Goya'S Dog (29 page)

Ten days passed. He was downstairs, in the drawing room, on the chesterfield, watching the sun ease along the wall. He wore no shoes, only socks. Sleepy, he heard doors open and close, the house working for homeostasis. He'd found an errands list in the book about the railways Darly had lent him that he wasn't reading:

3 o'clock Stebbins. Then library?

Daddy – telephone

8 p.m. : L : Candace : Velvet Room

(Tuesday dress!)

Her handwriting was like her face. She had such frank reflexes that she couldn't hide disgust or pleasure when they swept through her; he'd seen her wrinkle her nose, in spite of herself, at Mildred's fish-head soup, served with crackers.

He'd overheard her fighting on the phone, he assumed with Lorne. Her anger made her fearfully articulate and he realized he wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of her. She was saying that something just wasn't what she wanted—didn't that matter? He'd stood, back to the wall, eavesdropping. But when she hung up she started to weep. He wanted to comfort her but he skulked away: he could feel himself getting fond and foolish. She's Evie, he thought, and Lorne's her vicious brother, and Burner is the Rutledges: this can't happen again. It was a danger to everyone.

The problem with the physical, he thought passively now, is that it colours everything. You like the look of someone and then everything they do has grace. Whether she's pouring tea or brushing her hair. Like a wonderful new land, you tour through all the shallows and coves, and all is enchantment, nothing is amiss.

Now Dacres, thought Dacres.

He held on to her notepaper, thinking perhaps he would use it in a collage. After Evie, he'd gone through all her books, pulling out the letters, news clippings, his own doodles on theatre programs she'd kept. He'd sold all the books and burned all the papers. It was the only
way to go forward, he'd thought at the time.

What if I took up pottery, he said to himself. Or better: bookbinding. That would be a way to make these old hands make again. But he dismissed the idea as soon as it had come. It was decorative, and he was more than that: one couldn't aspire to be an illustrator, illustration was the lowest thing in the world. I'm not an artisan, Dacres mumbled, readjusting his posture.

Now he was working, sort of: he was considering the angle from which she'd be best served. Tradition gave certain responsibilities but could he put her in the garden? Or were young flowers all in bloom too obvious a touch? He had never been a great preparer, he had always trusted to the moment. But perhaps it was now time to be more of a preparer. He thought of trousseau pictures, he thought he could put Pico on the floor instead of the Arnolfinis' little dog. But that meant painting Lorne too, which wasn't a pleasant option. And there might not be enough paint, in Canada, for that.

But then Darly appeared and the thought was gone, never to be thought again.

“You look like the cat that got the cream,” Dacres said. His voice sounded flat because he was lying down, larynx compressed; the sound went down into the cushions. He sat up.

“Come with me,” said Darly. “No: you first.”

Feigning resistance, Dacres pulled himself to his feet.

“On, on!” she twitched.

He let her go first, however, and followed her beautifully up, around and around the stairs, past his bedroom, down to the white door at the end of the hall. Then she slipped behind him (“You first,” again) and he felt her hands over his fat eyes.

“Now what?”

“Open the door, silly.”

“I can't see the knob.”

She relented, let one eye see, and he reached forward: the brass was discoloured, duller at north from many thumbs. She blinded him again as he turned it and pushed the door open. Even though he was
only wearing socks she wasn't tall enough, and he felt her small breasts press in his back.

“Let's not hurry,” he said.

But she pushed him forward and released him with delight.

It was as bright as a room in a house for sale. The floorboards gleamed—the carpet had been taken up and the wood buffed—and the sun shone in, strong as a lion, through windows free of drapery. All the furniture was arrayed against the walls, so that the centre was wide and empty, a circle to work in: a stage. Against the far window a one-armed, red sofa waited—a chaise longue? There was a low metal chest with thin drawers on the wall to Dacres's right, next to a tan wooden table. To their left, a hefty cupboard. He took it all in quickly through panicking eyes. It was at once unfinished and luxurious and it looked to Dacres more like a showroom than a place where one could really work: wouldn't he be scared of making it dirty? He tottered and leaned one hand against the cupboard, past two easels that leaned against it.

Of course, he'd seen men coming and going, a blue delivery van had been lodged on the pebbles the previous morning like a crab. He'd heard banging in the guest room next to his, at the end of the hall, he'd seen Goucher come out scowling with dust sheets. So he'd known something was coming, though he'd pretended not to.

“There's pastels in there and oils and your brushes and I got gouache and turpentine and other things. Paper. I didn't know exactly what to get so I just bought some of everything.” She laughed at her extravagance.

This is Harrods's idea of a studio, Dacres thought. Before, he'd used a dinner plate as a palette.

Darly went and sat on that red divan. She was talking about how hard it had been to get the wallpaper down. Dacres's face glazed over as he looked at a stool on which there were two stacks of ironed cloths, green and blue.

I'll have to get used to this, he thought. How had she done it all so fast? He'd been hoping to have a few more weeks to get ready. He would need a radio.

“This one isn't the comfiest,” said Darly, pressing down. “But the one I wanted was going to take them six weeks! And I didn't want you to wait. Edward?”

He turned in a circle, slowly, feet unblistered on the floorboards.

“What do you think?”

Darly bit her lip.

“It's wonderful, Darly.”

“Really?”

“I'm astonished,” he made himself say. “How did you do it?”

He spread his arms out wide.

She told him in detail and he felt that he was treading water, keeping his mouth above the salt.

He started to spend his days in there. Or at least his afternoons: the morning light was only any good immediately after dawn, and he was never up at dawn. He preferred the gentler, more forgiving late afternoon sun. Although he found that anytime after lunch he was often too tired, digesting, to set off into a large expanse of work. So in the afternoons he rested, stretched out on the red sofa with his neck supported by two wrapped-up towels. He dozed. When he saw her, at the margins of the day, he told Darly that he was getting ready, getting accustomed to the room's dimensions, to the size of the windows. Then he would change the subject.

Sometimes in the afternoons it rained after the tropical fashion. The sky became green as it does during an eclipse, the trees telegraphed to each other in warning—and then thunder crashed out of the pudding of the sky. With his forehead marking the condensation on the windowpane Dacres watched line after line of rain pound the earth, waking up the worms. Goucher jumped arthritically from flowerbed to flowerbed with secateurs like a madman. And then the rain would suddenly cease, and Dacres fancied he could hear the flowers singing out in satisfaction.

Some people get their questions answered, he thought; some do
not. Matisse would have drawn a profile in the steamed-up glass. A single line painted with his little finger: it would be perfect, and then it would disappear. He remembered that he kept forgetting to ask Burner who had painted his mountain. Although he was avoiding Burner, a little, because Burner kept asking how his preparations were going, as if there were no other subject for conversation in the world, as if after all there was a stone wrapped in his munificence.

There were two sparrows trying to make a life for themselves under his eavestrough and he wondered how they coped with the deluges, what they said about them. Then on sunny days he watched them work: the young fellow shooting up parallel to the window again and again, picking up another twig in his beak, time after time, assiduous. He didn't sing; he made a lizardlike scratching sound as he dug into Dacres's wall. Then, once, he saw him affixed to the back of another sparrow—his good wife, Dacres hoped—and then she flew off a yard, and then he was onto her again. Stout chap. He couldn't make out her expression. He could have had Goucher throw out their little nest and brick over the hole and make Antigones of their babies—the burrowing noise would cease, he wouldn't feel invaded anymore—but he decided against. Perhaps, he thought, he was mellowing.

All this time he knew he should be working, and he knew all these thoughts were distractions, they were all a way to continue not to work. The commission hung over him. If Darly wasn't here, he should at least be preparing for her, getting his hand back in. Everything was arrayed before him beautifully, after all. And yet each moment came and went and he could not begin. Moment after moment passed, heavily, and then each day was done at last.

He played with objects he found about the house. A pewter spoon, an ancient mitten from the bottom of the airing cupboard. He arranged them and studied them. He had two old wine bottles from Burner's cellar—a good collection, though its growth had been hampered by a few years in which Burner dallied with the temperance lunatics—and a huge Mexican silver salver. It reminded him of the Spanish for
still life—naturaleza muerta
, which you could translate
literally as “dead nature.” He moved the wine bottle to the back. He needed a cloth over the platter to cut down on reflections. He ought to go and find one. No; it was clouding over anyway. Actually it was almost tea time.

One afternoon a maid he hadn't seen before floated out over the garden all in black except for her white apron. “Munch!” Dacres exclaimed. “De Chirico!” He sprang up, scrabbled on the floor for a sketchpad, and watched her. He needed to sharpen the pencil before it could be used (“Damn!”). By the time he'd dragged the wooden stool over she'd disappeared. He sat waiting but she did not return.

He decided he would find out who she was. He would have her come out in the early morning as the sun was rising. Darkness in the lower half of the canvas and something Scandinavian about the sky: the viewer would not be able to say if it was matins or twilight.
The Maid
, it would be called, or
The Day of the Funeral
. He decided he preferred the former, for its simplicity.

He gently laid the sketchpad aside and stretched back out.

“That's decided, then,” he said quietly.

They'd arranged nothing but one afternoon the following week Darly appeared. He unlocked the door to three soft knocks (he'd been half-asleep, thinking about the Grand Turk) and there she was.

“I'm ready,” she said.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“Where's your smock?” she asked.

Defeated, he stood aside to let her in, then skipped past to pick up three empty teacups off an old
Collier's
. Then he didn't know where to put them. She stood, waiting, with her hands together.

“What time is it?” said Dacres.

There were two things in him: first was the strangeness of having someone else in the sanctum. He was brushing off the divan to get her somewhere to sit. No one else had been in this room (he couldn't
quite bring himself to call it a studio) since she'd opened it up for him. The staff weren't allowed in lest they muck it up.

The second thing, simultaneous, was a soft gust across some old embers: alone in a room with a girl, to paint her. Once he'd loved this phenomenon, its dynamics. The appraising gaze and the seductive gaze and the controlling gaze. The beauty of the figure: how killing the body is. The student, the muse, and the exploiter. And this is something Ingres did, and this is something Pollaiolo did; this is something as old as eating: me alone with you, at the start, in a room.

All these thoughts were like hailstones.

“Where do you want me?” she said. She was wearing a black blouse with white curlicues like the breathing holes in a violin. Not enough colour. Dacres tucked his shirt in.

“Oh, sit,” he said, faffing. Gainsborough used to set up the canvas side-by-side with the subject, he didn't say. He'd done the same thing a few times; to be close.

“Are you all ready?” Darly asked. “I wanted to get my hair done but there wasn't time. Do I look awful?”

“What? No, not at all. The opposite. What a question.”

She smiled broadly.

“You look lovely.”

Young and bright and full to overflowing.

“Are you ready for me?”

He wondered had they made this arrangement and had he forgotten.

“We must make some decisions first.”

“We?”

He smiled. Outside the sparrows chirped in a frenzy.

“How does this work?” Darly asked. “I sit, you paint?”

“We can talk first. Such as what do you all have in mind?” “Mock heroic with
tricolore?
”

“No.”

“Well,” she said openly, sounding like her father explaining fluctuations in the metals market, “I think we'd want you to feel quite free in your approach.”

Dacres paused.

“People say that but then there's the risk you won't like the result. This kind of work is usually just about likeness, not the state of the soul. If it doesn't look like you no one will want it.”

“Well, I want it to be your work, Edward. Not all stilted and posed.”

“I don't think you could look stilted if you tried.”

She liked that.

“I should probably choose to start with a few preliminaries. Sketches and studies. Shape and angle. And that way you can get used to sitting too. How long do you have?”