Goya'S Dog (30 page)

“What about outside—couldn't we go in the garden?”

“It's easier here.”

“I don't know if I can sit perfectly still. I'm a bit of a fidget. At school: six whacks of the ruler on my palm.” She held her hand out flat. “Miss Burner, if you stand up in my classroom once more without permission you will prepare an essay on the relationship between the chair and the rear end.”

Dacres snorted, mirthless.

“Anyway I don't think we should be telling you what to do. Do what you wish,” she said. He raised his eyebrows at that, but not so she could see.

It was a while since Dacres had been in the supply cupboard and he wasn't sure where he'd left the key. As he checked his pockets and then the little littered table, Darly got up and circled the room, her handiwork. Her hand on the windowsill (he hoped she wouldn't see the tiny dead insects), her hand trailing along the chest of drawers.

“Did you always want to be a painter?” she asked him as he struggled with the rattling cupboard door.

“I always wanted to be Jack Hobbs.”

“Who? Is that a painter?”

“He used to open the batting for England.”

“You're silly,” she said.

He finally wrenched it open.

“Edward,” she said as he reached in for a scroll.

“Hmm.”

“Who are your favourite painters?”

Oh God, he thought: the question from every terrible cocktail party he'd ever attended. But he could see, when he came back out of the cupboard, that she really wanted to know. He exhaled and then gave a stock answer: he told her that you took what you could from different places. He decided to sit rather than stand and to use a wooden board as a backing. Then he changed his mind and turned back in to get a sketchpad instead, something he could balance on his crossed thigh. A sketch.

She asked him again, pulled it out of him. She didn't have his cynicism about these things, and partly he was flattered.

“You have to be receptive,” he said. “It is important to remain receptive.”

“But to whom? The person with the deepest soul? The greatest passion?”

“No,” he said instantly, almost bitterly. “No. There are some men we all have to genuflect before. A man like Cézanne is important but not just to painting: to human experience, its history. See? Not because of what he
felt
. Others you learn a special lesson from, this or that trick. And paint teaches you,” he went on. “How it sits and moves and works against itself. At a certain point you have to stop thinking, leave the thinking to others. At a certain point just working teaches you everything you need to know,” he finished. “You just have to work. I'm boring you.”

She smiled. “Not at all. I only feel I should be writing it down.”

“‘Dacres's Table Talk.' Just what the world needs.”

“When you finish we'll have the portrait insured, and then you'll be famous after the war's over and we'll write the book of how it was made.
The Masterpiece
. It's all in my scrapbook. Then the movie version. But I'll never sell the original.”

“Right,” he said.

It seemed he couldn't put off the moment any longer.

Darly adopted a few poses. Mockingly at first: in profile, looking stern. Arms crossed, and then feigning piety. But gradually she settled to watch him, her eyes on a plumb line. Dacres needed to settle too. He'd brought out the smallest sketchpad he had and a soft pencil. He wanted to start very simply, not kill himself with ambition. Just keep the hand soft. Darly picked up off the couch one of the books he'd liberated from downstairs: her Baudelaire. That was an image he wanted, oval and rectangle. He could see the pores in the paper.

“Am I allowed to talk?” she said.

“Yes, yes.”

He stood, came very close, moved her head back with two fingers against her forehead, and she looked up slyly.

“Is that comfortable?” he asked.

When Mars visited Venus, Vulcan caught them in an invisible web: a mesh of lines between them.

She read, and Dacres's hand drifted above the page. He shook it out. He tried to make the first mark, anywhere, a scratch, at random. That was a good thing to do, just close your eyes and break the white. But then there would always be another fresh unmarked sheet to deal with.

You can't think about this, Dacres thought. You know that's not the way.

“It's funny to read with you here,” Darly said, and then repeated it. “I'm trying to talk without moving my lips.”

“It's all right.”

He was doing some measuring now in any case, pencil horizontal in front of his eyes. The distance from ear to nose and crown to nape. Defamiliarize the shape first. The volume of the nose comes from the degree of inclination of the head. What? Consider using a shadow between nasal bone and eyelid to establish the eye socket. Who had said these things? Certainly his hand didn't know what they meant.

“Take a break,” he said, and he went to get a huge roll of newsprint and red charcoal. A cartoon, he had decided. That horse looming out from over the Virgin's shoulder in Leonardo.

“Change of heart?” Darly asked.

“You can move but remember how you were,” was his muttered response.

“I'm glad it's not a nude,” she said darkly. “Me in the living room in all my glory. Can you imagine?”

He could.

“Here come the Tompkinses in for tea and—
Good God, what the devil is that
?”

All the good humour in the room came from her.

“My heart!”

It had been stifled briefly because she'd been silent, and now it was coming out.

“I am good at being languorous, I think. This is interesting. You sit, and enjoy your thoughts, you only have to get used to the fact that you're being watched and then you forget.”

“We've only just started,” he replied over his shoulder.

“Someone should publish a history of art from the perspective of the model. I'd read that.”

Shadows from these unacceptable ribs between the panes: Piranesi's prison drawings.

He sat again. She settled down again, and her gaze was like a butterfly pin.

Hot, Dacres pretended to draw. His hand moved around the paper tracing cheekbone and jawbone, drawing invisibly. He tried to keep his hand an inch from the surface but it was impossible. When the side of his palm brushed around the paper it made him a little nauseous, but he was worried about her becoming suspicious of the silence: so he did it with a pencil turned the wrong way. Very lightly so as not to leave any mark. He ripped the paper off and dropped it on the floor face-down far too soon.

While he pretended to work she told him things. She seemed excited about the wedding: it was going to be at the end of the summer. She wanted it to be private but they had too many obligations. Lorne's huge extended family, her father's business partners. He
pretended to work and eventually she talked herself out of her good humour.

“When he asked me I knew it was too soon—for me and us—but he just said he hoped I wasn't too surprised.”

“I remember. You told me.”

“Yes, at your funny café. And he's being made captain.”

She trailed off.

“Well what could I say?”

Dacres didn't speak, his hand still.

“I'm curious, I suppose,” she said. “I want to know what'll change and what will happen. I'm a curious person.”

Curiouser and curiouser, Dacres thought.

He stretched. She read. For a long time she didn't turn a page and then she turned three in quick succession. He hid behind the paper.

“Can I see?” she said.

“Not for the moment. No.”

So as not to meet her gaze, he looked at a space on the wall beside her face—but was quickly drawn back.

“Something happens,” she started to say, and then, “I sometimes feel,” and then frowned and stopped. He watched her and thought his eyes were probably big and round and despairing.

A minute later she stood up, head tilted to the left, and came closer. “Does it ever happen to you that—do you ever feel we're talking and then something happens and it's like the sea has opened up underneath you?”

She was looking directly at him and his mouth was open, agape.

“Do you?”

He nodded.

Finally Darly frowned again.

“What is that,” she said. “I want to know. I don't.”

It felt like years ago that in the cab she'd taken his hand. Now she was standing so close and he reached for hers, he touched her fingers one by one. He gently brought them to his lips. She watched.

“Why did you do it?” she asked.

“It feels nice.”

He glanced up and she pulled her hand away tenderly.

“The lake. Can you tell me?”

Dacres sighed. He looked into her eyes and then away at nothing. “I don't know.”

“Why?”

“Because I'll never paint anything as good as a Vermeer.”

“No I'm serious, Edward,” she said instantly. “It's a serious question.”

She waited.

“What did the doctor tell you?” Dacres said at last. “The whole thing was a joke. Nothing graced his life so much as the taking leave of it. That sort of thing. Abysmal joke.”

“But why would you. You have all these possibilities …” She indicated the room and the paper and him in one gesture.

“I don't know why, Darly.”

She looked pained.

“Perhaps it was the big fat ring on your finger,” he said, pointing.

She went white.

It sounded true.

They carried on, they tried a few more times, and then the next week there was a dinner. Dacres suspected it was meant in part to introduce him into society. He stayed for a long time in his room, longer than he should have, and then upon descending immediately made a mistake by walking over to Darly and a young couple. He'd just been drawn to them, drawn to basking in their light, but they received him awkwardly; even she did. The boy, name of Tucket, had a big brown moustache. His companion was button-nosed with white-blonde hair. They were studying Darly's engagement ring and said nothing to him, even when he said they all looked utterly ravishing, and then Dacres felt a hand on his shoulder: it was Burner, pulling him across the desert to where he
should have gone from the start: to the old people. Oops, he thought, following. He could tell the adults had heard about him and he could already read the questions on their faces:
What's he doing here? Why isn't he where he's needed? What's he doing in Stanley's house?

He swallowed and put his hand out to shake.

There's something shady about him. What are his means of support? And his family—who are his people? I don't like the cut of his jib. How long is he staying?

Dacres met the Yallops and the Stevensons but was immediately confused as to which was which. They all looked like desiccated squids and he watched Darly glow on the other side of the room and tried to look at her to say it's the two of us against the world. There was a Marjorie, a Gerald, a Vincent, and an Edith. The men's heads poked out of their stiff collars, the women were pale and lifeless. They acknowledged him, looked him up and down, and seemed imperceptibly to form a circle of wagons against him. The tallest one carried on with a story about a series of errors made by his head clerk. Yallop, Dacres thought, didn't Burner recommend me to a Yallop, long ago? A young man he'd known in London had told him about dreams like this, in which bleeding spinal cords flopped out of dinner jackets: Dacres had told him to paint them, but the boy was intent on becoming an interior designer.

Laughing, Burner clapped Dacres on the back, waking him. A serving girl Dacres didn't recognize brought around sherry on a tray. They all went to the same church, Marjorie or Edith was telling him. Had he met the Reverend Green yet? Oh he must, he must! He's an expert helper, she told Dacres. He really understands the human soul. He can heal it.

At dinner he sat beside Stanley, under his wing. Mrs. Yallop shouted down the table at her daughter, who was Darly's friend. The boy with the moustache was joining the navy: he seemed far too young. “Are all your friends marrying officers?” someone asked Darly. Lorne couldn't come, he hadn't been able to get a pass. “Well, don't you fret dear,” Mrs. Stevenson said auntily. “We'll look after you.”

The men discussed the war. Stalin had made the deal Chamberlain had wanted, Stevenson argued. From a few seats down, Darly firmly disagreed and was given a patronizing answer. They seemed surprised at her forthrightness and quarrelled politely about Reds and perils. Dacres, silent, felt like a child with nothing to say about grown-up matters.

He had said nothing since, when they'd sat down, Mrs. Yallop had asked him why he hadn't returned home immediately. Wasn't he a patriot? He'd said the crossing was impossible now. From under her grey curls she said she wasn't sure about that. He told her he couldn't afford to go back in any case. At that she looked away, palely disgusted, as from a bad oyster.