Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 (19 page)

And so the little man crept into her heart, and into her bed. Never would he tolerate her kisses or caresses, starting away from her as if her touch burned him. But she told herself it was early days – a man and woman needed time to learn about each other – and perhaps, in some dark place, she welcomed the brute force, the compulsion.

Each evening when she came in from work, the smell of linseed oil seemed like the smell of promise. They ate vast meals and he talked about the smokehouse and the market for smallgoods. She studied him, enjoying his enthusiasm and the pleasure he took in everything. And they talked, about books and philosophy, art and music, the old cities of Europe and their bloody history, skating over them at dizzying speed. This, at last, was life. Greer wanted to dig deeper, to develop her ideas, but he was always off on something new.

She loved to see his paints and jars and brushes, the sketchbooks open on the kitchen table, the sequence of bizarre still lifes he was creating. In his paintings, Otto transformed the contents of her cupboards: her grand- mother's yellow porcelain bowl supported a nesting bird with extravagant plumage; a grove of old bone-handled knives, silver spoons and forks grew from the hill at the back of her farm; her cast-iron pot became an unlikely vessel afloat on a darkening sea; and a pig flew over a pile of her books. They were images from a child's fantastical world, and Greer was entranced to see the stuff of her life, grown invisible to her through long use and habit, transformed into art. She puzzled over the paintings but could find no meaning in them. Poetry often required effort. Like all good art, it didn't always open itself on a first reading, but demanded something of the reader. Why could she not see beneath the surface of his paintings? Art for her demanded the deepest honesty and the clearest sight, or it failed.
There must be some lack in me
, she thought, but still she was captivated.

Sometimes he would be there, bent over his small easel; at other times he would disappear for half a day, or a whole evening, coming home long after she'd gone to bed. Perhaps he went in search of new things to paint or to photograph. Greer felt unable to ask yet, her own place in his life still tenuous and undefined.

Within a month she found herself able to pack up her parents' clothes and possessions and store their bed in the barn. ‘It is best, Greer,' Otto had said kindly. ‘I help you. It will be my studio, this room. Something new. You will see. It is best to forget the past.'

The dressing table would be good for drawing, he insisted, and his pleasure in the room carried her along as she collected her mother's few cosmetics and tipped them into a bin. The brush, still smelling faintly of her hair, Greer pushed to the back of her own underwear drawer.

As she sorted and packed, she told him stories, to make him a gift of her childhood, and the parents he would never meet. She showed him her mother's few bits of jewellery, catching the worn ring in her palm and giving it a squeeze, rubbing the pearls with her thumb.

‘I used to fiddle with this ring while my mother read to me. It's one of my earliest memories. Those magical stories, and her warm weight on the bed . . .'

‘It is gold?'

‘Mmm.'

She told him about the rare times her mother had worn the pearls to a dance or a wedding, and how beautiful she appeared to her small daughter, her dark eyes gleaming, her lips an unaccustomed red.

‘They are valuable?'

‘I don't know. I've never had them valued. I always put off wearing them until . . . I don't know . . . until I became a woman, I suppose.'

‘This room is good for me,' Otto mused. ‘The light is excellent.'

The strand of pearls trickled through her fingers into their case and she snapped it shut.

‘This warze will do for my brushes.' He indicated a vase with a rich green glaze.

‘Oh, that one belonged to my great-great-grandmother. My mother used to fill it with blossom – she had a knack with flowers – and hawthorn berries in autumn. I don't think . . .'

‘Ah, Greer, you are such a bourgeois,' he said. ‘It is only a warze – so ugly.' He smiled. ‘These things, they do not matter.'

And they didn't, because Greer was happy, busier than she had ever been, but able to watch Otto while he painted, increasingly confident that he possessed the key to a door that would open onto that larger and more intense world which she had glimpsed in her single year at university. Both her parents had been readers, and she came from generations of self-taught farmers, but she was the first to go to university, and had always felt the two parts of herself, daughter and student, chafing against each other. In the grief and shock of her parents' death, she had done what was necessary. The poems had been both a way to honour her parents and an attempt to regain some of what she had lost, to reinsert herself into the world of poetry readings, small-press magazines and slim, hand-stitched chapbooks.

Otto talked of the smokehouse often. His best memories, he told her, were of his father smoking sausages when he was a boy – the mingled smells of garlic and pork and wood smoke, and the taste – there was nothing like it. Greer thought she recognised the voice of longing and loss, and pitied his homelessness. She wanted only what he wanted, but she was practical, and began to anticipate what must be done to please him. ‘We must make it modern, though, Otto. It must be clean, and it must be bigger than your father's to make sense commercially.'

She did her research in the evenings, when she came in from work. Otto would have a joint on to roast, the kitchen smelling wonderfully of garlic and onions and spices. He would pile their plates with meat and potatoes, and they would eat and drink until Greer pleaded satiety, then, feeling heavy but content, she would return to the computer until late.

Soon people from the city began to call to see the artist at work, or people Otto had met at a gallery, or on a bus, old friends perhaps. Often she would come in from mucking out the pens to find her kitchen full of people, all talking and laughing and admiring his latest paintings. The air smelled of cooking and fresh coffee and he would pour her a cup, solicitous and kind in front of them. ‘Greer, sit here. Would you like water also?'

‘Thank you.'

She felt shy, clumsy in her soiled work clothes, and un- used to so many people and so much chatter. But it had been one of her secret wishes, for a world where people talked about more than the drought, or the price of fertiliser; where they lived different lives from her parents, from Charlie; where she was not so odd. Perhaps this was the beginning.

Often they talked late into the night, wine bottles accumulating on the table, the coffee pot refilled. When she woke, bleary and thick-headed, in the morning, humps of bedding would cover the sofas and the door to the spare room would be shut. She would tiptoe outside into the day, closing the screen door carefully behind her.

Her poetry notebooks were untouched – she had neither the solitude nor the energy for her early-morning drafts, but she kept a small pad in the pocket of her overalls to jot down fleeting images and lines, hoping that one day she would have time. Each night she fell into bed too exhausted to read, but life was good, life was rich and exciting with Otto. The house filled with the things he made or found. He hewed firewood into crude beasts, torsos or heads and set them in the garden and beside the drive. He lined a discarded mudlark's nest with a lace doily and displayed it on the mantelpiece, and wove corn dollies out of straw, hanging them in the window. His view of the world was as fresh and unspoilt as a child's, and she loved him for it.

Some nights she woke to pain, and found him pressed against her back, his thick fingers clutching her breasts, kneading her flesh. Why did he have to ambush her like this, drag her back into her skin from the deeps of exhausted sleep? Why when she came to him in the evening did he turn away from her? But in the mornings he would smile like a child, delighted with what the day presented, and she would remind herself that his appetite for life, which she so loved, was the same force that drove him to bite her shoulder and tug at her hips in the night, the same force that produced his art. Looked at another way, it was energy and fervour – passion – that he brought to their nights, and she told herself she was squeamish and prim.

The smokehouse plan quickly became burdensome, but she pressed on, reading about meat mincers, brine injectors, smoke generators, sausage fillers until her head spun. Then there were the legal requirements, inspectors, standards, registration, packaging, labelling. When she tried to talk to Otto he poured scorn on her concerns. His father had never needed these permits. Pah! So many laws and rules, it was not necessary. ‘Here, I will draw you the smokehouse; it is all you need. And the labels, I will do. They will be the most beautiful of any.'

She would smile, and resolve to keep these concerns to herself in future. She needed more than pretty labels and picturesque wooden buildings – she needed money. Otto was an artist, an innocent, with an artist's view of the world. She was the practical one.

And so she found herself before very long sitting opposite the bank manager and asking him for a large overdraft. Otto was at home, painting. It was his work, he explained, and could not be set aside, even for a morning. ‘You go, Greer. It is your farm. I am not good with the money.'

Her family had been thrifty and modest, yet the bank manager made her feel like a beggar and a fool. Did she have a business plan? he asked her coolly, peering at her over his rimless glasses. Had she investigated the market for these products? Were there hygiene issues? His nostrils flared minutely, as if he could smell pig on her.

She answered his questions, listed her assets, pressing on mulishly, and he was cold and disdainful and uncompromising. She despised him, but in the end he drew up the documents and made her sign – here, and here – indicating the places with a manicured finger.

Her farm was mortgaged.

She spotted the green vase as she was on her way from the bank to the store. It was in the window of the gallery cum antique shop, alongside a set of cream-and-green canisters, some old green enamel bowls, and a couple of lime-green linen tea towels. Greer was shocked by the price tag.

At home, she walked into her parents' old room and placed the vase on the dressing table beside his paints. ‘I found the vase, Otto.'

He glanced up, then bent over his painting, concentrating on a detail, ignoring her.

‘Warze?'

‘This vase. It was not yours to sell.'

‘Still so worried about your china cabinet?'

‘It's been in my family for—'

‘I needed paints. Until my show I cannot pay.' He sounded furious.

‘If you need money you only have to ask—' She heard herself placating him, reassuring him.

‘I do not like to beg.' He jammed his brush in the preser- ving jar of turps she had given him and washed it thoroughly.

‘It's not begging. Otto, you know I begrudge you nothing.'

‘But you begrudge me this ugly old warze.'

‘No, I—'

‘This is bourgeois bullshit, Greer. I have told you.'

‘But it was my mother's.'

‘Do not speak to me of mothers,' he hissed.

One day, she recognised a journalist amongst the throng seated around her table – Evonne, Eva, something. They had both written for the university newspaper, although she must have been in her final year when Greer was a first-year.

‘Ah, here is Greer. Speak to Greer,' said Otto, beckoning her over. ‘She has a book of worse.'

‘Worse?'

‘Poetry,' she said quietly, filling a glass and drinking it in two long swallows. The woman barely looked at Greer.

‘You can write about my paintings and Greer's worse,' Otto insisted, good-natured as ever. ‘Greer, get your book while I show Eva my verk.' He pronounced it
Ever
.