Port Mungo (19 page)

Chapter Sixteen

Rapidly down the hall she came, shouting at me, unkempt as ever, in a flapping shapeless overcoat, her hair flying in all directions and her high heels ticking on the floorboards. Anna knew who she was even before Jack rose to his feet with a cry of joy. I was of course taken completely by surprise, not just by her presence here on this of all nights, but by the blazing intensity with which she now stood panting in the kitchen doorway and gazed at Anna. It was a remarkable encounter. They liked the look of each other, this was clear at once. Vera opened her arms, grinning fondly as she prepared to swamp the girl in a shaggy bear hug, and Anna, smiling shyly, her eyes alight, wrapped her long arms around her, spread her fingers across her mother’s back and held her close.

—Look at you, you’re the image of my Peg, Vera murmured, holding the girl at arm’s length, gripping her shoulders, to inspect her. I had never seen Anna flushed with pleasure and confusion, and how rare it is, I thought, to be so overwhelmed by another human being that we lose the power of speech and blush like a child. We sat down and Vera briefly gave her attention to Jack and me.

—Dear god, Veer, said Jack, how like you not to be in touch for years and then just show up on a Saturday night.

—You’re at home, aren’t you?

Anna was hiding her face, busying herself with tobacco and rolling papers, then Jack was getting Vera something to drink and Vera had resumed staring at Anna, eating her up with her eyes, the grin still there, the sportive gods of humour very much in evidence. Vera once told me her philosophy of life, this was in the old days. When in doubt, she said, the only thing worth asking for is more. More? Just more. Whatever’s on offer. The Philosophy of More, she called it.

—Here, give me some of that, she said, once Anna had rolled her cigarette, and the tobacco was passed across the table. Jack handed her a glass of fizzy water with ice and a slice of lime, Vera glancing at me as she took it, and our eyes met. Oh, it was hard not to like the woman, in spite of all the damage she had done, to Jack, to Peg—but all of it so long ago, all water under the bridge. I say this, though in truth I could now
afford
to like her—I had Jack, and she didn’t. Her eyes were back on Anna as she rolled a cigarette and licked the paper. The razor blade wrapped in black tape still lay on the table. She picked it up and turned it over in her fingers.

—I hear you cut up Eduardo Byrne, she said.

How on earth had she found out? Dora must have told her in the hall.

—I wish I’d killed the bastard.

Vera bit her lip. She was amused, already she loved the girl’s spunk, no solemn concern at all for her trauma. Strange to think I was looking at what had once been a nuclear family.

—I’m glad it wasn’t me, she said, I wouldn’t fancy getting cut up by the likes of you. What about you, Gin?

—Perish the thought, I said.

—Perish it indeed.

—Poor Gerald, she then said to Anna, suddenly serious. What was it like?

—It was quick.

—That’s something.

Her levity was gone. She sat smoking, pondering my brother’s death, and I remembered how her mood could govern a room. She examined her cigarette and crushed it out. I think she was not a smoker any more, just as she was apparently not a drinker. Not tonight anyway.

Anna watched her. She was very still. What was going through the girl’s mind? Here was her mother, whom she hadn’t seen in god knows how many years. A few days previously she’d learned of this woman’s responsibility for her sister’s death. Earlier that night she had sliced a sculptor’s hand with a razor blade. Shock after shock, yet she seemed to absorb them with barely a break in her stride. The depths to this girl were either immense or nonexistent. I believe the thought occurred to Vera too.

—Bit of a street fighter, are you, then?

Anna grinned at her.

—She’s a skinhead, right? She’s a sex pistol.

—Oh sure, said Anna, shifting about with pleasure.

—Where are you staying, Veer? You want to sleep here? said Jack.

Vera did not look at Jack; instead she glanced at Anna.

—My bag’s at the hotel. They have hotels downtown now, did you know? I’d better go.

—Don’t go, said Anna.

—All right, I won’t.

So she stayed, and we talked some more, the four of us, and got caught up on our lives. It was Vera’s habit to take control of a conversation so as to spare the company the prospect of boredom, and one was always happy to yield her the floor. I suppose it was pure fascination she aroused: you wanted to see more of the workings of her personality, for she was complicated, she was unpredictable, she was entertaining even in her sudden glooms and silences. There was what I can only call a full nature at work in Vera Savage, and such natures are rare, we are seldom fortunate enough to get a good close look at them. She inspired strong reactions, and she inspired love. She certainly inspired it in Anna that night, and while I saw the effort—I realized after some minutes that she was not strong, she was struggling to perform with her customary gusto—I don’t believe Anna did. And it occurred to me that if the traumas of the early evening caused some kind of delayed visceral reaction, then it would be absorbed at least in part in the welter of impressions and feelings awoken in Anna by her mother.

Later I lay awake turning this prospect over in my mind. At a certain point I knew I would not sleep. I had become anxious. I was remembering how unconstructive Vera’s influence on Peg had been. I imagined Anna adopting her mother’s cynicism, laughing the whole thing off, refusing to confront her own rather worrying propensity for violence. Vera’s life was not one to be imitated. Let Anna look to me, or Jack, better still, if she wanted to be guided, I thought, and see her mother for what she was. Was she smart enough to think this out for herself? Or was she seduced by the buccaneer spirit, as her sister had been? Somewhere quite near me she slept, or perhaps she did not sleep, perhaps like me she lay there with her eyes open, working over experience too heavily freighted with significance to be fully assimilated other than in the silent depths of the night. Jack slept, and so did Vera. Hard to imagine either of them worrying about any of this after midnight. But Anna and I, with complications piling up like wrack lifted by a rising river, our separate minds worked through the hours of darkness to impose sense and order on the events of the last days.

Sunday morning dawned clear, and the shapeless anxieties of the night had retired to their usual shadowy cloisters, and plain practical problems took their place: far less daunting. With a single phone call I established that Eduardo’s palm had been stitched and his tendons were undamaged, but his upcoming show would have to be postponed. Vera was up soon after I was, and the pair of us sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee. We talked about Anna, and I asked her to be careful of the girl. I put my hand on hers, I gazed at her in all seriousness, and saw her start to buck. It was the old truculence I saw, the old blind pride stirring to life, but I kept my hand on hers until she quieted.

—Meaning?

—Don’t let her see you careless. Things matter. Don’t make her hard just because she was hurt.

—I doubt I could make her anything she didn’t want to be.

—You know that isn’t true.

I sat back, lifting my fingers from hers, and watched her. I thought perhaps she was less a stranger to responsibility than she once had been, perhaps she was at least on nodding terms with the idea of responsibility. Seventy now, she had fought it long and hard, and all the old instincts were still there. But compromises had been reached, truces signed.

—It’s one of the two or three things I continue to regret, she said, that I didn’t try and hold on to her.

I was curious what the others were. The life she’d lived, and only two or three regrets?

—What’s so funny? Gin Rathbone, are you laughing at me?

The old bear growl never frightened me.

—I am laughing at you. Two or three regrets, is it? Not bad.

—Not bad be fucked. All right! All right. I won’t set her a bad example. I’m not up to it anyway.

I was relieved to hear her say it. Dear Vera. Jack appeared in the kitchen doorway.

—One thing in exchange, she said, turning to him.

—What’s that?

—Take me upstairs. Show me the studio.

It was a small price to pay. Actually it was no price at all, having Vera in his studio never did Jack anything but good. Up the stairs we went, the three of us, himself in front like a bride on her wedding night, he said later, and with more than a whisper of a bride’s anxious anticipation about what awaits her above. He opened the studio door and stood back to let Vera go in first, no darting about to set things straight, none of that nonsense, Vera knew her way round a studio. She stood in the middle of the floor in her baggy clothes, she turned full circle, sniffing, in her element. She murmured something about Jack’s studios always smelling the same but her attention had been caught, and held, I saw at once, by the portrait of Anna.

She did not go to it immediately. She had a long look at the large canvas first. And it was, as I’d suspected, another variation on the Narcissus posture, this one the clearest depiction yet: a figure leaning out over the side of a boat, reaching down with one hand to a second figure beneath the water, a reflection, whose arm reaches up, and the two hands almost touching. The boat was white, the water black, the figure in the boat a smudged crimson. A third figure, much foreshortened, stood upright in the bow, holding an oar. They were in a cave of some kind. It was a stark, simple painting, and Vera stood silently in front of it, shifting her weight from foot to foot, suddenly lifting a hand to isolate a bit of brushwork—she had delicate hands, Vera, feminine hands, plump and white, when she troubled to scrape the paint and muck off them—and talking to herself—oh yes, very nice that—or, more ominously—what the hell is that all about?—which had Jack by her side and staring at the offending matter, and seeing what she saw though not agreeing with her, not yet anyway. So she muttered at the painting, Jack hovering behind her so as to miss nothing and then, at last, unable to hold back any longer, the tension too much for him—directing her to a passage he was happy about, some accident of texture and gesture that he liked, and that she’d recognized all along.

—Narcissus crossing the Styx.

—Off to hell, said Vera. Just like you, eh Jack?

A flash of glee from under her frown, and away she went again—yeah, very nice, like it a lot, sweet—while Jack glowed and swelled like a candled Halloween pumpkin. All this she gave him before she pleasured herself.

She stood quite still in front of the full-length nude and there was no mumbling now. There might have been a quiet sigh. Jack came to the window and stood beside me, looking down into the garden, and up at the sky, which had clouded over, it was flat and gray now. He knew the painting was wrong, he knew she knew it too, but she was held by it as he was, he couldn’t abandon it and she couldn’t stop looking at it. Suddenly he grew impatient, and said he felt like smoking a cigarette. Vera’s presence often had this effect on him, she was his downfall in ways both great and small.

—Oh leave it alone for Christ’s sake, he cried, you know it’s no good.

She ignored him, she took her time, and when she did come away it had only been a minute or two but it felt much longer. A minute or two is an eternity in front of a bad painting, particularly if you’re the one who painted it.

—So?

She sank into the big chair and crossed her legs. I suddenly saw she was tired. Up for barely an hour and already tired. She seemed unable even to lift her head and look at Jack. He let her sit there as he paced about, doing the talking, explaining his ambivalence towards the picture, even telling her what it looked like in moonlight.

—How is it when she sits?

—She goes empty. We made a deal.

He hadn’t meant to say this, and it was the first I’d heard of it too. But she had to know. He didn’t know why she had to know, only that she did.

—What sort of deal?

—She’d sit if I told her about Peg.

She nodded. Not surprised. He said later that this was how it always used to happen when the two of them were alone together and Peg’s name came up. They seemed to move to another place, or onto another plane, rather, where more massive significance attached to things, and large last dramas played themselves out, matters of life and death, and laced through and around them their own lives, hers and his, their mistakes, their malfunctions, when personality and circumstance were horribly out of true and damage was done to the innocent. Only one real innocent in this story, of course, and Jack had no idea whether Vera had resolved the painful inarticulate confusion which she had more than once displayed, and which she had seemed unwilling to sort out and had instead—he presumed—pushed down, blocked out. Drowned. But now her silence was not restless, he did not hear the psychic machinery grinding. She was tranquil, slumped in the big chair with her hands unmoving on the arms, her head quite still and her eyes on the portrait of Anna.

—The odd thing is, she wants to know and at the same time she doesn’t.

—Why odd?

—She said she came to America to find out.

All at once there were smoky black knots of complication, of unspoken guilt, and resentment, and remorse and rage, all of it to do with Peg’s death. I watched closely from the far side of the room. Did each blame the other? Did she hold him responsible? She was opaque. She stood up and again approached the painting. Jack grew uneasy.

—Are you going to tell her? he said.

It must have occurred to him that Vera intended to talk to Anna about her sister’s death, and from her own point of view, whatever that was.

—Somebody must. She came to you.

—Let me tell her.

I was on the point of saying, But you’ve told her already!—when something passed between them, some difficult understanding. Jack was relieved, at least that much was clear, and I guessed that the responsibility of telling Anna was his alone.