Goya'S Dog (25 page)

Dacres looked left and right, slowly, avoiding looking down towards his feet. Opposite the window was a huge mahogany armoire, which seemed to be a very long way off. Closer waited a night table and a green wing chair. There were no prints on the wall,
no watercolours, nothing. He yawned. He was sealed into bed like the opal on a countess's finger.

He slept, all unawares again, and when he next woke it was because a door had just closed. Immediately there were thoughts in his head, such as questions about who his neighbours might be, what he should say if it was Jacques-Louis David, what was that matter he'd always wanted to ask Pompey about? Now he felt conflicting bodily desires: the wish to enjoy the bedwarmth, and the need to micturate. Dacres was surprised that God in his wisdom had not foreseen the problem but, he saw, He had at least provided a chamber pot, brass, ribbed like a tureen for jelly. Another thought popped: Dacres was surprised to have a body at all: shouldn't he be a ball of blue light?

To his left the longer branches beckoned and nodded to their more timid cousins. Years ago, Dacres remembered, he had spent whole afternoons studying the movements of trees; now, supine, he watched for a while. Presently he was asleep again.

When he woke there was a book face-down on the wing chair and a glass of water on the night table. There were bubbles, as if it had been sitting for some time. He had feared that if he looked down he would see devils and gnashing of teeth, he had feared that at the base of the bed he would see the Earth, thousands of miles away, or find himself at the top of a crashing, blood-red waterfall. Now that he looked he saw the wall and, in the corner, a white door with four panels, a bronze doorknob.

When he woke he saw Darly. She was in the chair on his right, reading a small book bound in green. One hand gripped it tightly from beneath, her other arm was folded at ease over her thigh. She was wearing a red print dress and her eyes hopped from clump of words to clump of words. When she turned the page he closed his eyes—the sound was immense, like the atmosphere being ripped in two—but when he opened them again she was watching him.

“Hello, Edward,” she said.

She smiled gently and snapped her book shut and lifted a good ceramic pitcher from the night table and poured water into a glass,
which she held out to him. When he tried to sit up she stopped him, and propped up a pillow behind him as casually as a fireman—and he breathed her scent in. His face wanted to drop into her chest and live there.

“You're in our house,” she said, offering the water again. “Try not to talk.”

“Why not?” A croak, like swallowing wood.

“I said don't. Because the doctor said to talk as little as possible.”

Dacres tried to roll his eyes but they wouldn't. So he tried to look urbane. He tried to speak, but nothing came out, and then he felt himself begin to panic.

“It's all right. Just for a few days. Some workers at the docks pulled you out of the lake and they took you to hospital. There was a card from daddy's club in your suitcase. You were under sedation for a few days but you're going to be fine.”

Dacres grimaced, but that hurt his neck also.

“A little hypothermic perhaps, they told me to look out for that. Goucher carried you up the stairs. I found you at the hospital,” she added with a little pride, and patted the blanket near his chest. “I brought you home.”

He pushed the glass at her. The base was hexagonal but the top was circular.

“More?”

She lifted the pitcher again, more easily this time, but he shook his head and his hair scratched against the pillow.

She picked up her book again and he studied her transparent hands.

Her eyes darted up and she said, “Try to sleep,” kindly.

He wanted to say that hands are always just about the hardest thing to get right.

Stanley Burner was at the bottom of the bed. He was trying to whisper to Darly but his speaking voice kept breaking through.

By slowly closing his eyelids, until flickering lines overtook his field of vision, Dacres darkened the room—but Burner wouldn't disappear. He said something and Darly half-turned, arms crossed, and Burner chuckled at her. Darly came closer to the bed, resting her hand on the back of the chair.

Watching them together, Dacres had difficulty detecting any family resemblance. The father was a potato, she was coloured glass. Then her hand sliced back through her black hair and she turned, and Dacres thought of Artemis meeting a talking hog in the forest.

But they had seen that he was awake.

“How are you, Dacres? All better now?”

Darly looked from one man to the other.

“He does have more colour,” she said.

Dacres tried to nod.

Burner—navy suit, double-breasted, golden tiepin—came to stand near Dacres's right foot, next to Darly.

“Dacres, we want you to know you're welcome here. If you need anything, just ring.”

Darly began to say they should let him rest but Burner had something to say and spoke, forthright. “You've had some difficulties, we know that. No beating around the bush: well, we all have difficulties. We won't breathe a word of it.”

Dacres's temperature rose, and under the blankets he gripped his thighs through the pyjama bottoms.

“The important thing now is to rest. Rest, and more rest. Rest! The important thing is that you get well. I want you to know that you must make yourself at home. What we mean is: you're our guest now, and you have one job: to get well. All right?”

Dacres listened to the volume of Burner's voice peak and dip. “He's tired, Daddy.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” Burner whispered.

He kissed Darly on the cheek and told her he thought his meeting would last until six or seven. She asked him to have Mildred bring up a bowl of beef stock.

Half out of the door, Stanley turned around.

“Thank you for your letter, by the way,” he called out. “Most entertaining!”

He met his daughter's censuring gaze and playful, apologetic, he waved farewell.

Dacres heard voices and woke but did not move. He had read somewhere that it was better always to pretend to be asleep, that very few people would attack a sleeping man or sleeping beast. He lay still.

“Just: is it a good idea. This fellow's a terror.”

“Lorne, you don't know what artists are like. They live by different rules. They see through things.”

“I know what drunkards are like,” Lorne replied. “And wasters.”

Dacres opened his eyes fractionally, and saw the larger shape he feared and the smaller one he liked. His nose wanted to be scratched. Would someone do that, if he asked?

“If we can help someone, is that so terrible, to want to help someone?”

“Darly, of course you ought to help people. I don't see why you can't just get him a hospital room. Book him in a hotel. Give him some pocket money and send him on his way. You have helped him.”

“Well,” Darly said weakly, “I want to do more. He could have died.”

“All right,” said Lorne at last. “He can stay until he's on his feet, what about that?”

“It's not your decision, Lorne. This isn't your house.”

A pause.

“Well, that's fine then,” said Lorne, as if he hadn't heard.

Dacres kept his eyes shut tight until they were gone.

Darly had a kerchief on her head: playing nursemaid. At least you like me, Dacres thought, but did not say. She was very close indeed now,
she had his wrist clasped in finger and thumb, she was examining a watch. She shone. Not for the first time he took in her body, amazed at what youth is, how it glories in being, glorifies the world. He watched: she turned, she opened a black notebook, she made a note. She closed the notebook, recapped the pen. Then she took his temperature. For the doctor, she told him.

Later she brought in a silver tray, a razor, a steaming bowl. She leaned over him and with a pair of sharp scissors cut at his bandages. His hand went there—he was surprised to find very little damage. His wrists were almost fully healed too, no one would know. He was a little disappointed. Her touch was firm and direct but it lingered, he thought it was not completely medical. They did all this in silence, all he could hear was the twittering from the garden, the servants' occasional heavy footsteps in the hall; her breathing. This scent, he realized, was Darly. She laid his dirty white bandages in a snake pile on the floor and wrapped a sage-coloured towel around his shoulders. She brushed his face with lather and tilted his head back and ran the blade along his cheek. She stopped to check how well she'd done. She'd told him not to speak. She said Doctor Willis thought he'd be up and about in a few days. He kept still, eyes closed. Her hands were soft and moist and the cream was warm on his face. He would be happy never to move again. He was happy to let events take their course.

Memories in his brow. After the crash no one had looked after him: he remembered a hurried doctor telling him he'd been lucky. And then catching his tongue. I mean you haven't a scratch on you.

She drew a quick breath, she thought she'd nicked him; she had not. She made delicate little dabbing strokes until she got her confidence back.

The Neapolitan barber who'd asked him how many women he'd slept with, who wouldn't start shaving him until he confessed; then halfway through he wouldn't finish the job until Dacres listed off the details, case by case.

After the crash, they'd made him go home. They'd made him go back to the empty studio, finding his own way, though he was demented with grief. The journey seemed to take days and when he
arrived all he could do was sit motionless with only one notion in his head. No sleep, no matter what barbiturates he took. Days passed until he could think again and then what he thought was: what happens now, in my life?

Darly leaned back to assess her work, then forward again to make corrections to the lower lip. She smiled down at him, asked with her eyes how he was, quiet as a flower girl during a church ceremony, quiet as a seamstress. He looked back plainly, without expression.

When they came home drunk, he'd guide her to bed, he'd prepare the bucket. She'd always try to pull him down on top of her, she'd laugh and slap. Usually he'd give in: their room.

She said she was going to leave him a regimental moustache; she said she was going to leave him a Dutch beard. She laughed and he did not. Then she was telling him that he was going to be fine, that they were going to look after him, that he mustn't worry, anymore.

I deserve a turn in my luck, do I not? Dacres thought.

He woke and swung himself to his left and sat on the side of the bed. His feet landed on top of two soft slippers. After a few moments he stood. His knees shook, but then he was steady, and without lifting his feet far off the ground he took six small steps to the window. He put one palm on the wall to feel the texture. The sky was white, it was one immense featureless cloud. He looked at the stripes on the long lawn and the banks of flowerbeds lining it, like the shoulders of buried giants.

He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, and then more deeply, down past his waist, as if his lungs had grown down into his ankles. He leaned his forehead against the cool glass. He began to hum a very low, soft, sad tune.

There were some difficult moments—he alienated the maid by trying to speak in Russian to her, temporarily convinced that he had woken
up in a Russian play; he spent a morning sure that his body was an illusion, made certain futile yogic experiments to prove it—but slowly his strength returned, and Dacres set about exploring his surroundings. Darly left him a mulberry walking stick with an oddly apologetic note saying she had found it under the stairs in an old Italian chimney pot full of broken umbrellas. He liked her expressive black round handwriting and kept the paper folded in his pocket. And though he could walk well now, he affected a limp whenever he thought he might be observed in the bright corridors. He made himself look doddery before his time, he made himself feel more fragile than he was. The fact was he soon felt physically stupendous and mentally, for the most part, calm: he just didn't want to be kicked out of the oasis quite yet.

Next to his own room were two other guest rooms, for the moment empty of aunts. There was a carpeted crossroads, and then the family bedrooms down the way, and a spiral staircase downstairs. One passed by a swooping portrait of a mannish lady in peach who looked like she could have made a fair showing in the Grand National. Whenever he hopped slowly past it, Dacres covered his temple with his hand. Downstairs was a well-lit entrance hall with the tiles he remembered from his previous visit as part of the legation. On the left and ahead: drawing room, sitting room, parlour, and French doors out to the terrace, beyond which lay the garden. On the right: Burner's study, the library, the billiards room. The house was full of metal ornaments, brass trinkets, little follies from the factory on every mantelpiece, and burnished metal in places where you would rightly expect wood: on the door frames, in the bathrooms.