Goya'S Dog (26 page)

Dacres's visit months before seemed like something from another life. He was no longer angry with Burner for telling him Canada was all milk and honey. That, and everything that had followed, all seemed to have happened to someone else.

The house was spacious and comfortable. It was not as large as a proper English country house, but it was less oppressive as a result. The extremes were staff territory. The housekeeper and butler,
Mildred and Goucher, a hard-faced married couple, lived in a bedroom in the attic. The kitchen was in the cellars. The two of them cared for the house, though Dacres occasionally saw a pink-faced boy or girl come in to lend a hand in the garden or kitchen. Goucher doubled as chauffeur. Naturally they resented the extra work that Dacres represented and naturally, as his body and spirits recovered, he did all he could to confound them. He requested a basket of warm bricks from Goucher, and a bucket of ice-cold dairy cream from Mildred. He stored bacon from breakfast in his sleeves and made a familiar of the (otherwise unremittingly vicious) kitchen cat, Gib, which he re-christened Pico. Yes, he was starting to come into his own again, he realized. He only regretted there were no suits of armour for him to kick over.

But then tottering down the corridor on one of his tours he heard the front door slam and went to see. A surprise: it was Burner, cheeks sagging, stock-still in the hall. Like a sleepwalker he held out his briefcase and Dacres took it and laid it on the ground. In his other hand Dacres had the
Saturday Evening Post
he'd just found on the sofa; even as Dacres tried to think of a way to say what he was doing Burner was disappearing up the stairs like old Hamlet. Dacres could hear Goucher turning the car around on the shingles. Not knowing what to do, he followed Burner upstairs. He had to stop and keep a respectful distance when he saw that Burner was still, halfway up, gazing at the face of his dead wife in thick oils. Darly's mother; she had died fifteen years previously. Dacres tasted that bitter word
widower
again.

He had never been inside Burner's bedroom before. He was impressed by the giant orange rug, less so by the plain lace curtains. There was a dark dresser like a whale's mouth, a door that led to Burner's private bathroom, and—he saw for the first time—a glorious painting above the fireplace. It was a mountain in stark blues and a crisp foam of snow, with glass forests below, and the colours were such that he couldn't stop looking. He wanted to get closer—he recognized Caspar David Friedrich there, but there was something richer too. How had he not known about this? Beneath it were photographs,
which he tried to ignore: Burner in evening dress with a man covered in medals; Darly as a girl, dressed as a dryad for a party. He looked up at the painting again. He felt excited, something was coursing down his arms, but Burner was taking his clothes off.

His braces hung limply like withered dragonfly wings; his trousers were coming off now, he was standing in his gartered socks. His thighs were sturdy and hairy and pale. Deliberately, as if he'd just been diagnosed with something terrible, Burner got into bed. The muscles of the thigh, Dacres thought, flashing back into a medical anatomy class he'd sat in on, wooden benches and a body awaiting: the muscles of the thigh, their convolutions. He looked back at the mountain once—there was something almost Oriental in its perfection—but Burner was whispering.

“Pardon?” Dacres said.

“The world is dying,” said Burner quietly.

“What?”

With two fingers Burner signalled Dacres to come closer, and Dacres tiptoed around Burner's trousers: black, but the lining of the pockets was white, pinstriped.

Burner pulled the lime-coloured bedsheets up over his face and said that God had abandoned them.

I'm the one who's supposed to be sick, Dacres thought angrily—what the hell are you playing at?

“It's all being chewed up,” Burner said almost inaudibly. “Chewed, chewed up.”

He sighed, incredibly long and deep, and then neither of them spoke for two minutes. Dacres looked from bed to bright window to dresser and found no help; the picture was at his back. There wasn't a single book in the room, he noticed. He crossed and uncrossed his legs. Would he have been better off hiding in his bedroom? Or could they at least move the conversation there?

“Burner,” Dacres said at last. “Stanley?” he tried.

“Let me ask you something,” he began.

And when there was still no answer, “Who's that painting by?”

Instantly Burner lowered the covers and spoke with ferocity. His eyes were red and yellow like the devil's. “It's hard to raise a girl alone,” he said. “I've got on as best I can but sometimes … There's more I could have done for her, there's more I could do for her, there's some things a girl needs to learn from a woman. Although when she was little she pushed herself on, I never pushed: she never needed me to hold her hand at all, not even once, well occasionally, of course, but I mean in general. Meeting the Duke of Kent visiting or down to the Exhibition she was the first in line. Always sure of herself. She used to bring a stray cat home every fortnight, did you know that? We had a bloody feline infirmary.” He chuckled but then the laugh disappeared and he was grave again. “Dogs too. Stray dogs. Why don't I have dogs? I love dogs.” Briefly he trailed away.

“What kind of dogs?” Dacres asked experimentally.

“I should never have asked you here. Why are you here? Get out. You shouldn't even be here. It's only because of Darly that I—don't you have a life of your own? No, come here. Sit down. I miss Helen very much, sometimes.”

He slumped into another low sigh and raised the sheets up to his chin. Dacres stared, bemused, and kneeled down close to the bed on shaky haunches. The situation called for tact, but his soggy brain gave him little confidence.

“You have your own problems,” said Burner, “so why should you care? You should go. Go back to England. Are you well enough? Go where you belong.”

“Anyone would say you're a model father, Stanley.”

Burner raised the sheets fully over his head and was silent again.

A minute passed.

“What time is it?” he asked at last, muffled.

Dacres thought it was three-ish, but said nothing.

“I'm dying, and all that will remain of me is my intestines,” said Burner mournfully.

“What?”

“What do you care, Dacres? You'll live forever.” He was angry again.

Dacres's head snapped up like a terrapin's: “How?”

“Because you're an artist, man. What have I ever done that will last?”

Instantly Dacres was clouded over inside.

“It's not quite like that actually, Stanley,” he replied. He tried to think of something. “Your name's above that factory door, isn't it? You give a livelihood to—well, all those people.”

It was not easy, to match wits.

“I know nothing about what you do—really nothing—and I know painters who have been dead for centuries. Name a foundry owner from the Renaissance. You can't.”

“The Borgias?” said Dacres. “The Medici.”

“Stuff and nonsense.”

Dacres began to wish someone would come in with a canister of ether. Lingeringly, he imagined a troupe of red-clad dancing girls bursting in through the door. But Burner had gone into another deep round of sighs. Then he was saying quietly that he did love brass. He loved how it smelled. He loved how it lasted.

“So it does last,” Dacres said encouragingly, but to no response.

Dacres had spent time in bed. Optimists had tried to rally him. He tried to remember what they'd said. None of it had ever worked, but perhaps it would work on Burner. He scratched at his forehead. He looked back over his shoulder at the shining painting but even that was of no help now, and twisting back like that made him fall onto the carpet. Yes, he wanted to go back to bed. Could he join Burner under the covers?

“The war is our lifeline, Dacres, do you know that? Without the war, the plant would be dead already. Government contracts. Tank parts and ball bearings. We have to refit but otherwise—we came into this decade by the skin of our teeth, do you know that? Skin of
my
teeth. Almost a miracle. Whereas you're on all the museum walls.”

Dacres jerked: “What museum? What walls?”

“Darly told me, Dacres. You don't need to be so modest.”

He was mystified but didn't say so.

Burner was visible again, though grey. He swallowed and his prominent Adam's apple rose and fell. With Burner in bed and Dacres awkwardly propping himself up on one arm, their heads were level. It made him think of Holbein, the dead Christ in the tomb.

“We're all just trying to get through, Stanley,” Dacres said at last.

He could see a picture—Whistlerish, murky, a marsh not a river—of two searchers lost in the undergrowth. Your torch lights you up, he thought, but it doesn't help you find the other man.

“Millions would want to be in your shoes,” said Dacres without conviction.

“It's all going to pot. Everything's going to pot.”

Dacres didn't know what to say. Quote something of Evelyn's: there's a world elsewhere.

“It's all going to be crushed.”

Dacres's hand was disappearing into the carpet, and something was rapidly dissolving in him.

“I knew a man whose wife died,” Dacres said.

Burner was silent and then he said, “I'm sorry for him.”

“They say that if you survive such a thing you walk away pledged to live fully each day. But that's impossible.”

“Did you help him?”

“I tried to help him.”

“Good.” Burner was looking up at the ceiling. Dacres's hands were between his open knees, his back felt tight.

“He doesn't remember what they were talking about, the moment before it happened. I'll tell you that keeps him up at night: not remembering. Probably about the car, it was new. Hers. You're talking and laughing and then your life changes for good,” Dacres continued. “A lorry was reversing out from the left and he skidded to avoid it and there was a car. He was knocked out for a minute.”

It was the composition of the image—this was unlike anything he'd ever seen. In that first moment of wakefulness it was the composition
that struck him, but could he say that? It was too shameful to relate, though that was the scene he saw each morning, before he opened his eyes. So many elements, arrayed in red and black, to transform Shaftesbury Avenue into a piece of hell. Like something out of—well, nothing. The lorry pristine, a green rectangle across his line of sight. And to its right the scene, the setting. Don't move from here, he'd said, if you love her; but the fact was he'd stayed far from there ever since.

“What happened?”

“Car smash. Car crash. No one else was hurt, but the woman was killed. His wife I mean. He was stopped, forehead thick against the wheel, and when he woke he could still hear the tires shout, though they weren't swerving any longer.”

He ran to her, Dacres did not say, but it was too late already. He stumbled but he did not scream and he did not claw. He wondered at her skin and the sight; after that he felt nothing for a long time. He must have retreated, couldn't touch or think: then he was sitting on a low brick wall nearby and a man put a coat over his shoulders for comfort and a man with a thick brown moustache covered her up with a coat also, turning his head away not to look. Here are the legs this way, and here are the arms, how can this be: artist's doll. Her eyes not looking up, not looking at me, looking at the ground, not looking. And then covered up. But he did not scream.

“It took people a minute to realize, to come, and they wanted to talk, they wanted to tell their stories. He wasn't there to answer, he says, by this point. He was looking at his hands, at what they'd done. And then looking up at her hand, poking out: the side of the palm like bloodied honeycomb—now it hurt to look, but he was silent—and the fingers curled together like a child's in the nighttime. Then back down, chin in neck, to look at his hands, what they'd done. The metal smell and the fuel smell in the smell of March: the colours on the road all stained and mixed in with the smashed glass and her dress blackened and torn, her left calf had been there but now it was covered up.”
He could look at his feet down there, and he couldn't understand how it was the same thing, to look up at her in the road or down at his living shoes, how can it be the same thing?

“The other car was up on the curb with smashed pillars: young chauffeur, broken arm, face white, gibbering that he's going to lose his job. Spitting rain was just starting. He was thinking lorry, swerve, car, no; lorry, swerve, car. He couldn't think anything else; he hasn't been able to
see
anything else since, he says. He hasn't driven since.”

“It's a horrible story,” said Burner. “It's a horrible world.”

Dacres opened his mouth and found there was nothing to say.

But Darly was in the room.

“Daddy, Bernardine called me from the office. What can I do?” Dacres smiled, nervously relieved, waking, and tried to get up.

Burner lowered the sheet and his face seemed to organize itself. Just in her presence the pallor lessened immediately.

“It's nothing, Dotty,” said Burner, his voice weak again as his face turned up towards his daughter's like a baby's. “Nothing, just one of my …”

“Yes,” she said, “that's all. Everything's going to be just fine.”

She was still wearing her long beige raincoat. Dacres had stood back to let her through. She kneeled by the bed, clasping her father's hands. One mustn't be so nervous of touching people, Dacres thought; it helps them. I used to know this. She was saying, “Everything's going to be just fine, Daddy, you just need a little sleep.”

“Yes,” Burner said.

“I'll just have Mildred make you a lovely cup of tea, shall I?”