Goya'S Dog (3 page)

Looking, Dacres reflected that there was little difference in physiognomy. He might be in any small town in England. There were the same pink, sagging jowls, the same shrivelled chests. You heard the same equine laughter: he was in Leeds, Bristol, Belfast. The same dismal stock. He had a glass of white wine now and was holding it at the chest instead of the stem, warming it up. This little England.

His works were in the corner. Two small figureless studies from eight years ago, the brown sea and the yellow shore. One above the other, in a small space of wall next to a doorless opening. Next left
were Pear's bright bridges to nowhere, on the right two of Bury's tidy courtyards. You couldn't choose a worse way to display them if you tried, Dacres thought. With wine puddling in his brain he was full of ideas now. It struck him that there was something offensive about hanging more than one painting on a wall, any wall: you wouldn't play two recitals at once, would you? And saying that a work is complemented by another is to call them both partial, incomplete. He liked that line, he wanted someone to say it to:
You wouldn't play two concertos at once, would you? Concerti
. No,
recitals
. Each painting, even his own tripe, should be assessed on its individual merits. A room to itself. Yes, if he ever fell so low as to open a gallery, he would only ever exhibit one painting at a time.

“God,” he said into the glass. “I'm raving.”

He was wandering in the general direction of his paintings, stumbling against bodies. He had a vague notion of putting his knee through them. The men and women, the few who bothered to inspect the art, checked the name on the card and then looked around the room to put a face to the work. Once upon a time he would have made something of their rigid faces and they would have become curls in his sketchpad, horse jaws, rows of teeth. The thought of doing that made him shake and he banished it. The whole point of being in this country was to refresh, he told himself, to banish such worries for good.

He'd been to many events of this kind in his time, and had long ceased to see any connection between them and what was supposed to happen in the studio. It wasn't an original thought, he knew, not by any means, but there had always been something disgusting to him about the artist on all fours, tail and tongue wagging, while the plutocrats slashed through his pictures. Occasionally Dacres blamed the century he'd been born in for his troubles. He had been taken up by dealers in his youth, briefly celebrated, and then quietly dropped. He would have been better off working for a Venetian doge, he told people, and much later told his empty room. He hated the system he'd been caught in.

Christ, what was wrong with his brain? All it could do was wound him. Shut up, he told it: shut.

Fifteen years before, he'd told Evelyn, they'd been in a cab near Green Park, the mad driver apologizing to himself for something. Dacres was trying to ward her off, trying not to explain, he'd told her it didn't matter where they lived: I can be unhappy anywhere. How cool the air was that day, how she'd coloured with concern. It seemed now they must have been impossibly young. You say these things offhand, he thought now, and years later you still remember them, and it's no use to anyone. Passing the Canadians now he thought of waiting for the bell under the red walls at school, how sweet and dank it was in summer. Why was that in his head? Be calm, Dacres thought.

They were supposed to stay close to their work in case somebody wanted to discuss it. But Dacres knew that the artificer's presence more often inhibited discussion than encouraged it. And honestly, he felt little relation to the man who had painted the Suffolk seashores, one with a white blob, supposedly a dead dog, a long time ago. He couldn't speak for that man, could he? They were nicely framed, at least.

There she was, looking at his paintings.

Straight black hair, meaning youth. Slim, shape of an
l
, lissome. He thought she must be the first person with a hard gaze he'd seen on the continent. She was beautiful in the way the young are, bright and symmetrical. But there was something else that was striking, the sharpness of the glance. A face to draw, that would catch the viewer, pierce him, knock him over. And her figure: it took a certain effort of will not to embrace her there and then, he would have quite liked the slap and the scream, the being hustled down the stairs by her brothers. It would have been worth it.

Instead he finished his drink. He stood a foot behind her. He said, “What do you think?” He'd spoken thickly through something coalescing in his throat and he had to say it again, clearly this time. Was that his heart beating? Strange, the illusion of being alive, and all because of a girl's face. Well milk it.

She turned and looked at him. Green eyes, two ancient coins: he added that to the list.

“Because to me,” Dacres said nervously, “they're staggeringly inept. He's trying to talk about the sea and the sky, and you have this sort of brown triangle jutting out—what's that supposed to be?—and this here, the sand,” his hand waving podgily about in front, “under the water, it should be pulling away, it should be heavy. Complete dog's breakfast. Dog's dinner. Dead dog.” His finger was actually on the encrusted paint and this made her draw breath. He changed tack. “And this other one if anything is even more dismal. Looks like what, mouldy salad. Lacks even the most basic technical facility. If it were up to me, you'd have your hands cut off for perpetrating this kind of mess.”

He didn't recognize his own voice.

Some ways behind them, in the other room, Lady Dunfield was asking for applause for a poetry recitation. Trebs was being given licence to inflict his work on a new set of ears.

“Ignore them,” said Dacres. “She's a criminal.”

The girl grinned. She seemed amused, but not sure what to make of him, but game.

“You're much too harsh,” she said. “Are they by someone you dislike?”

He leaned in closer to her and breathed in through his nostrils.

“Why do you say that?”

“The brown doesn't look off to me. The triangle—I don't know about styles but I think … maybe it's just because they're a little sad and abandoned, over here.”

A woman after his own brown heart. Her voice he would have to get used to: the soft, slightly shapeless accent people had over here. But, he thought, perhaps even Helen lisped; history does not record.

He smiled broadly and was about to say something very debonair when two fellows joined them: a barrel-shaped, huge young man, and a smaller, older, bearded chap who looked like a rounder version of Dr. Freud. And then they were all together under water.

“Excellent,” the older one said. “Stanley Burner.” Wet handshake. “You've met my daughter.”

“We've met,” the giant said to Dacres. “Remember? Lorne Colbrand.” He had a face like a clown. Gorren had introduced them earlier. But had he called him Dacres or Davis?

“Darly,” the girl told Dacres, and they touched for the first time. At first he thought she was calling him darling. The oak tree planted itself next to her and she pointed Dacres's paintings out to him with one delicate finger.

“Seen anything you love?” her father asked briskly.

Dacres introduced himself to Burner and Burner asked him where his “stuff” was. Slowly, Dacres gathered that it was Burner's house. It was he whom Lady Dunfield had been thanking at length.

“You've no need to be so modest, Mr. Davis,” Burner said.

Darly looked skeptical.

“They're yours?” she said.

“My daubs, I'm afraid,” he said.

She shrugged a silent, surprised laugh. He wished he were a better painter.

“Daubs?” said Lorne. “If you say so.”

“Come come,” said Burner. “They're fantastic. I like a man who blows his own trumpet, you know.” He was an enthusiastic little chap, and as he spoke he bounced left and right on the balls of his feet, feinting, darting with his hands.

“Do you like them, Dotty? Darly is my eyes and ears in matters aesthetic, Mr. Davis. Very, what's the word, expressive. Shall we have them?”

“Stanley's built up a great collection,” Lorne said stolidly.

More bodies eased into the room, perhaps escaping from the soft-spoken poets.

“Only I'm not sure you'll be allowed to,” Darly said. “They're supposed to be on the rest of the tour, aren't they? Maybe if they come back from Windsor?”

Burner was not a man, it seemed, who expected things to get in his
way. Perhaps his daughter was the one person on the planet who could give him pause.

“Well, I hardly think Hyacinth would begrudge me this,” he said.

“Perhaps they're not for sale,” she said wryly, and turned to the wall. “It doesn't say.”

Dacres turned the conversation to war so as not to have to talk about buying and selling.

Burner predicted wonderful things. He had served in the last one. Dacres said he had been too young, which wasn't quite true, and it set their minds calculating, he could tell, for here he was, neither the daughter's age nor quite the father's. Lorne said there was already a rush ten deep at the recruiting offices, he'd seen, now they were taking men's names down and sending them home. There had been more weddings in August than in the whole rest of the year, he cheerfully added. Dacres wanted to say something comradely but nothing came into his mouth, and Darly interrupted the silence, asking about the mood in London. Dacres spoke about madness and resilience. Grumbling despair about the new technologies invented to kill us all in terrifying new ways, and then you open the
Times
and find the same letters as ever about Hindustani hill stations, ancient Persian horsemanship. A great change gathering in the air above, above everyone in the world, he wanted to say, but it would sound idiotic. As he spoke, she drifted away to look at his work again. The men's eyes had left him too, they scanned the room. Dacres couldn't bear to say another word.

“There are places on the east coast that look just like this,” Darly said to the wall. “Where there are more colours in the sea than the sky.”

“Actually it's impossible to know when we might return,” Dacres said. “It's impossible to know anything, at present.”

Burner butted in: “This is a young country and a huge country but we're not rich. Not yet. The last ten years have been hell. But this country is going to grow, and it's going to learn, and it's going to become great. We'll fight hand and foot for England—and for
Canada—and we will make sacrifices, and it will be a terrible thing, Davis, terrible, but I guarantee you this: we're going to come out victors, and we're going to come out stronger. Richer.”

Lorne was nodding along.

“And you know,” Burner continued, his tone changing, “it's all going to have to be documented. It's going to have to be told. And made flesh. There's no better place for a man like you than just where you are here, at this moment.”

Dacres had one eye on the girl.

“How is the life for a painter here?” he asked. “I mean exhibiting. Is there a Society? Or portrait work: how much would you pay for a portrait?”

“You see, Darly,” smiled Burner hairily. “Artists don't just lie around and discuss Truth all day. The mighty dollar.” He had his hands in his pockets.

“Mine is a profession like any other,” said Dacres.

“Not like
any
other, surely,” Darly said.

“Well, you have to live, don't you,” Lorne added. “Unfortunately—”

“It's just as I said, Davis. There's no better place for an artist right now than right where you are standing.”

“No better place,” Lorne agreed.

Dacres considered it.

“Darly's a very creative person,” Stanley Burner said proudly. “So was her mother.”

Darly looked at her father, annoyed but forgiving. And then held Dacres's gaze, quite unabashed.

Gorren wanted to lead them out on the town. He gathered a select group and fed them into two taxis waiting in the courtyard. Dacres took one last look at the dark back of the house, reflecting on the fact that he would never see it again, studying the iron ivy as Gorren told the driver to take them into the buzzing heart of things, the core. The
man shrugged, and then going down the hills he coasted. The other car followed. Dacres observed trees and flat houses, he sat next to Nelda in her felt dress, trying not to feel the softness, feeling dazed and sleepy and distant and not himself.

The driver left them on Yonge Street and Gorren ran back to persuade tidy Violet, Lady Dunfield's assistant, to pay for both cabs. It was almost dark now, the buildings seemed squat and unpromising—“Some are tall and some are shorter,” said Gorren, all chipper, and Dacres smiled—but it was warm, still, a late summer's warm evening, the sky was immense and pricked only by the drifting yellow moon. Waiting by the taxi Dacres tried to breathe it in, enjoying the scent in the air.

They walked in search of alcohol. If they went ten blocks south, Gorren said, they would reach their hotel. Dacres knew that south was downhill because of his conversation at the reception: Darly had told him that in Toronto if he was walking downhill he was walking south. Usually. She'd laughed at herself. The city was built on a slope towards the lake, she told him. It's a drain? he asked. Airily he told her London was shaped like a wheel and Paris was—and she interrupted him, she told him Paris was shaped like a brain. He'd liked that.

They passed a hat shoppe and several fire escapes and everywhere tram tracks and a neon sign saying
FURS
. Gorren had Nelda on one arm and her husband, Pear, on the other; behind them Bury was railing to Grace and Violet about Chamberlain and his umbrella. Dacres, alone, brought up the rear. A hoarding told him that kidney acids would rob his rest.

“Why's he going in there?” he called.