Goya'S Dog (2 page)

He'd heard the final “All Aboard.” He'd looked forward and back, but she'd caught his eye. She was wearing her tiny hat with the insincere green trim. From outside came a whistle. Christ, he thought.

“What a nice surprise,” said Lady Dunfield, closing her book. Tennyson? “Mr. Davis.” And then he was obliged.

Warily, gingerly, stooping, Dacres had set one suitcase on the floor and then craned to place the other in the netting above. Falling into sitting, he'd cupped his sweaty forehead in his hand and swallowed nothing. He'd wondered where her hatbox was. Perhaps Violet had it, her assistant. Lady Dunfield had never wanted for anything, Dacres fancied: she had that unswerving certainty. She talked, her specialty. Dacres couldn't believe his luck. The train had sat, vibrating, for ten minutes, and they went nowhere at all.

“What the bloody hell's going on?” Dacres said at last, his head pounding. “Why aren't we bloody moving?”

He sweated. Lady Dunfield ignored his outburst with a graceful smile. No doubt, thought Dacres, she puts it down to my artistic temperament. It was a pleasure to have the chance to share some reflections with him, she said. She was wiry and reptilian, tightly outfitted in a pastel blue dress.

“For it is at times like this, isn't it, Mr. Davis—isn't it at times like this that the Arts become all the more important? When the world reaches for its munitions. It is at times like this that we—men like you; and me, perhaps, in my small way—need to remind the
others
what is truly good and noble in life. A different world entirely. Do you see?”

He nodded. He pretended to search for the newspaper he'd taken from the hotel, folded it on his thigh and glanced down at it repeatedly. It was a provincial, parochial rag with five pages of society news.

My mistake, he thought, trying not to listen to her talk about Culture, was the chambermaid, in Montreal. She'd given him the eye and he'd invited her in—but then came the awful screeching in that bizarre patois, the horrible accent. Then she'd brained him in the doorway with a table lamp. Men in dressing gowns running down the hall to look: everyone wanted to see Dacres naked in the corridor. He'd lost the respect of the legation then. No, he'd never had their respect in the first place, what a notion. They were all younger than he by a decade; only Lady Dunfield was his senior, by the same margin. They all thought that life lay before them and the only one he could bear was Gorren. With artists he always found himself expressing reactionary opinions; with the bourgeoisie it was the opposite. But drab empty Ottawa was back in his head now: a mistake. The letter that had brought him on this ridiculous tour in the first place, mistake. If only he'd thrown it in the fire. Yes, leaving London was the mistake. How could he work anywhere else? But then he imagined screaming planes and children running. Oh to be in London for the bombs. No, he thought, my mistake came a long time ago.

Black words, visible, clumped slowly into sentences. His head hurt, his throat was hot and tight, the previous night he'd been up too late again. The newspaper, such as it was, was full of war and not-war: predictions of disaster and tight-lipped hope. Meanwhile, Lady Dunfield's talk of Art and Duty drummed at his skull from within. She had a reedy voice, it never let you drift away entirely, when you started to it pulled you back.

“Ridiculous person,” he said quietly.

“I'm sorry?”

“Nothing.”

“Mr. Davis?” asked Lady Dunfield. “Are you well? Whatever happened to your face?”

Gorren made me drink half a bottle of gin when I got Olympia's surname wrong, he didn't say.

“Fine,” he said, not looking. “Fine. Splendid. Wonderful.”

He'd told her his name a hundred thousand times but it hadn't been allowed entry. She would say
Davis
and he would say
Dacres
and she would say yes,
Davis
. Her mind must have curdled. Halfway across the Atlantic, a few weeks previously, he'd surrendered. He'd decided to play along, he started answering to
Davis
when she called. He'd longed for it enough in the last few years, after all, to exist pseudonymously, to become someone else. Gorren called him
Dacres
, so did some of the other artists and performers, so did Nelda in her delicious voice, but with la Dunfield he was
Davis
. She told him she was very excited by the new direction he was charting away from the pastoral. Her secretary, Violet, a suspicious mousy type (where was she?), was trying to get to the bottom of it all.

Their sister ship had been torpedoed, hundreds of casualties. Oh brave new world. So they'd gone north, north, hiding amongst the icebergs until the captain finally caught pluck and steered them down into the St. Lawrence. Then the trains: Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto. These absurd names.

He flipped the paper and saw a sporting review, the baseball season. One of those Canadian things, a tomahawk, was lodged in Dacres's forehead, and a line of sweat dropped down behind his ear. He pulled a fountain pen out of the pocket of his tweed jacket, which was too small for him around the shoulders. He needed to urinate. Trapped like a rat, he thought.

“The mistake,” he wrote in the margin, and watched the black diffuse into the honeycomb. He added two dots.

Glancing up at Lady Dunfield only encouraged her. Her lips formed a diamond.

“Oh I'm no genius, Mr. Davis,” she said. “I'm no brooding soul.”

Never throw this woman a bone, Dacres thought. He looked out of the window—elegant ladies of various ages waited. A man in khaki under a major's hat. Two indistinct moppets. A predominantly grey
covering on everything today—grisaille? He touched the glass. Their lips moved but he heard nothing. Suddenly the train lurched and halted, and Lady Dunfield tittered. They did not start moving forwards. There was ink on his fingertips. She chortled and inhaled.

Dacres unclenched his teeth, resettled his weight.

“But I do know this,” she was saying. “This one, little truth I can call my own. That if my efforts, my small efforts, in supporting the Arts, in this time of World Crisis, can do their part to deepen the understanding between our nations, then I will be satisfied, truly satisfied.” Her smile a dead butterfly.

She thinks she can stop the war by herself, he thought. By showing pictures and staging readings. But then he recognized what she was saying and stared at her in blank surprise: had she had a stroke? It was her speech from the previous night.

With immense restraint he asked, “When will we set off, do you think?”

Lady Dunfield wiped a false tear away with a lilac handkerchief.

He wrote:

Halifax Ottowa Montreal (!)

and paused, and then he wrote:

Broadhurst Gardens the neighbours

Cattle provincials

War declared.

She looked delighted now, her eyes on his pen; she must think it was the moment of creation. She started telling him again. He opened and closed the paper and wrote beneath
HANES
'
FLOOR WAX
:

Not really my fault.

Youthful efforts at Bohemianism (ha)

Inability to get along as one should

Stinking of failure Evelyn.

Get off the train.

The previous night hadn't been a complete disaster. The idea of the tour was to promote Commonwealth understanding. Each city they stopped in would have an afternoon showing or two and an evening of music and poetry among the paintings. In Montreal it had been the Chamber of Commerce, in Ottawa the High Commission; Lady Dunfield had her connections. In Toronto there was a stop at the home of a wealthy man who no doubt had pretensions. Dacres had explored the house with pleasure. He passed grey urns sitting in spooned-out alcoves in the walls of the entrance hall. The floor tiles there were black and white and umber, Siena colours: on them the women's heels skated, a sound like lobsters typing, and then there was the spiral staircase, wrought-iron balustrade, good for looking at ladies' legs. The estate lay in the outskirts of the city and it was not on too grand a scale; the one oddity was that it was full of odd small rivets and trinkets, a brass tap on display on the mantelpiece. There was a dining room, a smoking room, a billiards table.

Dacres stood in the little library staring out at the crisp lawn and the square, tended bushes, and the heavy orange air between the sun and his eyes. He was thinking that this wasn't the frozen wasteland he'd been told about; here was a pocket, look. He felt an unaccustomed calm, he felt as calm as the sun hanging motionless in the sky, calm as the sun growing more and more dense with colour. He was avoiding the preparations, avoiding the start of the reception. He stood, fingers pressing tight against the rim of a tumbler of Scotch, the ice melting. It was September, war had been declared, and here he was. Hard to understand. A moment of silence, Dacres looking out at green and yellow, nothing in his head.

Hearing movement, he turned and behind him saw a girl. She saw him too, she was looking past an older woman's shoulder, she was quite luminous, brunette; and they were gone, walking together down a corridor. He took a step forward and stopped. Fool. He'd just seen her open face for a moment and seen a Verocchio, then she'd looked away.

He waited a few minutes, watching, and then finished his drink, and set the glass down on the arm of the sofa. He went towards the hubbub.

Perhaps the usual order of things had been reversed, or perhaps he'd been staring out at the garden too long. In any case, in the reception room Lady Dunfield was being applauded on to a low stage. Usually she waited until the end of the evening to say her few words: maybe tonight someone had suggested she do the greeting. She looked pruney and as ever her voice depressed him beyond measure, two hand drills boring into his brain through his two ears. Briefly he shut his eyes but when he opened them again nothing had changed. Why had he left the tumbler in the other room? Fool.

The room tightened when she said “World Crisis.” The black-clad and bare shoulders kaleidoscoped and then came back to normal. Dacres asked himself what Severini would have done with all these elbows out at the horizontal holding glasses. The thought pricked at him because he knew that he could do nothing with these things he saw, not now. This state had already lasted for some time: years, don't pretend otherwise. But he didn't want to think about that. Instead he looked around for the little muse he'd just caught a glimpse of. That was a head to paint. His hand felt empty without a glass. His fingers twitched, playing a little tune on his thigh.

Gorren winked. Dacres took four steps to the right, avoiding an older man's bent back. A head taller than Dacres, Gorren looked like a stick insect, but he was almost a friend, a rare commodity. They stood together.

“You really shouldn't wear that thing,” Dacres said.

Gorren snatched the lime silk scarf from his neck and deposited it in Dacres's breast pocket.

“Any nibbles?” he whispered.

“I've been in the library.”

A few faces turned to inquire and hush them. Gorren especially, his voice was an oboe giving the orchestra the A.

“Galsworthy. The great Buchan. Book of the Month Club.”

“Just staring out of the window, really.”

“Don't be such a drip, Dacres. Energy. Energy!”

They received more unpleasant stares. At the front of the room, Lady Dunfield was talking about Importance.

“It's all right,” Dacres said. “We're artists.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Gorren, and took a pigeon step away.

“The man who owns the city paper is here, he's going to write us up.”

“The rich are always with us,” Dacres sighed.

“I'll add it to my dossier. You could too, if you had one.”

“You must be very charming when it's not me you're talking to.”

“Oh I am, Dacres, I am.”

Dacres looked left and right, past Gorren's chin. For a surrealist, he was a remarkably ambitious chap, Dacres thought. A burgher's wife scowled at them.

“Now that,” Gorren said, “is more my cup of tea.”

There she was again, and Dacres wanted to be a little younger. She was diagonally to his right, and as Gorren stared, Dacres half-stepped forward to see her better. He gave Gorren his scarf back blindly. Things happened in his belly and then he felt the familiar despair. She was staring ahead with some concentration, and then a bearded face interrupted his view, then he could see her again. She would fit in the crook of his embrace just so, if such a thing could happen in this world, he knew it could not. She watched, her arms as calm and focused as a reader's. He liked the stub of her nose and this pigment, the white shine of her face amidst all the pudding faces. Where did that come from?

He watched her, quiet inside, and then he thought she was suppressing a smile at Lady Dunfield—sarcasm—and he smiled naturally, and at that moment she turned her head and saw him. She
did not smile back. When she returned to look at the stage he followed her eyes that way too, respectfully, and tried to pick up the thread of what Lady Dunfield was saying, which part of her dismal text she'd reached. He saw, among the anonymous faces, features he knew: Nelda looked languidly bored, thin Merrie was paying furious attention. Dacres couldn't but look back at the girl, grimly lusting.

Gorren was looking too. You think you discover beauty alone, Dacres thought, but every time you're wrong. And cheap. And tawdry.

“You're supposed to be married,” he told Gorren. “Staring like a goat.”

Gorren grinned.

“You set too much store by these things, Dacres,” Gorren said.

“Institutions don't exist.”

Dacres hmphed.

“The world's ending, after all,” said Gorren.

After la Dunfield retired to polite applause, Dacres was supposed to mingle in the roomful of transplanted Scotsmen drinking soda water. Gorren left him, in search of larger prey. Dacres stood awkward, close enough to the bar that it would break his fall if things got bad, not so close as to look as if he'd taken up residence. He listened to the men's loud American voices: Would Canada make its own declaration? Would Hitler cross the Channel? Their bodies were like tires deflated. In Gorren's tones he told himself not to worry: none of this exists. Violet watched him carefully from behind her glasses.