Goya'S Dog (24 page)

In his head was a train journey. Concerned at every moment that the train would crash, watching the sheds rush past, the little gardens, the fencing, the fields. Not closing his eyes, not even blinking, for two hours. He only knew to go because Agnes, Evie's old nurse, had telephoned. Five times, the telephone ringing by his head, and the fifth time he had answered without getting up off the floor.

This is how I became locked in my own foolishness, Dacres thought.

At the church Malcolm said, “Don't you dare make a bloody scene, Dacres. Not today.”

Dacres followed them to the cemetery, limping, thirty feet behind, thinking only: it isn't her in that box. He repeated that to himself. Bosie did not acknowledge him, Lavinia wasn't there. There were children, however, little relatives, he looked at them instead. Malcolm's tiny daughter, walking now, holding hands with her mother; smiling, not comprehending. Through the gardens to the grave site: she wanted to skip ahead. Malcolm kept a close eye on her, kept a close eye on Dacres also.

This church, that church, Dacres thought now. Sandstone, brick. I made my own way, that's what they didn't understand. I didn't have any help, I didn't have a family tree. Nothing behind my name, he thought, so we had to hate each other. But I want to be buried in a gallery.

He'd walked slowly behind them distracted by graves. Crosses for local squires, local gentry: one that said Crimea. He saw curlicues, he thought the children might make rubbings here. It was an English day: bank of cloud and wash of ink; four banks of cloud; four greys. They were preparing for the service, he thought. Train tracks abutted the wall at the western end. So that Evie would be rustled by trains forever. Her bones, he thought, and then had to press his eyes into his hands so hard that his jaw hurt. When he could let go, he did; then for a moment he could only see red. This is the worst place in the world, he thought. When the service began he stepped closer, sideways, stop, step.

The boat rocked Dacres back and forth.

White soutane dampened by mist and rain.

“We can take solace from this place,” said the vicar. “Many have gone before us in the hope of resurrection.”

For a moment Dacres couldn't hear. As he got closer, he watched pale Bosie: his breath was rapid and uneven. It's a shame, he almost thought, that we can't understand each other: because you look like I feel.

“Their shared faith is commemorated in these monuments.”

Then an attack of coughing came on. He didn't recognize many of the mourners: were these the stiff, pearled cousins Evie had always
mocked, never allowed him to meet? Now they were taking her back. He knew that behind their black veils and under their black hats they were doing nothing but blaming him.

“But I am convinced that neither death nor life will separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us pray.”

Kneeling your head down won't help, Dacres thought. Putting your hands over your crotch doesn't make it better. Don't take her from me.

With snow on his knuckles, dreaming now, he knew it was Evie who had been the possibility of the future and that with her the future had passed. You could hear it in the sound of her name, the eve of something still to come. He said it now quietly, to himself.

The man fell to his knees, moaning, “No.” But nothing stopped: the others sprinkled earth into the grave. Each took his turn, stepping forward to drop dirt back into the ground it had come from, but something had happened to the man and he fell to his knees. Wet knees, instantly, wet through threadbare black trousers: because he was alive.

Bosie turned his head towards Dacres and looked away in disgust. Dacres fell forward so as not to see. He felt the wet grass in his face, he wanted to sink his face into it and eat. His elbows were up by his ears, and he began to drag himself closer to the hole, feeling the wet earth under his body each inch, wetting him through.

“Dacres!” whispered viciously in his ear.

Slugs and centipedes, he would wet them with his tears. He felt hands. He resisted, they pulled him half up. He could smell Malcolm and a rosy perfume also, but he freed himself from them, shouting incoherent things, screaming, threw himself down again; he could hear the bustle, he could hear the mud inside, and Evie calling out.

The grip under his armpits was truly harder, painful.

“The people around you are suffering.” It was the vicar on his left. “You must control yourself.”

Dacres struggled.

“Think of Lavinia. Think of Evelyn: think of what she would want.”

Dacres knew her body was in a dirty sheet a few feet away; he began to shake uncontrollably. Malcolm gripped him harder, from behind, arms locking Dacres up.

The gentle vicar stepped forward and slapped him.

Dacres froze, then slapped him back.

For a few hours he must have slept because he woke shivering terribly and feeling that his face had frozen over. There was a patch of gold and white at the corner of the sky by Bronzino. Immediately he was wide awake. There was the Royal York Hotel and there was the frightening big bank building where they'd refused to see him so he'd lain down for a nap in the lobby. In the other direction a verdant island: smoke rising from early morning stoves. Now he knew what to do.

He reached for the thick rope, rooting around in the briny hull until he found it. He had to lift his feet up to pull it free and then he put it around his neck. He couldn't do a hangman's noose so he tied a reef knot. No mother to teach him how to tie his tie. He reached forward and almost fell and opened one of his cases—no, the wrong one—and opened the other and took out the white vest his pistol was wrapped in with two bronze-looking bullets. There was a shaving brush Lucinda had given him; he hadn't used it in some time but it gave him an idea: he dug around further until he found a razor. Implements secured, he tied the rope to the oarlock.

Almost ready now, he admired the new breath of light in the sky. Then he opened the second suitcase again and quickly found one of the sketchpads he'd bought when he'd been so ridiculously vervy. One by one he began tearing out the pages. He crunched them into balls and threw them over his shoulder into the lake. Once he looked back expecting to see a chain of flowers but they had all disappeared instantly. The water was still and then it was choppy, making him nauseous, and then it was still.

This was the only time of day when the light in Tomato was workable, he thought: before anyone was awake to make use of it. It was cold and thin but it was gentle; it was not stark, at least. Twin
chimneys, and a huge ship docked: how could he have walked past that and not seen it? The squat skyline. He looked south instead. He missed grey-green hills sliced up by dark hedges so much that tears filled his eyes. But in a few more minutes, he knew, the contradiction between sun and night would become too much to bear, and the day would win, for the billionth time. For now there was a line of goldrimmed cloud near the horizon.

Well there were worse things that could have been his last sight of this paltry planet. Not enough to reconsider, but a fitting valediction nonetheless. No, he couldn't destroy the world, but he could do this.

“It's you,” he said to the skyline with sudden heat. “You're the reason.” He was looking in vain for Red Square, for the Duomo. “I came here with an open heart, didn't I? But you had to shove catastrophe in my face. Every step I took you tripped me, every lift I took you jammed, every day was a blizzard. I admit I'm a coward—but a hundred years from now, listen to me, a hundred years from now the only reason you'll be known will be because in this place, March 1940, Edward Dacres shuffled off the mortal coil, and went to a better place. Because believe me, no place could be worse than this.”

Angered, he was standing in the boat now, waving his arms, the rope getting in the way. The SS
Disaster
rocked treacherously. It was brown and diseased wood, he saw now, in the floorboards.

“Absurd, isn't it,” he said. “The pulse of life: I have a noose around my neck and I'm worrying about springing a leak. Enough.”

He could see one or two figures on the shore now, tiny working men in flat caps. He looked away. He was the only boat on the water.

“Right,” said Dacres, sitting down again on the thwart to assess. He inserted the bullets into the pistol and then lay it back down on the whitish vest on top of his closed flat case. The razor he left alone for now. He sneezed, and it was a wet sneeze that scraped his throat. My last-ever sneeze, he thought. When painting, when he'd still used to paint, he'd obsessively moved his oils and thinners around, rearranging turps with a brush in his mouth like a rose until everything was in its right place to allow him to begin.

The boat was turning, very slowly, with the current. He looked towards the sun, he didn't want to be looking at the city. Though now he began to hear, very clearly across the water, harsh clangs and an alarm bell. He even heard voices. Ugly human music.

Dacres lifted the gun to his temple. This is when I decide the sunrise is so beautiful that I can't do it after all, he thought. The barrel was surprisingly soft against his head. Why is it called a barrel? he asked, and knew he would never know the answer, and he was happy because he did not care. The boat continued to trace its slow ellipse; he looked down at the playful water so as not to have the city imprinted on his eyeballs at the Last Judgment, and kissed Evie farewell, lips moving against nothing. Then he closed his eyes and felt the boat rise and pulled the trigger.

There was a noise like a meteor the size of China crashing down but his knees were getting wet. The boat had capped a wave, he'd slumped forwards. His head sizzled and his ear rang powerfully and then, very suddenly, stopped registering anything. He put his finger to his head and there was blood in his hair and a smell like burning Dachshund but he was alive, very much alive. The pistol was in a puddle.

“Damn and blast,” said Dacres.

Furiously he tried to pull the rope around his neck tighter and to his disgust it snapped into two at the knot like an old shoelace, leaving him with a thick hemp bowtie he could neither untie nor tighten.

“You bastard,” Dacres said to it. “You bastard's bastard.”

He picked up the pistol in his bloody wet fingers. Warehouses were coming back towards him: the boat was drifting in the direction of the shore. He suddenly noticed there were no oars—what kind of sailor left a boat without oars?

A perfect white gull sat in the sky overhead.

“You think you can defeat me?” Dacres asked. “No one can defeat me. Only I can defeat me.”

He tasted the wet smokey metal of the gun in his mouth. In a muffled voice he said farewell again and, wrist tight, he pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He took the gun out of his mouth,
whacking his front teeth roughly, and examined it—though he had no developed idea how it worked, since he'd never tried to fire it before. It was more of a collector's piece than anything else. He dried it against his shirt, thinking that might help. Then he held it perpendicular against his forehead with both hands and with his eyes closed used his right thumb to click the trigger down: and again nothing happened. He threw the gun down angrily into the bottom of the boat and a train crashed into a greenhouse and he ducked desperately. No leak in his body, no leak in the boat, but the bottle of gin had been blasted clean out of the boat by his last bullet. Dacres stared at his bad luck, incredulous. To punish the gun, he stood unsteadily and threw it as far out into Lake Ontario as he could.

Mad, furious, Dacres sat and picked up the old ivory-handled razor and started chopping at his sleeves. Nothing doing, so he pulled back the tweed, but then stopped on a reflex: the pathetic look of his pale wrists saddened him. He didn't want to see what he was doing: he decided to slice the carotid instead. But there was still this ridiculous, chafing rope collar to deal with. For God's sake! He tried sawing through it but progress was slow and soon his hand was aching. He was suddenly so tired. He ripped open his shirt and tried to just slice his chest open and pull out his heart and be done with his absurd body once and for all but the razor was hopeless, it was like trying to cut the round park rocks at a picnic with a butter knife. All he was doing was tattooing himself and it bloody hurt; the blade slid on the little red patches that were clotting up his grey chest hairs. It definitely hurt and in the cold he couldn't even grip the blade properly. He threw it out over the side. He wanted to weep; not at the sadness of things but at the sheer physical difficulty of leaving them. He was exhausted by the gun, the rope, the razor. He just wanted to be done. There were men on the shore waving, calling out.

“This is what it's like to be a ridiculous person,” he said. Standing again, tottering, he looked at the grey factories and roofs and hotels. “You can't even suffer properly.”

With that, Dacres dropped himself into the cold arms of the lake.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dacres woke up in heaven. The linen was gentle on his skin, the sun shone in healthily through the windowpanes. He lay in bed, in ignorance, motionless, watching the branches of a maple tree wave hello. Every few seconds the carpet was dappled with green gold; then it was brown again. He wanted to wave back.

He stretched his fingers and toes out into the whole tight bed, exploring the sheets in all their cool cleanliness. Somewhere far away he could hear doors being opened and shut; he thought he heard feet padding up staircases. Putting his fingers to his neck gave him pause: there was a thick bandage there. He felt a plaster against his forehead. His silk pyjama sleeves were a handsome ultramarine, but they were thickened by bandages too: instead of sliding easily up and down his forearms they became caught, and they bunched and formed shaded valleys. But the blue of the sleeves complemented the pink herringbone wallpaper, and the effect made him happy. He was terribly thirsty.