Goya'S Dog (34 page)

“Lor', you've hit him into next week!”

“Sorry, old boy,” Lorne said brightly.

Dacres rubbed his chin.

“I'll help you find it.”

“Maybe I'll just give it up,” said Dacres, dropping his mallet.

Lorne whacked him between the shoulder blades and told him not to be silly, and they trundled away together. Lorne took large strides, using his mallet as a walking stick, and he quickly outpaced Dacres, who was shuffling downhill with his hands in his pockets.
Pock
went the balls behind them. Lorne stopped to allow Dacres to catch up.

“I guess this is the kind of thing that inspires you, eh?”

“Sorry, what?”

“You know: the sun, the trees, the river, all that.”

Dacres said nothing.

“I'd hang this view over my fireplace. Yes, I would,” he said, his big hand indicating the stream where Darly had caught minnows when she was a girl, the willows.

“I had no idea you were so sensitive to nature, Lorne,” Dacres said.

“Well, I am.”

It was a glorious summer afternoon, Dacres had to accept that.

They went on, Lorne twirling his wrist, swinging his mallet in wide circles as they went.

“Enders's a fool,” he said, happy. “I brought him all this way to talk to Stanley—he's wanted to for months—but he's making no use of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“He wanted to meet Mr. Burner, man. He wants a job, when all this is over. Thinking ahead.” He tapped his skull.

Dacres almost asked when all what was over but then he knew. He allowed too long to pass before he said, blandly, “You can lead a horse to water, I suppose.” But you can't make it jump over another horse, he didn't add. He'd spent long enough in the sun that his head was starting to feel warm and heavy. His skin was like a winter coat.

Perhaps it's that he's generous, Dacres was thinking. Lorne was certainly physically attractive, with clear features and a torso so wide that Dacres thought he could probably win the war all by himself. Perhaps he's trying to befriend me, Dacres wondered, but then realized Lorne was asking about London, about his plans, commenting on the price of the passage and the U-boat threat. Dacres temporized and looked away. Then it seemed they had nothing left to say to each other. Then they were entering a clump of trees at the bottom of the hill.

“It can't have gone all the way down here, surely,” said Dacres.

They couldn't see the others anymore. It was like a secret little bower; Dacres regretted not having found it before. He pushed ferns aside with his hand and foot; Lorne swished at plants.

Something hit him in the back and Dacres's face met a tree and he felt a wall collapse onto him: then he was being spun around. Lorne had a clamp around his neck. Dacres struggled, and Lorne punched him efficiently in the gut, and then Dacres couldn't feel his legs: he gave in utterly. He coughed for air as his lungs were squeezed into a matchbox. Lorne released the croquet mallet from his neck, just a touch.

“Christ you're strong,” said Dacres at last.

Lorne put one hand over Dacres's mouth and said, “Hush,” holding the croquet stick horizontal under Dacres's chin with the other. His palm smelled like sweat and eggs and hate. He was staring intently into Dacres's eyes; his own were hazel, and Dacres saw the angry little capillaries. His chest was marble.

“I have a bad feeling about you, Dacres,” said Lorne quietly, close.

“Really?”

“What?”

“Really?”

“Damn straight I do.”

Dacres wanted to turn to the left, he had no air, he was only breathing in the sweet gas that came from Lorne's mouth, but he couldn't move.

“What are you doing here?”

He could only answer when Lorne released the pressure further. As blood started to return to his lower limbs, Dacres thought of kneeing him in the groin. But that risked massive and terrible repercussions.

“You shouldn't be in this house. You tell Stanley you're leaving—get it? There's a fishy stench about you and I don't like it. And this is where this whole business ends. Get it?”

With his eyes Dacres tried to indicate that he understood.

“This whole art business—it's distracting Darly. We have things to plan, she has a wedding to plan, and you're no part of it. See? You don't fit.”

People are ugly at this distance, Dacres thought. One has to be blurred, a little, to be beautiful. Close up, Lorne's skin was chopped and gummy.

“You don't talk to her, you don't see her, you don't paint her. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Dacres.

There was a spot where Lorne hadn't shaved properly. Just below his right nostril.

Lorne released Dacres and stepped back. Dacres feared he would be cracked over the head with the mallet, and half sank back against the
tree trunk, arms lamely raised. But Lorne just eyed him. Then he spat into the bushes and marched away.

After a while, rubbing his neck, Dacres started looking around for his ball again, his windpipe knotted and bruised.

Dacres was woken by a panther leaping onto his bed. Darly wearing a white nightgown with tiny pink ribbons. Occasionally, appallingly, it slipped off her shoulder; her body was a beacon. She seemed playful and talkative, but when he asked her about Burner's mountain picture the conversation skipped from that to the portrait on the staircase, and then she was talking about her mother. She said remembering her was like remembering a song, and not quite remembering it; but remembering what it was like to hear it. She'd never known her well.

“But sometimes I wake up,” she said, intimate. “Not sometimes. Once a year I wake up and I remember everything about her. Everything: I can't say it now because I don't have it now but a door opens and I remember everything about her. She's singing a lullaby to me and I lie in bed without moving and I feel that she's watching over me—I feel that she's come to visit me. It's early morning and no one's awake and she's with me, sitting at the corner of my bed. She misses me.”

She caught his eye.

“Look at you,” she said sarcastically. “You think I believe in ghosts. But I'm just telling you how it feels.”

“That's not what I was thinking at all,” he said. “Not at all.”

“At
awl
,” she giggled. “At
awl
,” and her bright laugh bounced down off the ceiling. She asked him how he'd enjoyed the croquet match and they joked about that. But when he started telling her what had happened with Lorne, in the same light mode, she spun away off the bed and started pacing the room. He cupped his hands on his belly, surprised at the intensity of her annoyance, trying again to track the changes in her, trying to think what the shade of this sudden bitterness was.

“It's happened before,” she said. “He thinks he owns me. And you too—fighting over me like I'm a piece of meat.”

“I didn't actually do that much fighting,” he said.

“You're on his patch now so he has to see you off, doesn't he?” she seethed. Dacres had never seen her this angered.

“Well he is your fiancé, Darly. And we are, well … I don't know,” he said, and then wondered why he was defending Lorne.

“Yes, and I'm a good investment, aren't I?”

Dacres found it all profoundly unerotic. He'd been asleep, she'd leaped into his bed and then talked ruefully about the past; he'd even thought she'd come to give herself to him, physically, fully, although he wasn't going to push her for that, not with her father in the house. Unless … had she come to say she loved him? What the hell would he say back? But now she was walking back and forth with her arms crossed tight as ship's chains.

“I don't think he knows anything, Darly. He just doesn't like me. Lots of people feel the same way.”

She stopped.

“That's flippant, Edward. Very glib. Very English.”

Instantly he was the temple Samson brought down with his elbows. She saw, and she spoke again: “I'm sorry. I'm in a mood. I shouldn't have come.”

He said, “I am glad you did,” and from her expression he wondered if that was the wrong thing too.

“What's going to happen?” Darly said.

It wasn't the kind of thing he thought much about. She asked again.

“The war will end,” he began. “One day. We'll go back to England. I'll be a success. You can open a sweetshop; no, an antiques shop.”

She stared at him with wet eyes that seemed to say that he understood nothing.

They'd have a gallery off the Old Kent Road, he'd been about to say. They would lie in bed until noon on Saturdays and eat bittermints, and then take in the summer exhibitions. With quick shock he
realized that that was life with Evelyn: he'd thought he'd been imagining the future but he was replaying the past. He rubbed his eyes.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking away from him.

“What are you thinking, Darly?” he asked her.

“I want to join the Red Cross,” she whispered. “I want to work. I want to help.”

Dacres had nothing to say to that. He'd been about to lean towards her, but now he stayed where he was. Then he yawned, noisily, against his will.

“Maybe you shouldn't get married,” he reflected. “Marry me instead. We could drive to Mexico, escape. Or don't marry anyone. You're very young, you don't have to.”

“Lorne is going away,” Darly said quietly without turning her head. “He could be killed.”

“Not necessarily the most marriageable prospect then—”

Before he could take it back she was at the door.

“This is my life you're being so bloody blithe about, Edward!”

He was silent.

“We're talking about people. My God!”

Her hand was on the doorknob, her face full of motive; probably, he felt, she'd never looked so lovely.

He made an excuse. He apologized profusely. He said he was half asleep, that it was the middle of the night. He asked her to stop for a moment. He wanted to tell her she'd been ignoring him today, that was why he was upset; he wanted to say that Lorne had almost killed him, that was why he was upset. But he did not. He tried to apologize.

She leaned her head back against the door and studied the golden column of the lamp and then closed her eyes. His voice had petered out; all he could do was look at her, now.

Gradually they both became calmer. She'd been near tears but she returned to herself. She turned the conversation to dailier things; they walked on little stones to keep their feet dry. Then, when she was leaving for the second time, she stopped with her hand on the brass
doorknob again, and told him, smiling, that she could never marry him anyway.

He said, “Why ever not?”

“Because fundamentally you're not a serious person.”

He laughed.

“I'm not?”

But she spoke very calmly. “Don't be angry. Lorne can be silly and hurtful, I know that, and he's no poet—and he thinks you're a parasite—but he's good, inside, do you see? He doesn't sit around pondering himself forever; he takes life seriously. Look at what he's doing now.”

“He thinks I'm a parasite?”

“No—look at what he's doing, in his life. You have to respect that,” she went on. “I do. It's terrible, how I've treated him. It's terrible.” Briefly her hand was at her brow. “This is all mad.”

“You think I should be bluff, or meaty.”

“You could be a war artist. Lorne's trying to make a life.”

“Lorne likes the idea of killing people.”

“He's trying to make a life. You just dismiss it.”

“Oh, I tried that once, Darly, I tried to make a life—it didn't take.”

She examined him, puzzled, reflective, lucid.

“All I mean is, Lorne doesn't make a drama out of everything. It's not all fuel for a diatribe, with him.” She smiled.

It was the inverse of what had come before: now she'd touched a living nerve and made him glower, while there was nothing in her that was not tranquil. He wanted to tell her Lorne couldn't string two sentences together without hitting someone, but she was looking at him saddened.

“I don't mean to sound cruel,” she said.

He wanted to tell her she just sounded ignorant but another thought was in his head. “Do you know who's serious, Darly? Hitler, Stalin, men like that.”

“Yes, I know.” She had the door open now. She finished in a meaningful whisper. “But that's not what I mean. You know it. If you
had a thimbleful of determination you could do anything you wanted.”

Dacres thought of millions of men dying at his command.

“I mean with your work,” she said, her face soft. “You have to
produce
something.”

Now she was half gone.

“You've got a week, you know.”

Then Darly, who had been everywhere present, was nowhere to be found. Dacres had only the walls to talk to, again. He hid in the sticky studio, sweating. The loss of her body was a devastation: there were gaps all over the room now, all the places she ought to be. He missed the triangles on either side of her pupils and the unlined skin on her shoulders and her three knocks on the door. And by disappearing, he could coldly see, she'd taken something else away from him: not just herself, but his ability to feel affection. If it was not exercised, he knew, it would wither away. He'd be Dacres the Lesser, again. It was like another death, he thought, and chastised himself for thinking that; but for minutes at a time it was the only thought in his head: again, again, again.

As she withdrew, he had time to himself. Sometimes he felt obliterated, sometimes utterly sedate. Sometimes he was resentful and lustful, sometimes simple and stoic. They were all roles. He strode through the house shouting her name out recklessly, and then forgot her. He had meals at the big table, refusing to acknowledge Mildred while she served, staring at the two empty place settings across from him. I am taking my meals alone, he thought, as once I always used to.