Goya'S Dog (6 page)

Dacres interrupted: “I've just made a brilliant deduction, Watson.”

“Do tell. No don't: I know. She wants to get married and make you a millionaire. Only it can't happen because you won't accept the True Cross.”

“I think I know who she thinks I am.”

“Who?”

Gorren angled his long body closer and Dacres shared something that seemed to come from a dream.

“Waiting for the doctor one afternoon there was an advertisement in
The Field
. A watercolourist's show: hunt scenes. English hunt scenes.”

“And?”

“Edward Davis.”

“No—”

“I swear—”

Gorren paused. “And you only thought of it now?”

“Perhaps our addresses are similar. Perhaps I was on the secondary list. Our names are—I have exhibited, you know. In spite of my present …”

“Your present …”

Dacres couldn't think of the word, and patted his pockets in search of his hip flask, which he'd left in his cabin, and would forget there when the ship docked.

“Hibernation?”

“No.”

“Estivation?”

“No.”

“Lassitude?”

“Stop. I have exhibited,” Dacres said.

“English hunt scenes?”

“It's the kind of thing she would like, don't you think?”

Gorren smiled and in his nasal voice concluded, “I raise my glass to you, Davis.”

He tapped ash onto a line drawing of their ship in a thick glass tray.

“Keep it to yourself. Though they'd hardly cast me adrift now, not here, would they?”

The answer was Gorren's raised eyebrow.

It explained a lot. It explained the bizarre notion that he might be
a worthy ambassador for His Majesty. It explained his being a decade older than everyone else. It explained Lady Dunfield's affection for him. It explained almost everything; but of course, it resolved nothing.

In the meantime there was shuffleboard. There were stewards. And several Americans, escaping Europe before the start of the carnage. The men spent much of the voyage talking, seated in small groups, brown-suited knees touching and then parting, anxious for news from London and Berlin, and news of places they had never thought twice of before: Warsaw. The Sudetenland. War had been declared the day after they sailed from Southampton with an orchestra playing on deck, and Dacres was running from it even if he claimed otherwise. It was not a noble thing to do. At a quickly convened meeting Lady Dunfield told them it was unfortunate timing, but that the best course, now more than ever, was to see their mission through. Some of the men, Merrie and Trebs in particular, thought they should return to England immediately, and she understood, but of course the ship's progress was out of their hands. She led them in a chorus of “God Save the King.”

These delightful, splendid times we live in, thought Dacres, not singing.

When they heard four nights later that the
Beauregard
had been torpedoed, the purser stopped the news announcements: the captain didn't want there to be hysteria. Taking away their only source of information provoked hysteria. The lifeboats were checked, drills were announced. Through his O-shaped window Dacres watched passengers and crew run hither and yon in search of life jackets, life belts, life this, life that, like insects on a burning piece of wood. It got colder and colder as they went north, icy winds battered the empty promenade deck, and even in the Melody Bar the howl was audible. Still, you could always order another drink and just sign for it.

The Americans were clean and healthy and unconcerned. Dacres had several conversations with an arrogant Boston student, principally in the hopes of getting a few minutes alone with his desperately
unhappy female friend, a girl with immense eyes and soft blurred lips and nose. When they met, he thought that if she were a poet she would have tossed herself off a Paris bridge, hand-in-hand with a Romanian, by now. She had that sort of face.

But Rosalie was well-bred and pedestrian and she wanted nothing to do with Dacres. Fundamentally he couldn't blame her. But her body: it was like glass he wanted to eat. All I would need is a minute, he thought, trying to masturbate in the tiny cabin bunk, straining to harden, and then losing the thought. He was trying to think of Rosalie unbuttoning her skirt, but all he could see was the boyfriend and her, in separate beds, under separate sheets, in their cabin, lamp on, polite, joking about the smelly old goat who was mooning about after her. Unable to concentrate. Flaccid again.

He'd misread her terribly. Rosalie's sensitive features obscured a dully straightforward personality. She wasn't entrancingly bitter: she was just put out to be travelling in tourist. And she fumed, watching him as he talked to her Bradley, and never asked him a single question about himself. Still, they put up with him, somehow, and as he felt utterly alienated from the dancers and painters he was supposed to be getting to know, no matter how Gorren tried to make him mix with them, he spent more and more time with his little couple, over coffee, over photo-magazines. Bradley was unbearable: he had been studying Norwegian agricultural techniques, he kept repeating the word
transhumance
, and Dacres had long since missed the opportunity to ask what it meant. The boy had a square head and he could talk. As he did, Dacres studied Rosalie's silk blouse, the armour plating she had on underneath. Why is someone with your looks saddled with this dolt? he asked her, in his head; why are you dull? Then caught a glimpse of himself in the glass: fattened like a winter goose, face blotchy, hair waxy, awkwardly sagging out of his deckchair, his body having lost its tightness, like a balloon from last night's party. He looked away.

Gorren had bet him twenty Canadian dollars that he wouldn't ever even see her in her slip. “She's all-American,” Gorren told him. “You don't know the type. She would never consider it. Not even after a
barrel of vermouth, not even if it was just the two of you left alone on the planet.” Neither of them knew how much twenty Canadian dollars was, nor had ever had cause to care. Dacres was just glad to have someone to talk to.

They docked. Quebec City. Montreal. The chambermaid. What became known as the Ottawa binge. And then Toronto.

After ten days, when his roll of banknotes was getting so he could have folded it into a sardine can, Dacres made a business call. He'd been trying off and on to reach Stanley Burner, but though he'd left several telephone messages, he'd heard nothing. Burner was away or occupied.

The first time he'd telephoned, Burner's secretary had taken a message and said he would call back, but Dacres never heard from him. The second time he called she said he was away in Ottawa, but would be in touch just as soon as he returned. Eventually Dacres got on the streetcar to New Toronto (wondering how there could ever have been time to build a new one) and a different secretary he'd never spoken to told him that Mr. Burner was at the lakeshore donating his sloop to the navy for them to train volunteers. Dacres returned the next day, Friday, and waited outside the factory gates for lunchtime. When he saw crowds of blue-clad workers gather he ambled into the building. It was five past one and there was no one at the desk outside Burner's office. He grasped the cold door handle and marched in.

“What the devil?” Burner said.

They were not high up but there was a good view of the lake through three square windows and the light flooding in bleached the room. Momentarily, Dacres just stared out. Burner was twelve feet away behind a grave-looking desk with a green blotter. There were photographs on the desk, but they were turned away from visitors. Others, on the back wall, were too far away for Dacres to make out. In a diagonal line at Burner's right were three black telephones.

Burner himself looked smaller than before and more wan than Dacres remembered. He was probably only ten or fifteen years Dacres's senior. Dacres reminded Burner that they'd met and shortly the light of recognition came into his little eyes.

“Yes,” Burner said telegraphically, “Lady Dunfield—your tour—bridges and aqueducts, is it?”

Dacres smiled without opening his mouth and said, “Edward Dacres.”

Burner stood and offered Dacres a seat across from the desk. They sat down at the same time and then stared at each other, then Dacres looked at a silver tray which had what looked like an eagle feather stuck to it. Next to that, a clock embedded in a golf ball.

“But whatever are you doing here?” Burner finally asked.

One of the telephones rang and suddenly Burner was the dynamo Dacres had met.

“Tell him not until December. Well I can't now. No. You said Sturton at two, didn't you? No, I'm with someone.”

Dacres cleared his throat. He didn't see any paintings. Pipes were mounted on the walls with little white cards underneath, and on the black display shelf to his right, opposite the windows, was a French horn. You were never supposed to go to a meeting like this without going to a pub first. But there were no pubs in the city. So how did anyone here ever get ahead in life?

Burner had been told something very funny and he brayed into the phone, laughing and zesty. Then another black telephone rang and Burner lifted up a finger to say “Wait,” put the first receiver down, and picked up the second. Dacres started to feel annoyed. In his belly anxious bubbles popped.

“Sorry,” said Burner to Dacres eventually. “The likelihood is we'll have to convert to armaments in the coming year and it's going to be a heck of a job of work. Might be easier to just build a new foundry from the start! Not that the agitators are helping us any, the unions. And of course you can't get a straight answer from the ministry about the whens and wherefores. But the times demand it. Now …”

Burner waited.

Dacres tried to put into words what he was doing there without being crass, that is, without asking outright for money or favours. But as soon as he opened his mouth his little speech sounded ridiculous and he immediately faltered.

“You remember our conversation? At your house, at the reception. You said there were opportunities for painters here.”

“I did?” Burner looked surprised. “How odd.”

“Young country, you said. Document it … To be honest, I couldn't bear another minute of that delegation, they were going to Windsor or something of that nature and then returning to England—and I'm not sure frankly how strong an idea that is, now.”

Burner squinted.
Traitor
.

“So,” Dacres said, conscious of not really having explained himself. “Here I am.”

Burner looked down at his desk.

“Indeed,” he said. “And what is it I can do for you, exactly?”

Christ, thought Dacres, do you have to make it so bloody hard?

There was an immense
clang
and the entire room shook. And before Dacres recovered, one of the black phones rang, he wasn't sure if it was the same one as before. Hopeless, he thought about how hard it had been to get into this room and wondered if the effort could have been any less worthwhile. But when Burner replaced the receiver he eased back into his chair, looking newly calm and expansive. He even settled his hands behind his little head.

“I'll be honest with you, Dacres, the war's changing everything. I find it hard to think about anything else just now. Not only the big questions, but what it means tactically for us right here today now. Did you make an appointment with Moira?”

“I did try.”

A phone rang again, but this time Burner ignored it. He swivelled to watch a gull outside glide in an idle circle and then disappear out of view.

“You mentioned portrait work, Mr. Burner. Galleries. I thought you said ‘Best place in the world for an artist.' Didn't you?”

“You boys do commercial work, don't you, when times are slow?” Dacres shook his head.

“Illustrations? What I'm trying to say is, I think your big show at my house was
the
big show. Take my point?”

Just as Dacres sank bleakly into himself, Burner snapped his fingers and propelled himself forward. He checked his wristwatch then lifted up the leftmost phone: “Moira—four large sheets of paper please dear.” Then pointed a finger at Dacres. “I can give you a few names. I'll have Moira type you up a letter of recommendation. With the current mood I can't promise much. But we'll get you started. Okay?”

Dacres nodded, disappointed and concerned.

Burner grinned. “That's what happens, isn't it? You're somewhere on holiday and it's wonderful, but living there, that's a different story. Have you heard this one? Man dies and goes to heaven. Saint Peter says, ‘We've instituted a new system. You get a week up here and a week in hell, and at the end you decide where you want to stay.'”

Don't tell me a bloody joke, Dacres thought, a cold stone growing in his gut. He felt like he was waking up to things and didn't much like it. He thought,
I have to come up with a plan
, but felt he didn't have enough of a grasp of where he was. He tuned back in as Burner finished the story: “And the devil says, ‘Well, the last time you were only here on holiday.' Here on holiday!”