Port Mungo (15 page)

Oddly enough I had yet to meet her, and I felt that it could not be delayed much longer. Not that
I
wanted to delay it—I was eager to see what this scorpion girl of his looked like—it was Jack who seemed unwilling to introduce us, hustling her upstairs when she arrived in the morning and then out again once they had finished. Or perhaps, it occurs to me now, it was her doing, she didn’t want to meet
me.
Yes, and I know why. But finally I suggested we have her to dinner, and somewhat reluctantly he agreed. It was his idea that we have a fourth guest. He was afraid, he said, that otherwise I would bore the girl.

He could be such a bastard.

The dining table is up at the far end of the big room, close to the kitchen. Candles burned from tall slender sticks. A thin blue vase of white lilies stood among the gleaming glasses and cutlery. Anna had already arrived when Jack came down wearing one of his more colourful headscarves. She sat on the couch, frowning and smoking and picking at a bowl of nuts, while I sat in the leather armchair, absently fingering the stem of my cocktail glass and trying to put her at ease, though without much success. There are people one occasionally encounters who seem to mistrust any attempt one makes to be warm or affable or civilized, and who project the tiresome attitude that all social intercourse is false, a game, a trap. Anna was apparently one of these. I could hardly get a word out of her, and I had deployed a good part of my artillery. She was wearing a very short skirt and fishnet stockings, and ankle boots with spiky heels. Also spiky hair. Some kohl round the eyes, she’d tried to tart herself up but hadn’t got very far. I was relieved when Jack appeared. Anna seemed startled. Perhaps it was his headscarf. She sat up straight and produced a shy toothy smile.

—Here you are, he said.

—Here she is. I was telling her about the pictures.

—That one’s your mother's, said Jack.

—I know, she said.

He leaned down to kiss her cheek and she rose awkwardly to meet his lips. She had to steady herself with a hand on his shoulder. I moved to the sideboard and poured him a glass of wine. Anna had a mineral water. He sat down beside her, and at once she became talkative. She told us about the friend’s place on the Bowery where she was staying till she found something of her own.

—The Bowery, I said. Far cry from Surrey.

This provoked disloyal laughter.

—Yeah, Surrey.

—I feel the same about Surrey, I said. In fact I feel the same about England.

We talked about England. She was curious that we’d spent almost all our lives abroad. Outcasts on a distant shore, as I liked to say. I talked about the class system, and English envy—us and them. I said there was no such thing as envy in America, there was no “them,” it was all “us”—we the people. I watched her carefully. Small frown, dropping of the eyes, fingers laid flat on the table. I looked at her tattoo and wondered why she’d chosen a scorpion. Did she sting? She picked up her glass of fizzy water.

—Actually that’s crap, she said, looking up, looking straight at me.

She did sting!

—Of course it is, I said, laughing.

She glanced at Jack. We heard the front-door buzzer, then Dora coming out of the kitchen and crossing the hall.

—This is Eduardo Byrne, I whispered, as we heard his voice, you must sting him too.

The door opened and in he came, my old friend and once, of course, my lover. Why did Jack invite him tonight? He said he thought Anna would feel comfortable with him: Eduardo, he’d said, is a free spirit. I’d asked what that made me but he ignored the question. He had formulated some concept of the evening and it hadn’t been my place to question it. When he first came to live with me, I’d told Jack to consider the house as much his as mine. He had certainly done that.

Eduardo took Anna’s hand and peered at her closely. He had strong, knobbly sculptor’s hands, years of oil, paint, dirt and rust bedded deep in the crevices of the flesh, and eyes like a sad old horse that had worked too hard too long, dark liquid eyes under tangled black brows with silver wires in them. His face was creased and leathery, blue with beard even after a shave, and his body was covered with hair. Teeth large and gray, hair crinkled up on his head such that it never needed a comb, same first thing in the morning as it was the night before. Apart from the silver wires he seemed not to age.

—Eduardo, I said, pouring him a drink, tell us what you’ve been doing.

He released Anna’s hand and sat down. He rubbed his face. He had nothing to tell us of himself, he said, producing a shrug, the dark eyes rolling up from under their tangled hedge of eyebrow. About the making of work it is impossible to speak, he said, and about the selling of work it is undignified, so I have nothing to say.

—Then we will have a lively time of it.

Eduardo then turned to Jack and declared he would have recognized Anna at once as his daughter. She was staring at the floor and Jack was smiling slightly. Neither of them said anything—they were embarrassed! I glanced at Eduardo, who scratched his cheek then emptied the bowl of nuts into his palm and swallowed the lot. The moment passed.

Dora had prepared her roast shoulder of lamb with roast potatoes, and we had Federico in to serve, one of Luis’s young men from the Spanish place round the corner. I did the wine. Hot garlic soup to start. Eduardo was fascinated that Anna hadn’t seen Jack since she was a little girl, and that she was hearing her own family history for the first time. He got the girl talking and listened intently, tearing his bread roll into small pieces and placing them on his tongue one after another like communion wafers. He asked her if she knew her parents ran off to New York after meeting each other only two weeks before.

—Seven, said Anna.

—Seven? said Eduardo. I thought two. Two is crazy. But seven is also crazy.

—It was more than two, said Jack. It was more like seven. Who can remember these things?

—Perhaps it was ten, said Eduardo. Or thirty.

—Oh no, said Jack, not thirty. We had to get away from Gordon.

—Gordon the Terrible, I said.

Anna wanted to know what had happened to him. Eduardo, who was possessed of intuition in such matters, realized that her curiosity stemmed from some predicament of her own. He asked her what it was.

He’d touched a raw nerve, this was clear at once. A sick, resigned expression, the mouth working all manner of wry twitches, the body language evasive, ill-at-ease—but yes, her man. His name was Guy, and he was married.

Eduardo was sympathetic. We were all sympathetic. The dinner was going well, I thought, as a curtain of intimacy closed round us and we pondered Anna’s plight. I poured more wine. Eduardo murmured that he could well imagine the sorts of humiliations she had suffered. Meetings cancelled at the last minute—never being together all night—never being able to call him at home. His constantly divided attention. Anna listened carefully, nodding and smoking, as though her experience was being in some way validated by these rather trite instances of the mistress’s predicament. Eduardo certainly knew all about that.

—So why do it? he said. Why go on with him?

A snort of impatience here.

—Yeah, why? I don’t know!

Out it came, full of feeling, and the feeling said, I do know but it’s too knotty for me, and I can’t resolve it.

We all waited, saying nothing.

—Oh Christ, I suppose I love him. I’ve tried to stop, but you can’t, can you? You can’t just make yourself stop loving someone.

—Sure you can.

This came from Jack, and it startled her. It was not an idea she had encountered before.

—How?

—You make up your mind to it. You kill the love. Every time you feel it, you kill it. It’s like drowning puppies. It’s not pleasant but it can be done.

—Have you done it?

This was asked dubiously. She frowned as she said it, squinting at him through her cigarette smoke. She’d hardly touched her lamb.

—Oh sure.

—With my mother?

Talk about painting yourself into a corner. It would take him all night to answer that one.

—No, I couldn’t.

—Why not?

—I tried, but it was no good. Puppies wouldn’t drown.

Nobody but me seemed to register how tasteless this was, all this talk of drowning puppies, given what had happened to Anna’s sister. She pondered it in silence, picking shreds of tobacco off her tongue and inspecting them. Then she looked up.

—That’ll all come out, right? As we talk?

Jack told me later that he was somewhat overcome by what he’d just said, though not for the reason I was. He said he hadn’t even spoken to me like this, which was true, although of course I was well aware of the nature of his feelings for Vera, even if it was years since he’d seen her.

Anna then talked more about her married man, and astonished us all by admitting that he was in gaol, waiting to stand trial for stabbing a man in a pub. She said she’d gone to visit him in Belmarsh, one of the big London prisons, and seen his wife and kids in the waiting area. She’d had to come away. That was the worst of it, she said. She couldn’t even get him to herself when he was in gaol!

But she didn’t cry, and Jack said later she had never cried as a little girl. Her chin would come up and she’d press her lips tightly together, and though her eyes were brimming she would not let the tears flow. So she hadn’t changed in that respect.

The evening was a success, I think. Jack’s guess that Anna would be comfortable with Eduardo proved correct, for it was clear she appreciated his thoughtful interest, and also that she had warmed to Eduardo himself—this a man who, after a lifetime of chiselling his character to the stark complexity of one of his own black bronzes, could effortlessly display to an impressionable young woman all the brooding allure and dark romanticism of—
the artist.
They went home at half past ten, Eduardo offering to walk her across town to the Bowery. As Dora cleared the table my brother and I retired to the far end of the room.

—So?

I said I was impressed with her. I said I thought she was a remarkable girl, to have come here as she had so as to find out about her sister, though I was worried by this story of the man in gaol. Whether Jack glimpsed the precise drift of my thoughts I do not know. He might have, you could never tell with him. It was late, he was tired, so he said good night and went up to bed.

I was not tired at all. In fact my mind was seething. I had seen the girl’s resemblance to Peg, though it was certainly not as strong as Jack supposed. It did strike me as rather an eerie coincidence that her punky haircut should resemble the mess Peg had made of her hair, the last time she was in New York—but no, not a very strong likeness, even if Jack apparently thought it was, and this in fact was what disturbed me. I had thought that my influence, and the atmosphere of this house, were powerful forces for good in this regard, our tranquil routines, I mean, and the slow, painless extraction of poison which I effected each evening as we murmured to each other over our wine. In one way the girl was having a tonic influence on him, for he was displaying more enthusiasm for his work than I had seen in a long time. But it alarmed me that this was a direct consequence of his perception of a likeness to her dead sister, and I was still fearful that the rekindling of ancient emotion would eventually have a negative effect, and that sooner or later he would unravel, go to pieces, I had seen it before; at which point I would have to put him back together again, and all my work would have been for nothing.

But I understood my brother well enough to be sure that were I to attempt to obstruct him, I would not succeed. He would have his way regardless of my feelings in the matter. For Jack had this in common with Vera, and it largely accounted for the turbulence of their years together, and Peg’s disorderly childhood—that he was stubborn, and selfish, and had a will of iron. I had come up against Jack’s will on more occasions than I cared to remember, and I had certainly seen him stubborn, oh yes, and selfish in the extreme.

I have said that my brother could be selfish. But what he did next astonished me beyond anything I had seen before.

It happened three days later. He had made his decision, he said, and felt that to delay it any longer would be foolish—this a decision he had not thought fit to discuss with me. He had had an appointment with Anna in the morning. She was punctual as usual, he said, and they worked well for an hour. Then he told her to smoke, and as he took off his lab coat he asked her if she had found somewhere to live. Anna’s room-mate had gone out of town, so the pressure was briefly off her, but she didn’t want to ruin the friendship by overstaying her welcome. When her friend came back Anna wanted to be able to tell her she was moving out.

—You can, said Jack.

—I don’t have a place yet.

—Come live here.

There, it was out. A long pause here. No rushing in to thank him, or to say it was out of the question, too kind but she couldn’t possibly—none of that English nonsense—instead she frowned, she began to think, he watched her thinking, she glanced at him and nodded slightly, then out came the bag of tobacco. When she’d rolled herself a shaggy one and set it alight she asked her one question.

—What does Gin think?

—She thinks you should live here too.

—All right then. Thanks.

And that’s how simple and dishonest the transaction was. They worked for another hour and then he showed her the empty bedrooms and told her to decide which one she wanted.

She certainly wasted no time moving in. Nor was she heavily burdened with luggage. She appeared shortly after six o’clock with a canvas shoulder bag and a hard black guitar-case, and Jack soon had her installed in the room she wanted, the one at the front of the house overlooking the street. He told her to come downstairs and have a drink when she was ready, then left her to herself and closed the door quietly behind him. When I got home a little later I was presented with a fait accompli, and it was all I could do to keep my temper until I’d properly digested what he had done. I went upstairs reeling.