The Beast (9 page)

‘It’s about Rachel. She told me she’d come in to see you the other day.’

‘Yes. She did. She often does.’

Mrs Menon ignored that; she clearly had no time to spare.

‘Did she come to see you on purpose?’

‘She didn’t come by accident.’

Mrs Menon just suppressed a sigh. ‘The thing is that Rachel has a few rings and trinkets of her own. Not many, and not particularly good. In fact they’re pretty cheap. But I have a feeling she might be trying to sell them, and when she said she’d been to see you, I wondered if she’d offered them to you. You would, I suppose, be the logical person to come to.’

Daisy’s first reaction was not to reply to this; but since the woman was obviously not going to move until she did,
and Daisy wanted to get her out of the shop as quickly as possible, she eventually said, as firmly as possible, ‘She offered me nothing.’

‘Well if she does, don’t buy anything.’ Mrs Menon hesitated, as if uncertain whether to add more. But then, as if she had forgotten Daisy’s presence altogether, and simply wanted to speak her thoughts aloud, she went on ‘She’s fallen in love with some damned South American refugee. He’s an anarchist or a communist or something, and is both unstable and, I suspect, dangerous. He writes poetry, and tells Rachel that I’m the ultimate bourgeois monster, or some such rubbish. Well, I don’t give a damn about that, but I do care that he’s trying to persuade Rachel to leave university and go away with him
somewhere
. Hence her attempts to raise money. So if she does come in—just tell her no, and get in touch with me please.’ Mrs Menon stared at Daisy. ‘My God, I’d never have believed a child of mine could be an idiot. But I expect it’ll blow over soon, and—oh well, take care of yourself Daisy.’

She left as abruptly as she had come.

Daisy watched her disappear down the street; and as she did so the old woman realized she was trembling. So that was what was wrong! Oh, it was wonderful! She didn’t know anything about South American communists or anarchists—that was Mrs Menon exaggerating, she suspected—but she did know something about Rachel. And if Rachel, to save herself, had to leave university and run away with a poet—well then, let her run. Let her run, Daisy wanted to shriek—and if
she
could do anything to help—oh, she prayed that she could. She prayed that she could …

She could, and she did. Two weeks later, early one morning, she was still upstairs when she heard her doorbell ring. And when she went down and opened the door—her flat had a separate entrance by the side of the shop—she found Rachel there. A flushed Rachel; a wild looking Rachel; a Rachel wearing a headscarf and large dark glasses; but a Rachel more beautiful than she had ever seen her. And before the girl could even speak—for she knew why she’d come—Daisy said ‘Come in dear’; and stood back to allow the girl through. ‘Go upstairs.’

Rachel went, apologizing as she did so for disturbing Daisy at this hour of the morning.

Daisy couldn’t be bothered to say ‘that’s all right.’ She simply, when she was upstairs, faced the girl, gazed at her and murmured ‘How much do you want?’

For a second Rachel was so confused Daisy thought she might have to explain about her mother’s visit. But then a sort of light dawned in the girl’s face, a sort of glow of wonder; and in a voice only just above a whisper, a voice that seemed awed by the magnificence of Daisy, she said ‘How much can you give me, Daisy? How much is it worth?’

That made Daisy feel confused. ‘It.’ What did ‘it’ mean? She had assumed, when she had seen Rachel standing at the door, that the girl had come to sell her trinkets. But surely she didn’t have just one piece. Surely …

And then, as Rachel started searching in her shoulder bag for something, she realized; she
knew
. And however struck Rachel had been by her magnificence—it was nothing to the wonder that Daisy felt for her now. Even more than wonder maybe. A sense of ecstasy. A sense of having gazed, at last, on perfection.

She didn’t wait to see what Rachel was looking for in
her bag. She didn’t have to. She simply turned to the dark old Victorian safe that sat, squat and ugly, on the floor—and had been sitting there for a hundred years or more—and taking a key from under an old brass Victorian lamp, unlocked it. She didn’t know how much money she had inside—she took her takings to the bank when she remembered, which was every other year or so, and
certainly
hadn’t been recently—but there seemed to be lots—piles and piles and piles of it—and she took it all, and filled an old shopping bag with it.

She said ‘I don’t know if that’s enough, my dear. But if you like I can go to the bank and get some more.’

‘Oh Daisy,’ Rachel breathed. ‘It’s a fortune. It’s far too much. It’s—’

Daisy silenced her with a tiny smile. ‘I’ve been waiting for this all my life,’ she said. ‘And nothing is too much.’

And then she handed over the shopping bag to Rachel, and took from her a small package, roughly wrapped in tissue paper.

‘Now go my dear,’ she whispered. ‘And God bless you.’

It was in the shop, that morning, that Daisy had two visitors. Two men, who identified themselves as policemen.

They didn’t want to alarm her, they said, or shock her, or upset her, but …

Sometime during the night a certain Mrs. Teresa Menon—‘Oh I know her, quite well,’ Daisy interrupted—was brutally murdered with a hatchet. The only thing missing was a ring she owned; a ring of enormous value. It was
assumed that the woman had been murdered for the sake of this ring, and if—of course it wasn’t likely, but if—anyone should come into the shop and offer such a ring for sale …

‘Oh no one’s likely to come in here,’ Daisy said. ‘I’m only a little jeweller. I don’t deal in anything—oh, you know—great.’

Of course, the policemen said. And it’s probably out of the country already. But we just have to be sure. You never know what people in a panic might do. They
sometimes
try and sell things to the first person available.

‘Yes, I suppose they do,’ Daisy said; and then added ‘Oh poor Rachel, how terrible for her. That’s Mrs Menon’s daughter.’

‘Yes,’ the policemen said. ‘We’re trying to contact her. We understand she’s travelling in France with a friend.’

‘Oh, how terrible,’ Daisy repeated.

*

And so it was; and perhaps because it was terrible Daisy was quite relieved that she never, ever, heard from or of Rachel Menon again—the case of her mother’s murder was never solved—and perhaps also why she never, ever, unwrapped the small package inside her safe. Though there was another reason for this, too. For—in addition to certain misgivings she had about the whole affair,
misgivings
she never allowed herself to dwell on— Daisy was terrified that if she did, at last, examine the priceless jewel, she would discover it to be flawed.

He stood, pale and earnest, in the middle of the hot, empty, but untidy room, and gazed at the canvas in front of him. He shifted his feet slightly. He cleared his throat. Then, slowly, he raised his hand.

This time, he told himself, he would do it.

The brush was only an inch away from the almost
perfect
face.

He paused, though he was quite calm, and listened to the waves of the winter lake breaking on the shore. Out of the corner of his eye he was aware of dirty socks,
discarded
clothes and, through the window, grey and white water and snow-covered mountains in the distance. He even heard some people talking in the street below, and the sound of passing cars. But none of these intrusions on his consciousness distracted him. Rather, they only made him concentrate the more; made him more intensely feel that there, in his thin white hand, in his brush, he was holding all the outside world, and all the people in it. No—it wasn't dark paint on his brush; it was an essence of world, of nature, of life! He felt himself soaring.

He moved the brush closer and closer. Half an inch. A quarter of an inch. His hand was absolutely steady. An eighth of an inch. And now it was almost touching. Another fraction, and he would be there; that shadow, on
the corner of the mouth, would be fixed, set forever. And then he would back away, gently, and finally allow himself to sweat, and shake, and tremble with the effort; to
contemplate
—what? The world, transformed? Possibly …

Oh, how he longed and had waited for that moment. And it was so near now, so very near. Just a tiny shadow, and it was his. The world. Transformed. Just a tiny shadow …

The brush touched the canvas …

And then the telephone rang. Shrill, bright, strident, the sound filled the room. And as it did his hand, holding the brush, moved imperceptibly. And he had lost it. He knew. His chance was gone. It had moved perhaps a millionth of an inch; but it had moved. The shadow was there—but it was not, quite, where it should have been. Was it too high, too low, too wide, too small? He didn't know—but he knew that it was wrong; just as he knew that there was no point in trying to correct his mistake. If he didn't get it right that first time—and he never had got it right—he would never get it right a second or third time. There was no point in even trying. He would simply have to sell this painting—and he probably would; it was certainly his best and he sold most things, anyway—and start again from the beginning. He should, he told himself, be used to the disappointment—it was, after all, a disappointment he had experienced two or three times a month for the last eight or nine years—but he wasn't, nevertheless, and felt quite sick, and had tears in his pale eyes, as he put down his brush, wiped his hands, and went to answer the phone. Because this time he'd been certain he had done it.

As he sat down on his dusty, white tiled floor and lifted the receiver he looked back at the canvas—already quite objectively and dispassionately—to check that he wasn't
mistaken; that he hadn't, after all, achieved what he had been trying to achieve. But he hadn't.

The figure he had painted—nude, bald, and sexless—was as haunting as all the other figures he had ever painted, as it sat in a white room furnished with furniture as plain and simple and unfurniturelike as lunar rocks; but the face that stared out of the canvas wasn't as it should have been. For somehow, though why and in what way it would have been impossible to say, it expressed something. Pain? Loneliness? Pride? Greed? Lust. It
was
impossible to say. But it did express something, and so, once again, he had failed. Because for nine years now he had been trying to paint a face that was without any expression at all.

He said—with no trace of his disappointment in his voice; that wouldn't have been polite, and his caller couldn't have known what that first strident ring would do—‘Hello?'

There was no reply.

He repeated, ‘Hello?'

There was still no reply.

He said, ‘If you're calling from a public phone, press the button.'

And finally there was a sound from the other end of the line; the sound of someone clearing their throat, or of someone shuffling some papers.

‘Hello?'

It was only a whisper.

‘Hello?'

‘Hello. I'm sorry I can't speak any louder.'

‘Who's that?'

‘It's a friend of yours.'

‘Who is it?'

‘I would like to see you,' the voice whispered.

Andrew Smythe said, ‘Who is it? Hello? Hello?'

But the caller had hung up.

He closed his eyes for a second, fighting back tears again. He didn't want to see his painting. His painting that had been ruined by some crank, some lunatic. Was it a friend of his, playing a game, he wondered? If so, it was an unfunny game. But then he reminded himself miserably that no one could have known what the call would
interrupt
.

He got up and went over to the window and looked down onto the road that ran beneath his apartment along the edge of the lake. It was only four o'clock, but some of the cars had their lights on already. Surely, he thought, when he had been preparing himself for that final
brushstroke
, just a minute or two ago, there had been more light than this. It almost seemed as if the anonymous caller had been a messenger, announcing the beginning of night.

As if in confirmation of this, the wind rattled the window panes, and he saw one or two drops of rain start to splatter on the glass.

He went, tall and thin and pale, to have a shower and to change.

*

At six o'clock, dressed in dark grey trousers and a blue blazer whose arms were slightly too short, with a clean white shirt and a dark blue tie, and looking for all the world like a nervous earnest Englishman, he got in his red sports car to drive the hundred and fifty or so
kilometers
to Venice, where he was having dinner with some friends. But in spite of his appearance, and the number plate on his car—and in spite of his name and even his passport, which he carried in the inside pocket of his blazer—he wasn't really English, and he felt particularly not so
as he pulled carefully out into the traffic, to take the road towards the autostrada. He always felt un-English—though he knew it was an irrational feeling, since he didn't believe in inherited national characteristics—when something
disturbing
happened. And his phone call, two hours earlier, had disturbed him. It belonged, somehow—as all
disturbing
things seemed to him to belong—to the world he had been born into, and the world he had lived in for the first year of his life. A world briefly—just two or three months apparently—of war, and after that, of refugee camps somewhere in the middle of Europe. A world in which he had been raised, for that first year, as a stateless child of parents unknown, until he had finally been adopted by one Edith Smythe, of Cheam, Surrey, England. Edith Smythe, his ‘mother;' wife and almost immediately widow of Harold Smythe, businessman …

Edith Smythe had brought him up, sent him to a private school—where he had been lonely and unhappy, terribly aware that he was not one of these children born in a pleasant and temperate land—and had willingly allowed him to go to art school when he was seventeen. (If he had been her own child he was sure she wouldn't have; but as he wasn't—which he was never permitted to forget—and as he was, essentially, a foreigner—well, it was all right, if not positively natural, that he should want to be an artist.) She gave him his way in everything, in fact, partly because he never made any real demands on her, partly because she thought it her duty as a suffering Christian to do so, and mainly because she was terrified of him. Terrified of his pallor, of his earnest intensity, of his loneliness, of his birth—and above all of her own act of charity in taking this orphan in. An act of charity she had never been able to explain to herself, unless by saying—as she did to
Andrew, frequently, when he was small—‘I felt it was my duty.' But it hadn't been. It had simply been a moment of sentimental weakness; a brief flickering of imagination in a dull, heavy mind. Imagination that never again
thereafter
even glowed; doused forever, perhaps, by the
continuous
and appalling evidence of what imagination could do. Bring a child—a child of horror—into her quiet suburban home, with its solid furniture, solid cooking, dark Indian carpets and purple hydrangeas! It had been madness … However, she had never been cruel to him, or cross with him, and had never made him go without anything, so he had never borne her any grudge, and had indeed always sympathized somehow with her attitude towards him; her trembling and almost total policy of laissez-faire. (All she had actually insisted on had been that he speak perfect, BBC English—to the day she died, when he was twenty-one, she had a particular, slightly over-loud way of addressing him, as if she were afraid that he didn't really understand her, which had made him so
self-conscious
that he ended up talking English like a foreigner who had learned it perfectly but whose mother tongue is something else—and that he had, at all times, perfect manners; especially with regard to saying ‘thank you.')

In fact, the only things he couldn't sympathize with were her occasional and confused attempts to teach him that his unknown parents were murdered innocents who it was his duty in some way to avenge. The trouble with this was that by the time he was eighteen, he had reasoned—with the same logic that he later applied to leaving art-school with a gold medal, to frequenting, politely, the people who could help him and further his career, and to becoming quite a well known artist—that there was at least a
fifty-fifty
chance that his parents, far from being murdered
innocents, were actually the murderers of innocents. So he had thought it best to forget about them as far as possible, and pretend they had never existed.

And generally speaking, he was successful, and made do with his official status in life; which was that of a
thirty-four
year old English painter who lived half the year in London and half the year in Desenzano, on Lake Garda. The fact that he couldn't be sure precisely how old he was—if there had been records they had been destroyed—was as of little importance as who his parents had been. He had been born, and Edith Smythe had brought him up, and he had a passport that give him a birth-date and a nationality.

But now, as he drove through the wet dark evening, he felt himself back in a world beyond passports, beyond Edith Smythe and beyond perfect manners; back in a grey cold world he had read about—been persuaded, by Edith, to read about—in so many books and magazines that he felt he could remember it. It was stupid, of course, but on the other hand that telephone call had been stupid, too; and more than stupid, frightening—even if it had been made by a friend. But he didn't believe—having thought about it for two hours now—that it had been a friend. Because if it had been, surely, after he or she—he hadn't even been able to tell if it were a man or a woman—had made their joke, they would have called back five minutes later to say what they had to say. Also he had very few English speaking friends in Italy—and the caller had almost certainly been English—and of those he did know, none was the type to play that sort of joke. Only if it hadn't been a friend—who could it have been? Who, even, could have had his phone-number since it wasn't in the book?

He didn't know, but he was upset and also, he admitted to himself, rather angry—though he didn't often admit to anger. Because if it
hadn't
been for that phone call …

He imagined the painting, and more particularly the face, as it would have been and could have been; a face unlimited by any human expression. A face which could take the whole world in, and leave nothing out. A face which could know everything. A face which could express any and every emotion, simply because it was confined to none. The face not of any particular person, but the face of whoever in the world might look at it. An
uncontaminated
face. For he couldn't help feeling—though he knew it was as unreasonable as his feeling un-English—that expressions were born in wars.

Oh yes. He was, apart from being disturbed, really very, very angry.

*

The rain stopped soon after he got on the autostrada, but by the time he got to Verona, a dense white fog had settled over the road. He should, he told himself, have slowed right down. But if he had done so he would have been late for dinner, and while he hated being late for any appointment—there was no justification for being
unpunctual
, he always maintained; after all, why arrange to meet at a certain time if one isn't going to?—tonight in particular he felt he had to be there on time; had to pay a special attention to the outward forms of life, and to the surface of things. Because if he didn't, he would become still more disturbed, and would feel more than ever the presence of that grey, cold, passport-less world.

And so, pale and relentless, he kept his foot down, and drove hard into the dazzling whiteness in front of him, and strained his eyes to watch for the guard-rail of the
autostrada, and for the tail-lights of any cars going slower than he.

Was he being ridiculous, he wondered, risking death simply so as not to be late for dinner? In a way, yes. But on the other hand, while good manners might be merely surface-matters, mere cold formalities designed to keep the beast at bay, he also thought that, carried to their logical conclusion, they did provide the only feasible
framework
on which a life could be hung. He didn't want the door, as it were, slammed in his face, so he slammed it in no one else's; and even held it open for others as far as possible, just as he hoped others would hold it open for him. So—