Goya'S Dog (33 page)

She was mercurial. She would come in unannounced, kiss him full on the lips, and then slap him away, tell him he had to produce
something if he wanted any more of that, tell him to work. But then soon she'd change her mind. He told her she was absolutely a muse, he told her he wanted to know every line of her, and he kissed her little belly. Then the soft skin on the inside of her arms; he pushed the falling ribbon of hair away from her neck to kiss the notch there and she hmmed. Darly was wry and cautious and then aggressive: she wrestled him down onto the floor and then heard something and was up and gone in a flash. He'd lie there, rubbing his bruises, wondering if she'd gone because he was fat and old; he worried that his wooden fingers would scratch her soft cheeks. But he couldn't stop touching her.

“Mildred will know,” she said, stopping his hand, telling him why she had to go. “The servants always know everything.” He had his key around his neck on rough twine. “No they don't,” she went on, and giggled. “I'll be back. You work.”

“I will,” he would say, watching her go.

And then thinking: There's a room I'm going to die in. Let it be here. Let it be now.

Sighing.

She would come back with a gift: two apricots, a scarlet teapot she thought he'd like the Oriental shape of. She waited for his reaction and he bundled her up in his arms teapot and all.

Lying on the floor he wondered how Lorne kissed her. Did he twirl her around like a matchstick or was he gentle? When he was reasonable he wanted to do everything at her pace, but as soon as she was in the room he wanted to take giant bites out of her; it was insane to resist, impossible to resist. And let the world tear itself to shreds, he thought.

At dinner she wouldn't look at him. He couldn't understand it: she seemed completely normal, entirely at ease. Wasn't her heart pounding in her head like his? He found himself always about to say something stupidly revealing in front of Goucher; fortunately he resisted, for the moment. He would drop his fork, reach out for her thigh under the table, and she would brutally kick him away, even if no one else was there. She passed him the salt, he grabbed her wrist, hard, and held on too long. Her eyes flashing. The next time she
visited he bit her beneath the ear, to leave a mark, and she had to wear her hair down for three days. He was happy, in the evenings, under the covers, thinking of her. This bliss.

She stood up to watch the sparrows and lying on the floor he ran the nub of a paintbrush down her calf, first one and then the other, following the swell of muscle. The body is perfect, he thought, before the messages start to blur and get confused, and every lunch you've ever had takes up residence under your chin. Skin grows on skin, he thought, the bright cords loosen, scars take longer to heal, you no longer reflect light. Then the back cracks and the teeth blacken and fall out and that's it. But first the body is perfect, like hers.

He watched her watch. That same strand of hair fallen free behind: she didn't know and he didn't tell her. He was wearing a white undershirt and a pair of trousers she'd bought for him at Eaton's.

She said she wanted to take off her shoes but she was afraid of splinters.

“They've made a little home for themselves, haven't they?”

He'd shoved the chaise longue right up against the window for her to see and she was sitting up on it backwards, looking out, her knees on the seat, her back to him. That amazing blue portrait Dalí did when he was about twelve, he thought, Gala looking out of the window at the sea. Now this would make a fine composition, he mused, without saying it aloud because he didn't want to distract or overexcite her, as sometimes happened when he told her about ideas for paintings: a gigantic pair of feet (where had he seen God's golden feet seen from below, zooming down into the world? Was that Dalí too?). Her feet in the air like a child's, my hand up close, the studio upside down. Not quite the wedding present Stanley had in mind, probably. That thought summoned up anxious stirrings that he quelled by humming, feeling the sound echo out of his back into the floorboards. It could have been any time of day.

“Now the mother's going to get some lovely worms for the babies,” said Darly, leaning forward to get a better view. “They can't see me. They are noisy though.”

“Pigeons flap noisiestly,” said Dacres. “Owls most quiet.”

“Shh,”
she said.

“But pigeons can take off vertically, so you can't condemn them. Even if they are no better than rats.”

“Hush, she's coming back.”

“They can't hear us, Darly.”

“They can!”

“They don't have ears.”

“Of course they do.”

Suddenly, she was self-aware. She settled her blouse and looked down for her cardigan, the pink one.

“Don't go,” he said.

“I must.”

“What'll I do without you?” he said, by reflex.

Her stare fixed him. “I'm sure you'll find something,” Darly said, hands on her hips, looking around the studio.

“Not without my model …”

Instantly she replied, “I thought you said—”

“Just joking, dear. I'll get to work on your fantastic eyelashes. They're almost Arabic.”

He reached towards her from the floor but she slipped past.

He sighed.

“See you soon, Darly.”

“I'll see you,” she said, emphasizing each word.

He watched the door clatter shut and listened to her lock it with her key, as he'd instructed.

They were being very slow, physically. Just kisses, embraces, but that was more than enough for him. In Paris, at her age, he'd tried to seduce his models and met with incomprehensible barrages of abuse—he could never understand why; everyone else was doing it—that left him cowed and hopeless until at the
zinc
one night he confided in a Uruguayan sculptor he'd just met. This man, Rimelli, had told him (after his laughter had died down) that of course they put up a fight: you don't pay attention to that,
cabrón
. A bride has to
be
tamed
, he'd said, and Dacres had shuddered. But the advice had helped in one or two cases Dacres still recalled fondly. Though word had somehow got around that he was impotent, possibly homosexual, and couldn't even grow a moustache.

Those were the days, Dacres thought.

He'd actually met Evie in a life class. It was something she did “for experience” and to break out of her family's plans for her, which presumably didn't include standing naked in front of strangers. So his first sight of her had been hand and eye at once. She was nervous and issued fiery-eyed challenges at each one of them and out-stared them all and everyone, he remembered, had produced worthless scrawls that day. He'd followed her out into the street and pulled her back and then he found he had nothing to say: but she took pity on him. She took him out on expeditions through London—she had the city in her pocket—to cockfights and cafés and antique furniture shops where she picked out fabrics for projects.

And he'd just been discovering a new mode of loving her, like suddenly seeing the canvas you know well from a different angle altogether, they were just entering a new phase of each other when she'd been wrenched away from him. Like a fire in an opera house after act two and so you never know how it ends. Where were the books and books of drawings he'd done of her? The portfolio of her lips, the portfolio of her neck, portfolio of Evie seated.

On the night they eloped he sat awake, past two in the morning, drawing her on card, drawing her asleep and sated in the cottage outside Dover. They knew no one for a hundred miles—the boat to the Continent left in the morning, and their landlord was a gruff old man with mutton chop whiskers. He said he'd left the Church; he winked knowingly. Unable to sleep, Dacres got out of bed and lit the lamp. He drew the bedclothes and Evie lost in the bedclothes. Sitting in silk pyjama bottoms, her gift, watching her cheek rise and fall. She woke and yawned and propped herself up on one elbow and asked him if he was happy. He said of course.
Are you happy as I am?
she asked. He smiled: How happy are you?
You couldn't be
. She said it was
just the two of them in the universe entirely, it was a line in a poem:
Nothing else is
.

Now a door slammed somewhere in the house, again, and slowly Dacres pulled himself up off the floor, creaking. These memories were like a blade with no handle: he couldn't pick them up without being cut.

The curious thing was that he did miss work, physically. Perhaps because his body was starting to feel a little awake because of her presence. He missed the feel of the brush in paint, and smearing it on your trousers, and missed leaving the cloth on top of the palette for lunch. He missed wandering around the tray in search of something, like wandering through the rooms of an immense palace. He was missing something else too, missing what it was like to solve problems, to move forward; problems you set for yourself and problems set for you by glare on a woman's shoulder. The embers were shifting, he felt. Shifting, slowly shifting.

The thing was, he thought, he felt these things in the tub, or after he'd turned out the light for bed. In the studio when he was alone all he did was think about Darly. Or lean against the window, looking at his immobile hand to study its old lines and speckles, wondering at it. Under his gaze it would tighten until it started to hurt and he had to shake it out.

When he was alone he thought of her and when she was with him he was with her. He knew she wanted him to work; he knew how important that was to her. He'd told her he could work from the preparatory sketches he'd (supposedly) done but she was too intelligent to be held off by his excuses for much longer. He knew he had to produce. And yet he was superstitious: all these good things between us have happened while I have not worked. If I start working, won't I curse them? Or more superstitious still: the portrait was a wedding present. No portrait, no wedding, yes?

Dacres watched a hornet beat against the window in four places, looking for a way to get in. Every sound in the house was Darly's footsteps approaching. He knew the British Expeditionary Force was
dug in: he'd read that morning that the British legation in Switzerland was burning its papers. But he was thinking of something much smaller, and then he knew he was a rat because of the littleness of his thoughts. He was thinking of how a few days before he'd taught her how to forge Chagall's signature, or any artist's signature: draw it upside down as a series of lines, not a name. He'd taught her what to do and guided her hand.

“Oh, that'll come in handy,” she'd smirked.

But she practised, and took her paper away with her when she left.

Lorne had another weekend pass (Dacres was starting to wonder, was he ever going to be shipped off to war?) and he came back from a night at his parents' house outside the city to spend Sunday afternoon with the Burners. He said being stuck in camp for so long frustrated him, but he was making the best of it: he was organizing extra marksmanship trials, he was on the athletics committee. He brought a timid, narrow friend with him to introduce to Burner, named Endsleigh. Dacres watched Darly set up croquet hoops around the garden in an intricate mazelike arrangement that she told Dacres was based on Knossos. Lorne followed her around, laughing and criticizing.

She'd fought with her father at dinner the previous evening but everything seemed well with her now. He'd started going over wedding ideas with her, in front of Dacres, and when she'd cavilled he'd become harsh with her, told her not to play the fool with him. It's not me who's playing, she'd said cuttingly.

“Sarcasm is so unbecoming, Darly,” Burner had said. “I certainly don't know why you think it's acceptable.” He'd said this looking squarely at open-mouthed Dacres. She'd stamped her feet at that, and left the table.

Burner went shortly thereafter, awkward, and Dacres finished eating alone, spooning a bread roll around in his gravy like a caravel.

But now her mood was sunny and they were joking together. They were bright now, sweetly blended colours. He felt stupid: he felt that enjoying life might not be a complicated trick but it was one that he'd never mastered. He'd regretted telling her how beautiful she was; now he wanted to say it again. But how did her moods change so swiftly? He liked the green, the sun, the warmth; he rolled up his shirtsleeves.

Dacres disliked games of all kinds but there was an extra mallet, and he felt that he had to make some effort to get back on Burner's good side. And, in all honesty, once they began he found himself quite enjoying it. Gradually he began to feel less like Wilde in a yellow tie at Niagara Falls and found himself lost in the important task at hand: hitting the red ball through the hoops. He became irked at their jokes and Darly's utter lack of competitive spirit. Then Lorne stood on his ball and gave it a fearful blow, sending Dacres's contiguous one careening away off the lawn and down the hill.