Goya'S Dog (9 page)

“Bother bugger bastard blast,” said Dacres. But then, in Edelweiss's accent:
“Allez, Edwood
.
”

Outside a shiny cinema he stopped and doubled back, took the first right. Sometimes you just have to trust: four glorious neon signs promised to put him up for the night. Surely this was the Canaan Edelweiss had spoken of.

At the first hotel he was told they had no room. He walked on.

“No, I am glad of precipitation,” he said. “Reminds me of my studio. Where I live, the rain comes down through the ceiling into four saucepans. Plink, plunk, plenk. And there is an orange fungus in the ceiling.”

He tried to imagine himself there. Step, then step, then step.

As you already know, but it surprises me, I miss the things about you I used to hate. I used to hate your clucking laughter, Evelyn, and I told you and you clucked. You weren't very ladylike, you would tromp into a room and inspect everyone, quite unabashed. How uninterested you were in my cemetery tour also, and you did nothing to hide it. My word, your miserable mien throughout the Low Countries.

At the third hotel he buzzed the night bell. The clerk looked at him through the glass, amused, bemused, uninterested. How do they know me? Dacres wondered. How do they know it's me? Is my wallet on display? Is my photograph in the papers? Open the damn door!

He walked on, starting to enjoy this game much less. It was time to give it a rest, he told God, time to turn to other matters, like the collapse of civilization, wasn't it?

“It rains almost every day,” he mumbled.

At the Yorke Hotel, green neon, a soft-spoken man calling himself Mr. Bowes told him gently that there was no room at the inn. They talked for a while, standing just out of the revolving door, and it was something pleasant to Dacres, like talking to Death himself. But he genuinely had no space, Bowes said. No, it was not personal. But Dacres could see he was torn.

“We have a lacrosse team coming in from Kingston on the last train,” Bowes whispered. “If it weren't for that …”

What's lacrosse? Dacres wanted to know. What's Kingston?

They eyed each other as if in a tableau: Bowes had a thin moustache, like Edelweiss, and Dacres wondered if it was a professional requirement. They were coming to know each other, Dacres felt, the man was going to let him in over his red-and-brown carpet with the golden inlay—to rest. Then Bowes suggested a soda counter a few blocks west.

He walked until he was passing commercial buildings, a refinery with
SUGAR
over the doors, and then, next door to a milling supply company, was a grim restaurant. A white sign with the stencilled outline of a rascally lion's head in dark blue:
THE LION GRILL
. It was longer than it was wide, the lamps hung down low. Dacres saw stools by a counter: not a pub. Not anything he recognized. But it was open. It would do.

Dacres sat down at the counter and the gruff man came and said thickly that he wasn't going to make anything except coffee. Dacres said that was fine, coffee was all he wanted. Coffee was likely all he could afford, he thought quickly, but he brushed that gnat off his skin.

Really all he wanted was somewhere to sit. There was a Berlin café in which three revolutions were plotted, there was a Spanish café where the lawyer rented a table week by week and that was his office. Taking calls at the bar.

Here there was a wireless but it was off.

“Where do people sleep in this godforsaken town?” Dacres mumbled. He'd left his sopping hat on the red seat next to him.

The owner or cook eyed Dacres but said nothing. He was rolypoly, his hair cut short around a bald head. The thick ox arms swung. He opened the cash register near Dacres but then slammed it immediately shut and it rang.

Doing nothing, waiting to be told it was time to go again, blowing into his coffee, Dacres watched the man scrape leavings off the grill. The labour of it. He was tired and benumbed. On a board above the stove, letters said “Corned beef on rye.”

“Have you ever been alone in a city?” he asked.

“Alone in the town, alone in the city.” There was something Baltic or Slavic in the voice, Dacres now heard. But not unkind. “Of course, alone.” He said almost everyone had.

“Perhaps my plight is not so uncommon, then,” Dacres said.

“Uh?”

He looked over to the window. Outside it was raining, raining harder than before, the drops throwing themselves at the glass in desperation.

Dacres made a face: “Ha,” he said.

The chap spoke as he cleaned up.

“Nineteen,” he said. “Nineteen. I left my village. They took our farm; I know no one outside. My parents were dead, my brother took my fortune.”

He said this so matter-of-factly, listing off the specials of the day.

“Ah,” Dacres said.

“I married a girl and she left. Most beautiful woman in Kiev.”

Kent? Dacres heard at first, but corrected himself.

“I am writing a letter,” he said. “But not this minute.” He quelled the thought. Instead he focused on the man's scapula. He had turned around again to work: behind the white straps of his apron, over his white undershirt, the muscles widened and narrowed as he scrubbed the sponge back and forth over something Dacres couldn't see.

Then he stopped: “She is the most beautiful woman in Ukraine.”

Tunbridge Wells, Dacres thought. No, Tankerton. Most beautiful woman in the Home Counties. Most beautiful woman in the Black Country.

He sipped some spitty coffee, suppressed a little shiver, a little burp. He thought it best not to ask about the war. This is what it's like to talk to a man you don't know, he realized, late at night.

“I was in my military service—and she married an officer.”

Dacres spoke lightly: “That's what women are like. Just when you think you know where you stand,
poof!
They disappear.”

The man laughed, turned, nodding.

“More?” he asked, and reached for the coffee pot.

“Why not?” said Dacres.

“Poof,”
said the cook. Laughing easy, he extended a hand. “Leo,” he said. “My place.”

“Edward Dacres.”

Leo was apologetic about having to do his own sweeping up. He told Dacres that he had no one to work for him, that he hired helpers but they were unreliable. Dacres could hear a dull roar, he didn't know if it was a furnace or some kind of restaurant ventilator. Leo, when he leaned close from his side of the counter, smelled of onions and lard.

“Why do you give them a job,” he said, “when they can do nothing? You train. Then they can mop. Then they don't come.” He told Dacres, in his imperfect English, that there were a hundred wrong ways to mop. Dacres sneezed. “But they have to want to learn,” said Leo wisely, finger pointing each word to Dacres.

“There's an art to everything,” Dacres said, not believing it.

Dacres came to gather that the man's assistant had failed to come tonight, and that was why Leo was surly and puzzled and betrayed. Or maybe he was always this way.

“They don't even tell you they quit,” Leo spat.

“Where's he sleeping?” Dacres asked. “Where do you people sleep?”

Leo seemed not to understand.

“Travellers' hotels. One thousand places.”

“Where do you sleep?”

“Upstairs,” he said at last, pointing.

“Of course.”

The coffee was finished. Leo was leaning back against the hob, his work done.

Dacres raised his heavy head and looked up at the big round clock. Then they both looked at the window. They both looked at the rain.

Leo pointed with his thumb.

“Back room,” he said.

“Really?” asked Dacres, excited. He was already reaching with his foot for his suitcases.

Through the door past the little toilet.

A bare light bulb, and white tubs, a tiny desk, boxes, and wonder of wonders, a fold-up cot. Watching Dacres struggle with it, Leo pushed past—Dacres leaned against shelves and his elbow touched tomato cans, there wasn't room for both of them to stand—and opened it out with military efficiency.

“Generous,” yawned Dacres.

“One night,” he said.

“Understood.”

“If you break anything, I chop off your neck.”

Thick hand slaps thick palm.

“This is really most kind—”

But then Leo was gone. Dacres pulled at the threads dangling from the hanging tea towels, began to arrange his things, and then decided there was no point. His hips and thighs were wet from rain. He wondered if the man had locked him in, but did not check.

As soon as the light was off, the voice began once more.

Now all I can think of is the line of your cheek. All I can think of is pulling the hair back to kiss your temple.

“No, none of that,” he said out loud. “The most beautiful woman in all the Russias. All the Kents.”

It would take much to visit you, wouldn't it. It's far. Too far. But if I stretch my hand out I can touch the dusty floor.

He was not tired.

He woke up too early, woken by the clatter of pots and pans and heavy male whistling. He flailed at the bats in his eyes, the bats went screeching away into the corners of the room. They had been clawing at his eyes. He smelled coffee, and this was proof that he really was awake, because (he mused) you can't smell anything at night, the sense of smell works only during the day. He must have slept, then, although he'd thought he'd been awake the entire night wrestling with the paper sheet—but here he was in his clothes. He sat up, sank into the cot, ran his hand over his sandy jaw. Spine knotted. Snot in nose. He had the Burlington Arcade in his head, and then it went the way of the bats.

Dacres stumbled into the toilet and urinated with his eyes closed. Then he was standing, in the wan light of the diner, mouth open.

Leo was talking to a younger man in a language Dacres thought he recognized but couldn't speak. The younger one, lightly moustachioed, smiled a greeting. Leo ignored him, even when he sat and waited for coffee on the stool he'd taken the night before. Probably, he thought, they were talking about him. Though they hadn't broken off; they were still talking. His eyes hurt. Bath, he thought. He wondered how he had offended Leo.

The youngster, much thinner than Leo, came to talk and spoke from close to Dacres's shoulder, and Dacres tried to nod along as the boy said that it was probably best to go now. But if he came back in a day all would be fine. He just had to go now: Leo didn't like it if you stayed in the morning. He even patted Dacres on the back, human contact. He said his name was Janusz.

Outside, Dacres felt all the more tired. Four hours' sleep, was it? Three? Twenty minutes. And then no coffee, to cap it all. He had his suitcases, each by the scruff of the neck. He walked, he passed low wooden houses, warehouses, and small factories. It was not Florence. A bearded coal man clicked along beside him in his horse and wagon. Walking, not knowing where, he passed a service station with a Tudor cottage. A parking garage half full of buses with dragons' noses.

“It's all right, Edward,” he said aloud. “You'll wake up from all this shortly.”

The sign in the window said “Room for Rent,” so he trooped up.

Then he was in a room without windows. It was not properly speaking a room at all. At the front of Mrs. Bark's house was a shabby parlour; rose-painted wood boards stood between it and what had once been the dining area that was now Dacres's new home. Against the plaster wall was a low cot with a blue-and-white striped mattress, like something from a prison. Next to the door was a teak table that tottered at any human contact.

He'd just nodded to everything she'd told him on the veranda (she called it a deck). Again and again she'd made the same statements, talking to him through a screen: he'd be lucky to find anything so decent with the housing shortage. But she wasn't sure she wanted to rent the room to a single man.

Record's scratched, thought Dacres. Like a mouse in an experiment, her mind kept tracing the same blocked paths.

Dacres told her he was a tie salesman. He said he had a wife in England: he didn't say where in England his wife was.

She said again that she wasn't sure she wanted to rent the room to a single man. But then there was a chap with a moustache, stopped on the pavement, watching. He raised his hat; Dacres doffed his own automatically.

“A happy landing to you!” the man called out. And then, acknowledging, called out, “Lydia.” She came outside.

Making space, Dacres bowed stiffly, mystified.

“You know Mr. Bowes?” she said. Her expression hadn't changed.

“Old friends,” said Dacres absently. That was it: Bowes.

Who was he?

“My cousin.” She waved shyly.

Fellow from the hotel last night. Bowes. Dacres waved, but the man was on his way. It was good enough for Mrs. Bark. She led him in.

She said she was not able to provide him with meals and he should just ignore the children when they were rowdy. Her husband was in the merchant marine and when he returned they would taste the leather of his belt but with him away—she raised her hands in
surrender—they were impossible. She fingered the lacy collar of her otherwise plain olive dress and, looking away from him, told him the rent. He didn't demur. He barely listened. He told her he would go to the bank as soon as it opened (thinking he would borrow from Edelweiss if she ever insisted). In an inspired moment, he said he didn't plan to stay long so there was no need for him to leave a deposit: his tie company would be sending him a train ticket to Windsor shortly. “Now if you'll excuse me,” he'd said abruptly, lest she object. Fingering the thin crucifix around her neck she left him.

Dacres lay on his back. He studied a bud on the ceiling, an empty light fixture—two sprouting wires—encircled by quite an elegant moulded medallion. The room would fit a dining table: he thought of dinners when he was an infant, he remembered stalking between giant table legs, hugging the wood and avoiding the shoes, and being hauled up by large hairy hands. It was his only memory of his parents. Now he counted the roses in the sky-blue wallpaper. He saw Darly Burner: bright features and supple arms, she was surely a spot of life in this limbo, but where was she? The door creaked open two inches and Dacres craned his neck to look and winced. A mangy, lopsided yellow-black cat stared at him. It blinked twice. He hissed and it turned tail.