Port Mungo (16 page)

When I came back down I was sufficiently in control of myself to say to my brother that he was looking pleased with himself. He pretended to be unconscious of the irony, saying why wouldn’t he be pleased, having his daughter back under the same roof? I told him quietly that he should have talked to me first, but Jack had no time for any of that, and briskly told me that with Anna in the house there would have to be changes.

—Changes?

Dear god but he was behaving badly. I am not fond of changes, as Jack knew better than anyone.

—We will have to try and entertain her, he said.

—I should have thought it was the other way round, I said, but at that moment Anna appeared in the doorway. Jack at once rose to his feet and padded towards the drinks table.

—What will you have, my dear? he said.

Anna was well mannered enough to thank me for letting her stay with us, and I had to put a good face on it. A little later I gave her a set of keys and explained about the locks on the front door. Then I said something about dinner, and Anna told us she would not be eating with us.

—But why ever not? cried Jack.

He had assumed we would all be sitting down together, but it seemed she had made other plans. She was having dinner with Eduardo. Jack did not trouble to conceal his irritation, nor I my pleasure. A few minutes later she went back upstairs, and soon after that we heard her coming down again, and the front door closing. I glanced at Jack.

—So where would you like to eat? I said pleasantly.

That night I lay awake like an anxious parent, listening for her key in the door. New York locks can be difficult, and I did not want her waking the house. I soon recognized that this anxiety merely masked a deeper one, which had to do with Eduardo. But he was old enough to be her father, and an old friend of the family, so surely no danger there? Nonetheless it was a worry. I never heard her come in, but there she was at breakfast, pale and waxy as ever, and completely unforthcoming in response to my one polite, noninvasive inquiry as to her night out.

And that’s how she got into the house.

Chapter Thirteen

Having Anna with us soon changed the way Jack and I rubbed along together, this was one of the first changes I observed. When we were by ourselves in the big room downstairs we both listened for her key in the door, her step on the stairs. And although I did not admit this to him for some time, I began actually to enjoy her presence, and was disappointed if she was out! Jack was worse, he was soft and doting, quite unlike himself, and I think even Dora was infected with the new atmosphere in the house, like us she was susceptible to the inimitable vital perfume which fills the air with the mere presence of youth. Anna was an unusual youth, dour and serious and to my mind profoundly mysterious, I think because she communicated so little of what she did outside the house. She implicitly declared that she had a private life, would we please respect that, and of course we did. Of course we did.

I discovered how to navigate the awkward silences she seemed to generate. They never seemed to occur when Jack was present, as he was entirely at ease with her now. But with me the girl was not at ease, and if we were alone together she would soon find some reason to leave the room. The answer was not to try and find a neutral topic to talk about, but rather to talk about
her.
Youth is profoundly obsessed with its own dilemma, which crudely put is the problem of going forward with the appearance of sure-footed confidence into what looks like a morass of uncertainty and risk. One day I asked her if she had any plans. She seemed startled by the question. She had a job of some kind in a bar, which kept her out several nights a week, but beyond merely surviving in New York we had heard of no specific schemes or goals or ambitions. I suspected at the time that she was here solely to know her father again, possibly her mother as well, though for some reason she was reluctant to say so. I had no patience with any of that. What is it, I asked her, that you want to
do
here?

Again she was startled, and I felt I had intruded on her privacy. But I persevered. Was there a career she wanted to pursue?

Expression of distinct relief. Oh that’s what you mean. What else would I mean? Shyly she told me she wanted to do something creative.

—You want to be an artist, Anna?

—Yes.

—A painter like your father?

—No, not like him.

This came out with what to my surprise sounded like disdain, contempt almost. Certainly with a charge of fierce feeling that I couldn’t interpret at the time. Perhaps she believed that painting was dead, I thought, and wanted to be a conceptual artist. But she said no. At least we had managed to have a sort of conversation, and it was easier between us after that. She even started talking to me about Eduardo.

For the first time in many months Jack began to work in the afternoons, not on the portrait of Anna, that was the morning’s work, but on the large canvas, which he had begun to call
A Dream of the Lower Waters.
As soon as I heard the title I knew the painting would be a reworking of his old motif, what he called the “Narcissus posture”: a figure leaning over a surface in which he finds a distorted reflection, and the reflection clawing up at the leaning figure through a web or latticework of some kind. It had not escaped me that there was a grim correspondence between this and the macabre picture I held in my mind’s eye of the Port Mungo fisherman who’d leaned over the side of his boat one day, out among the mangroves, and discovered to his horror a drowned girl gazing up at him from a tangle of underwater roots.

These fresh energies of Jack’s I attributed entirely to Anna’s presence in the house. I saw that she was beginning to assume the role of muse to her father. She continued to sit for him in the mornings, and by now they had established a routine: she came to him three times a week from ten to one. She let Dora know when she would be eating with us and when not, and by the end of the month I believe we had all adjusted to our changed circumstances. As for our having to entertain the girl, I was not aware of making any particular effort myself in that direction.

I was surprised to learn that Jack had not yet talked to her about her sister’s death, nor had he decided what he would say when he did. But he had at least told her something of the early years in Port Mungo. I asked him how she’d responded, and he said he didn’t know, she gave away so little. More to the point, he said, he’d also been waiting to hear what she thought of his catalogue. The day after he’d given it to her she had come into the studio and gone straight to the large canvas, and frowned at it as though she had formed ideas about his work overnight and was testing them against the work in progress. Since then of course she’d moved into the house with us, but still she’d said nothing about the catalogue. I knew it was troubling him, so I made a point of asking every evening if she’d mentioned it yet. I was still a little angry that he’d failed to consult me before inviting her to live with us.

—Not a word.

—Must be awkward.

—It’s extremely bloody awkward. I feel as though she’s come upon me fast asleep, and she’s inspecting me, and I’m naked.

—Jack, it’s your work she’s looking at, not your body.

—It feels the same.

I suppose I understood this, but why didn’t he just ask her? Oh no. That wouldn’t do. He didn’t want to put pressure on the girl. So he continued to fret. But the work went forward, and I understood that by this time he had completed a number of sketches and had begun a full-length study.

—What size? I said.

—Sixty by twenty-four.

That was big. Or tall, at least. I wondered who’d stretched the canvas. Jack used to have an assistant but he’d let him go, there simply wasn’t enough for him to do. I asked him if he was stretching his own canvases now.

—Anna’s helping me.

A little later he told me it had been Anna’s suggestion that he employ her as his assistant. She was apparently intrigued by what went on in a painter’s studio.

—Not surprising, he said, with all the artists in the family. I think she might be one herself.

He described how every morning they’d have a cup of tea in the kitchen, then go upstairs. He said he liked to watch her in the studio, for he recognized that the role she assumed there was his role, the artist’s role, and that in her imagination the studio had become her studio, herself the one who came into it every day to struggle with her demons and out of such conflict bring ideas to life on canvas, or whatever it was she thought he did up there. He said she strode about quite confidently now, no longer awed as she had been at first—there had been something reverent in her manner the first few times, as though the studio were a sanctified place, a chapel, but now she strutted about in front of the
Dream
with a vaguely proprietorial air, and he could almost hear her address the painting, very much as he himself would before he started to work, or
interrogate
it, rather, ask it where it all seemed inclined to go—what it was he must do next—this the throb and thrill of the thing, he said, but also the fraught danger every morning: starting again, that is, on work left the day before in a state of incompletion.

As she peered and pondered she seemed to be playing out some such script in her head, and perhaps her imagination was adequate to the task. Perhaps she did understand what it was Jack did in his studio every day. It was another mark of her growing confidence that she often initiated conversation after they had begun working. She stood naked in front of a large drape of black velvet, gazing off blankly as Jack stared and stared and dabbed and dabbed. Then out it came.

—Gerald said my sister should have been sent to England to be educated. He said he couldn’t understand why she wasn’t.

—Never been a shortage of things Gerald couldn’t understand.

It was the quick bitter riposte of a distracted man at an easel. But he saw her flinch, and reminded himself she had had no word of her sister that had not come from Gerald. She was ripe for the dismantling of the construction of events she had been given since childhood, and he knew he must not hold her responsible for received ideas, no matter how grotesque. In the struggle for Anna’s mind and heart Jack had the advantage now. He must not show his teeth like this, it did not help.

—Gerald had no idea what our life was like.

—Did she get educated, then?

—Sure she got educated.

After a fashion, he might have added; his fashion. He didn’t tell her that the girl practically ran wild.

—So she could read and write.

—And she could paint.

At this she turned towards him, and he told her sharply to look straight ahead.

—You taught her to paint?

—I don’t know that we did much teaching. She just imitated what she saw going on around her.

—Was she any good?

No answer from Jack.

—Do you have any of her work here?

—No.

A long silence now, and not an easy one, the room thick with questions, the most insistent of which was where this sudden anger of his had come from, why such a spiked denial?

—Sorry, he said.

She waited for more but that’s all there was.

—It’s just I don’t know what to say and what not to, she said.

—It’s not your fault.

Another silence.

—I drowned my puppies, she said.

—Oh yes?

—Yeah. I finished it.

Throughout this she stood there unmoving, her arms by her side, her head turned away, her eyes fixed on a point outside the window. He was behind the easel with his head down. The atmosphere grew more relaxed. More time passed in silence. I have seen Jack at work with a model, more than once he has painted me. Touch the canvas, lift the eyes, look hard; touch the canvas again. Mix the colours on the glass, rub the canvas with a damp rag, wash the brush. Jam the brush between the teeth, draw well back to inspect, gesture at the sitter with the brush, then repeat the gesture on the canvas.

Take another long, hard look. Wash the brush, remix the colours, criss-cross dabbing, touch the canvas with a Q-tip, change the brush, stick the old one in a jar of turps, take a swig of tea, and so on and so on and so on—

—I just wish I’d known her, she said. Oh god Jack, maybe this is all a waste of time. It only makes you angry and me confused. We should just say she’s dead and leave it at that, not try and bring her back to life.

She poured this out to the window and began to turn towards him, then thought better of it.

—I think we shouldn’t give up, said Jack.

—Why?

—I don’t think she would want us to.

Hard to argue with that.

Peg in Port Mungo. He wanted to impress on Anna that the girl was born there, delivered into the world, it is true, by an Englishman, but she never knew Europe. The two times Jack brought her to New York she was not happy, she soon became restless and was eager to get home. She was a native of Port Mungo and knew it in a way that he and Vera never would. She grew up with the children of the town, she was in and out of their houses every day of her life, it was of no significance to her that her skin was white while theirs might be any one of a dozen hues between bone and coal. She spoke the patois that Jack had never troubled to learn, she ate what Jack remained too fastidious to eat, in short she encountered none of the barriers between herself and the place that even after years Jack had not crossed. And she ran wild, by which he meant that after a couple of hours of schooling in the tin-roofed building behind the marketplace she had little else to do all day but mess about in leaky boats. Jack saw no harm in it.

And she painted, of course. She loved to paint. They let her use their stuff, Jack said, and encouraged her as much as they could.

Anna stood frowning at the window as Jack talked on, and he was aware, he told me later, that while he worked—and he seemed able to work fast when he talked about Peg, though he was not sure what prompted what, the painting the talking or the other way round—he was aware of a flow of reactions across her face, still turned away from him in quarter-profile, as she took hold of this picture of her sister’s childhood. Did it conform to what Gerald had told her? He tried to see it through Gerald’s eyes, and glimpsed a dark, primitive world where a white-skinned girl scampered half naked with the native children and grew up without benefit of civilization or culture—

—Was she a bad girl?

Curious question. It said much about her, I thought, when Jack told me, and the unresolved complications of her view of herself, I mean this evident attempt to make sense of her own life through an understanding of her sister's. Jack tried to tell her that the concept of badness was not an easy one to apply in a place like Port Mungo. She was always home before dark, and this may have been the only rule they had. Night falls fast in the tropics.

—What about my mother’s drinking?

Here Jack heard the distinct rumble of his brother’s ponderous moral lucubrations.

—What about it?

—Did it affect her?

They let her drink a beer with them when she was eight. When she was seven they let her smoke. There was smoking and drinking in the house every night, no point trying to hide it from her. She was curious, she wanted to know what it was all about, this thing her parents did with such ritualized enthusiasm every evening, and Jack had long been anticipating the day he could sit out on the deck with his daughter, the pair of them drinking beer as they talked about whatever it is that fathers and daughters talk about.

Another lengthy silence.

—Were you a bad girl? said Jack.

Good big grin in response to this question. The English certainly have this distinction, their dentistry is the worst in the world. Already yellowing with tobacco, those chipped, irregular teeth like a set of tilting tombstones in a neglected country churchyard, and the girl barely into her twenties—it was extraordinary that she should be so beautiful, and her teeth so bad. I certainly thought her beautiful, and I know Jack did too. Was it merely youth that lent her beauty in our jaded old eyes? Perhaps, but I think not. That fine head, the swan’s neck, the gaunt, towering frame—the architecture of the creature was so very fine, her flesh so white and her hair so black that it gave me the best sort of pleasure simply to watch her, she reminded me of Jack at that age. I noticed one evening after dinner how his eyes followed her as she moved around the room, and I was aware that mine did the same. Was she aware of it? She didn’t show it, but she must have known what was happening. It was not good, something ghoulish, surely, these two old crocodiles feasting on the beauty of a tall pale girl with bad teeth—!