Goya'S Dog (23 page)

He stopped.

“I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say. I am only talking about a few men, who saw things, one or two things. They set them down on canvas if they could. I can't answer these other questions. Not until the end at least. I think that was the arrangement. I forget.”

He was thoroughly confused. He leaned his elbows on the lectern.

“Perhaps I'm making false distinctions …”

He mumbled into silence. Nobody spoke, nobody applauded.

Suddenly awake again, Dacres looked up. There was Janusz coming in through the double doors at the back of the room, wearing his blue overalls. Leo was with him and he waved a frying pan brightly. Dacres looked around; he wanted to descend from the podium and say hello to Gorren, whom he hadn't heard from in months and months.

Only a very suave gentleman had come in, and he was smoothly speaking at the other end of the room. And everyone was turning to see his speech on the artist in wartime. He spoke beautifully, without notes; he inspired and enlightened as he entertained. Even Dacres felt cleverer. All the while he was painting the scene as he observed it.

“Davis,” Dacres seethed.

“That's
Lord
Davis,” the man said in rejoinder. He was juggling plates.

There was Darly, quite close to the stage now—he waved a reassuring flat palm in her direction. Can't let Darly down.

He went on. He was going to vomit. He decided to speak from the heart.

“Now the problem, my little friends, for the arts in Canada is, what do you do?”

“Yes, what do we do?” they chorused. Storch floated up through the floorboards with angel wings. He was carrying twenty bottles of gin.

“Well, I'll tell you. Because you (a) cannot compete with the parent civilization, because you are a tiny herd in a freezing wasteland, and (two) your average miner doesn't give a fig for the arts in Canada, and nor does his hotelier.”

“He doesn't?”

“No, he doesn't.”

Darly was closer now, looking back anxiously at her friends. He smiled like the pope: this is going wonderfully! I am glad you asked me. Well, I'm just glad you agreed. Darling. Darling!

“And this is quite a refined point, so listen tightly. The general atmosphere is not so much hostile as indifferent. Which is bad. Because as you know, if a woman out-and-out hates you, you have a chance; at least you have provoked a reaction. But if you're a portraitist in Canada, what's the point? Do you exist? You might as well not. Now you say: there's a war on. To which I say: when you say revolver, I reach for my revolver. My culture, when you say revolver.”

He grinned proudly, but then he was doubtful.

“Did I say that already?”

And was he paraphrasing Lady Dunfield?

Because she was standing, an old lady in the second row under a gigantic pink hat, shaking her fist at him. Darly was up on the platform now, there was a man in a monocle with her.

Feeling close to the end, Dacres changed tack angrily.

“The Canadian painter protects his little bone, his little achievement, from his peers. But also from the occasional stray visitor. The occasional refugee—who might even be capable, brilliant even, though under-recognized—the occasional trapped exile who, if he were given but a chance, a single chance, just a solitary little helping hand, might prove himself the saviour of the entire benighted nation he finds himself trapped in, penniless.”

He was distracted by a strong visual memory of his feet in the Hotel Acton.

Mrs. Millen's four sons crossed their arms significantly into Xs at the back of the room. Their little Irish boy threw a snowball. Dacres swayed out of its path and had to grab the lectern not to fall. Snow smeared the face of a portrait on the wall behind him.

“I don't know what joke is being played on me. If that old sadist
the Almighty had set out to destroy me, could he have chosen a better place? Well, I should just raise my glass to Him. It's empty. Does anyone notice if a man dies in this city? Even if by some miracle I were able to work here—I admit it, I am not—what would that matter? What I am worried about is my standards dropping. Walking around in the grey slop so long that I become one of you, that I don't even notice what I'm breathing. So much grey slop, breathing it in, that I no longer even see it, that it becomes my skin. I have to prevent that. The only way is by hating you, a lot. I have to stay awake.”

The odd thing was that the little snowball thrower had the face of Dom Federigo, his Portuguese student. Now what were the chances of that?

He looked at his wrist to see how long he'd been going, and cursed.

“Someone stole my bloody watch this afternoon. Or did I leave it in the hotel. A gold watch, it was given to me by—well never mind who gave it to me. I took it with me to Egypt and Athens, and to have it stolen in a bloody flophouse not even worth the—” He looked left and right and down in the lectern's shelf and almost lost his footing. “You see? This is what happens to the Arts in Canada. It gets kicked out of its hotel. It gets manhandled and beaten and—yes!—actually crucified,
in the streets
. Romans! Jews!”

Darly moved very quickly towards him—assassination attempt, be resolute—and he held fast to the lectern. He said his last thoughts quickly.

“As if it wasn't already enough, they started a war solely to keep me here. It's nothing to do with Poland! You adore the motherland, you say? You love the king? Well: love me.”

Her hands were on him, trying to pull him away, and the monocle man was pushing too.

“I
am
English. What do you think of that? Gone in the liver and yellow teeth. But don't think you deserve to pick up the pieces.”

The noises from the audience—were they actually booing?—made him spit out a few more words even as Darly's very white face told him to calm down.

He shouted out at them: “You disgust me, you primitives. You disgust me. Hideous, irretrievable pygmies. Valueless. You'll get and spend and die and be forgotten. You're not even worthy of my contempt.”

Somewhere, Europe was devastating itself.

He said “Sorry” to her, very quietly, very collected. She looked so confused.

Dacres then walked slowly and precisely away from the lectern, down a step and then back, along the side of the room again, to the door. Appalled, appalling faces, and no applause. He went downstairs to the basement and pushed past Storch and took the bottle of gin from his cabinet. Then went back upstairs to the cloakroom where he retrieved his two cases from the boy without a word to him or anyone else.

Dacres walked down through the city, alone as always. Nighttime, he trudged along through snow and sludge. Carrying his cases and veering left with the weight of the left and right with the weight of the right. He didn't know quite where he was going. After leaving the club, he'd walked along Bloor Street, then taken an aimless right down a giant fascist avenue. Slowly he walked around the parliament buildings, a hospital, a synagogue, an armoury: all the institutions of control that he'd always tried to avoid. There was a curious fog in the city, unlike anything he'd seen before. It was almost Victorian and the air was heavy and damp with it. The street lights were bathed in spirits. He couldn't understand how it could be warm enough for this. But here again, the snow seemed to be melting at his feet. Perhaps he had a fever. Perhaps he was on fire.

One foot continued following on after the other in the same miraculous, thoughtless way that day followed day. I've always considered my hands, Dacres mused, but they've never been as good to me as my feet. His genitals were not to be trusted, his knees were rickety, but his
feet always seemed to know what they were doing. He decided he would put more faith in them generally. As he passed a beer parlour two men waiting outside squared up to outface him: he watched his feet take him around and away from them and he smiled down benevolently. My lovely loyal feet.

He walked. He walked along streets named for monarchs, he walked down a slope. He walked over railway tracks. He walked past an empty field with a little hut in one corner. He walked.

Until if he wanted to walk any further he'd have to learn to walk on water.

Here the distances between buildings were immense. These were distances designed for barges or boats, not for men. Dacres stood in the wet and cloudy dark. The warehouses had lights above their doors but the mist swallowed them up: in between them, you walked blind. He thought of de Chirico seen in a gallery at night: a girl chasing a ball. No, a hoop. He'd sat and copied that, once, but he hadn't been able to get the sense of dread.

Cold, Dacres upturned one suitcase and sat, thinking, Cigarette. Any last requests, he asked, as he lit one up. The lake said plash, and then said plosh, and then said nothing at all. Dacres sighed: a lowriding boat went dug-dug-dug but still he saw nothing but halos. He wondered where all the seagulls were. Were they asleep or did they migrate for the winter? The smoke eased into his lungs, it relaxed him, but his hands were cold.

Almost time now, he reflected. Almost time.

Something clocking against his knee. A cat mewled and rubbed its bony ribs against his shin frantically.

“You have fleas,” said Dacres. “I shan't touch you.” But he scratched its head and it purred enormously and then, mercurial, snapped at his fingers. There was a luminous good flash of white on its chest.

“Did you eat all the seagulls?” Dacres asked. The cat said nothing. “I don't have anything to give you, I'm afraid … Do you have anything to give to me?” Another plaintive
mrow
and it was gone. “Bastard.”

He stood up, his knee popped as it always did, he threw the fagend away. He picked up both his cases.

“Where to?”

“Where to?” said thickly: he'd taken taxis everywhere in the year after her death because he wouldn't drive. Terrified and miserable every time and paying beyond his means.

He turned three hundred and sixty degrees and then he set off. Walked along quays in the dark, waiting for a night watchman to hit him on the head with a torch, but none did. They must all be at boxing matches. He was wondering when he'd take a step too far left or right and plummet eight feet into the water.

He found a sort of pier and took it, and then felt he was walking out over the air. Hollow-sounding steps now, tiny ones. There was a long building on his left with a series of garage-sized doors painted white. To his right was concrete, a step, the slightly frozen water. A long way away the city lights watched him, bored. He wondered what you called these things, these posts: he wanted them to be called gunwales but he knew that was wrong. He'd known a man in London who made his living designing amusements for piers. What had been his name? Treadwell? Threlfall?

Well, it doesn't matter now.

Beneath Dacres, at the end of the quay, was a rowboat tied to a concrete millstone. He stopped. He kneeled. There was a tarpaulin; kneeling out he tried to pull it towards him, feeling shivers at its oily surface. He put a finger through one of the ringed holes at its fringe and forgot it on the ground like a student's skirt. He looked around and behind: no one saw. Ahead of him the lake stretched out into blackness and cloud and German expressionism: into the end of the world.

Gingerly, for he was a landlubber, he dropped his suitcases into the little boat. Climp, clomp. He struggled with the hard rope for a while and couldn't untie it—sailors' knots—but he did manage to loosen it enough that he could just lift it off the post. Slowly slowly the boat wanted to twist away from him. He heard a scurry in the water like
two or three fish scampering off. Left leg first, then right leg, and then he was in.

“Should have come here months ago,” Dacres said. “Sail off and wake up in New York and be treated like a king.”

The bottle was very important. He opened up one suitcase delicately.

“I could use some of this ice as ice,” he said, scraping snow off the side of the boat with one palm. He spooned it into his mouth and drank four gulps of gin directly from the bottle.

Ever since he'd formed his plan his mind had felt crystalline, perfectly clear.

The boat moved, up and down and from side to side, and he let it go where it wished. He sat, drifting, waiting, and thinking, and rationing out Storch's gin. He sat on a board he wanted to call a crossthwart and examined his bark. One thing he'd never got used to was the wetness of boats: it always made him think they were going to sink when they were usually just going about their business. Time passed, and he shivered and snuffled, but the gin helped with that as did his last cigarettes. Smoking and waiting he thought about everything that had happened to him that day, and his mind filled with grotesques. He thought about everything that had happened to him in the last six months and they receded just a touch. He thought about everything that had happened to him in the last nine years. He thought about everything that had ever happened.