Goya'S Dog (5 page)

He was staying in the second-best hotel in the city. The room was creamy and spacious and Dacres almost felt guilty leaving it by itself in the late mornings. But he wanted to spend as much time as possible exploring his New World. He didn't unpack, and kept his suitcases by the door. In one were his worldly goods: he had five pairs of socks and underwear, a suit that needed re-lining, three ties, one of them brown, some formerly white shirts, and trousers whose cuffs were giving up hope. He left his dirty clothes on the thick carpet and when he returned each evening they were pristine in the wardrobe (and he moved them back into the suitcase). Wrapped in vests was an old service revolver (someone else's) that he kept under his pillow at night. In his second suitcase, more forlorn, were his work materials. Scrunched up balls of expensive paper, a travel palette he'd toured Denmark with years ago, Gorren's typed manuscript, a pair of corduroy trousers that had once belonged to the bishop of Oxford, two tubes of burnt umber, a few brushes he was fond of. What little else he owned (easels, trousers, tea cups) was in London. He had decamped without giving notice, let alone paying the back rent, so he surmised that if his things hadn't already been boxed up or burned they soon would be, the flat rented out to a new, better behaved, less impecunious tenant. Well, so be it: they would all be bombed to bits soon enough anyway.

The King Edward's assistant manager, Edelweiss, was a man of the world, Dacres felt: he didn't mention the bill and Dacres didn't pay it. They sat together of an evening in Edelweiss's wood-panelled office or the large white dining room and Dacres told Edelweiss about the things he'd seen, and Edelweiss, a gentle Swiss émigré who'd wanted
to be a painter himself in younger days, listened. Now that the legation had left, Dacres was calling himself a tie salesman, but Edelweiss knew the truth. Dacres liked Edelweiss's prematurely grey moustache, and his thin shoulders, and his few words, and the indifferent ease with which he marshalled his underlings. Dacres admired competence. But there was another side to Edelweiss: the stories he told about Swiss village girls and what they got up to in the mountain passes kept Dacres up in his soft bed. And if they were not fast friends yet, Dacres was certainly glad not to have to deal with the manager proper, who was away sick.

“They seem to like the English here, don't they?” Dacres said late one night in the empty dining room. Edelweiss brought over two brandies in giant delicate snifters. Two gentlemen. “Think I could turn this to my advantage. Could be quite the hero.”

“I say every time I am Swiss. Otherwise they think me German.”

“Dear me.”

“You are a member of the royal family?” Edelweiss asked wryly.

Dacres snorted.

“Not quite.”

“Then you may disappoint. The king and queen visited six months ago.”

“Yes—I know that.”

“
They
were a success.”

One could drink in the hotel, unlike most anywhere else. Byzantine laws governed the distribution of alcohol, lest the natives start enjoying life. Dacres was not sure he met the property requirements to buy a bottle of Scotch. You went to a blank beige shop and waited behind a line of men to sign the first of several forms; it was like getting a cure for VD. Twice, too frustrated, too impatient, he'd walked out without liquor.

“Here you have English, French, Scottish, and other things,” Edelweiss said, watching, over Dacres's shoulder, a waiter set out the cutlery for breakfast. “But not so much of your artistic world. Not much attention is given to it. They are less ironic here. The outlook is more—”

“Our artistic world, Edelweiss.”

“No, not mine. Victorian, perhaps? The outlook is more Victorian.”

Dacres shrugged.

“The joke is that this country could have had French cuisine, American know-how, and English culture; instead it has French know-how, American culture, and English cuisine.”

Dacres thought it over. “English culture?” he said. “What's so good about that?”

Edelweiss ignored him. “Canada as a country is my father's age if he had lived. No more than that. And the city is a pinprick at the bottom of an immense land. All I wish to say is, doors may not spring open before you. Particularly now.”

French culture? Dacres thought. English tailors, perhaps.

“Country seems too small to me,” he said, taking another long coppery sip.

“Then you need to look around. The woods, the lakes, the north.”

“Edelweiss I'm a city creature, you must know that.”

Edelweiss got up slowly, the fingertips of one hand still touching the tablecloth.

“Then, my friend, I say again, you may be disappointed.”

Edelweiss padded away after a boy who had disappeared through the swing doors to the kitchen with his arms full of cloth napkins. He left his brandy half-finished. Dacres's glass was empty except for the golden smear at the butt. He leaned forward and switched them.

What was he doing in Canada? The whole thing was a mistake, a bad joke from the start. The summer of 1939 had found Dacres at a particularly low ebb, unable to do anything but read the papers. He blamed his disastrous state of mind on the news, though he knew this was unfair: it wasn't the news's fault.

He was staring out of the window a great deal, soft chin leaning on the knuckles of both hands. He didn't often go out; days passed without him speaking to a soul. He had a largish single room on the third floor of a house and he called it a studio and avoided paying rent when he could. He had a little money left over from the last school he'd been ejected from. He was feeling too old for this life—forty-one—but there didn't seem to be any way to change it.

Earlier that year he'd tried giving private lessons: a minor Portuguese count came once a month. Dacres suspected Dom Federigo was taking pity on him. He showed him a few little tricks of perspective but they spent most of the time talking about the problem of evil. He feared the awkward moment at the end of each class, but Dom Federigo was an aristocrat: he had money for Dacres clipped within a page of marble letterhead (just his title, no address), he slid it invisibly onto the table at the end of the hour without breaking eye contact, like a conjuror. But he had not come for months.

In the past too Dacres had borrowed from friends but their patience had been ground down by now to an almost perfect hardness. Few friends remained. Unfinished portraits leaned against the wall. Next to the sink and in the sink, his abandoned cups of tea grew circles of white-green mould. If he became desperate he knew people in magazines, didn't he? He once had. There was illustration work to be had, there were contracts he could pursue. In moments like this in the past he'd taken on commercial work. This summer he couldn't summon up the spirit. His furious silk-turbaned landlady banged something metallic against her ceiling, his floorboards, every night before going to bed.

The view of the small houses, built a century before as workers' cottages, never changed. He could give a name to each brown brick that had once been red. Over the years, he'd watched the boys from across the street grow from charming scamps into promising young vandals. These days their friends—they used to collect conkers—pissed against the side of the house before ringing the bell. It was no longer amusing, he could no longer be detached, he no longer
thought things were going to be any different, ever. He could not work: pacing to and fro, he muttered to himself fanatically, suspiciously. He waited for lunchtime, he waited to toast a piece of bread on the burner. He was tortured by occasional crystal thoughts:
All you need to be a painter is an apple and a pear
. He could see that the line of his mind was thickening. And the world was about to tear itself to shreds again, that much was obvious.

The letter had seemed like an escape. It had come in an embossed cream envelope, it was neither a bill nor a summons, it was an invitation to participate in a cultural legation. He was asked to attend an introductory meeting in the Strand if he was curious to take part. He was given a central London number to telephone if he had any questions. It was signed on behalf of a Lady Dunfield. It sat for a few days on the dusty mantelpiece like an early Christmas.

The letter had come to his address but it wasn't quite in his name: it said Edward Davis. Later in the day, he'd gone downstairs to the hall phone and tried to clear the business up like a good honest man. He should have asked the straightforward questions: was he invited or not? If he was, why wasn't his name right? If he wasn't, why had they sent the thing to his address? But on the telephone he always found it hard to express himself. Another tenant, the old stoat Horniman, came in as he was calling and lingered, wanting to use the phone, an apparition on the tatty brown carpet. Dacres's unaccustomed presence there was an impertinence.

“Davis,”
said Dacres.
“Dacres.”

The chirrupy girl paused. There were noises in the office behind her, he imagined her standing at her desk, in her coat already, having picked her handbag up off the floor as the phone rang. She said she would make a note, she would speak to the gentleman who had made up the lists and would be sure to telephone him back. Horniman was standing much too close and Dacres tried to shoo him away. He didn't like talking in front of other people, but he persisted, and she was tired, and she wanted to go home, and she became more frank and brusque. She said there was an alpha list and a beta list and it seemed
they had become intertwined. There was some difficulty in the disentangling, she said, staff were coming and going, they would do what they could to sort it all out … Looking back as he ascended the stairs he saw Horniman wiping the receiver on his sleeve.

So in a spirit of resignation—if God wanted him to preach Art to the Colonies he had better preach Art to the Colonies—he'd gone down to the Strand for the meeting. He had nothing else on that week; literally nothing.

In the Strand, he felt old and alien and excited amid cabs and bowler hats. Much time since he had seen so many bodies. He presented his cream invitation (
Edward Davis
) as you would at a ball. Up the white stairs, into a reception room with dark green walls, and then he was curiously timorous, feeling that there was more riding on the next hour than there ought to be. He stood alone in a youthful crowd of artists and poets and hangers-on. He waited to be offered a glass of something, but none came. There were sorry-looking biscuits on scratched plates and the room was too warm. He spoke to no one. He had in his head the notion of chatting with Miss Mills, the harried girl he'd spoken to about his invitation, but he didn't make much effort to find her. He thought about animals: when you put a dog in a kennel with others of its kind, does it get its guard up, as men do in a new place? Assessing the threat and the expectations? Outside, the clouds waited, with all the time in the world.

Lady Dunfield got up to speak: she talked about obligation and opportunity. (Her natural habitat, he would discover, was the low stage; her natural armament a flamethrower sincerity.) Afterwards she was asked if politics would affect their plans. She said that they would not allow themselves to be deflected by events on
that
plane. Someone behind Dacres muttered,
“Well, that plane will bloody well affect you when it bombs you in the middle of the sea.”
He wanted to go home and he wanted to stay put. Eventually he retrieved his hat and his threadbare coat and traipsed back to the underground, consciously avoiding looking at the National Gallery, feeling the pennies in his pocket. He had no other errands to run that afternoon. He thought about what to do.

A fortnight later came another embossed envelope. It was as if an angelic bureaucrat were trying to rescue him from himself. It contained a signed letter of confirmation on the same sturdy material, and a carbon-copied sheet of instructions about itinerary, packing.
“If you are a dancer … If you are bringing props
…
”
There was a train ticket to Southampton. Two weeks' notice. They recommended a service for cabin trunk delivery.

He was not the sort of man to check a nag's teeth.

“I love your foxes,” Lady Dunfield said to him in the liner's smoking room, enthusiastically, her face like a soufflé gone wrong. Dacres didn't know what the devil she was talking about. He ascribed the comment to her haphazard connection to the Real. And before he could think what to answer the gong sounded and she was being called away. “Sit with me at dinner,” she said, grasping his forearm—but she knew full well that he wasn't in first class, that he had to sit in a different dining room altogether. Violet called to her and she eased away, happy within herself.

Back in the same room after dinner, Gorren offered Dacres a Player's. He made a jibe about preferring to watch the icebergs from the deckchairs than the deckchairs from the icebergs. Gorren was unhappy that they were being taken north. They were silent, watching for a moment as Nelda passed. Then they were talking about the potential difficulties playing billiards would present on a boat, on a smaller boat. They didn't ever discuss their work, though once they had a conversation consisting just of artists' names:
Furini
, Dacres had said.
Monet
, Gorren objected. Dacres rebutted instantly with
Manet
, and then added
Juan Gris
, but then Gorren trumped him with the unexpected
Duchamp
.