Port Mungo (8 page)

—How old was Peg?

—About two.

—Was she fond of her?

—She resented all the attention she got.

Silence as we pondered this. Various flashes out on the horizon, a distant boom of thunder. We were still on the deck with our rum. Something bit my ankle and absently I slapped at it.

—Does she have no maternal feelings
at all
?

Again he sat forward, pushing his hand through his hair, frowning, groaning slightly, I presume because the question aroused such bitter emotion. He looked at me, he looked away, he muttered something under his breath. All this theatre. At last he spoke.

—None.

—Oh Jack.

I leaned across and took his hand. He gripped my fingers hard for a few seconds. Then he said he believed he could have held her had she not been unfaithful to him. She was not at root a promiscuous woman, he said, rather her sexuality was stitched into her emotional dependence on the man taking care of her. But her affair with Johnny Hague created a disturbance which seriously damaged the connective tissue between them. She realized, unconsciously, he believed, that by destroying their sexual bond she could destroy his power over her.

He sat there in the darkness after telling me all this and busied himself with the lighting of a cigar.

—Your power over her, I said.

—Christ, Gin, somebody has to control her!

Chapter Six

Jack’s revelations shocked me but they did not surprise me, I suppose because I had made my mind up about Vera in London, and my antagonism towards her, which I deluded myself into thinking was based on a cool assessment of her character, was in fact shot through with the resentment of a rival: she had taken the man I loved. Absurd and irrational, of course—I was Jack’s sister. What we had was not a romance, but it was a relationship of a profound and intensely intimate nature, and I did not recover quickly. My own move from London to New York a year after my father’s death was partly an attempt to draw closer to him, and I must acknowledge the pleasure it gave me at the time to think that I had been right about Vera—that she was no good. She was a bad mother, a faithless lover, a drunkard, a spendthrift, a drifter. I am not proud of this, but it did at least allow me to empathize with Jack in his constant worrying at what had gone wrong, why things had turned out as badly as they had. She grew increasingly restless, he said, and the time came when she was more often absent than present.

—But why?

He said he supposed she never felt she had a duty to stay at home. To stay at home when she wanted to be off, that would have seemed to Vera a kind of death, he said, a strangling of some vital impulse, and this was all tangled up with her idea of herself as an artist, which was the only part of herself that mattered to her. Mother, lover, teacher, muse—she cared nothing about her performance in any of these roles, none of it had anything to do with what she thought was the point of her. Anyone could be a good wife or mother, this was her argument, but nobody could be the artist she was, nobody could make the paintings she had it in her to make. Therefore anything was justified if it served the work, and if that meant setting off at two days’ notice to tramp across Chiapas, then the hardship suffered by those she left behind was of no real consequence.

—Does she love you?

Eyes down, shake of the head. Knotted silence.

—God alone knows, Gin. After her fashion.

—So what happens when she comes back from one of these trips?

We were out on the deck, it was late in the evening, we were watching the Mungo. Lightning flickered in the distant mountains of Guate. All at once Jack became animated. His line was: Not so fast, lady! He had no time for any of her barroom philosophy, if she wanted back in his house she must earn it. First would come the row. She shouted and sulked, she refused to admit she had done anything wrong, she insisted she had never promised to be other than she was, she tried the sanctity-of-the-artist line, but it did her no good at all, she knew in the end that the only thing that would suffice was a sustained, sincere apology, and until she somehow found her way to the place inside herself where sustained sincere remorse could be awoken then her life would be hell, Jack would make it so.

So they would hole up in Pelican Road and after a day or two she was forced to acknowledge what Jack had suffered by her absence. He did not rest. He said he scraped away at her denial like a sheet of industrial sandpaper. There was little sleep for either of them, there was much shouting, there was even—rich one, this!—the throwing of plates. She would threaten to go off again and never come back and he told her to go ahead, did she think she was the only woman he could
procure
if he wanted one? What was the point of a woman anyway? Someone to drink with, someone to take to bed, otherwise a distraction from the work.

This sort of argument Vera could understand, of course. They shouted their existential slogans back and forth, they trumpeted their manifestos of artistic self-sufficiency, but in truth it was all bravado, though Jack knew it better than she did. And she was the one who’d come back. She needed him. And if, once, he had missed her badly when she went off, he had learned how to live alone, he had had to—

When he said this, I lifted a sceptical eyebrow. Far from learning to live without her, he was plunged into such distress by this latest absence that he had been forced to send for me. Even his tone of voice belied what he was saying, for it was with a smile on his face, and a kind of fond nostalgia in his tone that he spoke of her homecomings, as though he actually took pleasure in these ghastly fights. I assumed this meant he was always glad to see her again, which was incomprehensible to me. What possible justification could there be for loving a woman who behaved like this?

After the row, the sex. Stripped raw by sleepless nights of ego-battering insults hurled back and forth across a battlefield of broken crockery and beer bottles, apparently they fell upon each other with ravenous appetite. I believe she crawled all over him like a frog on a branch, Jack hinted as much, and several drawings pinned to the wall of his studio suggested that this was how they went about it. A day or two in bed, and then, still smarting from their wounds, they were more or less back to normal. It was during those hours that she’d tell him where she’d been, and out would come the dusty sketchbooks, the tequila-stained notebooks, the photographs, the maps, the stories. He said these were happy hours. He may have hated her abandoning him, but he seized eagerly on the records she brought back of her adventures. Then he would show her the work he’d made while she was away, and how he liked to hear her talk about his painting! I watched his face grow soft at the thought of it.

—What then?

Then she’d remember Peg, and off she’d go to find her daughter, shambling, barefoot, rootless woman, her hair spilling out of her headscarf, and looking in her canvas trousers and bleached shirt like nothing so much as a sailor fresh off a pirate ship and lacking only a parrot for her shoulder and a hoop ring in her ear. A silly fond smile on my brother’s face as he told me this. Off she’d go across the white sand with a bottle of beer hanging from her fist, and despite everything, he said, he loved her.

I let this pass without comment.

So Jack raised Peg almost entirely by himself. He was at the same time pursuing his work with a ferocious discipline, and a pattern emerged: him pouring more and more of himself into his painting, her coming and going and doing less painting with each passing year, and Peg growing up a careless free spirit, running wild.

I have vivid memories of Pelican Road. I was of course very curious to know Peg, having heard so much about her in Jack’s letters. When I was down there she was a shy girl of eight with the long limbs and narrow, pointed features of a true Rathbone, and already quite a character. My first evening, after I’d had a wash and then warily settled myself in an old cane chair on the deck over the river, she hung back in the doorway, peering at me, shifting her weight from foot to foot and frowning.

—You’re very white, she said at last.

I detected the faintest trace of an English accent, but it was almost totally submerged in the lilt of the patois. She seemed to decide I was harmless, and approached me. Gingerly she touched my hair.

—Aunt Gin?

—Yes Peg.

By this point the child had quite overcome her shyness and got herself half seated in my lap, and was picking at my earrings with her long, brown, dirty fingers. I worried there were lice in her hair.

—You want to go out on the water?

She pronounced “water” like “matter.”

Jack appeared on the deck with a bottle of rum and two dusty tumblers.

—Darling child, Gin does not want to go out on the water, in fact I don’t think I want
you
going out on the water.

He turned to me and said they’d recently lost a child to a crocodile. Peg grew excited at this and with her strong dirty fingers she forcibly turned my face away from her father and towards herself and told me about the boy seized by the croc—“right near this house, man!” Her face was inches from mine, her eyes wide.

—That boy, she whispered, he one bloody mess.

—Peg, why don’t you bugger off now, said Jack.

—Okay, Jack, she said, in a weary tone she must have learned from her mother. I’m going to bugger off now. Later, Aunt Gin.

—Later, Peg.

Then, quite deliberately, watching me as she did it, she took a cigarette from her father’s pack, lit it, and let it hang from the corner of her mouth as she exhaled smoke through her nose. Jack appeared not to notice. She left the deck backwards, still with the cigarette hanging from her lips, holding my eye and making peculiar wriggling gestures at me with the fingers of both hands. Once in the gloom of the house, with a shout she darted off, and we heard her bare feet pattering down the stairs.

—Remarkable child, I said.

—I worry about her in that boat.

We gazed out at the sluggish river, which gleamed in places in the last of the sunlight, and probably harboured hungry crocs at that very moment. I rather enjoyed watching my brother being a father. He seemed good at it, rather like our own father—affectionate, distracted, indifferent to petty matters like smoking, watchful in a vague sort of a way—and Peg, I thought, seemed to require no more than that. Later that same night, undressing for sleep in my shed of a bedroom at the back of Vera’s studio, I suddenly became aware of a figure standing in the doorway. An oil lamp gives out only the weakest illumination, and I was startled to see a motionless figure where a second before there had been none. I gave a little scream. It was her of course.

—Peg! What are you doing there?

—I want to see your white skin.

I was astonished.

—Well, I’m sorry, my dear, but I’m rather modest in that department.

—Can’t I watch? Jack doesn’t mind.

—I’m afraid not.

—Okay. Later, Aunt Gin.

—Later, Peg.

She melted into the darkness. Jack doesn’t mind what? It was another world down here. I had no idea how they lived. I decided to jump to no conclusions about any of it.

The next day Jack took me down to his studio. I remember it vividly. All his work was there and much else besides, all the junk he’d accumulated, plus the work of local painters and others passing through who’d heard of Jack Rathbone’s studio in Port Mungo and come to visit. It was a vast, cavernous space with wooden walls and lofty rafters, and huge doors giving onto the dock through which flooded light reflected off the river, with a wooden scaffold on wheels for getting at the high parts of large canvases. Amid the quantities of stuff in there I remember the jaws of a shark mounted on a beam, and the figurehead of an old sailing ship, the wooden head and torso of a goddess with red hair. In those days it was a social place, Jack’s studio. Local people moored their boats at his dock and squatted in the sunlight, smoking and murmuring to one another as they watched him work. Children scrambled up onto the dock, and clustered dripping and grinning in the doorway. Others came by with objects for the artist, in hopes of earning a few cents. Men he drank with dropped by, and occasionally some grizzled native of the town would approach the canvas, peer at it closely and murmur a word or two about the colour of the sea, or the plumage of a tropical firebird flying over a volcano, or the figure of a lost girl rooted in the trunk of a ceiba tree.

He introduced to me various characters sitting on his dock and then took me to the back of the studio and hauled out the work he’d been making. Dear god they were strange things! Untreated jute or sacking stretched on knotty sticks, the dimensions uneven and the paint itself having a kind of fatty texture, heaped up thickly on the rough surface and the imagery a raw, passionate, primitive response to the world he lived in. Some of them were six feet on a side, and the colours—the greens, the blues, the purply blacks, the orangey reds, the greenish yellows—had a harsh and acid tone, and were all the same weight somehow, so little air seemed to get through. Perhaps it was my own immediate ambivalence towards Jack’s world which shaped my reaction—the jungle, I mean, the sun, the river, the shacks, the sea, the flies, the trees—the
light
—but growing conscious of these stirrings of bewilderment I knew enough to say that it was strong stuff, although in truth I was profoundly unsure. Later, of course, what had seemed like so much bluster I came to regard as heroic, the sheer scope and ambition of what he did down there.

Years later, when he came back to New York, Jack continued to work out the imagery he first developed in Pelican Road. He told me he would never have worked with such, oh—
grandiosity
—had he not lived in Port Mungo. He found there a reflection of himself, he said, and the meaning of his life as an artist was the effort to translate that identification directly onto canvas. I thought of his repeated motifs, his rain forests and rivers, his serpents and birds, and in particular his gleaming mythic bodies staring into pools—and much as I came to admire the work I never properly understood how he saw himself in those paintings.

It was after Vera had returned from yet another of her boozy journeys—this happened about five years after my visit—that during one of their passionate reunions Peg’s little sister, Anna, was conceived. So I missed the spectacle of Vera Savage, a woman sorely lacking in maternal instinct, and well into her forties by then, giving birth to her second child. Jack had no expectation that her behaviour would be any different from how it was before, nor was it. Once again he took responsibility for the infant girl when, after a few short weeks of half-hearted mothering, Vera became bored with little Anna and began to treat her with what she called “benign neglect.” Jack recognized it as the same wilful disregard to which Peg had been subjected, but this time he made no argument and simply took over. He employed the same wet nurse who had breastfed Peg, a large, calm woman called Dolores, and for the first fifteen months Anna lived in her house, along with Dolores’s seven children. During those months it was Peg who spent hours every day with Anna, and could often be seen wheeling her little sister down to the waterfront in a barrow to show her off to the fishermen. Jack told me all this without any rancour. He said it was not Vera’s fault she had no interest in mothering. Fortunate thing, he said, that he could cope. And Dolores was a treasure.