Goya'S Dog (35 page)

All around him the house buzzed with action. He heard it all from his room: they were taking down the curtains to wash them, they were scrubbing the walls. Goucher had marked out tennis-court lines on the lawn with a funny little roller. Stunted boys with bad teeth flashed past with vases, orchids.

He ignored it all. He found himself thinking about the days of sleepwalking, after Evelyn. She'd been flung from the car—all he'd experienced was a dull bang, like a dam being bombed miles away—and then that was her, grazed and horrible, mangled, dyed. He'd slept for a second and then stepped from the car, physically entire. He'd walked towards her. The other cars went on going.

You were supposed to be able to make something out of loss. That was the point of civilization: the Black Paintings; death thou shalt die;
Kindertotenlieder
. It was natural perhaps that his hands had been tied in the first few months after; that was just shock. But then something had gone wrong. All around him there had been huge lines of men out of work, fighting in the streets—in England, families going hungry—and all he could feel was that he wanted to commemorate her in some way. But it immediately felt wrong. You were supposed to learn, he knew—not to forget the dead but to find a way to live with them, dead. But instead of making a monument to her he'd buried himself.

Just a week ago he'd told Darly about how he'd gone through the volumes of Dante in reverse order, reading bits, mostly looking at the engravings: heaven, then purgatory, then hell. And so it all ended with Satan, the great betrayer, hairy and upside-down in his frozen lake.

“You read it backwards?” she'd said, laughing her laugh. “You're terrible.”

He was running out of time. He was supposed to unveil the gift at their summer party—a party Burner held every year, made special this year by the impending wedding, which was to be a more private affair after all. Now that she had disappeared he was free to work, wasn't he? And he did have this desire again to begin, to finally get something done. He had a desire to see again, to look the way you look when you draw: to remake the visible. Like a Neanderthal, he leaned down and blew heavily on the tiny red spark—and blew it out. He had no sketches or photographs to work from, nothing to work with, and he was getting tired, more than anything else, of the sameness, the constant inability to make, to do. It was like a perpetual siren in his
head. He was lucky that Burner was massively occupied with work and constantly travelling. Dacres had escaped from two conversations with him about his ideas for the future, about what he was going to do after the picture was finished, about how it was coming time to move on. The second time he'd literally run up the stairs and locked himself in the studio. He started hiding from the servants, and smuggled ham out from the kitchen to eat alone behind the chaise longue. The axe was dropping fast on this life, he knew. But the deadline didn't push him: it threw his guts into an icebox.

Coming down the stairs one afternoon he found Darly and Burner whispering to each other. They stopped when they saw him and he felt like a relative they'd forgotten. They both smiled falsely—the same false smile—and the initial pleasure at seeing her dissipated into the awareness that they were making terrible plans for him. A vague fright. They made an excuse and walked away together, and then he was alone again.

Dacres knew that he had been to a party in this house, on his first night in Toronto. He had capered about with Gorren and pretended to vomit during Lady Dunfield's address. And then somehow nine months had passed. He wondered where Gorren was, and where were the rest of them? Sleeping in shelters in the underground night after night, or spread out across the great Canadian breadbasket like sapphires in muck? Or were they the muck on a bed of sapphires—he wasn't sure any longer. Perhaps he should go and look for them, he thought, seek them out:
Hello chaps. Sorry I've been away a bit. You won't believe what happened, most extraordinary thing …
They wouldn't look up from their drinks.

Goucher and friends had brought down a bar from the attic where it was stored: it stood in the reception room like something from an elegant carnival. Behind it, Goucher's nephew, a pug, was wiping the insides of wineglasses and highball glasses, frowning. When Dacres
asked for a drink the boy said it wasn't time yet, and, unable to cajole him, Dacres reached forward, all elbows, poured himself a generous gin and tonic, took a slice of lemon, and put it between his teeth. On every surface there were platters of hors d'oeuvres, prunes and cheeses impaled by toothpicks, peanuts. He hadn't spoken to Darly in five days, except for occasional verbal lunges in the corridors. Now she was upstairs getting ready and he wondered what her thoughts were and had to admit defeat. Dacres decided to go to the billiards room because there was sure to be no one there. He asked himself if there was a word for the excitement and tension in a house before the first guest arrives at a party. There probably was one, in German, in which case it was off limits.

They'd lent him a penguin suit and it was too tight in the shoulders. As he tried to stick a finger under the collar for some breathing space he was clapped on the shoulder in the Canadian way. “All correct?”

Dacres blew out his cheeks in response and Burner, unsmiling now, inspected him from above his black bow tie.

“Good. Ready for the grand opening. What if nobody comes?”

“I'm sure people will come,” said Dacres.

“Of course people will come. I always say that.”

Dacres had a flash of pre-opening excitement. Come, switch these two around.
Pirette's on his way? Who says?
The title's peeling off. Edward, there's no price for this one. Well, it's priceless.
And angle that light properly
.

Of course this time there was one difference.

Meanwhile—was that a midge in his drink?—Stanley had gone off into one of his talks. “The Robertsons and the Sherwins, of course, and Allardyce, we were in partnership, when I began. Still friends.”

He was leading Dacres around, by the elbow, as if Dacres were his ward. He took Dacres towards the library, the room where Dacres had stood drink in hand and first seen her. He remembered.

“Now, I'll be giving my little speech, introduction, celebration of the young couple, and we'll have a champagne toast. Light in a dark
time. This takes place over in that room, the reception room I call it, where there's space for everybody. You'll be off to my left, off to the side, and I'll introduce you, and you can present—no, let me talk to Goucher, we can have two of the boys raise the velvet off it and
ta-da
. That out of the way, I'm going to talk about the house, and then Lorne's father wants to give another toast. He always gets a little teary.” Stanley made a gesture that indicated tippling; Dacres looked down at his shining shoes.

“He goes on but his heart's solid.”

It was dusk, and the trees were orange. Heat hung in the house like something fetid. Goucher appeared with a question about the ornamental vases by the front door and Burner told him to improvise, improvise. Then turned back to Dacres.

“You should bring it down beforehand—why don't you bring it down now? That way, we'll have everything all set.”

Dacres still found it hard to hate Burner: he talked like a man with a list of errands, but he was reasonable, overall. Really, he was incredibly decent, incredibly Christian, to the point of softness. But Dacres had decided he was leaving.

“Stanley?” he said.

Burner turned back, his mournful eyes freezing.

“I have a bit of stage fright, I think,” Dacres said, moving his drink from right hand by right hip to left hand by left hip. “Appearing in public is … well, I do my best work behind the scenes. Do you see?”

“Don't worry, old man, I'll be right there with you.”

Burner chortled and went to go again.

“It could use a few final touches, you know. Not quite done. What if it really were a wedding present? At the wedding?”

“The wedding is for family,” Burner said, sharp. Then he slowly exhaled, and at last, for once, he stopped moving. He looked at Dacres steadily before speaking. When his voice came out it was harder.

“You've been living here, Dacres, working here, for quite some time. I've been generous to you, principally for Darly: she seems to
think you're some kind of genius. But it's time we've something to show for it, don't you think?”

An inch of steel blade drawn from the scabbard.

Dacres agreed immediately and unconditionally. He thought of jellyfish.

“It's time.”

Burner, oddly, presented his hand, and they shook, as if they had signed a contract. He hid away his white teeth and said there were several matters he had to attend to.

“Can I do anything?” Dacres asked, but Burner was already on his way.

It's curtains for Dacres, thought Dacres.

He knew almost no one at the party; he didn't understand how anyone could have so many friends. The house was crawling with people. He ducked away from conversations, from talk of Mackenzie King and Hepburn; he veered away from angry and emaciated faces, hotly awaiting his doom. When he saw Lorne enter and march up the stairs, he hid behind a wall. When he saw Mrs. Yallop, he turned one hundred and eighty degrees and almost knocked over a boy carrying a tray of shrimps.

Burner winked at him from across the room, where he was talking to two men who appeared to be identical twins, and pointed at his wristwatch, and then pointed upstairs. Dacres nodded and ducked behind a vase. He had already spent some time leaning against wallpaper next to doorways. He wondered where Darly was—he hadn't seen her all evening and was on his fourth drink already. The first time I ever saw her, he thought, was over there, in that corner. She'd been admiring his Suffolk coastline, she didn't know it was him. Two blind mice, he thought. Well, it was fun while it lasted. Everything's fun, while it lasts.

He was in the entrance hall by the front door, one of the stations on the pattern he was tracing through the rooms of the celebration,
through the hubbub. A tray of champagne glasses floated by like a bather. He had a dim memory of the night he'd spent outside the church in the snow, like a tribal elder's memory of a night spent with spirits. There are so many things in my head, he thought: tears, metals, exhaustion. I could make a list.

In the parlour, a crone took his hand.

“How is Benjamin?” she asked.

“Benjamin?”

Her other brown-paper hand rested on the hook of a walking stick.

“What swamp did you crawl out from?” he said quietly.

“Yes, how is he?”

Dacres looked around desperately, finally released himself from her leafy grip.

“Fine,” he said at last. “He's really very well. Splendid.”

“Oh
good
,” the old woman said, and she seemed to feel the word in every bone. “How is Mason?”

“Mason's very well too,” Dacres replied, and fished around for a detail to prove it. Mason was thriving. Mason was riding?

“Mason died twenty years ago,” said the woman savagely, offended.

“I'm so sorry,” Dacres improvised.

Bargelike she began to go and then stopped, knowingly, possessed.

“I was at your talk,” she said.

He smiled.

And then, “Animal.” She turned away horribly slowly. She left him alone.

Was that why everyone here hated him? Was that why they all looked askance when he approached? He swallowed. Well, they had no idea: soon they would really have reason to hate him.

Dacres went to stand near the fireplace, and then set off again. Each time he got to the end of one of his laps around the ground floor he got his drink refilled. Murmurs, chatter, clinking, blinking, braying. A title:
The Flirt.
A title:
Study of Wineglasses
. A title:
You Forgot Your Cigarette Case on the Piano
. No, that was rubbish. There was nobody unusual here, was there, no one out of the ordinary. And
there were too many old people and not enough of Darly's friends, he thought. Too many widow's peaks, too many ancient couples; family he supposed, country folk stuck behind their perpetual scowls. Oh, I'm an old person, he realized, and cursed out loud. In the library a string quartet played—students from the conservatory, they were absolutely beautiful. Haydn. He leaned his head against the doorjamb just to listen to them and time stopped, until a couple ambushed him. The one with the moustache poked him in the ribs and said, “Stanley tells us you're the painter. From England.” He seemed impressed.

They introduced themselves as the Colbrands of Oshawa. Dacres still had no idea until the nervous lady with the slicked-down curls said, “Lorne Colbrand? Darly's fiancé.” She took visible delight in that word.

“What a pleasure,” Dacres said. He immediately asked, but they said they hadn't seen Lorne since they'd arrived and Darly not at all. Mrs. Colbrand, outfitted in something that looked like it had recently been covering a billiards table, seemed over-enthusiastic. She made him sad. He didn't want to tell her she was wasting her time with him, that she'd gain no social advantage from the association, that she might even be damaged. Her husband, Lorne's father, was rotund, with large black eyeglasses and a puffy white moustache, altogether a healthy badger. He was chairman of a commercial concern. Dacres wanted to ask them what giant vegetables they'd fed their son, or perhaps Lorne had been a foundling, abandoned by a race of fleeing ogres. He led them away from the music—trying to listen with them talking was criminal. Mr. Colbrand was telling him about municipal life: he was an alderman in his little town.