Martin Sloane (14 page)

“What do you want?” she said.

I looked down at the catalogue and confirmed this was the right address. “Are you Francine Bryce?”

“No,” she said, her voice quavering, but she didn’t move to close the door. She stood in the verge, stilled by fear.

“I don’t mean to be any trouble,” I said, “but I’ve come as —”

“As what.”

“I was given this address by Leon Hofstaeder.” I was now on the landing, having cautiously climbed four black steps, and stood only feet from the woman. Her hair was parted flatly on top, yellowing near her scalp and curling stiffly to its white ends. Her skin was almost grey. “I’m looking for Martin Sloane.” I held up the catalogue. “You represent him, don’t you?”

“What do you want with him?”

“I need to speak to him.”

“What did he do to you?”

“Oh,” I said, “it’s nothing serious. I just need … do you know where I can find him?”

“I don’t,” she said with some finality, and she closed the door, leaving me staring at a filigreed mail slot. For a moment, it felt as if someone had just snatched something out of my hands and my body tingled all over. Proximity. I pushed the slot open with my finger and peered into the hall. Mrs. Bryce’s body was vanishing around a corner, the backs of her calves bristling with veins. I saw a cat looking down imperiously from the side of a staircase, and then two more walked out of the room Mrs. Bryce had gone into.

“Mrs. Bryce? I really need to speak to you. I’ve come from far away to get in contact with Mr. Sloane and I’d be grateful if you could spare a moment for me.” A scent of decomposing paper and yellowing magazines wafted through the slot. I waited, and then let the little metal lip clank shut, and stood back hoping the door would open. It did not. I repeated Mrs. Bryce’s name into her front hall and waited again, but this time when she didn’t answer, I just tried the door, and finding it unbarred, walked in.

The smell of old, browning paper and wood intensified in the front hall. Mrs. Bryce crossed the hall through another doorway without seeing me. I heard her footfalls descend to the basement and then the sound of a radio rose up from below. I walked quietly down the hall. “Mrs. Bryce?” I called. “The door was open. I really don’t mean to bother you like this.” Something touched my leg and I startled: another cat walking past and then sinuously down the stairs. Beyond, there was a kitchen table that was clearly never used for eating. It was piled with newspapers and magazines. A chair with torn vinyl seating (from which sprang vilely discoloured fluff) was loaded down with a pile of magazines called
The Pestle
, and many ragged newspapers. A headline I could see from the hall read “Motion Pictures Immoral: Decency Legion.” Half-eaten tins of catfood were crisping on most surfaces.

I went into the room I’d first seen Mrs. Bryce enter and was surprised to see another woman, this one slight and bony, sitting dwarfed in a thick leather chair beside a bookcase. She was looking out of a window onto the back garden, her face expressionless, her entire body limp except for the arm propped up by an elbow on the rest, and which terminated in a cigarette. Behind this woman rose the pale spines of ancient hardcovers, tooled leather, faintly golden titles stamped into them. I would have spoken but for the shock of seeing the very artworks that were illustrated in the Hofstaeder catalogue, plus three or four more. These were boxes I knew as well as I knew my own handwriting, arrayed on tables, on shelves, carelessly laid flat or turned so their contents might suffer sunlight. The woman said nothing. I moved, unable to control the impulse, to the box nearest the door, an artwork that had been pictured in the catalogue and that I knew as Carriage. It was in the Art Gallery of Washington, one of Martin’s most prestigious sales. I lifted it up, flicking anxious glances at the old woman, but she was as still as death, frozen behind tendrils of smoke.

The boxframe in my hands had been poorly mitred (Martin had always been meticulous about his corners and angles and often sent back entire batches of wood if the carpentry wasn’t perfect) but the insides were the shock. A plagiarism would have shown an attempt at exactness: this Carriage was not making any effort to be mistaken for the “real thing.” The parts were subtly different: the iron wheels on the original had been carefully sourced by Martin, whereas these were plastic, and off a child’s toy; the hands at the top of the carriage door were laminated magazine cut-outs, not doll parts. There was no map on the bottom of the box. But the carriageman’s lamp, which in the original had a sprig of gold tinsel for light, here had a tiny Christmas tree light in it. I turned the box around to find two thin wires connected to a battery duct-taped to the back of the box, and tamped one down to the terminal. A yellow glow played against the palm of my hand. An improvement? Evolution? I glanced nervously at the motionless woman again. What the hell was this? The hair on the back of my arms stood up. This Carriage looked different than the original, but it imparted the same secret longing, the same sense of hope as yet unthwarted. But where was the map, the narrative of the lovers’ journey? It was an eerie absence and it made me feel outcast from it, where the original, built for me, had been nothing less than a love letter.

Now, I saw the old woman looking at me. She had on the shut-in’s loose, stained housedress. Her cigarette had burned down to a cylinder of grey ash two inches long. I put down the box and found a crusted ashtray. She watched me approach without fear, a flicker of a smile on her face. She was pleased to have a visitor. She allowed me to take her wrist and direct her hand over the ashtray.

“Who are you?” she said.

“My name is Jolene Iolas. I’ve come from Canada.”

“Good god,” said the woman, and she looked at me more fully. “Has it occurred to you to cut your hair?”

I looked at her in shock. “Do you know me?”

“Of course not,” she said. “Anyone can see you need a cut. Fetch me another cigarette?”

I let out a breath and searched through the things on the folding table beside her. Pill bottles lay on their sides around a glass of discoloured water and a Bible. The cigarettes were on top of the Bible. I took one out, put it in her mouth (which she had, like a helpless nestling, already opened) and lit it. She took a short draw, then held it in her hand, as before, where it slowly burned.

“What’s your name?”

“Jolene Iolas.”

“Are you Greek?”

“Half.” She held out her hand. “Francine Bryce,” she said, smoke drifting out of her mouth. “Where is Lenore?”

“She’s gone downstairs.”

“She’s doing the laundry.
Lenore!
” she called, and we both waited for an answer, but the radio was probably all the other woman could hear.

“Do you need anything? I can get it for you.”

“No, no. I just wanted to let her know we had a visitor. We don’t have a lot of visitors. What time did you get up this morning?”

I kept up, jumping cognitive logs. “This morning? Nine, I guess.”

“Mm,” said Mrs. Bryce. “I haven’t had a sleep-in in years. Lenore gets me up early.” She shrugged, as if this was a problem any sensible person could help her with.

“Why don’t you ask her to let you lie in awhile?”

“She thinks I’ll die.”

“Oh,” I said. “Why does she think that?”

“She wants the company in the morning, so she tells me if I sleep in I might die, and so I get up and keep her company. She was always an early riser, Lenore, even when we were children. She used to call me lazy. Can you imagine?”

“No.”

“Well, early mornings do my head in.” She looked over at the cigarette, squinting at it, not sure what it was doing there. “What is your name?”

“Jolene.”

She smiled at me, the bright trusting smile given by babies as well as people who have been removed from society. I gave back a crooked, uncomfortable smile. “I’ve come from Canada,” I said. “I’ve got a couple of questions for you.” Mrs. Bryce settled back into her chair, and her face clouded a little. I tapped her knobbed finger over the ashtray to knock off the ash, and saw a scorched circle on the carpet directly below Mrs. Bryce’s hand. “I don’t want to impose on you, but I’ve come a long way and I need to know a couple of things.”

“Are you from Taxation?”

“No, I’m from Toronto. Canada, as I said.”

“Because I wouldn’t be able to lie if you were, I think lying is a dreadful habit.”

“I’m not from the government.”

“All right then, what do you want to know?”

I gestured around the room. “These artworks, they’re copies.”

“Yes, I know.”

“And you’re the artist’s agent? You arrange to have them put on display?”

“That is what my existence has come down to, yes.”

“Why, though? Why can’t he do it himself?”

“Oh, he used to, but when we —”

She was interrupted by a fit of coughing, and it took a few moments for the spell to pass. She held up a hand to let me know to wait, and she closed her eyes. The eyelashes over her right eye were stained yellow, whereas the ones over the other eye were as white as her hair. I was anxious that her sister would return, but I hurried into the kitchen, dodging cats and cans of food, to fill a glass of water. I brought it back in and held it to her mouth, and she gulped it in long draughts, the skin on her neck shaking. She held her hand up again, and sat against the back of the chair, catching her breath. Unable to remain politely attentive, I looked at a couple of the other boxes. None of them had any of the business that Martin had habitually indulged in. He would often paper the exterior backsides of his boxes with newsprint, or restaurant menus, or letters people had written to him, little asides to himself connected with some memory tangential to the content of the box itself, a sort of material free association. Martin liked that there was an aspect to his work that most people would never see; it constituted a communion he had with it that no one else did. Most usually, he signed the boxes on their backs, but none of these were signed. Pond was here, but with only six feathers, a strange oversight that made me suspicious. I held it at eye level, absolutely straight, and saw that the lip of the bowl (which Martin had filled with crushed glass and resin) hid what was behind it, where the seventh feather would have featured if the person who had made this thing knew that there was one. I put it back down. Mrs. Bryce was waiting patiently for my attention.

“Are you all right now?” I asked her.

“I forget …,” she said, and looked up at me, imploring.

“I wanted to know why you arrange exhibitions for Mr. Sloane. What he wants in showing this work.”

“He wants it to be seen, love.”

“But it
is
seen. The originals are in galleries throughout North America.”

“Dear, I just do what I’ve been told. I’m duty-bound.” She waved the cigarette in a tiny circle, then muttered, “Not that anything will come of it.”

At the word “duty,” the penny dropped. Martin would be around this woman’s age now: they were contemporaries. He had reached the age some of my friends had warned me of; I would still be a young woman when he was old, they told me. Some had even had the terrible presence of mind to tell me that he had spared me a prime-of-life with nothing but fragile companionship. So this was how it would be. Perhaps I would be permitted this with Daniel one day, I thought bitterly, a precarious life riven with duty. A hollow was opening in my chest, a feeling that the conclusion to this matter had already been reached. “How long ago did you marry?” I asked quietly.

“Almost eight years.”

“But you call yourself Bryce.”

“My first husband. All my friends know me as Bryce. Mind you, they’re all dead.” She fell silent, thinking. “I suppose it wouldn’t confuse them now,” she said quietly. “Francine Sloane.” She finally took a drag on her cigarette, and I thought I could hear the sound of the smoke driving open the clenched passages of her chest. “So obviously you knew Martin,” she said, exhaling yellow air.

The sound of his name, in her mouth, made me feel weak. “I did once,” I said. “In America.”

“You were close?”

“I know. There was a bit of a difference in our ages.”

“A bit.”

“We went together for a few years. I probably shouldn’t have come here.”

“It’s understandable why you did. It must have been very difficult for you.”

“So you know that I need speak to him.”

“Who, dear?”

“Martin?”

“Oh, well, yes, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

“Is he in Dublin?”

“No. Oops,” said Mrs. Bryce, laughing. Her ash had toppled onto the back of her hand. She held it out as I manipulated her finger over the ashtray, and she looked at me, lovingly, it seemed. “You’re a beautiful young woman,” she said. “If I had help like you, my life would not be in danger every second of the day.”

“Why is your life in danger?” I asked distractedly.

“We’re just two stupid old women. Do you think my sister can lift a fire canister? I might well burn the house down,” Mrs. Bryce whispered, leaning toward me. “You better make sure she hasn’t fallen down the stairs, dear.”

“I don’t think your sister would be happy to know I was here. I’d better just go.”

“You’ll come back, though? And bring some fish and chips?”

“Yes,” I said. I just wanted to get out. The oppressive thickness of the smoke, the hopelessness of the room. I wanted to run.

“My sister is not so well in the head,” Mrs. Bryce said, groaning. “She thinks the king is Jewish. Can you imagine?”

“Which king?”

She frowned at me. “The king of Ireland, dear.”

I took the smouldering remains of her cigarette out of her hand, which she watched with sad dismay, and then I stood away from her. I righted one of the boxes that lay flat on a table. It was a box with loose sand and hidden pictures. I couldn’t remember its name. I placed it in its correct position. The head of a mushroom peeked out. “I’d better go,” I said. “If you could just tell me where can I find Martin?”

“My lord!” barked a voice behind me, and I spun around to see Lenore standing in an attitude of shaking terror. “Francy?” she cried out.