1985 - Stars and bars (18 page)

He found himself thinking again of Gage’s father’s horrible death. Surely nothing so dreadful would have befallen Arnold Dores in Burma? To his surprise he found himself worrying for his father’s safety, as if he were still alive and still involved in his perilous mission. Take care, Dad, he said to himself—and then rebuked himself for his absurd sentiment. It had been an odd moment, though, a kind of eerie time shift. He felt suffused by a low, steady sadness, which gradually gave way to unease. He hoped he wouldn’t hear of anything too awful…

T
he next morning Henderson got out of bed and fell over. He sat on the floor for a few seconds and watched his hands shake. A largish prism seemed to be wedged between his spine and his rib cage. The internal triangle. His viscera felt stuffed to capacity with gravel. His eyes throbbed painfully, as if they had been removed from their sockets, bounced up and down on the floor and reinserted. He crawled back between the sheets.

Bryant looked in later to inform him she was going to Atlanta with Duane to buy some records. Henderson waved her on her way. At lunchtime Alma-May brought him a pickled cucumber and chopped onion sandwich. He crawled out on to the balcony and threw it in the garden.

In mid-afternoon he received a visit from Cora.

‘How are you feeling?’ she said. She stood in the centre of his room, cigarette burning in one hand. She seemed quite friendly now.

‘Not so good,’ he replied. ‘Very weak. Chronic indigestion. Intermittent nausea. It must be that sipping whisky.’

‘You got a phone call, Shanda says. A Miss Irene Dubrovnik? You’ve to phone back.’

‘Oh! Oh right. Good. Thanks very much.’

She left and Henderson shakily got dressed. His back was aching, as if his spine couldn’t take the strain of keeping his body erect. He went to the lavatory and sat there for five minutes, teeth gritted and eyes watering with the pressure, but nothing shifted.

He tottered carefully down the stairs and shuffled over to Shanda’s trailer. Out in the park an old black man drove about on a miniature tractor cutting the grass.

Henderson knocked at the door and Shanda let him in.

‘Can I use the phone?’

‘The phone? Sure.’

He sat down warily on the glass and wrought iron seat. He wondered what Shanda did with herself all day. She settled down on a sofa and leafed through a magazine. He punched out Irene’s number. He felt excited but a little inhibited by Shanda’s presence and subdued somewhat by his weakened state.

‘Hello, Irene. It’s Henderson.’

‘Hi. I got your letter.’

‘Look, I’m really sorry about all the—’

‘Forget it. How are you?’

‘Actually, I’ve got the most appalling indigestion. I drank something called Henry’s Goat and ate something called hoppin’ John.’

‘Redneck food, Henderson. You’ve got to be reared on that stuff. Have you had grits yet?’

‘It feels like it.’ Perhaps that caused the stuffed-gravel sensation. He shifted slightly in his seat, turning his back towards Shanda who was listening with candid curiosity. He felt huge relief and gratitude at this restoration of feeling between him and Irene.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘can you get down here?’

‘I don’t know. When?’

‘This weekend. We can stay in a hotel. Then we’ll take a few days and drive around. Charleston, Savannah, somewhere like that.’

There was a pause.

‘OK, maybe I can get down on Friday night.’

‘I’ll meet you at the airport. Atlanta.’

‘No. I don’t know which plane I’ll get. I’ll come straight to the hotel.’

‘Great. Hang on a sec.’ He turned to Shanda. ‘Shanda, what’s the very best hotel in Atlanta?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Hotel. The very best. In Atlanta.’

‘Well…I guess Monopark 5000. But it’s real expensive.’

It sounded more like a brand of hair conditioner than a hotel, but he would have to take her word for it. He relayed its name to Irene, who said she’d heard of it and the massive complex of shops, plazas, banks and adventure playgrounds out of which the enormous hotel soared.

‘See you there,’ he said. ‘Friday night.’ His voice went hoarse. ‘Bye.’ He put the phone down.

‘Was that your wife?’ Shanda asked. ‘I mean your fiancée. Bryant’s mommy?’

‘No.’ He thought quickly. ‘A business associate.’ No word of Irene’s trip must reach Bryant’s ears. He asked if he could make some more calls (‘seein’ as how he wuz darned well a’sittin’ by the phone’) and received Shanda’s permission. She went off into the kitchenette to make him some coffee. He called Beeby and told him the good news, gave him a description of the paintings and approximate market prices and said that Gage seemed entirely happy and prepared to sell through Mulholland, Melhuish.

Beeby’s joy was profound. ‘We are all in your debt, Henderson. Great news. When are you coming home?’

Henderson told him of his plans to drive around for a few days, explore the South a little further.

Take as long as you like, my dear boy, as long as you like. What about the Dutch paintings?’

‘Very average, as you thought. There is one curiosity.’ He described Gage’s dirty picture. ‘I can’t place the myth. I thought Pruitt might know.’

‘I’ll ask him. Enjoy yourself.’

Henderson put the phone down. Shanda came back with a cup of coffee. Her love-bite had faded to a brown smudge. Her distended breasts swung unrestrained, it seemed to Henderson, beneath a bright floral-patterned maternity dress. They sat and chatted as best they could for a few minutes. He thought she asked him if he and ‘Bryant’s mommy’ were going to get married in a church. He told her no, and sketched out the arguments in favour of a registry office wedding.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Registry office.’

‘Red just offed his what? His wife?’

Did they have registry offices in America? ‘No. A registry office.’

‘Air defence officer? Who? Red?’

‘Fiss. Fiss. Aw-fiss.’

Shanda lit a cigarette and smiled worriedly at him.

‘You know, it’s still not working,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it’s fine an’ I hear you OK. But other times it just goes. I’m lost.’

Ten minutes later, Henderson stepped exhausted from the trailer. He walked around the side of the house, belching quietly to himself in an attempt to dislodge the ball of warm air trapped behind his rib cage. He wandered down the cool overgrown alleyways of the back garden feeling slightly more at ease. Apart from his clogged and costive body, his life was beginning to pick up again. He was finally getting on with his job and was reconciled with Irene. The last few days had been an absurd and regrettable hiccough. It was as if in driving south he’d passed into some anarchic and frustrating time zone—like Alice falling down the rabbit hole—but now things were returning to normal.

He pushed through a screen of laurels to find himself on the banks of a large brackish stream. On the far bank was a dense pine wood. Over to his right was a stone bench, upon which sat Cora.

‘Mr Dores,’ she called. ‘Come and admire the view.’

He joined her on the bench. She wore black cotton trousers and a white blouse, and with her short hair looked obscurely Chinese.

‘The view?’

‘My mother planned to construct a ‘vista’ here. But it never got made.’

‘I see. Shame.’ They sat and looked at the pine trees some thirty or forty feet away across the stream.

‘I suppose you think,’ she said, ‘that it’s a rather pretentious idea. A Southern lady playing at being a landscape gardener.’

‘Not at all,’ he said defensively. He changed the subject. ‘I was very impressed by your father’s collection.’

She turned her sunglasses on him. ‘Is he going to let you sell them?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Do you like ‘Demeter and lambe’?’

‘That’s the one where…’

‘The girl is holding up her dress. Yes.’

‘What did you call it?’

‘‘Demeter and lambe’. It’s written on the back of the canvas. I don’t know who the hell they are, though.’

‘I can fill you in on Demeter, I think. Goddess of the harvest. Her daughter, Persephone, was kidnapped by Hades, god of the underworld, one day while she was gathering flowers. Demeter goes wild with grief, permits no harvest for a year. Mankind about to perish, Zeus persuades Hades to release Persephone. Harvests restored. I don’t know where lambe fits in. One of the rarer Greek myths, I suppose.’

‘I
suppoase sowe
, ’ she imitated his accent. Henderson smiled. He could take a joke.

‘Are you married, Mr Dores?’

He explained—roughly—the position in regard to Melissa.

‘You divorced her and now you want to remarry? Why?’

‘Well…I think because I now realize that the only time I was truly happy was when I was married to her and, well, I think I can be happy again.’ He was a little astounded at his honesty. Having uttered the sentiment he reassessed it in the light of his recent phone call to Irene. Was it true? Yes, he told himself and remarked again on the boundless capacity for self-deception that resides in every human being.

‘So I take it Miss Dubrovnik isn’t your intended.’

‘Who? Oh no. Why would…what would make you think that she might have been?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just that when I told you she’d phoned you looked so pleased.’

‘She’s a colleague. She, ah, had some important news for me about the paintings. Actually I’m meeting her in Atlanta on Friday. Some problems of dating, provenance, that sort of thing. Seventeenth-century Dutch is not really my area.’

‘What is?’

‘Late nineteenth. I’m what’s known as ‘an Impressionist man’.’

‘The Impressionist man,’ she said grandly.

‘Yes.’ He couldn’t tell why he felt uneasy.

‘I see.’

‘May I ask you something?’ he said, emboldened by the friendly turn the conversation had taken.

‘You may.’

‘Why do you wear your sunglasses all the time?’

She looked at him. ‘Because I’m an Impressionist man as well, yo’u might say. An Impressionist woman.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Because everything looks nicer. The country, the weather, the people. They all look more as they should.’

Henderson wasn’t quite sure if she were being serious. ‘You mean as you somehow imagined they would? Ideally speaking.’

‘Let’s say, as I think they
should
. Without my glasses the world doesn’t look as bright or as richly coloured. The people look nastier too.’ She puffed at her cigarette, sending small clouds up into the branches of the tree that overhung the bench.

‘Stands to reason,’ Henderson said without much conviction.

‘Do you want me to take them off?’

‘Well, I…I mean only if—’

She took her sunglasses off and turned her face towards him. It seemed an almost profane and indecent gesture, as if she’d suddenly exposed her breasts or, like the girl in the painting, raised her dress. Her eyes seemed small and were brown like beer. English bitter, he thought, how apt. Her face seemed bland and empty. It was impossible to assess—with the removal of such a dominant feature—whether she was pretty or plain. It was like a good friend shaving off a beard he’s worn for ten years. Someone entirely different—unknown—is exposed beneath.

Henderson felt uncomfortable. A fly buzzed round her face and she flapped it away. The removal of her sunglasses seemed to imply an intimacy between them, as if she were doing something specially for him. He hadn’t asked her to oblige, he reminded himself.

‘I think,’ he said with insincere gallantry, ‘you look much nicer with them off.’

‘Remember I’m seeing you differently, too,’ she said, scrutinizing him. ‘I’ve torn away a veil.’

He smiled edgily. The fly buzzed back, around his head this time. Just then the distant sound of rock music came from the house.

‘You’re not quite so hostile to us Brits, today,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Life can get a little boring around here. Don’t blame me if I try to liven it up a little. Create some tension. I like to draw people out, you know. Force them to be themselves.’

‘Well, your blindness was very convincing. Your contempt for the English, too.’

‘What about your contempt for us Americans, then?’

‘What contempt? We don’t have any contempt for you. I don’t, certainly.’

She looked hard at him. ‘Well, we don’t care, anyway. We know it’s all brought on by envy.’

He decided not to be drawn out any further.

‘Why are you living here, if you don’t mind my asking? I heard you dropped out of medical school.’

She replaced her sunglasses. ‘I was going to be married,’ she said in a quiet, solemn voice. ‘Three days before the ceremony my fiancé was killed in a car crash. I came back home. That was six months ago.’

‘Oh. I’m really sorry.’ He felt very sad, all of a sudden. ‘I didn’t realize…’

‘Actually, that’s not true.’

‘Really.’ He felt angry, all of a sudden. What
was
true in this family?

‘I was at medical school. After a while I just couldn’t see the point. All those illnesses, you know. Not just the big heavy ones; it was the horrible little ones; the ‘syndromes’, the ‘diseases’, the ones named after people. Too many of those to cope with.’

There was a pause.

‘Duane seems to be back,’ Henderson said. ‘Will he have fixed my car or is that too much to hope for?’

‘See you later, Mr Dores.’

That afternoon Henderson took polaroid snapshots of all the paintings. Going round clockwise from the door, he measured each painting, took it off the wall to check the back, made a brief description and noted the title, if it was signed—recorded the position—and dated. Back in New York he would consult the
catalogue raisonee
of each artist but he felt instinctively that all the paintings were ‘right’.

He broke off for dinner. His saliva glands squirted into action when Alma-May entered with a large steaming casserole dish containing what she described as ‘spaghetti bongaleeze’. It turned out to be a vegetarian version, however, with various types of nut substituted for the meat. It was reasonably tasty, though, and Henderson ate his modest portion with some enthusiasm—mixed with vague qualms about whether one could actually overdose on vegetable fibre. His bowels seemed to have shut down entirely: the drains were well and truly blocked.