already ten past, but he needed to stay here a little longer. No other
gents came down into the Gents—a quick reconnaissance on his way in had suggested it was mostly ladies attending the lecture—and aside from the smell of asparagus this wasn't an unpleasant place, all cherry wood and quiet. The gleaming fixtures sweated.

When Dacres flushed the empty bowl, his head spinning, the toilet attendant got up off his little three-legged chair and waited, hands clasped behind his back, while Dacres fiddled with the Brylcreem, the cologne, the nail clippers, all neatly set out for him on the counter before a downy white towel. The attendant was a careful man, age about sixty. He had on a white coat and a black tie, and had grey, close-cropped hair. Making time—like an actor caught when the mock telephone at stage right fails to ring, so he picks up cups and saucers, drapes himself on the arm of the couch, pretends he isn't waiting—Dacres chatted as if he were just down from dinner. Storch was the man's name, John Storch. Dacres kept his eyes on the toiletries. His skin felt alternately very hot and frozen cold.

Storch was from Glasgow and he spoke, reluctantly, in a beautiful but almost incomprehensible falsetto. Arms crossed, looking left now, hip against the counter, always watching himself in the mirror, Dacres listened. He understood one in three words. Which perhaps helped matters: very slowly, the toilet attendant grew more expansive. He must be used to the whims of the rich. Dacres was in his dirty shirtsleeves, his tweed jacket on the hook by the door where Storch had mounted it: good man.

He'd been in Canada for thirty years, Storch told Dacres, restocking the toiletries from a small cupboard by his seat. Dacres backed away one step. Storch had made several fortunes in several enterprises, Dacres eventually gathered: he had discovered gold on more than one occasion in the Yukon; he had filmed for the newsreels down east; he had invented a silent tram wheel. But all his money had been leeched out of him by women, by wives, he spat with sudden bitterness.

We're all fantasists, Dacres thought, but even a toilet attendant's illusions were better than what awaited upstairs. He actually felt his
skin was bubbling, and had to look in the mirror to make sure he wasn't pustulant, or gangrenous, or about to boil away.

Storch's current wife was a better sort than the previous vampires: she was the toilet attendant in the Ladies.

“Not such a bad arrangement,” said Dacres.

“No, sir,” said Storch.

You and I, cleaning our toilets, separated by a wall. Flush-flush, flush-flush. We wash our hands in our sinks and unroll our sandwiches at lunchtime:
le paradis
.

Inspired, Dacres winked and asked Storch if he had any medication for a sandpaper throat. Storch looked around with a sly smirk, and went to the door and poked his head out. His movements really were those of a toy, thought Dacres, licking the roof of his dry mouth. Returning, Storch nimbly bent into his little wooden cabinet and reached past extra toilet-paper rolls. He was kneeling with his back to Dacres, who still managed to see—he got up on tiptoe, he almost seemed to float and had to grip the counter for steadiness—a thick unmarked bottle in Storch's right hand. Storch poured Dacres a measure of gin, neat, into a small white porcelain cup.

“Good man,” said Dacres. “Not having one?”

Storch shook his head. “Not while I'm on duty, sir.”

“Eh? Good man,” Dacres repeated. He'd had nothing to eat but crackers for three days.

Eventually, Darly was going to come down the stairs looking for him, he knew. It was a shame to let her down. Still, she'd put him in an impossible position. He wanted to stay—seeing her face, even for a few seconds, felt like the only worthwhile thing on the planet, at this moment—but obviously he had to escape. Perhaps there was a secret exit out of the toilets, a fire escape, a tunnel into the castle? He looked hopefully at Storch, whose face was a blank. Dacres suddenly wondered how long he'd been silent. The last of the gin made him twitch as it went down.

“Jesus Mary and Joseph, Storch—what the hell am I going to talk about?”

Storch said nothing so Dacres said it again, out loud this time. And then Storch said something Dacres didn't catch. Now that he wasn't talking about himself, he'd reverted to his initial sobriety and distance. Dacres wanted more gin. He stood at the sink, gazing into the mirror; he rubbed his lifeless flabby cheeks. The ends of his collar were frayed, his elbows brown. He went over and put his jacket back on. Ever so slightly better. Then he looked back at Storch.

“Your white coat, man: you look like a Dublin barman.”

“Really, sir?”

“Better than a Dublin barman. Better than me, too. Maybe you should be the one upstairs talking, and me the one down here, with the gin.”

Storch didn't take the hint.

“Let us say a Glasgow barman,” Storch said (a few times, until Dacres nodded).

“You like that better? I'll call you anything you like. If you could just—” Dacres held out his little white cup, hopeful-despairingly.

Rather grudgingly, Dacres thought, Storch performed his little balletic trick again, and the cup was refilled.

“Something I have to tell you,” Dacres said when Storch was back on his seat, stony. Dacres didn't understand it—he'd been so friendly at first.

“Can you be discreet?”