Port Mungo (4 page)

—Did you want another drink, hen? she said.

They had more drinks—he could go one for one with her even in those days—and then went to a hotel. Back then you had to go somewhere seedy if you wanted a room for an hour or two and had no luggage. There was a place off Russell Square she knew, and she preferred to go there rather than to our place in Kennington, or the old fever hospital. They went by bus and sat on the top deck holding hands. Afterwards, when it was all over, they went to a pub round the corner. They were ravenous with hunger. They had pork pies—and god, he said later, how good they tasted!—and were in a dizzy mood, side by side on a bench at the back of the public bar, the pub transformed into a theatre and the two of them, he said, the only audience—life a comedy performed for their benefit alone—they were silly with love, or at least with sex, and drunk already on the American plan, the beer and the gin having nothing of the potency of this fierce happiness which had sprung to life between them.

For it had gone well in bed. Jack told me all about it later. I listened with mixed emotions—hard not to think of little Miss Splendour in the schoolroom that night—as he described in some detail the dowdy, cramped room with the grubby lace curtains on the window, and a large dark wardrobe at the foot of the bed with mirrored doors of tarnished glass, and yes, it had gone well. Slow and cautious at first, the pair of them had clambered from opposite sides into a musty bed and lay between cheap sheets, holding hands, Vera whispering that this was enough, they need do no more than this. They lay there for a few minutes, there was some tentative stroking, then a kiss—and that woke them up. That got the blood moving, and somehow they discovered how—or their bodies did, rather, for it was their limbs in their shifting negotiations under the sheets that found a fit, and the fit of their bodies, convex to concave and thigh upon thigh led them without difficulty and with sudden growing pressure of passion to the moment when Jack flung back the sheet and rose up on his knees to pull off his shirt, and Vera the same in manner more demure, and it was consummated then; and they clung whimpering to each other for many minutes afterwards. Vera was really rather a reticent lover, Jack once told me, her libido weaker than her personality might suggest, but bed, in the early days, served to instill in them the sense of fusion that set them apart from the world, and rallied them to the cause that swept them clear across the Atlantic, that cause being—them against England!

So they sat in the back of the little pub off Russell Square eating pork pies and drinking beer and talking about America. He never wavered for a minute. He later said that he had seen it all quite clearly the night of the lecture, that he’d known then that he wanted her but could never have her in England. The plan had been formed that night, he said, and by the time she was making her idiotic bow in the middle of the Charing Cross Road he was certain they were bound for New York.

This was not strictly true, and I was there, but this was how Jack liked to remember it.

It was a fraught time for all of us, those last few weeks in London, as Vera disentangled herself from Gordon the Terrible, as we now referred to him, and we waited in a state of breathless suspense for the great day to dawn, I mean D-Day, Departure Day. My own position was delicate: put bluntly, I disliked Vera, and I disapproved of her, but I couldn’t risk alienating Jack by saying so. And though I was learning more about the woman every day—Jack talked of nothing else, of course—none of what I saw or heard aroused my sympathy, much less my affection. She was more complicated than she appeared, this I did admit, and she was possessed of a powerful original talent, but she had little control of that talent, nor did she seem to want to control it, in fact at times she seemed determined to trash it, for there was a self-destructive quality to her drinking even then. I saw vulnerability and isolation in her, and of course there was the damage done by her upbringing, which was a Gorbals tenement building, violent father, alcoholic stepmother, too many children in too small a space. None of her deep damage would manifest for a while yet, but what did alarm me was that she had an impulsive streak every bit as unpredictable as Jack's: they were too much alike, and what they saw in each other was little more, I believed, than a reflection of themselves. And although I hoped that because she was married she would back out of their arrangement at the last minute, I could not be confident about this.

The decisive encounter came ten days before they were to leave for New York. Jack was meeting her in the Salisbury, which had become their trysting place, being close both to St. Martin’s and to her various haunts in Soho. She was late, thirty-five minutes late; he remembered glancing at the clock over the bar just as she came through the door. She looked grim indeed, he had never seen such an expression on her face before—more than her face, her whole body seemed to have been battered with a plank. She sank down on the chair opposite him and pushed her hands through her hair, sighing and groaning as she did so. Jack went to the bar and bought her a gin. She took a long swallow then stared hard at him, and he was apprehensive, he did not understand what was going on.

—Well, she said, that’s done.

Her fingers closed on his. He said nothing. Then he knew it was all right. Her teeth bit down on her bottom lip, it was the wicked-schoolgirl expression, she wore it when she’d got away with something.

—You told him?

—I bloody did. I told him.

—And?

It happened in the kitchen, she said. Gordon had been cooking their supper. After the word “divorce” came up he began to cry, but when she repeated it he flew at her like a thing possessed and she’d had to push him down onto a chair. Then he threw a plate at her.

—Then what? Jack whispered. He threw a
plate
!

—I threw a plate at him.

—Christ almighty.

Jack was flabbergasted. He was not afraid to steal the man’s wife, but he was shocked that they would throw plates at each other; as was I—clearly we had thought the thing through with insufficient imagination. It seems there was a good deal of plate throwing, and shouting, and swearing and weeping, before she was able to get out of there, and it was her opinion that Gordon would continue to refuse even to discuss the idea of divorce, but that he could not stop her going to New York, how could he?

—He knows about New York? cried Jack.

He did. This at once cast my brother into a state of acute panic, for he feared Gordon would find a way to wreck their plan. It was for precisely this reason that I had been ordered to tell my father nothing about it, and not a word to our brother Gerald either, who was bound to make a fuss if he caught wind of it. But with regard to Gordon’s potential for interference Vera was sanguine. She told Jack that he expected her to come back after she had had her “squalid little fling,” and that when she returned he would be waiting for her. It seems this was far from her first squalid little fling. Apparently Gordon too had flings, and I think Vera quite enjoyed being caught between the two men, each formidable in his own right, and herself unsure which of them would prevail in the end. I do know she shared Gordon’s bed right up to the day she left.

I learned in the days following that Gordon had broadcast Vera’s “outrage” to half of Soho, and that Jack had acquired a certain infamy. This he could tolerate, and even savour, provided Vera got through the last days in London without vacillating or, god forbid, changing her mind. It was a period of excruciating tension, and only my own staunch support sustained him. My misgivings I kept to myself. He had told her that if she didn’t come to New York with him he would go alone. He had meant it when he said it, but the prospect of going without her filled him with dread. Our plan was that if she didn’t go then I would. What would happen after that I hadn’t the faintest idea.

Came the day of departure, and we found ourselves under the clock in Victoria Station. He had his suitcase, his passport was in his pocket, also his roll of ten-pound notes. It was a miserable wet morning in October and he was wearing a black raincoat with the belt cinched tight and the collar turned up. He wore a black hat pulled low over his eyes, but he spoiled the effect by taking it off every five minutes to wipe his forehead with his handkerchief and push a trembling hand through his hair. There he stood, smoking a cigarette, staring off into the middle distance, a tall, nervous, long-haired young man making the first large dramatic romantic gesture of his life. I thought of Manet’s
Gare St.-Lazare,
all vaporous iridescence, a fragile web of glass and iron, figures dissolving in steam—and dear god, I thought, much more of this and Jack too will dissolve in steam. They were to travel by rail to Southampton and board the
Queen Mary
in the late afternoon.

I had become fatalistic. I knew she wouldn’t come, and that I would be forced to travel with Jack to New York to face a future of—to put it mildly—some uncertainty. I glanced at him as I paced about the crowded station hall, and he was quiet and abstracted now amid the steam and flurry and din, and then I scanned the crowds for some sign of Vera. The big clock ticked overhead, and the departure of the Southampton train grew imminent. Curiously I felt a kind of sadness, as well as relief. I understood well enough my own resistance to Jack’s departure, I wanted him in London with me, and I passionately resented this painted creature from Glasgow who was taking him away from me. All the same, I remember thinking that Vera would not find with Gordon, or with anybody else for that matter, what for all his immaturity she would find with my brother—I knew his strength, I knew his drive, and I knew she needed him, if she were to grow, and flourish, and be fulfilled as a woman and an artist, though I was not certain that
she
understood this, I couldn’t be sure she
knew
she needed him, and that he would solve the problem of her existence. What a waste, I thought. What a sad, foolish waste, what a waste of
Jack
—

Then—a shout—my heart sank—and there was Vera, coat flapping open, weaving through the crowd, colliding with a man in a bowler hat, not pausing to apologize, and her friend Julian hurrying behind with her suitcase, and Jack was running towards her and then they were in each other’s arms in the middle of Victoria Station on a damp Tuesday morning and it was all theirs, it was all spread out in front of them—

No time to lose; and a few minutes later they were squeezed into the window of their compartment, with me and Julian on the platform, and we were all talking at the same time, and then the whistle, and clouds of steam billowing up in the damp air, and the train was moving—

They collapsed into their seats. The compartment was full, five each side, but despite the performance at the carriage window no person in it permitted a flicker of human interest to cross their face, nor their eyes to meet the lovers’ eyes: the last of England indeed. Without turning to her my brother punched Vera in the arm and murmured, “Beast.” He knew she was grinning because the woman opposite suddenly jerked her head to the window and rigidly stared out at the wet dreary streets of South London.

A week later they were in New York.

His first visit to the city was not a happy one, but despite that my hard-headed unsentimental brother was never able to think of Manhattan other than with a kind of blind grateful affection, and hold it in his imagination as a place of refuge for lovers in flight. They were on deck with the other passengers when through a misty rain he saw the skyline rear up before him, a close-packed mass of old-fashioned skyscraper buildings huddled at the tip of a mythic island. They stood at the rail, wrapped in their overcoats, as Vera explained how the streets ran east to west, and the avenues north–south, and the Brooklyn Bridge spanned the East River, and the subway cost a dime, or was it a nickel, and on and on, but after a while it was too wet for them on deck so they slipped down to the bar for the last drink of the voyage.

They were disembarked at 42nd Street and came down off the ship into a great damp shadowy shed with steel rafters and a hubbub of echoing voices, crowds of milling men and women, suitcases and cabin trunks piled everywhere, laconic American officials. Having cleared customs they found themselves and their luggage on a pier on the West Side just as the rain eased off and the clouds parted. The sun was going down over the Jersey shore in a haze of smoky reds and grays, and they had a place to go to, a small hotel on 29th Street called the Madison where Vera had stayed before. They found a cab and sped off crosstown. The midtown skyscrapers stood out against the darkening sky with their lights all ablaze, symbols, surely, of, oh, hope, I suppose—aspiration—power, glory, success, and Jack said that during those minutes in the cab he experienced an excitement so intense that it aroused him sexually, and with it as powerful an intimation as he’d ever felt that
greatness
lay within his grasp; and he could see no earthly reason why, with Vera beside him, he should not achieve all he knew he had it in him to achieve.

Chapter Four

My brother could never be called a wistful man, but there was more than a whisper of nostalgia in him when he spoke about their first days in America. They were glorious, he said, he could
taste
it, the feeling of those days, as though it were a piece of fruit he’d just bitten into and the juice still wet on his lips. Everything they saw and did seemed to amplify the outrageous joy they had in each other, a pair of bold young painters flushed with the flame of their new romance and shaking the dust of old Europe off their boots. They had got away with it!—this was the feeling. Down Fifth they’d stride at night, he said, the collars of their overcoats turned up against the wind, the city throbbing round them like a living heart and warm light spilling out of bars and restaurants on every block. They would push through the doors of some smoky saloon with gleaming brass rails and dark wood panelling, the jukebox in back and large mirrors behind the counter such that every bottle had its double, and find people who remembered Vera from her first visit, and with affection too, how could you not? With her ceaseless talk and her wild, gap-toothed laughter, how could you not want to draw close, said Jack, and share the light of that abundant spirit?

Abundant spirit was certainly the theme of their first nights in New York, he would then say wryly, and of the many that followed, for whatever the company Vera assumed she had more to offer it than anyone else, and she did not hold back. Instead she held forth, and when propped up at a bar with a glass in her hand she could dominate any group. How she loved to tell the story of dumping Gordon and leaving England, all for the love of this beautiful boy who had carried her off with such purpose, such gallantry!—and how the crowd applauded when she lifted her glass and declared Jack Rathbone the last of the great lovers, the last true romantic, and Jack, poor Jack, clutching her close to him, bewildered and intoxicated by it all. The talking and drinking would run on into the small hours before he could at last go home with his genius, and if no one was able to recall much of the conversation the next morning, what did survive was the feeling of being privileged to be taking pleasure of such a rare and elevated kind, to be out carousing, I mean, among artists at play with their wits at full stretch, their tongues unfettered and winged—

But as the days flew by, each much like the last—an endless round, it seems, of bars and parties among people he later came to regard as phonies and losers—Jack said he became aware of the first flush dying, and it was dying because he was beginning to feel a deep unease that they had not yet made any
work.
I understood his impatience, of course I did, and his frustration too, because I knew how intensely ambitious he was, and it never occurred to me to doubt his account, I suppose because it confirmed what I already suspected about Vera, that she was a slut and a lush and
lazy.
In time I came to regard her differently, and even grew to like her; and I leaned on her heavily after Jack’s death, when for a while she was the sole pillar of strength in a house of shattered women. But in those early days I felt only disdain, which was simply the mask of my jealousy. A studio with a bed in it had been promised by a guy called Herb who was about to leave for the Cape. He would let them have it for nothing, he said, and given their limited resources this was important, but they saw him in the Village night after night, in one bar or another, and he always had a reason why he must be in the city a few days more.

Jack became convinced that he was Vera’s lover from her previous visit, and that he didn’t leave the city precisely because she was there, but it meant that they had to stay on at the Madison, where they could not work. So as they tramped the city streets by day it became clear to my brother that while he grew increasingly anxious, Vera was untroubled by their idleness. Every morning he woke early with a hangover, and lay in bed seething with impatience as it grew ever more clear to him that if they carried on this way they would one day be without any money, and worse, that Vera did not care—that she was content to let that day dawn, and would not worry about the prospect
until
that day dawned. Which meant that it was up to him to make sure they didn’t go broke, but without involving her at all. That seemed to be the deal. He had thought the deal was they were going to set up a studio together and work side by side. Vera was certainly looking at art, and talking about art, but she wasn’t
making
any art. She said she needed to charge her battery.

He asked her how long this took, and I imagine from what he told me that they were in bed for this conversation, that it was late morning, and that they had had a late night. Another late night.

—It takes, she said, as long as it takes.

I see her sitting up on her elbow, licking her dry lips, groaning, pushing her hair off her face, reaching for a cigarette. Jack was unsure whether such behaviour was to be expected of an artist like Vera Savage, and therefore accepted, or to be resisted, to be challenged. All his instincts told him he was watching not creative gestation but waste. He said this. She turned to him, squinting; then her face changed, she stretched out a hand and took his jaw in her fingers, and angled it towards the light, what little they had of it in that poky room with its one small window, his pale hair flopping over his forehead.

—Just look at you, she whispered, and with so much tenderness, the tears standing out in her eyes!

How then to berate her for her shiftlessness? But he tried.

—Darling, we’ve got to
work
!

Still she held his jaw. Then she was astride him.

—You’ve got to work. Go on, work.

Then she sank onto him, closed her eyes, lifted her chin.

—Not just me, he said, or murmured, rather, as he lost control of the conversation.

Or so I imagined it. He thought he might try again later, when they were out on the street. There was the chance of a more serious conversation when they had their clothes on, but there were so many distractions. Here was the new Guggenheim Museum, extraordinary spiral going up on Fifth Avenue, here was Central Park, the park, yes, all that wildness and water and silence at the heart of so much congestion and
din
—! He would talk to her seriously when they were in the park.

So they talked seriously when they were in the park. They went in at 86th and tramped south in their overcoats, hands plunged deep in their pockets and Vera’s head sunk low as she frowned and he poured out the thoughts that woke him each day at dawn and cast an ever-lengthening shadow on his happiness. And she nodded, and agreed that yes, it was time they made some work, and she understood, yes, that he was eager to get on, and so yes, tonight they would decide one way or another about this studio of Herb's, and if it wasn’t going to work out, why then they would look for something else—and then all at once a large shaggy hound was padding towards them and she cried out with pleasure and sank to her knees to make friends with it—and he saw it meant nothing to her, what she was saying. She was trying to make it mean something, she was trying to share his compulsion to work, but it simply was not in her.

This rocked him. He had to stop and sit down on a bench. They sat under a tree, the dead leaves drifting down around them. The day was cool and misty, the park was empty. They sat smoking by the Bethesda Fountain and he could not explain how rocked he was by what he’d just seen in her. He didn’t know her any more. How she worked, this was a mystery to him now. Whatever it was, her working process, it bore no resemblance to his own. He did not know what this would mean for them.

Jack said he saw then that the idea of them properly living and working together would only become a reality if he made it so. He knew he had it in him to settle to long sustained bouts of work, but he wanted to have her working beside him, in an adjoining studio, and for them to come together at the end of the day, to talk of what they had done, to criticize, to learn, to encourage, to develop—this had been the idea, but he now saw he had been deceived. She was a stranger to the long sustained bout of work. How she had become the painter she was he didn’t know, but he now suspected, and it was awesome to him, that hard work had not been the key—rather, some kind of innate talent: it had come easy to her. But what evidently did not come easy to her was the will to exercise that talent, and Jack didn’t know how to ignite it in her.

Facing this, facing the ruin of the dream that had driven him to abandon England, and landed him in a city where he was a stranger, with a woman he now felt he didn’t know, he sank, for a day or two, into something approaching despair. A black cloud attended him, and this I know well from my own experience, that when my brother had a black cloud attending him no joy was possible for anybody else. Apparently Vera did not understand what had happened. She assumed he was anxious about money. She attempted to reassure him. She told him she could always get money from London if she had to. He asked her how. From Gordon, she said, and Jack lifted his head and laughed a bleak hollow laugh.

That night they were in a bar as usual and Jack was still deeply absorbed in his predicament. What could he tell her, when she asked him what was the matter—that
she
was the matter, that the future she had seemed to promise him was an illusion? She would have denied it vehemently. She would have passionately reasserted her commitment to the idea of a partnership of artists—the American Studio—an idea first formulated late one night in the back of a Soho pub and embellished in the weeks since. But now Jack feared that the American Studio would never materialize, not in the form he had imagined it, and this fear left him adrift, uncertain where to go next, what to do—dear god he was only seventeen years old!

It was a strange, violent night in New York. As though a spirit were abroad, or a posse of demons. There were jangling discordant energies wherever they went. Shouting cops, restive crowds, snarled traffic. Saturday night, a full moon, madness in the city: in one bar an enraged man picked a fight with a stranger and when they tried to throw him out he tore the washroom door off its hinges and hurled it across the counter, bottles, glasses and mirrors shattering, and they all had to run for the exit.

An hour later, in another bar, Vera’s friend Herb turned on Jack, irritated by his silence.

—What are you doing here, man? he shouted, over the hubbub of talk and jukebox, and in a tone of sufficient hostility that the rest of the table fell silent and looked on with interest. They all knew Herb’s history with Vera. Jack shrugged. He was burning, he told me, with rage and embarrassment, but all he did was lift his glass, lift his cigarette, as if to say, Nothing, drinking and smoking like you.

—Yeah, but what are you doing? I mean, taking up space, that it? You give me nothing, man, you’re like a plant.

—Shut up, Herb, shouted Vera.

—A houseplant.

Herb turned grinning to the table.

—Better a plant than a Herb, shouted Vera, but it was too late for Jack. It hadn’t occurred to him that anything was expected of him here. These people were older than him, they were Americans, they knew Vera from before, their talk gave him no openings. He was not an artist, not yet, he was not an American, he had nothing to contribute. He bought drinks, he assumed that his position was understood. Now this. The rage all at once boiled over and he lunged at Herb, swinging wildly with both fists. His mood was brutal to begin with. For several weeks his existence had had meaning only in relation to Vera. He was baffled by her friends, he hated bloody Herb—he was sure there was something between them still, and it preyed on him—he felt there was no solid ground under his feet, nothing familiar to cling to. He needed me, but me of course he had left far behind. Now this. Herb scuttled away and stood panting and growling and shouting at him to settle
down,
man, be
cool,
man, and Jack slumped back onto his chair, wiping his face where he’d spilt beer in his brief assault. Then he pushed his chair back and in the sudden silence the legs scraped loudly across the boards of the tavern floor. Without a word he walked out into the night.

For several hours he walked the streets, thinking of nothing but how good the cold air felt on his skin, and seething still with jealous rage. He didn’t know that Vera had rushed out after him, but that he’d walked away so fast she didn’t see where he’d gone, nor in the loud, mad city did he hear her shouting for him. He tramped the city streets, his thoughts in utter turmoil, alone in this alien place, and Vera a part of a world which offered no place for him, which rejected him. He tramped the streets and allowed the anger and misery to boil up and rage unchecked.

Midnight, and he found himself down at the Battery, sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette, gazing out at the harbour where just a few weeks before he’d stood on the deck of a liner and felt the limitless promise of the city. The night was cold and clear. The crisis was on him, and he must make a decision, to go back or go on. To go back was unthinkable. But how to go on? He had to get out of New York. But he had to get out of New York
with Vera
—and that simple thought shed all the light he needed. It was a decision not to abandon her.

I believe he made other decisions that night, or rather that certain ideas crystallized in his mind. He told me he waited for sunrise, for the first light of dawn to touch the Statue of Liberty and burn off the mist on the water. He said there had been other times in his life when the early-morning hours seemed to open new avenues in his mind, something to do with the edginess, the febrility that comes of not having slept, something to do with the sense of an empty world out there, a sleeping world, the space for one’s thoughts not contested but free, rather, for expansive movement, for the sweeping perspective. Gazing out at the harbour Jack at last found some clarity. He said he understood that years of obscurity lay ahead of him while he became a painter. He would suffer humiliation and neglect, but this he could endure: he would grow the hide of a rhino and become impervious to the opinions of others. Better by far, he thought, to spend those years elsewhere. He would come back to New York but only when he had something to
offer
New York: he would return a mature painter with a body of work. The city was no place for an aspirant, for a beginner. New York was full of aspirants and beginners, and they all seemed to be Vera’s drinking buddies. He would stagnate if he stayed, he would grow sodden and lazy, and delude himself into believing he was an artist when he was nothing of the sort. He needed rigour, he needed routine, he needed somewhere he could live cheap and work without distraction. Above all he needed Vera beside him.