Port Mungo (14 page)

—No, no, not necessary, Gin—

But he was too weak to put up any real resistance. I packed him a small bag and helped him into his overcoat, and we struggled downstairs to the street. An hour later he was tucked up in clean sheets in one of the spare bedrooms, and an hour after that my own doctor was at his bedside. There was little enough to be done other than to keep putting fluids into him, and for the next few days we tended conscientiously to our invalid. By the end of the week he was getting up for a few hours in the afternoon. Then he was joining me before dinner to drink a glass of red wine and smoke a cigarette. He was thin and pale, purged, he said, and glad of it.

—Flushes out the system, a good muck sweat, he said. You should try it, Gin.

—A good muck sweat, I said doubtfully.

But I was glad he was up on his feet again and showing a bit of spirit. It distressed me to see him weak.

—Jack, you find this house comfortable?

—I never gave it much thought. I hate the wallpaper. And those rugs!

—I could strip the walls.

—Why would you want to?

I didn’t need to say more. He did me the courtesy of pretending to think about it, but I knew the answer was no, at least for now.

—Where would I work?

—The attic.

He nodded. He knew the attic had the floor, the walls, the light he needed.

—I don’t think so, Gin.

It was another two years before he moved into the house, but I planted the idea that day. I think he went back to Crosby Street with perhaps the first seeds of disillusion with that rickety shed of a place sown in his mind. Perhaps he remembered my offer as it stayed in the high nineties through August and September. Or perhaps in January, stapling sheets of plastic over the windows to keep out the wind, which also kept out the light, he reflected on how it would be to live in a building where the windows fit their frames, and central heating kept all rooms at a comfortable, steady temperature, and there was always hot water, and Dora made lunch every day. And also did the washing. Was I wrong to lure him from his noble squalor? Certainly not. I believe Crosby Street would have killed him had he stayed there much longer.

But as I say, it took him a couple of years to leave the loft. I did not hound him, hounding was counter-productive with a man like Jack. No, I had sunk my hook, I could only wait for him to reel himself in. He made work steadily, if slowly, over those two years. No new collectors appeared so he had almost no income, apart of course from the allowance I drip-fed him. And yes, Vera was around, off and on, and as far as I was concerned she did him no good at all. She disrupted his routines, she compromised his sobriety, she destroyed his peace of mind. Did he care? It’s immaterial. He cared, but he could no more turn her away from his door than he could cut off his hand. And she appeared as powerless to break it off as he was. I was at a loss to explain why this should have happened, and could only record it as a phenomenon, and say: It is inexplicable but it is a fact. They exerted an irresistible force of attraction upon each other, and were equally helpless to control it. So the question arises, why, after Jack left Crosby Street, and moved in with me, did they abruptly stop seeing each other?

Jack would never talk about it. But I worried at it constantly, and even began to wonder if it was something to do with me. It was not. It was to do with a story, or a vicious rumour, rather, of such potent malice that when Vera heard it a rupture was created between them which was never healed. She discussed it with me only once, shortly before Jack’s death. It was not a satisfactory conversation, and it remains a source of great sorrow to me that to this day she insists on believing a falsehood concerning Jack which was entirely the product of hatred. It originated, of course, in Port Mungo.

Chapter Twelve

In his last years, then, my brother was not robust. He lived with me for the simple reason that I could provide him with the kind of protective shelter he required in order to make art. And I have an admission to make in this regard. Jack actually produced very little art the last few years of his life. It is true he went up to his studio every day, and stayed there for hours, and insisted on being left undisturbed, but the results were negligible. It was a long time since he had completed a painting. The so-called large canvas showed no sign of ever being finished. It was not a thing he liked to talk about, he preferred that we sustain the illusion that a good deal of work was being done up there. But it must have been apparent even to him that nothing ever came downstairs except himself. This told me that the man was fragile, and given that fragility I was by no means sure that this odd girl Anna wouldn’t crash about and upset him badly. Just how badly, in the end, she
did
upset him, I couldn’t have begun to imagine. But I protected her—I protect her still—what else am I to do?

They began work the next day, this at her suggestion, as indeed the entire enterprise was at her suggestion. She arrived at the house at ten. Jack made her tea, and they went upstairs. Halfway up the stairs he heard her panting behind him, her breath shallow from all the rough tobacco she smoked. He paused and asked her if she was all right. She said she was nervous. They reached the attic. Ten years ago it was remodelled as Jack’s studio: ceiling and interior walls torn out, rafters exposed, windows enlarged, everything painted white. I was rarely allowed up there, and Dora never. The few times I’d seen it I’d been appalled at the squalor.

—Will it just be my face? she said.

No answer from Jack as he organized himself for work. He struggled into his paint-smeared lab coat. He put a high wooden stool in front of the north-facing window and had her sit. He moved her about on the stool until he had her where he wanted her, and adjusted the position of her head. He stood over his work table with his back to her, then dragged his chair over to the window and sat down, so close he was practically on top of her. He crossed his legs, frowning, peering at her, a block of gray paper on his knee. Later I asked him what he planned to do with her. He didn’t know yet. At this stage a few drawings, see what happened. See where it went.

He began to draw, pencil lines for the planes of the face, shading with charcoal, highlights with chalk. She shifted about on the stool, blinking at the light. She reached down for her bag, groped about in it, produced a pair of sunglasses and slipped them on. He stopped working and stared at her. The sunglasses made her opaque, but also somehow naked. All you saw was the mouth.

—I don’t think so.

She took them off.

The work proceeded. At last her head was still, and for some minutes there was no sound but the scratching of charcoal on paper. I pictured it in my mind’s eye: the grizzled artist humped in his chair with a block of paper on his knee, staring at a pale girl on a stool, this intense silent conversation taking place in a few square feet of cleared space amid a sprawling chaos of painterly debris. Cold light flooding in, bleaching the girl’s skin to a more naked whiteness even than its usual skull-like pallor, as the artist’s eyes dropped and lifted and stared, then dropped and lifted again. His fingers stuttering across the paper.

—Can I smoke?

—No.

Silence once more. Jack was working rapidly, he had to, he had to do as much as he could before his knuckles got hot. He told me later he had anticipated that once he properly got to know the girl’s face the likeness she seemed to share with her sister would collapse, and a face would emerge that was different in a thousand particulars of structure and feature and complexion. But to my dismay—we were downstairs in the sitting room before dinner—it was not so. It was not so. He was restlessly rubbing his knuckles as he talked. There was, instead, a kind of convergence, he said, frowning, intrigued, in that the head he was drawing, the image of it on paper, was beginning to make a match with the image he held in his memory of Peg’s head.

Forty minutes he had her sit there, and then he told her she could smoke. She stirred to life as though waking from a deep sleep. Jack later said she was the most natural model he had ever had. Almost at once she ceased posing, he said, and behaved as if she were alone in the room, and a conscious human being alone in a room—a room, that is, without a mirror—is more truly herself than at any other time. She blinked and grinned, she stretched her arms above her head, she yawned, then she reached for her bag and hauled out the tobacco.

—Can I see? she said.

He tore several pages out of the tablet and pinned them to the wall. She stood in front of them and Jack stood beside her. She appeared in the drawings to be frowning, but the eyes were glazed, they suggested a sleeper’s vulnerability, or the lazy indifference of a cat.

—Shall we go on? she said.

—I don’t think so.

He was gruff now. He would not meet her eye. He did not tell her that his hand was beginning to claw. He did not tell her that he was getting angry. Having to stop work because of pain always made him angry. He hated to feel weak. He worked as long as he could bear it, and when he had to stop it made him angry. It wasn’t Anna’s fault, but she couldn’t know this.

It seems the second session was much like the first, although towards the end of it he became aware of a rising agitation in the girl. They had discussed nothing at the end of the first session. He had made it clear when it was over, he had paid her, and she’d left. I’d been out all day so again I missed her, but how very commercial Jack made it sound, when we talked that evening, and I remember asking him was there any
warmth
expressed between them?

—Warmth? Sure.

—How?

—All perfectly cordial, Gin. Quite warm enough. Sits well, when she settles down.

—Jack, she’s your daughter.

—I expect we’ll get around to all that soon enough.

Anna clearly wanted to get around to “all that” sooner rather than later, and at the end of the second session she spoke up.

—Jack, she said.

He was washing his hands, she was rolling a cigarette. He grunted.

—Can we talk now?

—Sure.

My brother could be intimidating when he was irritated, and I had to admire the girl’s courage, that she would say what she wanted even as Jack stamped about grunting and glowering. He sat down and they faced each other, him in his work chair and her on the stool. I thought she would be direct and she was.

—Where’s my mother?

—You don’t know?

—I think she might be upstate.

—I haven’t seen her in years.

—Me neither.

I was not surprised to hear that Anna had had no contact with her mother since Gerald took her away. I’d realized that other than what he’d told her—and that, I imagine, was not flattering—she knew almost nothing about Vera. But by the end of an hour’s conversation with Jack that had all changed, and she apparently saw her mother in a new light. Not only was she an artist, not only had she led a rackety, wandering sort of a life, but she’d never buckled to the power of a man, or conformed to anybody’s expectations of how she should behave. When Jack told her how they’d run away to America seven weeks after they’d met, the girl hooted with pleasure. I think she believed her generation was the first to produce feisty women, and certainly she wouldn’t have come across many like Vera in Surrey. Jack told me this was all to the good, if it made her realize that everything Gerald had told her was wrong. Jack intended to wean her off Gerald’s version of the past.

—She’ll tell you all about herself now, I told him. She’ll tell you more than you want to know.

—Why more than I want to know?

—My dear, I said, you live like a monk. You need me and Dora, but you don’t need anybody else.

That had been true till Anna arrived. Now I saw he wanted to pour it all out. He wanted to tell her everything.

He’d spent an hour giving her the flight-to-America story, and when he’d finished he felt sure she must be eager to get away. But she wanted more. She wanted to know why they hadn’t stayed in New York, if that was where the future of art lay, why they’d gone south, why they’d fetched up in Port Mungo of all places. What she really wanted, I think, was to hear more about her mother’s adventures, and Jack said there was much he could have told her, because incidents he hadn’t thought of in years were rising into consciousness in some detail. He suggested they go down to the kitchen and have a cup of tea. Or a drink. They needed it, he said.

It was warmer down there, and they settled at the table with a bottle of wine and an ashtray. The initial chill—the hesitation, the mutual distrust of these two prickly creatures—this had dissipated, and a kind of wary affection had sprung to life between them, all in the space of a morning.

—Jack, she said.

—Anna.

—Are you successful? I mean, have you had a good career?

There was no point being anything other than honest. No, he said, he had not had a good career. He told her about the big show in Soho and all the good press he’d had. But his sales were lousy and eventually the gallery had dropped him. He’d worked too long in isolation. He told her how he’d created a style of painting called “tropicalism”—was she still with him?—she was nodding away but he wasn’t sure—he had her come into the big room and stand in front of his
Narcissus.

She stared at it for a long time.

—So do you still have exhibitions? she said at last.

—Oh sure. There’s always shows. But they’re small shows. I don’t give myself anguish about it any more.

—Are there many tropicalists?

—No. School of one.

There was a pause here—and then they both shouted with laughter. It was lovely, honest laughter, he said, it erupted quite spontaneously, and they cackled away at each other till Anna started to cough. He told her she must have had enough of him for one day, and although I think she would have preferred to stay, she understood that it was Jack who had had enough.

—What are you doing tonight? he said, as she was leaving.

—Going out with some guy.

He closed the door behind her and leaned against it, suddenly deflated, and aware of a grumbling in his wrists and knuckles.

They had agreed not to meet for a few days, as Jack wanted to get on with the large canvas. But when he went up to the studio he found himself drawn instead to the sketches he’d made of Anna’s head. He stared at them for a long time. He thought about the years in Port Mungo. She was a silent, dark-haired little thing who could settle with a heap of shells and a boxful of sticks and be occupied at the back of his studio for hours. She never seemed to mind the heat, and she never cried, and when he and Peg went to the beach to drink beer they would take her with them and watch her toddle along the shore, then all at once stop, and peer down, fascinated, for minutes on end, at a dead crab, or a dead jellyfish, or a dried-out branch of seaweed. She would squat down on the sand and extend a tentative finger, and touch the thing, whatever it was—pull her hand away—touch it again—and so her small deliberate researches proceeded. He remembered how much he had missed her when Gerald took her to England, and he remembered too the brisk, brutal way he had then forced himself to forget her. Jack always said that he was a bad father to his older daughter, that he knew it even at the time. He chose to be a bad father to Peg, he said, for he did not believe a man could be both a good father and a good artist.

But now he wanted to be a good father to this lost girl of his, though he did not know how to, or even if she wanted him to. Why? Because he saw Peg in her. And again he roused her image, and tried to glimpse a match with the girl who sat in his studio with a glazed look in her eyes and her hands dangling between her knees. But this time he failed to find the match, and realized it must all be in his imagination. He had simply superimposed a family likeness onto the fading fabric of memory, and grown excited at the resulting chimera.

All this he reported to me that night. We were in the sitting room after dinner. He told me that Anna had asked him if he’d had a successful career.

—What did you say?

—I said I hadn’t. Am I right?

I was amused. I myself came to terms with artistic ambition long ago, but I was familiar with the passions that still guttered fitfully in my brother. That night I was indulgent. I reviewed his career, I spoke of the dogged commitment with which he had persevered as a painter in Port Mungo, his courage in holding off coming to New York until he had found his mature style, and the forcefulness with which he had then claimed his place in the art world, before renouncing it with equal force. So—discipline, I said, frowning, as I analyzed his enterprise—industry in adversity, the creation of a body of work—

When I talked like that it wasn’t long before Jack was in front of his
Narcissus
in a state of rapt astonishment at the scale of his accomplishment. He needed nights like this; there were days enough, god knows, when he sat in his studio sunk in the profound conviction of his own futility, despising everything he had ever done. He decided he had misled Anna. He must rectify the error when he next saw her.

Some days later he watched her leaf through his catalogue, sitting on the edge of the couch in his studio with the book on her knees and her ankles splayed out, long back bent and an air of intense, pointed concentration. She lingered for several seconds as she lifted the corner of each page, and Jack told me that as he watched her the emotion rose in him with a sudden
lurching
sensation, threatening tears, this an event he had not experienced for many years, and had known only in relation to Peg, long ago, when she was a little girl.

He’d have liked to tell me that Anna too almost burst into tears, looking at his work, but no. All the same she had stared at the reproductions for many minutes, then asked him if she could borrow the book. Borrow it, she could have it, for god’s sake—! He didn’t tell her he had fifty more in a cardboard box downstairs. He signed it with a flourish and she carried it off as though he had given her a precious holy object, the relic of a saint.