Port Mungo (12 page)

—Does he still hate me? said Jack.

The pathos of it. They were standing by the window in the sitting room. Jack waved her to a chair. You feel the largeness of the room because there’s so little in it now. One good rug from Oaxaca on the bare boards, two big paintings, Jack’s
Narcissus
and one of Vera’s early canvases, big strong paintings against the high white walls, and the mimimum of furniture to make the room habitable; after Jack moved in I tried to keep my clutter elsewhere. There was a large mirror in a hardwood frame over the empty fireplace. It was also rather a cold room, and this we liked too, it was good for Jack’s arthritis.

Anna sat forward with her elbows on her knees, her hands hanging between her thighs, shivering, her black scarf trailing down to the floorboards. She gazed at Jack with a frowning intentness utterly lacking in self-consciousness. She hadn’t taken off her coat. Her hair was chopped and spiky and she rubbed at it with a hand that might have been Peg's, once, he said, apart from the scorpion. She had four small silver rings up the side of one ear. A high-templed white plate of a forehead, unblemished and unlined.

—Gerald’s dead, she said.

—Yes, of course.

Somehow this had slipped his mind. I remembered my older brother’s righteousness on that earlier occasion, his strident anger towards Jack. None of his anger was directed at Vera, she could not be held responsible for anything. As Anna pushed a hand through her hair Jack saw that her fingertips were stained yellow.

—Smoke if you want, he said.

The tension had grown acute but Jack wasn’t aware of it until suddenly it broke with him telling her to smoke. He got a smile from her then, the first proper smile, more of a grin really, lop-sided and matey—gray discolored teeth revealed, one of the canines badly chipped—as she dug in her leather satchel and produced her tobacco and rolling papers. Jack fetched an ashtray. He stared at her for several moments, and then realized how uncomfortable he was making her.

—Is it very cold in here? he said. I’m afraid I don’t feel it any more.

—It’s bloody arctic.

She fired up a ragged cigarette and sank back in her chair. Suddenly there came a volley of coughs, she doubled over, and Jack stared at her in some alarm, thinking that her pallor perhaps signified something more sinister than a lack of sunlight.

—Sorry about that, she muttered.

She picked a shred of tobacco off her tongue and examined it, then wiped it on her jeans. Just like Peg, he thought.

—Was it a shock? Gerald, I mean.

—It was a relief. He had this awful tumor. Worse for him, being a doctor and knowing what was going on, he was like, Cancer is cancer.

Gerald said things to Jack that I have never forgotten, though none of that concerned Anna. She understood that a chasm of mistrust and anger had separated the brothers, but for her it had no relevance. She was here, now, with Jack, and she barely troubled to hide her impatience with this ancient history.

But this was not right either. There was something else happening here. Jack watched her as with lowered eyes she pulled at her ragged roll-up then tap-tap-tapped the ash into the ashtray. He liked her candour. Jack used to say that he too was impatient with imprecision and insincerity and indirectness, that he too valued the cold-bucket-of-water of unvarnished honesty.

—Why are you here? he said.

—What, New York?

—New York, this house—?

He told me he already suspected why she had come, but she was not yet able to admit it. She thought she ought to, she said.

—Anyway, it was time.

—Why was it time?

Eyes on the table again. Some evasion going on.

—It’s complicated, she said.

Jack waited.

—Can I tell you about it later? she said. In a few days, I mean. It’s just such a
mess.

No tears, but a most dismal expression, and Jack leaned over for her hand. There was the grin again, the lift of the chin, the long white tobacco-stained fingers pushing through the spiky hair, all this accompanied by a bit of sniffing and coughing, and he suggested they have lunch.

Over the course of lunch it became clear that she had indeed come, as Jack suspected, to find out what had happened to her sister in Port Mungo. Apparently the subject was never discussed in Gerald Rathbone’s house. I began then to sense how very strained it must have been for the two of them, this awkward girl come to see the father she hadn’t ever really known, and come, what’s more, with this serious and terrible question to ask—and Jack, no less awkward, no less a stranger to whatever was required to handle such a fraught encounter with any sort of grace—also his inability to be warm, despite the fact that he was growing more pleased, as the shock of her presence diminished, to have his daughter with him again, he who had assumed he had lost both his daughters twenty years before. All this going on, but these two odd suspicious characters unable to articulate what they were feeling, instead circling each other like clumsy wary animals until at last Anna cleared her throat and made her proposition. And I remember the look Jack gave me as he told me this, how his eyes gleamed in the candlelight, almost vulpine, I thought. I asked him what she’d said.

She’d offered to sit for him. To be his model.

—What did you say?

—What do you think I said?

—You said yes?

—I think she needs the money.

She left shortly after five. He said he watched her from the window of the big sitting room as she emerged onto the sidewalk and went off down the block towards Seventh Avenue. She strode off into the dusk with the leather coat flapping about her, he said, her satchel slung over her shoulder and her scarf wound tight around her neck. Thirty years between us, more, he’d thought, but there are days I stride the sidewalks of Manhattan like that, when I lope through the streets like a wolf.

Then he had turned back into the room. The smell of tobacco hung in the air and he enjoyed it, he said, he who had become as fastidious about cigarette smoke as me. It reminded him of the old days when everybody smoked and artists smoked more than anybody else. And it reminded him of Peg, who’d smoked from the age of seven and smoked like a man, cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, eyes half closed, face wreathed in blue fumes. And I saw then what was in store for us. Anna Rathbone, by coming into our life like this, and rousing the past, was rousing her sister; and Peg, once roused, invariably laid waste to that most fragile of organs, I mean her father’s heart.

Chapter Eleven

Until ten years ago, when he came to live with me, and at last accepted that routine and moderation were the only way, for him, to a productive life, my brother lived in a state of the most delicate equilibrium. Periods of hard work would be followed by periods of dissipation. He travelled extensively but he never gave the impression that his life fulfilled him. It seemed, rather, merely to distract him from private matters about which he never spoke. During the Crosby Street years he was never at rest, never at peace, and I began to feel that he was in a state of perpetual flight, though from what he was fleeing I had no clear idea, unless it was the memory of his daughter.

His sexual life in this period was obscure to me. There were various women for brief spells, but I suspect he may have purchased a good deal of his sex. If there was any thread of continuity it was Vera. During the years in Port Mungo she had used Pelican Road as a kind of depot to which she would always eventually return. Jack had accepted this. He seemed able to ride the emotional turbulence of this loose chaotic arrangement, perhaps it suited him. I don’t know.

There was the five-day reunion in the summer of 1982, in the Crosby Street loft, but then she’d drifted off again, and quite where she’d landed after her trip to London I didn’t know, nor did I know whether she had visited Gerald in Surrey and had an opportunity to renew her relationship with her daughter. Nor, frankly, did I care. That she was out of the picture was enough for me, and I was sufficiently foolish to think she was out of it for good. Not so. Whatever the attraction between those two, despite everything it hadn’t yet played itself out. Back she came two or three years later, and did Jack take her in? Of course he did. I heard about this only through a third party, the sculptor Eduardo Byrne, who was my lover at the time.

I should probably declare here that I do not have a particularly impressive record in this department, I mean with regard to love. With my brother occupying such a large, central role in my life it was hard, as you might imagine, for anybody else to measure up. Julian was the first—Vera’s friend, the poet, who’d come with her to Victoria Station that damp fall day in 1957. And what a day that was!—end of an era. It was only when the Southampton train had finally disappeared, and me still standing on the platform gazing after it, that I allowed the awfulness of Jack’s departure to come sweeping up from somewhere deep inside and overwhelm me. I had to sit down. I had to have a drink, even though it was not yet lunchtime. Julian was very good, he saw how distressed I was. He took me into the station bar and bought me a large whisky. We stayed there until half past two in the afternoon, when they threw us out. We had eaten nothing, and I was not steady. I may have been a little hysterical. I took him back to Kennington Road, where I allowed him to undress me and take me into bed, or to be precise, into Jack’s bed. And that is how I lost my virginity, weeping in my brother’s bed, overcome with grief because he had left me.

Julian was a nice enough man but he soon began to annoy me. He was courteous, thoughtful and deferential, and I dislike those qualities in a man. Jack was never interested in what I thought. If I wanted him to pay attention to me I had to make bloody sure it was worth his while. Julian opened doors for me and bought me drinks and asked me how I was feeling, and as a result I became distant and chilly rather quickly, which oddly enough he seemed to like, for he promptly redoubled his attentions. He was such an utter Englishman, and I sometimes wonder whether it wasn’t just this that drove me across the Atlantic, I mean an impatience with utter Englishmen. What I will say for Julian is that he taught me how to do sex, and he was gentle about it. This I did appreciate, even when I realized that he would much prefer that I behave like the man in bed, and let him be the girl.

My subsequent romantic history was at best sporadic. After a brief phase of rampant promiscuity—it felt rampant to me—I became extremely selective. But even so I was often disappointed. None of them had that—what will I call it?—a kind of bracing self-involvement that swept one up and carried one along, made one tingle with vitality even if there was a bit of brutality too. Not physical brutality, a roughness of manner, rather, that came of impatience, and kept one on one’s toes, and exposed one at times to ferocious ridicule but also opened one to experience that wouldn’t otherwise have been available. I think I came to be regarded as something of an ice queen when I was young, but it didn’t put men off, in fact I was much in demand, and I began to realize that they liked me because I was stronger than they were, when what I wanted was a man who was stronger than me. Someone like Jack.

It was different in New York because there I found men who had the kind of brutal narcissism I missed, but the problem with most New York men was that they lacked that which even the most wilting of Englishmen seemed to possess in abundance, and that was wit. New Yorkers could talk about themselves all night with far more passion than they could ever arouse in the bedroom, but they spoiled it by bringing a kind of mind-numbing
earnestness
to these flights of ego. No sparks, no sudden flares of wicked irony, no barbed sardonic asides—no self-deprecation—the only real malice I encountered in my early days in Manhattan came from the mouths of homosexuals, who liked me for my ice-queen manners, and who amused me with their conversation, but who in a very real sense were my competition, for we were after the same sort of men. Several years passed in this way, and I was starting to become seriously emotionally isolated when I encountered Eduardo Byrne.

Eduardo was a tough, stringy man, a gristly piece of meat of a man with a face that always made me think of the men who work in the engine rooms of oil tankers. A merchant seaman, that’s what Eduardo looked like, and when a merchant seaman struggles into a suit to attend his mother’s funeral, that’s how Eduardo dressed. He was a sculptor who only late in his career received any serious attention. When I first knew him he had just begun to make money but the manner in which he lived had not changed. He had a loft on Mercer that was even more primitive than Jack's.

One night he came to the house for a game of chess and told me about Vera’s return. My concentration immediately went all to hell, and I soon conceded the game. Eduardo then said that I had too narrow a view of love.

—Love? I said. That isn’t love. I don’t know what it is that those two have but it’s not love. It’s a pathology they share. The minute Jack begins to recover, back she comes and infects him all over again.

I did not say, That woman is directly responsible for the death of his child.

—That’s love, said Eduardo.

—More like malaria.

I may not have been successful at love myself but I knew what it was and what it wasn’t. What Jack and Vera had, and the mess it invariably made of their lives, that wasn’t it, and I said this to Eduardo.

—Love is always a mess, he said.

Spurious romantic claptrap, this, as though to live in vigorous talkative concord with another human being is inferior to a dreary predictable cycle of fighting and reconciliation involving spilt drinks and broken crockery and slashed bedsheets and kicked-in canvases and people thrown out into the night and doors being locked against them, and whole buildings woken up, and yes, actual physical violence—tears and screaming—then sobbed apologies and hungover sex—yes, and wild doings at night that end in tragedy. That’s not love, I said, it’s emotional intemperance, only a fool would think it was love. Clearly Eduardo was a fool, and I told him that too.

He laughed in his knowing way, thick condescending chuckles which implied that I didn’t know what I was talking about. His own compulsive promiscuity hardly qualified him to comment, in fact his inability to commit to even the briefest fidelity was making me seriously question the future of our relationship. I had not yet decided whether the sex was adequate compensation. I told him that any responsible person would greet the news of Vera Savage returning to New York with cries of dismay.

Eduardo was right at least in this regard, that one should not be too hasty in predicting the same appalling levels of discord every time. I took them out to dinner one evening, and I have to say Jack looked quite healthy. His hair had been cropped short, and he sat rubbing his bristled skull and grinning with pleasure as Vera was humorous at my expense. I can usually give as good as I get in conversation but Vera’s tongue, Vera’s
mind
—which I will charitably call mercurial—was often too quick for me. She too seemed healthy. She was in a tight black skirt and absurdly high heels, it was the cheap-tart look she had made her own in London and which still apparently bewitched my brother. How was my
flock,
she wanted to know. Vera enjoyed pretending that I was employed in an ecclesiastical capacity. She liked to think I was a lady bishop in the Episcopalian church.

—Weeping and praying, I said.

She grinned at me round her cigarette. There was the black slot, and it was hard to be altogether indifferent to her despite all the harm she had done. It seemed she was good for Jack just then, for he’d been sunk in grief for many months and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard him laugh. Purple Virginia, she called me, and I think that on some level we were actually beginning to grow fond of each other, even if I did regard her as a wicked and dangerous woman and endured her company only because Jack wanted me to.

Our dinner was pleasant enough. We did not speak about Peg. It emerged that Vera had been living for some months in a farmhouse near Rhinebeck, but quite what the arrangements were, who was paying the bills, this was not stated. What did impress me during the course of the evening was the current of genuine tenderness between them, and this I attributed to their mutual loss: each recognized in the other the same private pain, and for this reason they were gentle and affectionate.

Later, I walked home by way of Washington Square. It was early April, and after the rigours of a particularly bleak winter the air was warm, the trees were in blossom, and not a hint yet of the sweltering humidity of the summer to come. So, a mellow Sunday evening in spring, and I asked myself why I should not be surprised at the evident pleasure they took in each other, given that the Port Mungo years had been a time of such sustained shabbiness, in every sense, and had culminated so hideously. I’d have thought they would prefer to avoid each other so as to avoid confronting so much in their lives that was ugly.

Not those two, apparently. Were they without vanity, then? Was it to do with the activity of painting—a daily discipline of vision unflinching? Or was it, rather—and this represented something of a shift, for me, towards Eduardo’s position—that here I witnessed a form of love I had not recognized before, so robust in construction—so
stormproof
—that it weathered tempests which would have scuppered any ordinary relationship?

So I entertained the idea of love like a ship unsinkable. A ship unsinkable—I circled the idea and I asked it, was it real? Or was it, rather, a wisp of gothic romance, swallowed whole in childhood and rising now to the surface like an undigested scrap of salad leaf? But no, no. I had always seen it straight. Vera was chronically unstable, but she had always somehow convinced Jack to take her in, I think because he felt he was responsible for her frailty. She played on his guilt, and then she left him. The very repetitiveness of the pattern, the way it circled round on itself and never went forward, seemed to mark it for an unhealthy relationship, obsessive-compulsive in nature and quite emphatically neurotic. So enough of gothic romance, and more of clinical analysis, I thought, unless—and I paused on my doorstep, the key in my hand—unless the thing is a spiral, which even as it circles, rises?

How long she stayed with him I’m not sure, but I think it ran into weeks. By all accounts this was Vera in her domestic aspect, a rare sighting indeed. She shopped for food, she cooked for him, she cleaned the loft. This I had from Eduardo, who was a frequent visitor to Crosby Street at the time. We laughed together at the bourgeois tendency of the Rathbone household, neither of us in any doubt as to its prospective duration. He too remarked on their evident tenderness for each other, and I wondered if something else had happened, an event which had served to clear away or otherwise resolve tensions to do with the death of Peg. I did not say this to Eduardo, of course. Not that it would have made any difference to him, for him love required no such design of cause-and-effect as it pursued its erratic course. Experience, and reading, have taught me to look deeper into things. I fired him soon after. I discovered he had four other lovers at the same time as me, not all of them female. We remained friends, however.

One day that summer Jack called at the house and Dora brought him into the big sitting room. I at once guessed what had happened. Poor Jack. And things had been going so well. He smoked, he frowned, he stared at the floor. He had just come from Penn Station, where he’d put her on a train. Why had she gone? She wanted to work. Ironic, considering their history.

—She can’t work in the loft?

He shook his head. They couldn’t work in the same space. She had a studio upstate and she wanted to be in it. I asked him if he wasn’t getting a bit too old for all this.

Up came his head, and he stared at me with an expression of disbelief, which changed in another moment to amusement. Too old? Too
old
?

—What’s so funny? I said.

But he wouldn’t tell me what was so funny. He sat there with his elbows on his knees, grinning at the floor. At least I had managed to lift his mood. I had by that time, with the dismissal of Eduardo, re-established a certain tranquillity in my own life, and I could see no reason why Jack should not enjoy the same. But the very idea amused him, and he left my house still grinning. He loped off up 11th Street, and without turning lifted an arm high over his head and flapped his hand at me where I stood at the front door watching him go.