Port Mungo (17 page)

—Quite bad, she said.

—Oh?

—Nothing very dramatic. I didn’t like to worry them.

—You were discreetly bad.

—I suppose so. Were you bad?

—I was wild till Vera came along.

A little later they were sitting over coffee in the kitchen, talking comfortably, intimately, the lunch things not cleared away. Jack asked her if she remembered which room she had stayed in when she first came to the house as a little girl. She didn’t know. He told her it was the same room she’d chosen two weeks ago.

—That’s so weird, she said.

—Why is that weird?

—To not remember the room, but to recognize it. I must have recognized it, right?

—That’s not weird. What’s weird is that you should want to move into the room you lived in when your world had just collapsed.

—I guess I felt safe there.

—I guess you did.

She sipped her coffee. She pushed her chair back from the table and crossed her legs. She flung an arm over the back of the chair, turned towards the window and coughed. He stared at her frowning profile. She reminded him of a photograph he had seen somewhere recently. She turned back and looked straight at him.

—Did my sister kill herself?

Poor dear foolish Peg—I could hear Jack saying it—she had her mother’s knack for finding trouble though not her skill at getting out of it. Too ready to follow, too eager for the good time, never any pausing to consider the consequences. It was her nature, and this being so, Port Mungo was probably the best place for her in all the world. But it was no paradise, and Jack was always emphatic about this, there were forces at work on the river that were darker and more complex than the sunny surface of tropical life would admit—oh, all this oblique stuff, which raised more questions than it answered, yet I imagined it flickering through his mind as he and Anna stared at each other in the kitchen, silent but for the ticking of the clock above the cooker and the muffled roar of the city beyond.

—No.

She dropped her eyes and then her head. She was sat square to the table, an elbow planted either side of her plate and her forehead clamped in the heels of her hands, with her fingers sticking up through her hair. Without moving a muscle, without lifting her eyes, she asked him was he sure. She asked the question in a hollow tone, black empty yawning hole of a question, the way she said it: Are you sure? So hollow it wasn’t even a question. It was just what had to be said.

—Yes.

The hands flopped onto the table, the head came up. She looked suddenly exhausted. She cast a quick fierce sidelong glance at him.

—Gerald said she did.

This now becomes painful in the extreme. When Jack told me what she’d said—“Gerald said she did”—I felt a distinct lurch of horror, and it was all I could do to conceal it from him. He was watching me carefully. He asked me what I thought the girl was talking about. She’d seemed upset, he said. I said I had no idea. He said he didn’t either, but he hadn’t pursued it, he’d let it go, lacking the mental wherewithal to attack yet again Gerald’s skewed idea of what happened in Port Mungo.

But I did know, I knew exactly what Gerald was talking about, or rather, I knew what Gerald thought
he
knew. It was the terrible day he took Anna away from my house. That afternoon I’d gone to the Park Plaza Hotel, where he was staying, but without telling anyone. So much of what had happened earlier in the day was mysterious to me that I felt I couldn’t simply let him carry Jack’s child off to England without at least hearing why he was doing it. So for the hour before they had to go to the airport we talked in his room, and Anna played with her doll on the carpet between us.

It has the feeling of a nightmare for me now, the hour I spent in that hotel room at the Park Plaza. There is a lurid, unreal quality to it, and I remember it in some detail. Gerald was not surprised to see me. He was brisk and urbane as he met me at the elevator and brought me into his room, and had me sit in a wing chair, while he sat across from me on the other side of a glass-topped table with his back to the window. The room faced north, and I had a fine view of Central Park. The leaves were changing colour, and an endless carpet of red and yellow and gold was spread before me as far as the eye could see. Gerald took control of the conversation at once. He asked me how I thought Jack had changed in the years he’d been away, and I knew what he was getting at; like me he’d realized Jack had deliberately destroyed in himself the forms of polite social behaviour we’d been taught as children. Gerald said that presumably he regarded them as vestiges of the English way of life, and abandoned them so as to embrace—what, exactly?—a pure primal existence which allowed him to fulfil his creative urges? This was how Gerald expressed it, and his words dripped contempt and condescension.

Certainly I had glimpsed something of what he was talking about during my days in Port Mungo, and again when Jack and Peg visited me here in the city. But I’d thought it a matter of manners, merely, and I said this to Gerald: What does it matter if his manners are uncouth? He’s an artist, for god’s sake.

My brother took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. As he did so there was a good deal of frowning, and he asked if I didn’t suspect it went much deeper than that. How, deeper? I said. Oh, this foolhardy adventure of his, this idiotic notion that for his art to flourish he must remove himself to some backward place where he wouldn’t be distracted by the complications of urban life. What a delusion that always turns out to be!

I pointed out that Jack had worked hard in Port Mungo. I found Gerald’s attitude unpleasantly patronizing, and I was irritated. He said he didn’t doubt that Jack had been working hard, but in the absence of institutions and art galleries and museums and so on—in other words, with nothing of the culture to guide him—could he have improved very much? He replaced his spectacles and said: Gin, what nature can teach us is quickly exhausted.

I didn’t believe him capable of judging such a thing. I asked him if he was saying that Jack’s life had been a waste.

—If he thinks he can make worthwhile art outside the Western tradition then yes, his life’s been a waste.

—That’s why you’re taking his daughter away?

Now we’d arrived at the crux of it. He stared out of the window. As with the artist, he murmured, so with the man.

Suddenly I thought of Vera, who early on had recognized the limitations of Port Mungo, its dreary sameness, day by sundrenched day, the utter monotony of the tropical existence and all that that monotony brought in its train. She’d found in travel, in exploration of Central America and the Caribbean islands, an antidote to the lassitude she was wise enough to fear.

Gerald’s thoughts seemed to have travelled in the same channel as my own.

—He couldn’t keep Vera down there.

I watched him carefully. He was coming to the point. He told me then exactly why he was taking Anna away. In Vera’s absence, he said, in his loneliness and frustration, Jack had indulged a primitive physical reflex. A primitive reflex, Gin!

And then at last I saw what he was driving at. With utter disbelief I listened to him saying that Jack had recognized under his own roof a girl just coming to sexual maturity, and had gone to her room at night.

—No, Gerald!

—Listen to me!

He was not specific. He could not tell me when it had begun, but he knew what it looked like once it
had
begun. He had seen it in his practice, he said. It was not as rare as I might think. A lot of it in Suffolk. The pattern was invariable in such cases. What cases? Paternal incest.

—Rubbish!

—Listen to me, Gin. The girl adored her father. He would have spoken quietly to her in the darkness. He would have made the arguments such men always make: There is nothing wrong with this, it’s nice, it feels good. And then, when it was over: But you must not tell anyone.

I was shaking my head, I denied absolutely what he was saying to me. You can imagine it having the structure of any clandestine relationship, Gin. You can imagine him convincing the child that it was their special game, this secret thing they did, and teaching her how to enjoy it. How could she resist him, what defences did she have, once he had corrupted her? He was her father. He made her. He had the right, or so he would tell himself.

Still I refused to accept it. I stood up and listened with mounting horror as Gerald talked, his tone as clinical as if he were describing the progress of a disease, which I suppose in his mind he was. On he droned, his voice level and cool, explaining that her conscience would disturb her more and more, and yes, she would tell him it was bad, what they were doing. But how could it be bad? he would say, she must not care what other people thought, because other people were stupid, they wouldn’t understand—

—Who told you all this? I cried.

Little Anna looked up in alarm, and I sank to the floor and told her that everything was all right.

—It doesn’t matter who told me.

I suppose I should simply have walked out, but I was strangely transfixed by these lies. I sat down again. She was entirely in his power, he said. Her shame put her in his power. And as the months passed this squalid drama played out perhaps every night, perhaps every few nights, perhaps only once or twice a month, it doesn’t matter, the effect was the same. The girl would have become very deeply depressed indeed. Feelings of utter worthlessness. The sense of being dirty, filthy, all the time. Her mother was present, for part of it at least. She knew what was going on, at some level, so she drank all the harder to keep the knowledge of what Jack was doing well below the surface—

—That’s enough, Gerald!

—That’s why she killed herself. And that’s why I’m taking Anna away. To protect her from him.

We were both suddenly drained, shocked,
shamed
by what he’d said. It was hard for us to look at each other, as though we too had been contaminated. I stared out of the window at the rotting, dying leaves.

—Who told you this?

He would not say. Then all at once I had the answer.

—Johnny Hague told you!

His eyes flickered to mine and I knew I was right. Oh thank god. I was flooded with relief. Oh thank god. I tried to explain to Gerald that Johnny Hague was not to be trusted, that all this poisonous stuff issued from a love affair gone bad, that Johnny hated Jack and had spread malicious rumours about him, there wasn’t a grain of truth in any of it—Gerald wouldn’t listen! He had no more time, the car was waiting downstairs, they had a plane to catch. I implored him to hear me out. No, he would not discuss it any further. He had told me why he was taking Anna away, and now they must leave.

So I sat in that hotel room high over Central Park and watched as he carried Anna off, knowing that it was Gerald’s mistake but that I could never say anything about it to Jack, because he knew it too and yet had
done nothing.

The day Jack told Anna that he didn’t believe her sister killed herself, she didn’t come back to the house for dinner. I suspected she was staying at Eduardo’s place. Jack and I sat in the sitting room that evening, the pair of us deflated and depressed. All at once Jack stirred, and stood up, and told me to come upstairs with him, he was going to show me the portrait. Strange, he said, as we climbed the stairs, how it had begun to draw him back at night, this was not the first time, despite his having concluded the painting was turning out a failure. He felt a rare ambivalence towards that painting. It was all wrong, so why did he keep going back to it? He did not turn it to the wall, or destroy it, but kept it out, rather, and chalked up its attraction to some mystery of the art-making process, and god knows, he said, he had not come to the end of mysteries in that department, no artist does.

We reached the studio. I have said that Anna was beautiful. But at the same time she was gaunt, and gauche, and it was all there in the picture. And it occurred to me, as Jack carried it to the window, and stood it on the sill, so it was framed by the night sky, that the power of the painting had its source in the very contradiction that rendered the girl beautiful—her beauty only apparent, I mean, because it was conflicted, because the glacial stagnation of a classical kind of beauty was here disturbed by subterranean clashes and fissures: Anna, in crisis, became beautiful, when otherwise she would be merely gawky—was this it? I said this to Jack as I gazed at the painting, and he said he wished he could ask Vera the question, no doubt she had already thought the same thing about someone else and reached conclusions for which he would spend five years groping.

It was an unfinished full-length portrait of Anna standing against a hanging drape of black velvet. It reminded me of a Venus I once saw in the Louvre, a Cranach I think. Her body was slightly torqued from the true, one bent arm lifted, pressed close to her head, the hand clamped to the back of the neck. The other hand was pulled behind her back as though chained or cuffed to the wall. Jack turned off the lights and we moved to the other side of the room. The low glow of the city created an atmosphere in which the pallor of the painted skin seemed to absorb what little illumination spilled in from the outside, then gave it back into the ambient dusk with an effect not unlike moonlight, a cold, pale radiance. Naked, she was like a long white flower, a slender androgynous creature straight out of the pages of romantic mythology.

And I remembered a night in Port Mungo. Jack and Peg loved the wild weather, and this one night we heard the wind rising offshore, and by the time we had made our way to the beach the palms were already flapping and flailing, taking the brunt of the gale not with their trunks but with their leaves. Peg flung off all her clothes and ran into the surf, where she tossed and plunged like a dolphin. It was midnight. The wind died as suddenly as it had arisen, and then the moon emerged from between high clouds pushing west towards the mountains. The sea slackened to a light chop which broke foaming on the sand as the night sky turned dark blue and filled with stars. Peg rose up in the shallow water and waded in towards the shore, lanky slim-hipped creature with her skin bleached out by the moonlight, and it was the same body I saw in Jack’s studio that night.