Goya'S Dog (7 page)

Dacres forced a smile.

“Hence the pitchforks. Instead of martinis. Because it … ah. The prime minister of the province told me that one.”

“The what?” asked Dacres.

Burner was serious again. “Of course, it's not going to be easy. No no no no no no no no no. But naturally I'll do everything in my power to help you.”

Dry-mouthed, Dacres made himself say, “Well I appreciate that, Mr. Burner.”

“Please. Call me Stanley.”

Dacres stood to shake hands and Burner motioned him to sit again. His knee pinged.

“How is your daughter, by the way?” Dacres asked, but as he did so there was a doorknock, and Burner's secretary appeared. She eyed Dacres, very suspicious, but Burner dismissed her and laid out the paper she'd brought in on the desk in front of Dacres.

“Now then sir,” said Burner. “Why don't you sketch something of me? I'll show it around at the club. Best advertisement for you to show your worth. We'll get commissions for you yet. I hope you don't need me to sit perfectly still.”

He picked up the rightmost phone this time and asked to be connected to Hamilton.

Dacres stared at the paper and wondered what he was being punished for. There was a time when he'd carried pastels in his breast pocket but that time was long ago. I didn't expect a bloody audition, he was on the cusp of saying.

The paper was bright and white and empty.

Or he could say, I can't perform on demand, I'm not a blasted monkey.

But he knew it was at the same time an opportunity.

He stared at the bright sheets. Burner flicked a fountain pen across the desk and it flew into Dacres's lap. He smiled encouragingly, thumbs up, but was already deep in conversation about pressure gauges.

Dacres got up and walked out of the room without looking back.

There was a lunatic on the streetcar. He was a young man with happily crossed eyes and a fuzzy black moustache and every few seconds he checked the buttons of his coat. He leered at women but kept away from them. When men tried to get onto the car, however, he stood in their way and tried to outface them. They brushed past him. He could find nowhere to sit and threw himself onto the floor at Dacres's feet, stood up again, checked his buttons, threw himself down. None of the Canadians did or said anything.

Dacres got off “downtown” and walked, seething, not knowing where he was going, until he found himself in the pitiful excuse for a town square. Now the city looked empty and tiny and grim. All he could see were the etched black wires, electricity and streetcar, clotting
the sky. He felt as if he'd been slapped in the face by the hatcheck girl and had suddenly sobered up. Even the air was cooler around him. He sat on a hard bench and the wind found new weak points in his clothes. A page of newspaper blew into his feet: he saw a giant black arrow pointing at France and another aimed across the Channel.

He felt his personality starting to return.

Walking again, he compared everything to London. He knew his life in London was a farce but, nonetheless he compared at every step. None of what was important to him could be found here, he mused. Where were the great museums? Where were the ancient cathedrals? Where was there anything approaching intelligent conversation? Yes, he was warming up now, building up a nice rhythm, step by step: he had got off the train, he thought, in Belfast or Leeds. It wasn't even Canada's largest city. Montreal had a dapper look, why hadn't he gone to ground there? Ah, because of the threat of a criminal case, he remembered. But still.

By the time he got back to the hotel that evening, he felt almost cheerful.

Edelweiss had worked at the Savoy for a year.

“No!” said Dacres. “When? I had a studio on John Adam Street.”

“We were neighbours,” Edelweiss said, rueful. And then looking down at his crossed knee: “Perhaps we passed one another in the road.”

Dacres admired Edelweiss's beautiful shoes. “Perhaps we had a pint in the same pub,” he said. “I had one of the worst experiences of my life there, you know.”

Edelweiss burst out laughing.

“With my wife for lunch. Well she wasn't my wife then. And we were meeting her family too. Not a pretty sight.”

Edelweiss grinned. “One of the worst experiences of your life. In my profession, this is what you long to hear.” He stretched forward for a cigarette from the case on the desk.

“You should apologize, on behalf of the Savoy.”

“I do, I do.”

The hotel was hosting a banquet and, now that the main course had been served, Edelweiss could rest briefly. Dacres leaned back into his leather chair.

“Funny story, in fact. I was preparing an exhibition. I needed to finish four canvases by the end of the week. But Evie's family, my wife's parents, wanted to see her and we'd spent months avoiding them so down we trotted. Bosie had every meal at the club when he was in town, but once in a while he decided to air Lavinia out. I remember there were perambulators all over Charing Cross, it was like walking through the jungle. And I was fearfully late, under-fingernails all painted, you know how it is. So I hurried.”

He thought now: There are things you do out of love. They make you bigger. For ten years I've been shrinking.

“The maître d' wouldn't let me in! Asked me was I meeting a table. I gave him the name and he said they weren't there. The mendacity. He told me I needed a tie, so I asked him does he have one for me. ‘This
is
the Savoy, sir.'”

Edelweiss nodded his approval.

“I said: ‘This is the mentality that produced the Terror.' And then the conversation.”

Bosie and Lavinia.

“Bosie despised me already. Particularly unhappy because I'm late, something he can't stand. He doesn't even acknowledge me. No preliminaries. Evie, I can tell, is upset because I've abandoned her for an hour with Mummy and Daddy; not angry but saddened, which makes it worse, let me tell you.”

Dacres remembered.

“‘I was just going to have Turley's send you the letter,' Bosie said. ‘But we don't know where you're living, do we. And Lavinia wanted to meet in person. So here we are.'”

Here we are, Dacres had thought.
En contre-coeur
.

Bosie had his points all ready, assembled in his head. They marched out.

“I remember he said, ‘We've been patient with you, Evelyn. Too patient perhaps.' He couldn't hear, artillery shell, so he always spoke much too loud.”

Dacres was surprised they'd chosen a public place: the couple at the next table listened in over spinach. Evie was playing with a coin, spinning it around and around until Lavinia leaned over and snatched it away.

“They were cutting us off,” Dacres told Edelweiss. “Cutting us off, if we married. Because they didn't approve of me. Well nor would you. They thought this would affect us—they really did—when neither Evelyn nor I cared a fig. At that age these things just roll off your shoulders, don't they? Now you see me abasing myself in this piss-pot city for a hundred dollars, for”—he caught himself before saying “a room for the night”—“whatever I can get.”

“Bosie was angry. Apoplectic. Usually he was, I must say. But gentle with animals, hounds—which in my experience is a bad sign.

“He said: ‘We've been patient with you, Evelyn. Too patient perhaps.' He said now their patience was at an end. Lavinia was crying into her triangled napkin. The waiter came—how do they know, do you teach them?—at exactly this moment, when we were all silent, all raging, and Bosie put on his civil face again, and told him yes, we needed nothing. I thought,
If the mackerel comes now, are we going to eat it? Will they hang me in this tie?
But I smiled sweetly up at him too, automatic: I don't think Evie forgave me that. She was glaring.

“‘Well,' said Bosie, ‘I didn't think this day would ever come.' Long suspiration. He didn't look upset, however. He was talking to me the entire time, did I mention that? When I come in, not a word, not a hello, no preliminaries. But as soon as I sat, he addressed himself to me, though speaking to Evie. Now what do you think that meant?

“‘Of course, Evelyn,' he said, looking at me, ‘when you come to your senses you're always welcome at home. Always welcome.'

“Lavinia sniffed in agreement.

“‘Everything you need is in here.'

“He took a fat envelope from his inside pocket and placed it in
front of me. I smiled. I hadn't said anything, but I was smiling. I couldn't suppress the laughter. The nonsense of him, his bluster, I couldn't take it seriously. And his mistake: the simple blunt stupidity, I mean. I had nothing but contempt for these people: I had to make my own way. But that's beside the point.

“‘You find this amusing, do you Dacres?' he said to me.

“Lavinia said ‘Don't.'

“Why was I laughing? He thought it was me. Bosie, the family. Something in the bewitching line. They thought if I were excised she'd be fifteen again, in stockinged feet.”

“What do you mean?” asked Edelweiss, interested.

“Sorcery. What I mean is she hated them before she met me. We met in London, not in the country: she was living with her cousin. She painted, she danced, she knew everyone. She'd started four magazines. She'd been to Algiers. All before me. When I was in my room, working, all miseryguts. And yet they thought I was the cause: I wasn't even a catalyst. She was the catalyst.”

Dacres wondered why he had made himself remember.

“Finally Evie spoke: ‘I don't care about you,' she told them. Now we could hear the musicians starting up. They had a quartet behind the leafy fronds. It's a very aquatic place.”

“I know,” Edelweiss said.

“Of course. She said, ‘All you've ever done is try to crush me. I don't care about your money either.' Bosie moaned. ‘I just want to know: is it Malcolm's doing?' Her brother. The scion. When she was in tears she would call herself a footnote in that house.

“‘For God's sake, Evelyn,' said Bosie. By this time we were standing. Bosie couldn't get up out of the chair. I'd see them again, once more.

“She took me home,” Dacres remembered. “We made love, on the bare floor. We decided we were going to get married. The sun shone in, surrounded by my works.”

Dacres waited, thinking.

“But you sound happy,” Edelweiss said.

“I do?”

Dacres realized he was smiling.

“Why do you call it a bad memory?”

Dacres said: “I still have his tie, somewhere.”

Via Poste Restante

Gorren,

You should have got off the train with me. What godforsaken hole have you fetched up in? Tell me you're not returning to England (dolente regno), it seems like suicide now. I don't just mean personally—the whole blasted project has come to nothing and it's time to start from scratch. Come with me, we'll live as gods. We'll divide the place: you take Calliope and I'll be Polycletus. And all the guff about the snow and ice: it's positively balmy. People say such things.

I have landed on my feet. A man told me a joke about holidays and life: Saint Peter gives you a week in heaven and a week in hell. When you visit hell it's splendid, all racy brunettes mixing cocktails, but when you decide to live there it's the old story, pitchforks and brimstone and sodomy. When you complain the devil says: Well the last time you were just a tourist.

But the point is I'm not really living here, am I, that's his mistake. I am a visitor. Perhaps on extended leave but nonetheless. I will not even be here for the Duration. New York beckons doesn't it (vile country though). But for the moment I have an arrangement with the curious moustachioed little chap who runs the hotel we all stayed at remember? He is Swiss, I imagine he must be an excellent dancer, he is certainly rather delicate. Wanted to be a painter so he has a soft spot for me: I've offered him lessons as payment in kind but he's too shy to take me up on it. No, no chambermaids for me, I am taking good care this time.

Gorren we might as well get to the point: send me £20 or the equivalent or whatever you can manage will you? Naturally, I'll pay you back. Funds have temporarily dwindled and the promised commissions are still only promised. I will be introduced around (thanks to Stanley Burner, still father of his daughter) but he says people will be a little cautious initially. War air. (Though I imagine the place just as ponderous and stuck in its miasma long before now.) Bridging funds is all I need to tide me over—it is always this way in a new place as I know you know. Send it c/o the King Edward Hotel, King Street East, etc. Various currency restrictions are being talked about, so act now.

Good God, I hope you're still here. I've heard nothing of the troupe. Nothing in the awful papers at least. Half expected to be tracked down by the Dunfield art Gestapo but no such pleasure. My love to the Lady. And do send the cash/PO instanter.

Dacres

He spoke to Stanley Burner's secretary several times over the next week and even went back to the foundry again but he had no luck seeing the man. On the telephone one of the secretaries had started calling him Davis, and Dacres wondered if he did in fact have a doppelgänger stalking him across the city, walking in his steps, and no doubt making a success of himself by painting Canadian hunt scenes. Moira asked him did he intend to keep calling back every day and Dacres said he fully intended to, trying and failing to make her feel she was in the wrong. Finally he received two copies of a letter of recommendation from Burner—
hope you will forgive, distinguished figure, excellent opportunity
—and a list of names. He went to see a banker two blocks from his hotel. They told him to return the following week but he knew what that meant so he took up residence in the waiting room. The point was to land a commission. Once he did that, once he had
established himself, he would be able to ignore it, and concentrate on his Real Work. But first he needed to land a commission.