How to Paint a Dead Man (13 page)

That was the thing. Danny never went in for monogamy. He never chose. I can’t do conventional, he used to say.
They’re all so nice. And I’m way too weak with the booze in me.
He told them all very early on that his love was a shared commodity, and went with the ones who didn’t mind. The liberals, the hippies, the partygoers, and those girls for whom casual consensual sex was a step up in a relationship. There was something about it you took comfort in: his refusal to prioritise, his being un-winnable. Sometimes you felt guilty, for the connection between the two of you, for having had an unfair advantage all those years-as if, after you, none of them could stack up. True enough, they were all variably inferior. You knew it when he said things like,
She’s a babe but she’s just not on my wavelength, Suze. She doesn’t totally get what’s in my head.

There was never any damage done in the end. He was considerate. He talked them through it, said goodbye in bed and out of it, let them stay an extra day or two. He remained in contact, a semi-reliable friend, an occasional subsidiser of rent. He was simply Danny, a joker, a drinker, the sweet-hearted, sensitive, un-marrying man. Shallow, but for his depth.

Your parents grew used to meeting one pretty fool-stung girlfriend after another. They got good at temporary welcomes, the remembering of names for bumpings-into at the supermarket and the bank. It was very amicable. Hello, love. Hello, Shelley. Hello, Caroline. Kat. Della. Pamela. Amanda. Clare. Alison. Gillian. Rachel. Freya. Fiona. Lorraine. Rosie. Sharon.

At the flat you waited for Terry to go, then you opened the envelope and unfolded the paper. His handwriting was as bad as ever, made worse by the influence of whatever they had taken, and the idiotic anticipation of tombstoning thirty feet down into pitch-black water. There wasn’t much to read–just three lines. You’d expected a thicker tome, reams of loopy, mushroomy crap scrawled across the page, because it usually took Danny a good few goes to find the meaning in what he was trying to say. Danny had never quite arrived at maturity. You’d assumed that he’d be eternally juvenile and harebrained, and you’d always have the task of dismissing his crackpot notions or humouring him. Danny never quite got to grips with the real world. He always thought things could be knocked together somehow, towed or balanced, spun or floated or flown, when it was obvious to any halfwit that they could not.

Like the time, aged fourteen, he decided to paraglide off Skiddaw using an old sailcloth tied to his belt, and they had to pin his leg in two places at the local infirmary.

Like last year, when he entered the river Eden paddle race, with an oil-drum yacht–
The Dirty Sanchez.
You and Nathan had tracked his progress from the bank, cheering him on as the kayaks made off downstream. You’d watched him float along at a glacial pace, the various agricultural inflatables bulging below the planking.
She’ll pick up speed,
he’d reassured you, grinning,
she just needs to build up a head of steam.
He was wearing flip-flops, a Hawaiian shirt, and blow-up armbands. He’d roped a four-pack of beer to the deck and he pulled it up from the water and opened a can. When the raft ground to a halt in the rapids, Danny had leapt into the water, splashing around and drenching himself, and he’d managing to tug the rusty hull free. The other supporters had laughed and cheered as your brother gave the thumbs-up. Two hundred yards further on the vessel had begun listing badly. People yelled at Danny to abandon ship. In the end it was Nathan who had intervened, heroically jumping off the sandstone bluffs into the water, and helping your brother to tow the sinking
Sanchez
into an inlet, where she was hastily dismantled. The two of them had swum to the finish line with a tractor tyre floating between them. Then Danny had chased you down, picked you up, and thrown you in the river, as if you were eleven years old again.

You loved this quality about him. His yaw. His silliness. His lovely, lofty profundity. He was a boy with a brain full of gorgeous, ludicrous thoughts, even at the age of thirty-five. He didn’t understand doom. And you so badly wanted him to succeed. Just once. To build his machine, ride the rapids, fly. In Danny you could see a wonkier version of your dad, the progeny of those adventure-inventor Caldicutt chromosomes. When Terry handed you the will, this is what you expected–more of the same. Obscure quotes and hip musical instructions, the desire for sloe poteen to be passed round in some nude forest ceremony. You’d have put good money on it. But you were wrong.

You read it and you felt your heart drop inside its bone cavity. All he wanted in the end was you. It was extraordinary to be reminded in that single moment of who he was and who you were. Compatible birth mates, biological repeaters. Closer than anyone else could ever be to you, and you to he.

You sat on the floor of his flat, now empty and smelling of mildew, and folded and unfolded the note. You read it again. You thought about Dr Dixon and the insects in his aquarium trees, their bodies damp with mucus after crawling from their skins.
Say I do, Sue. Say I do.
You remembered how as a child you had gradually lost a sense of what Danny was doing in the next-door room–pulling off his socks, watching a spider scuttle, picking his nose. You retuned the channel, started broadcasting on another frequency, clean and static-less and one-way.
I, I, I,
you repeated,
me, me, me.

And you thought about the time Danny had run away. It was at the end of that six-month period of treatment at the clinic. He had slipped out of the cottage and on to the moors one afternoon, and had hidden under a thorn tree. He was upset because you weren’t playing head-talk any more, and he thought you were angry with him. When it became apparent he was missing, you went out with your parents to try to find him. You called his name. You tried to think where he would be–you tried to know where he would be–on the huge brown expanse of the moor. You had never felt so lonely. You had never been so sorry. After what seemed like hours, your dad found him curled under a blackthorn, his arms scratched and bleeding. He was sound asleep. When he was lifted out he woke up. He took your hand. You were forgiven.

Occasionally there were reminders, a residue of some kind. He’d laugh out loud if you were thinking something funny, and say he wanted tuna mayonnaise for his lunch if you had planned on having it. The day you got your first period he seemed aware, if not of the uterine aches, then of some kind of general malaise, because during your next lesson together he handed you a Disprin tablet from the chalky stash of pills he kept in his pencil tin.

You were still siblings, still the Caldicutt twins. But cognitively you went your separate ways. At school you accelerated through academic disciplines while Danny tooled around, arranged local haunted-house tours, scoured the fields and marshes for mushrooms, got into Ecstasy and speed. He formed discordant bands, cycled the Roman roads. After his foundation year, there was never an attempt to make it past amateur artist. He was a craftsman of the ordinary, he said, a plain old smithy.
I’m a lesser-bearded Ruskin, a salon-less Courbet.
Not a Peter. Not a Suzie. He was happy for you and your dad, proud of the acclaim, the attention, proud too of everything your mum did, her loaves, her scrapbooks, the haircuts she gave him. He was humble, and deeply pleased.

Your silly, soulful brother. The one on the right side of the womb, the one, it turns out, earmarked for extinction. Cut short in his prime, they said at the funeral.
Poor Danny,
people said,
why did it have to be him? Life is so cruel. He got such a raw deal.

But that’s not true. Danny was blessed. He was touched by the hand of a benign deity. He was living the dream, seizing the day. Somehow your brother avoided the solemnity and dross of the modern world. A tap dripped happiness into his temperamental reservoir. There was no lust for money or new things, no lamenting the terrible state of the world and the depravity of humankind. Instead he tracked comet showers, had skinny-dipping parties, read Walt Whitman. He shared flats above chippies and launderettes with old friends from school, worked for minimum wages, saved up to go to Greece and Glastonbury and to get ferries to Man for the races. Then he always came back again.
I’m all right here, Suze,
he would say to you when you offered to help set him up in the city.
This is home. I like it here.
Danny with his flat of so few items and his slack wallet. But almost five hundred people turned up to his funeral, from Carlisle, Bowness, and Scotland, from Hexham and London. And didn’t they sing for him.

No. Danny wasn’t unlucky to be killed. The world was unlucky to lose him.

You pocketed the note, took the boxes out to the car. You locked up the flat, and dropped the keys down to the po-faced landlady in the shop below. She said something to you about having him as a tenant. You didn’t hear and you didn’t care. You were thinking about Halloween, when you were teenagers, running crazy between the burning whin bushes. All across the common land in the darkness, the wagging yellow cones of gorse that you had fired. Danny would yell at you to light another one and you’d hold the lighter to the green spines and hear them rat-tat-tat-tatting as they caught. Then you’d take turns to jump across the flames, from blackness into blackness. When you ran and launched yourself Danny would be so afraid and full of laughter. He’d wait on the other side and grab you.

You drove out of town and turned on to the military road towards your parents’ cottage. As you drove into the hills, you had a strange fantasy, about making his pyre, like he had asked you to. You imagined laying his body on a mound of hawthorn and sitting with it as the sun went down and then lighting the fire. The wind would bellow it fierce, until the red embers were hot enough to leave no trace of hair or bone or molar, not even the pins screwed into his leg. His essence would billow across the valley. And when the fire burnt down, the soft tresses of ash would blow away, and nothing would remain above the ruined black cot of stone.

You were thinking of this as you drove back to the cottage, and it was so very comforting, and for the first time in days you felt he was close.

I fear we are beginning to lose our oldest skills. The repair of mosaics and frescoes is a delicate matter and one that is currently providing much consternation. The younger generations do not understand the manufacturing processes and the raw materials with which we have produced great works. These lessons are still relevant–there is much the medievalists can teach us about quality and application. During class on Thursday I asked the children to tell me about paint, about how it is made and where it comes from. To children, paint is a miracle produced alchemically within the tube. Suppose the shops were shut, I proposed, and the materials not available to us. Suppose the factories stopped making these miraculous tubes. There would be no violet, no orange, or green, or indigo. Is it not a predicament in which we find ourselves? But what solution might there be?

Next I produced quills of goose feather and showed them how to split the shaft and insert and bind the brush and trim the tip, and I gave them a rudimentary lesson on the manufacture of yellow. We walked to the mountainside and took ochre out of its seams with palette knives and the children were obliged to grind the earth with pestles and bind the substance and strain it, which they did with great enthusiasm. Suddenly they were the busy apprentices of the fifteenth century. Now you can see, I said to them, that as artists you are free to paint whenever you choose. The use of such methods is a long and trusted endeavour. It is not naïve. It is not quaint. You can wear the leather apron of the journeyman with pride. You are enabled always by the grace of the land.

Signora Russo permits the children to leave the establishment if they hold a knotted rope, which I must lead. It is knotted to indicate the number of children; each child holds a knot when we walk. I do not know if this is the typical method for transporting her assembly or whether she is worried that I will lose some of them down the burrows and into the lake. I have no trouble remembering where I have placed my shoes each morning, I tell her. I am reminded of the Eastern fairytales my mother told me as a boy. And with our childish knots, safely through the woods we go.

My cough has become less offensive. I have felt well all week and so have postponed the appointment at the hospital. I know I am old and susceptible: I do not need a medical diagnosis stating this. I only need to look up from the page to see that my garden has become a province of tangled grass. The garlic thrives, as do the small fruits and herbs, but much else is running away. We have had heavy rain and the banks have begun to erode. Theresa cannot attend to these tasks, though she has sympathy for the garden and my affection for it and my increasing inability to care for it. Giancarlo has helped with repairs in the past. I have no wish to employ a gardener. It would be to admit defeat.

Theresa is filling her big pan with the last tomatoes as I write. Later she will prick their skins and remove their seeds. She will take the sauce home balanced on her bicycle seat. Today we have not been getting along. Theresa is vexed by the library of books in the house–that is to say my collection of books, catalogues, and pamphlets. The piles are impossible to clean round, she says. Ants nest between them and then march into the kitchen, into the pot of honey and the pot of sweet dates. But ants are marvellous creatures, I tell her. Do you know they have a private stomach for themselves and a public stomach for the good of the colony? If an ant could read a newspaper surely it would choose
L’Unità?

She does not wish to be told jokes or teased about her proclivities. She wishes to re-order the books and put them on the shelves. By this she means she wishes to dispose of them. All the shelves at Serra Partucci already contain books. I suspect that she believes books to be unimportant. She is a provincial woman who cannot tolerate literature. Her opinions are intractable and she will not be enlightened. If I contradict her she becomes sullen and puts too much salt into her dishes to dry up my mouth. In the past I have accused her of attempting to poison her employer. We can pass hours in silence if the mood of the day is one of bitter disagreement. The books will leave this residence only after I do and much less quickly than Theresa if an ultimatum is issued. I informed her of this quite plainly this morning. No doubt I have become abrupt over the years. This afternoon, by way of a truce, I found a poem in the collection of Giacomo Leopardi and read it to her. ‘And as I hear the wind rustling among these plants, I go on and compare this voice to that infinite silence.’ He is the most crystalline of writers. She left the room halfway through the recitation. She is often an intolerable creature.

Once I made for Theresa a little straw model to show the frame of a lizard. One long piece and two shorter horizontal pieces twisted to it. It looked, in fact, like her double crucifix. I have also shown the children in the school this replica. This is how the lizard moves, I said, and I bent the front and back legs together on the left, and then I bent the front and back legs together on the right. This is how they can climb to such great height, I said. This gives them great speed and great stability. Do you see? Theresa retrieved her dustpan from the cupboard and swept the model into it and deposited it outside, and then she collected her bicycle and went home.

The slow rusted bicycle of Theresa, its wheels pleading for oil with each rotation as she pushes the contraption down the hill.

There has been no letter from Peter this week. I have been spoiled to receive so many. I think of him often. I wonder how he progresses with his studies and his painting. What are his current philosophies? Which sculptors and colourists does he admire, and how will he begin to articulate these influences? How will this Peter of the Rocks found his church? He should heed the words of Cennini, who writes so intelligently on the subject.

For three years I studied in the red city. It was a different age of learning then. The gates of Accademia di belle Arti were decorative iron. But as immovable as this firmament were the teachings within the establishment. All affiliation and experimentation with the modern was quickly denounced. In my youth, I burned pictures related to Braque and the fragmentalists. The scholars at the Academy would tolerate no such curiosity or experimentation–they believed in paralysis and perfection. All attempts at the primitivist styles were accused of impatriotism and, if found guilty, we were made to study the great pieces again, and in some cases retake
corso comune
as humiliation. These teachers could, with one stroke, intervene and impose upon any painting that offended them. I have never felt such frustration as when watching a canvas dividing its wooden brace as the flames consume it. I have never once touched a brush to the paintings of my students.

In these times, poetry was the only salvation, and we were, all of us, poets and hungry for what the true poets were saying. It was they who collated our passion and our insult. It was they who reminded us to breathe when we held our breath, and taught us courage.

I have prepared a canvas for the new painting but I have altered the position of the bottles again-something was not quite right. I have written to inform Antonio. Each time I begin a painting I think I know everything, I believe myself fully equipped to work, but in truth I am starting with nothing and I know nothing. It can be a desolate thing. I am unable to convince myself of success. When I turn to look in the studio mirror I see a man of superficial health who reads poetry to his housekeeper instead of going to the hospital. I watch him. His hair is shockingly white. He smokes until the cigarette scalds his fingers. He smokes another. He waits for something-a bird, perhaps-to flit across the window, or for an announcement from the wind at the door of the house. He waits for permission from the objects on the table. He considers the spaces between. He rearranges by a fraction.

Peter must visit the National Gallery in London. He must see the glazed earthenware and the pewter, the wet fish-scales and gold-ringed eyes in the marine studies of Velázquez. He must see the liquid pooled in the sockets. He must see these paintings and not try to interpret utensils or religion or any such thing, nor should he try to unravel the symbolism of Vanitas or the elegant paradox of each title. Peter must feel the temperature of the bream, the death-shroud of seas over it, and the crackling of garlic skin as it is peeled. He must hear the sound of grinding in the kitchen mortar. And he must see the dragonfly of van Os–arrested–its transparent wings, its essence of flight. In America he must see Cotán’s quince and cabbage, suspended, tied delicately with string. The melon’s seeds slipping from the orange flesh.

I would present him with the timeless gifts of the
nature morte.
Still-life with citrons and walnuts. Still-life with lobster, the serration of claws. Still-life with parrot, and fruits out of season. Still-life with cloves, chilli, eggs, hare, dead birds, dewdrops, and rose. With asparagus, coins, straw skull, wicker, terracotta vase. Still-life with drinking horn.

Only then will he begin to understand living art.