Prochownik's Dream (28 page)

eighteen

Theo died the following night. The funeral was held on a day of grass fires and hot winds from the desert, a final vicious blast of summer before the tempering of the seasons. As he stood with Robert and Marina in the chapel at the crematorium, the heat storm seemed to Toni an unfitting send off for Theo, whom he had thought of as having been a Central European by election, and as having shared something of the cool, grey, indeterminate tones of that mythical ancestral place with his own father, each of them an artist and an exile from his native country for most of a lifetime.

During the first week or so following Theo's funeral an unreal stillness settled over his work and over his life with Teresa and Nada. He tried working during the day again and sleeping with Teresa at night in their bed, for this seemed to him a necessary concession to Teresa's cherished normality. Nothing difficult was discussed. It seemed events had sobered them, and they had both eased back on their demands and expectations. Robert telephoned one evening while they were watching a show on the television and offered to give Toni his father's collection of sketchbooks. ‘He wanted you to have them,' Robert said. But Toni could not accept them. Robert's gesture was far too generous. And, anyway, Theo had cherished hopes for his work that had reached beyond the grave, and Toni did not want to be the gatekeeper of the dead man's dreams.

Each weekday morning at seven forty-five he kissed Teresa and Nada goodbye at the front door and watched them drive off to the kindergarten and the agency. After they had gone he made coffee and went down to the studio. But his work did not advance and he failed repeatedly to place the figure of Marina convincingly in
The Other Family
. He had lost touch with the picture. Without Marina the project had stalled, and he began to realise that he was not going to have three major works finished in time for the island show. In frustration he telephoned Andy and asked him to borrow back his painting of Marina asleep on the island from Haine. ‘That picture was my main reference and I need to look at it.' But Haine had gone to New York and Andy was unable to get hold of the painting. Toni needed more life studies of Marina, but he did not feel at liberty to call her and ask her to sit for him. It was a baffling situation, and he began to resent the compromise that it represented for him. The storm had not broken over his head and destroyed him and his family; but the manner of his survival scarcely seemed to have made the escape worthwhile.

•

He stepped away from the canvas and stood looking with disgust at the failed figure of Marina. He didn't have the will to scrape the image back yet again and he left the painting and stood at the window. The blackbird was back, taking a bath in the fountain. The faint hum of the city out there. He turned away from the window. In the studio everything had come to a standstill for him. He picked up a book at random from the pile by the door and took it over to the chaise.
I came
to Warley on a wet September morning with the sky the grey of Guiseley
sandstone. I was alone in the compartment. I remember saying to myself:
‘No more zombies, Joe, no more zombies.'
He had soon developed a loathing for the book and its principal character, the miserable Joe Lampton, but he kept reading as a kind of punishment for not having the courage to face up to
The Other Family
. His own craven attitude was mirrored in the weak personality of the book's hero, and his loathing for the man was, he knew, partly self-loathing. He could not imagine his father enjoying such a book, but the old Penguin paperback was well-thumbed and had obviously been read a number of times. He had been reading for an hour or more, slumped miserably on the chaise resenting the power of the story to keep him there, when he heard a car pull up in the lane and the slamming of its doors. He tossed the book aside and got up and went over and opened the back door of the studio. Marina was straightening from the back of her car. She turned, a carton hugged to her chest.

‘I brought Theo's notebooks,' she said. ‘Robert insists you take them.'

They stood looking at each other.

She looked down helplessly into the carton in her arms. ‘There are thirty of them. One for each year. I haven't counted them.' She looked up. ‘Please, Toni! Don't look at me like that! Where shall I put these?'

He stepped up to her and took the carton from her and they went into the studio and she closed the door. The black notebooks each had a year blind-stamped on its spine. ‘They belong to Robert,' he said. ‘I can't take them.' He could smell the familiar perfume of her.

‘You're working,' she said, and she walked across and stood in front of
The Other Family
. ‘You and Robert can sort out the notebooks. He's not going to take them back.'

He set down the carton. ‘You and I are not finished with this yet.'

‘The male figure is wonderful,' she said. ‘It's even stronger than I remember it.' She did not mention the new figure of the solitary woman.

‘I was working with the right information for that one.' He watched her turn from the painting and move restlessly about the studio, as if she were afraid of being still or of standing too close to him. She went over to the window and lifted the sheet and looked across at the house. He picked up his sketching block and began making a rapid drawing of her.

She turned from the window and watched him. ‘It's no good,' she said. ‘I have to go.'

‘Do you want to see the notebook Theo gave me?' He gestured towards the plan press. ‘It's there. Have a look at it before you go.'

She walked over and picked up Theo's book and stood leafing through it, making little exclamations of amusement.

He drew quickly, finishing one sketch then doing another, hungrily gathering as much information as he could. ‘So what do you think?'

She said, ‘It's very Theo.'

‘Not exactly a memoir for his son of his last days.'

She said gently, ‘I do miss him.'

‘So do I.' He waved his stub of charcoal at
The Other Family
. ‘He gave me the key to that figure.'

‘Robert seems to have been liberated by his father's death,' she said. ‘It's as if it's all been resolved for him, and now he can get on with his life without having to deal with it any more. He seems happier.' She looked across at Toni. ‘How do you mean, Theo gave you the key to it?'

‘I got down to the reality of it with Theo's stuff. That painting there against the press, it's me with Theo's head. It's where I got the male figure for
The Other Family
from. The idea was straight out of his youthful satyr with his own head. A straight lift. Theo's idea, not mine. It wasn't until I began to draw myself naked that I understood what I was doing.' He stopped drawing. She was bending down, examining the picture. ‘Pose for me naked,' he said.

She turned and looked at him over her shoulder. ‘I don't think I should.'

‘Without you this picture's nothing. Look at it! I've scraped you back fifty times. It's hopeless. I can't
see
you! I don't
know
you! Without you it's never going to be finished. This whole thing is still your portrait.
The Marina Suite!
Remember?'

She stood up and glanced towards the window. ‘What about Teresa?'

‘She's at the office.'

‘I probably shouldn't have come,' she said. She stood looking at him uncertainly. ‘I wanted to see you.'

‘Pose for me,' he said. ‘Stand there by the window against the light. Just for a few minutes.' He began to draw her. ‘If you don't pose for me, I'm not going to be ready for the island show.'

‘That's blackmail.'

‘It's the truth.'

‘Half an hour, then,' she said.

‘Half an hour.'

‘Turn away while I get undressed.'

‘No. I need to see you moving. I need to see everything.'

She sighed and drew her T-shirt over her head and took her jeans and underwear off, placing the clothes on the pile of his father's books. She stood naked against the light, looking at him, her arms hanging awkwardly at her sides. ‘I feel ridiculous standing here like this in front of you. Suppose Teresa comes home and sees me.'

‘She'll kill us both.' He was surprised and touched to see how old she looked in the hard light, without make-up or her clothes. ‘You're beautiful.' He drew rapidly.

‘Don't say that. Please! I know I'm not beautiful. You don't need to say things like that to me.'

‘You are beautiful to me,' he said seriously.

‘You are to me, too.'

They both laughed helplessly.

‘What a ridiculous conversation to be having,' she said.

‘Stay like that! Just the way you are. Your outline's disappearing into the light on your right side and it's sharp and beautifully cut on your left side.' A minute later he said, ‘You can move if you want to. Turn around. Sit down. Whatever. I'll tell you when to hold it.'

Suddenly they were working.

She stayed an hour and when she was leaving he went out to the car with her. ‘Will you come again tomorrow? Will Robert mind?'

‘No, of course he won't mind.' She smiled. ‘That was hell.'

‘It was brilliant. It's like being let out of prison to be working again.' He leaned down to the car window and they kissed, and she touched his hand quickly. He stood and watched her drive away, waiting until she turned at the end of the lane, then he went back inside. He lifted
The Other Family
down from the easel and picked up a new canvas, 74 x 100 cm. He set it on the horizontal and prepared a medium. He drew straight onto the canvas with the medium. He could see the finished work: Marina lying naked on her stomach on the cane chaise, her forearms resting on cushions, her chin on her hands; a woman alone in the privacy of her own thoughts. Not a girl. Not a young woman. Not a pale odalisque to tease the eye of the voyeur, but an older woman, naked and alone; an artist, vulnerable and preoccupied with the complexities of her own creativity and anxieties, the uncertainties of her life. It was the painting he had visualised that day at the auction rooms when he had first seen the cane chaise. It had surprised him. Like an unexpected visitor.

He worked quickly, with the energy of having abandoned caution.

While she had been posing for him she had told him, ‘I used to think that one day I'd go out on my own with Robert's blessing. It was an event that stood in the future of our lives. My eventual independence always seemed to have been implied in his recognition of my work when I was his student. We both believed it would happen one day.' She had fallen silent then, and when he had asked her why she had never gone out on her own, she said, ‘Eventually we just stopped talking about it and I began to see that my work was with him. That my work was
our
work.'

He decided to title his new picture
Nymphe
, as a homage to Theo. He was working again and didn't care about anything else. There was, he suspected, something of Theo's selfish freedom in his attitude now. He wasn't altogether comfortable with this, but perhaps it was necessary. He could not work cautiously. That was not the way he could do it. Caution blocked his energies. He did not inspect Theo's books. One was enough. When he finished work for the day, he pushed the carton into a corner and covered it with a cloth.

nineteen

For the rest of that week Marina came to the studio each afternoon and posed naked on the chaise. After they had finished work they went up to the house and he made coffee. He did not let her see the new painting but covered it with a drop sheet after each session. He was cleaning his hands on a rag and she was already dressed and sitting on the edge of the chaise fastening her sandal.

She smiled. ‘You look happy.'

‘I'll finish it tomorrow.'

‘Then you won't need me to pose for you again? Is that it?'

‘That's it.'

‘Our last session then?' She sat looking at him. ‘It's a little sad. What about the figure for
The Other Family
?'

‘I've got the information I need for it now. I'll do it when I'm alone. I don't think I'd be able to do it with you here.'

‘I'd get in the way of the fiction?'

‘Something like that.'

‘What will you do with this one? You can hardly put it in the show.'

He had not decided what he would do with the new painting. He doubted if he would ever be able to persuade Teresa of its innocence. He had not told her that Marina had been posing for him naked. He thought, however, that she might have guessed. It had just seemed too difficult a subject to be direct about. The evasion was all part of their new pact of silence. It made for enormous tensions between them and he hated it. But there didn't seem to be an alternative. It would be over soon and then there would be no need for it. Perhaps he would remove the canvas from its stretcher when it was dry and put it away, lay it on its face in the bottom drawer of his plan press and conceal it under a pile of drawings, let it lie in the dark for years like his father's pictures, until it no longer possessed the power to arouse jealousies and dangerous emotions and could be viewed for what it was, just another piece of art. He thought how much simpler it would have been if, instead of hazarding the human likeness, he had become a painter of still lifes like his father.

‘I can't wait to see it,' Marina said. She got off the chaise and looked around the studio. ‘I'll always remember these days working together. It's been wonderful.' She fell silent. ‘Your dad's old suit, Nada's drawing, all your drawings and your private things. It's very precious to me.' She looked at him. ‘We've really got to know each other at last, haven't we?'

He looked up from cleaning his brushes. ‘Time for coffee before you go?'