The Beast (3 page)
Authors: Hugh Fleetwood
‘No. But enough. And I don’t think he really saw my face. I mean—’
She let her voice trail away, but Mirko suddenly no longer seemed concerned with what she meant. A
thoughtful
, calculating look had come into his eyes, and after what he obviously judged to be a decent interval he murmured, trying to sound disinterested, ‘Is he rich?’
‘No. I don’t think so. In fact no, I’m sure not. He was always too stupid. And anyway,’ she laughed, knowing what
he was getting at, ‘even if he is, he’d never believe that you were his son. He’d think you were just trying to get
something
out of him.’
‘Why didn’t you ever tell him?’
‘Partly because I didn’t want to be bothered with him, partly because he was already married with children of his own and wouldn’t have left them for me if I’d wanted him to, which I didn’t; and partly because even then he’d never have believed it. He wouldn’t have wanted the responsibility or something, and anyway I don’t think he ever knew that I
never
had sex with Eduardo. Oh, it was all too silly, really. Like an opera.’
Another smile out across the empty steppes …
‘Though it’s a shame Eduardo never knew you. He’d have liked you, and given you money.’
‘You shouldn’t have divorced him.’
‘I shouldn’t have married him.’
She had wanted someone to take care of her …
‘He shouldn’t have married
you
.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He shouldn’t.’
He had, poor Eduardo—as far as she’d been able to
discover
—because he pitied her; or because he felt some sort of affinity with a thin and strikingly beautiful survivor of a concentration camp; or because he needed a wife for social reasons, and felt that she, at least, after all she had been through, would
understand
. Whatever his motive, however, it wasn’t until after they were married that he had made it clear that theirs was to be a marriage in name only. She had put up with it, having the occasional discreet affair, for almost six years; and then, for no particular reason, had decided she would put up with it no longer. And wanting to free herself, she had done so in the crudest, most effective, and only way possible. She had had an indiscreet affair
with the one man her husband couldn’t forgive her for having an affair with; the man that he himself was, and had been for years, in love with. (Though this man, stupid as he was, had never realized it, and merely considered Eduardo his best friend.) And everything had gone according to plan. The divorce, that is. What didn’t go according to plan was that Eduardo, in his hysteria, declared his love, and finding his declaration received with disgust, put a gun in his mouth and blew off enough of his face to kill him three months later, and that his young ex-wife, arriving penniless in London (penniless because she wanted nothing from her husband, and in London because she couldn’t think where else to go), realized that she was pregnant.
‘Anyway,’ she said at last ‘money isn’t everything.’
She thought that might provoke an explosion. What she got instead—and she might have preferred the explosion—was a long deep stare from her son; a stare which took in her huge bloated body, the old armchair in which she sat, the striped wallpaper around her and, somehow, the whole of her life for the last twenty-six years.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re right. And I don’t want money. You know that. I just want to be able to paint.’
What could she say? She sighed, and smiled saying ‘Well, if I’m dead, you might just as well inherit now. I’ve got ten pounds in my bag if you want it.’
He stared at her again, and she was afraid he was going to start crying.
‘I can’t.’
‘Take five then.’
‘But five is no use. Ten is no use. I can get one canvas for that. One’s no use. And anyway—’ he stopped, and gazed at the wreckage on the floor; at the remains of the two paintings.
‘They were beautiful, weren’t they?’, he whispered.
*
Yes, they had been beautiful, Elisabeth Vidozza thought half an hour later as she cleaned up the mess, and after she had given Mirko four pounds to go to the cinema with, or to buy a film for his camera, with which he would take beautiful photographs. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Only—she had been beautiful once, and now the father of her only child didn’t recognize her. And the house where she had lived as a girl had been beautiful—and now it no longer existed. And her mother had been beautiful, and Venezuela had been beautiful … She had had so much beauty in her life—Mirko being the most beautiful thing of all—but what had happened to it? What good had it done her? None. None at all. It had just served to conceal the beast who was always waiting to spring out and destroy. And perhaps that was the real reason why, beautiful though she found Mirko’s paintings—strange, almost abstract yet deeply real landscapes, though of no land ever seen by man—she couldn’t entirely take them seriously; couldn’t help viewing them with an ironic eye. For they were only beautiful, and she wanted something more. She
expected
something more of her son. She wanted beauty, yes; but she wanted beauty that didn’t conceal the beast. She wanted a beauty that included the beast; that showed it in all its loathsome ugliness, in all its bloody foulness, in all its horror. She wanted to see a very portrait of the beast; yet a portrait that, with its beauty, transformed the horror and made it not the whole, nor even the essential subject of the picture, but merely a condition of it. An appalling condition, maybe; but a condition that could be accepted—indeed had to be accepted—and a condition that by being accepted, became if not harmless, at least bearable. Yes, that was what she
wanted of her son’s paintings, and that was what she didn’t, couldn’t see in them. They were lovely landscapes; but they were landscapes without the beast. And it wasn’t enough.
What
was
going to happen to them both, she wondered.
It was only much later that night, as she lay awake in her bed still trying to answer this question, that an idea came to her. It was an absurd idea, a ridiculous idea—and at first she tried to dismiss it from her mind as the pathetic fantasy of an unhappy woman. But then, as she thought about it more and more, it more and more took hold of her, until she was positively trembling, shaking, sweating with it in the darkness. Yes, of course it was ridiculous, of course it was absurd—but it was so very, so absolutely right that it was somehow inevitable.
She had told Mirko’s father that she was dead; and she had, in a way, been right. Only now, now she was going to resurrect herself. Now, for the sake of her son—in order that he might do what she longed for him to do, and get away from her baleful, disbelieving presence—she was going, once again, to live …
She started the next day; and for the following six months she kept at it. And it involved, this return to life, the eating of the bare minimum to keep herself, just, on her feet, and of working, though starved as she was it cost her twice the effort it formerly had, as much as she possibly could; drumming up any and every sort of order and
commission
from her regular clients and friends. She ate nothing to be thin again; and she worked hard in order to have enough money to pay, at the end of six months, for plastic surgery to remove the stretched and hanging flaps of skin from a body that no longer had the fat to fill them.
She went at it with a passion, reducing all her thoughts and energies to this one aim, of being thin again; and with such a passion that Mirko, though he guessed, more or less, what she was doing—and though he attributed her motives to wounded vanity after his father’s visit—
somehow
drew back from her, and left her alone with her obsession; and behaved, with one or two exceptions, like an awed little boy waiting, throughout a long religious ceremony, for the sacrifice he knew would come at the end.
It wasn’t easy for her, naturally; apart from the physical discomfort, she had periods—aggravated by the lack of food—of extreme depression; whole days when she would despise herself for what she was doing, and when she longed to fill herself with, and let herself drown in, a torrent of sugar and chocolate and sweet things. Yet she never, not even once, gave in; and in spite of her
depressions
she was never, really, even tempted to. For this, she told herself, was her last stand; and foolish though it might be, vain though it might be, wicked though it might be—she was determined to make it. And if the effort killed her, as it well might, at least she would go out spitting; or laughing.
But the effort didn’t kill her, and at the end of eight months, after the pain of the operation had worn off, she could hardly believe how successful she had been. Because of course she was fifty years old now, and of course the strain of the preceding months had added new lines to her face, and of course her body was scarred; but nevertheless, when she looked in the mirror wearing the new clothes she had made for herself—and she had made them well, of the very best materials—she wasn’t exaggerating, or being unduly vain, when she told herself that the image
standing there in the glass was beautiful. It was; and she could be quite objective about it. It was even more than beautiful in a way. There was something terrible about it, something magnificent; something … great.
Mirko thought so too, and told her; she couldn’t remember when she had seen him so enthusiastic. He took photographs of her; he drew sketches of her; he even—the ultimate tribute, though not to her—phoned the strange, pale, unwholesome youth who was by way of being his only friend, and asked him to come and admire his mother.
‘Isn’t it incredible, Peter,’ Mirko said, indicating the proud and shining woman who stood in the middle of the room; a woman who felt unaccountably pleased at being admired by a fat young man who worked as a nightwatchman in his father’s garage and whose only attraction, if attraction were the word, was his being so completely without any sort of personality—without wit, charm, intelligence, manners—that one could, if so inclined—and Mirko obviously was so inclined—see him as the very paragon of goodness. And Peter, rising to the occasion, said ‘Yes. I think it’s a great improvement.’
It was that evening that Mrs Vidozza told Mirko she was going to take a trip to Italy.
‘What for,’ he said crossly; and his mother could already see him working out the cost of the trip in terms of canvases and paints.
‘I want to see some beauty.’
‘Isn’t there any beauty in England?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Mrs Vidozza—who loved, in a way, her adopted homeland and in any case would never hear a word against it—said. ‘But I want a different sort of beauty.’
She didn’t expect this to satisfy Mirko, yet strangely it seemed to. He looked at her thoughtfully—rather as he had when he’d asked if his father was rich—and studied her; and after a while murmured ‘Yes, I suppose you must do.’
And then he came over to her and put his arms round her; and whispering ‘you deserve it,’ he kissed her.
*
She left a week later, telling Mirko she was going to Florence; to look at some paintings and see some opera, she hoped. But in fact she took a plane to Pisa, and from there made her way to Siena, where she stayed her first night. And the following morning she took a taxi …
It was a long ride, some twenty-five kilometers out of Siena; and ended, after a bumpy final stretch up a dirt track through thick woods and vineyards, in the grassy forecourt of a huge old house; a forecourt in which chickens scratched, and cats lay warming themselves in the October sun. The house itself was built round three sides of this forecourt, with the main block at one end and the two wings divided into separate houses where the estate workers and their families lived; so that the whole gave the impression of being more a tiny self-contained village than one house. Mrs Vidozza knew all this, having had it described to her in letters, and having seen a photograph of it; yet she had always imagined it rather cold and
forbidding
, whereas it was both more homelike than she could have believed, and also far, far more beautiful. The
unenclosed
end of the forecourt looked out over hills, and hills, and hills …
Faces gazed through windows to see who the new arrival was, and an old woman, hanging out her washing, smiled at her; and when Mrs Vidozza asked for Signor Hillinger,
the old woman pointed at a green faded door in the middle of the main block—and then came over and escorted her to it. She took her down a stone-flagged corridor and into a large, simply furnished living room, whose walls were hung with paintings.
‘Attenda,’ the old woman said, and disappeared; and as Mrs Vidozza waited, gazing out of the windows which looked, from the front of the house, across a small terraced garden towards an even more spectacular view than that to be seen from the forecourt, she felt, suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, intoxicated. She had told Mirko that she wanted a different kind of beauty, and she hadn’t altogether been lying. But she had never bargained for this. And for perhaps the first time since she was sixteen she felt
wonderfully
, and extraordinarily at ease. The whole place—the views, the stone floors, the furniture, the atmosphere, the smell of baking bread, the soft October light—seemed to be welcoming her, telling her not just that this place was home-like, but was actually home. It was absurd of course; home was her small flat in Fulham, in the great soft sprawling London that she loved: the London where exiles could live like insects under a stone, fairly confident that the stone would never be moved, that they would never really be disturbed, and that they would, with any luck, never again be exposed to the sort of elements that had driven them there in the first place. Yet here, high on this Tuscan hilltop, though she felt appallingly exposed, and in the greatest danger of being disturbed, there was
something
that embraced her, that took her into its arms; and whispered to her that while there might be no safety here there was, however, splendour; splendour, and space, and air enough to soar in …
