Port Mungo (20 page)

—You know what it is?

She was standing square in front of the picture now, hands in her pockets, her back to him.

—It’s not her, she said, it’s not even Peg. It’s you, Jack.

Why hadn’t he seen it? Why hadn’t I? I saw it now!

—Haunting. Portrait of the artist as a young man. Right, Gin?

She turned to me, impish fires springing to life in her tired eyes. She was right, it was Jack as a boy. I had seen that thin white body often enough. It was Jack at seventeen, as he was when he first met Vera. He paints himself over and over again, I thought, it’s all he ever does. Even his jungles are self-portraits, he told me so himself.

—Haunting, she said again.

—Fuck off.

That got a laugh out of her. We went downstairs a few minutes later. She wanted to get back to her hotel. On the doorstep I asked her to check out of the hotel and come stay in the house. I said I wanted her to be comfortable, and I meant it.

Now she was touched, and it was all getting too mawkish for words. But she didn’t say yes there and then. She said she wanted to see more of us while she was in the city, and would call the house later. Then off she went, down the steps and into the street, as Jack and I stood watching in the doorway.

I didn’t see Anna until late in the morning. As expected she was suffering from a compound hangover induced by the events of the previous day, partly alcoholic but mostly emotional. She told me she’d been sick in the night, and I wasn’t surprised. There she sat at the kitchen table, in her floppy pyjamas, her eyes full of sleep, and asked me if her mother was in the house.

I was still profoundly uneasy about her reaction to what had happened. I wanted her to confront her violent behavior. I felt that we must deal with it now, and that Vera must help. I told her Vera had gone back to the hotel and would call later, and then I asked how she felt about what she’d done to Eduardo. I saw as if through a pane of glass how the pain flooded up and was forcefully pushed back down. Her face puckered like a child's, then turned hard. Her eyes briefly filled with tears but not a single one spilled onto her cheek. Was I right—did I
have
the right?—to question the manner in which she chose to regulate her emotional life?

—It’s too soon, I said. Let’s have a few quiet days.

I think perhaps she had not yet considered the immediate future. I think the idea of a few quiet days filled her with dismay—the prospect, I mean, of having quietly to digest this recent ugliness. Again I saw the hurt bewildered child rise up behind her eyes, and like a child she asked if we could all have dinner with Vera tonight.

—You call her, I said.

She took the number and padded out of the kitchen, and I knew that for a few days at least she would be fragile. Good that she had us to support her.

Later I was pacing the sitting room, waiting to hear what was happening about dinner. We hadn’t seen her all afternoon. It was time for cocktails, and still no word. I asked Jack if he thought she was all right. He was sure she was. So many complications, and all to do with Anna. At least now we had Vera as well. She would help us see her through it, and eventually Anna would laugh about it. Her mother had always found it easier than either of us to see life in its comic aspect. I said this to Jack.

—Vera pretends that life’s a comedy, he said, but deep down she knows it’s tragic. That’s because she feels.

—Toad, don’t be profound. I’m not in the mood.

—It’s the sign of a generous spirit.

—What is?

—Sparing your companions your tragic view of existence. More people should try it.

By nine that night it was clear Anna had forgotten our dinner plans. I told Jack I was going to check her room. Up the stairs I went, along the corridor, and knocked on her bedroom door. No answer. I went in. It was as I suspected. In fact it was as I dreaded, for I had grown more and more certain that she had gone. The black leather bag she had slung up on top of the closet was not there. Her underwear drawer was empty, as was her bedside drawer, except for a subway token. Nothing hung on her hangers. I sat on the bed a moment before going back downstairs.

—She’s gone, I said.

I picked up the phone, and while I waited for the hotel to answer I said: You’re not surprised.

He shook his head and walked to the window.

—Is Mrs. Savage still with you? I said.

Jack turned from the window and faced me from across the room. I nodded as I heard the answer, then hung up.

—She’s gone too.

Anna did not make contact for more than a week, so we had only our imaginations to provide any picture of where they might be. The house seemed very empty. We both, I think, felt abandoned, spurned. Vera had left her phone number in the country and we rang it several times, but there was no answer, nor was there in the days that followed. Could they have gone to Port Mungo? It was, in a way, plausible, but no. Ageing painter takes lost girl to jungle paradise where lost girl was born. In Nature’s Womb both healing and redemption occur. Lost girl emerges whole, artist dies happy. Credits roll to the sound of violins.

Thus my thoughts as I paced the big room, and Jack shifted about in an armchair, frowning, tapping his fingernails on the side of his wineglass.

—Dear god I wish I still smoked, he said.

Unable to contact any public authority—to say what, that she’d gone off with her mother without telling us?—unable to do anything but wait and fret—these are the kind of hours, said Jack, that the gods of anxiety intended for the smoking of a great many cigarettes. But he resisted, and continued to resist, and so, day after day, we moved about the house in silent despond, and the weather mirrored our mood. I told Dora what had happened, and she, dear woman, as always was a rock. No word from anybody. Even in New York, where communication fizzes through circuits of connection as dense as the root systems of a potato patch, inexplicable lulls do occur and one grows oddly becalmed. The phone doesn’t ring all day, nothing appears in your mailboxes and you wonder if the equipment is faulty—but no, it is just systemic lull. The city, as though to echo and amplify the deafening silence from mother and daughter, became silent too. There were mists, those salty mists which drift into New York in the early spring and remind you that this is after all an Atlantic seaport, and though it has since become the capital of practically everything you can think of, in the beginning what mattered was the harbour and the ocean. And so, fogbound, with no signals reaching us, our thoughts turned in abstract circles which soon became knots, tedious knots, knots of tedious solipsism.

Jack spent many hours in the studio that week and seriously debated buying a pack of cigarettes. He said it was like the first days after giving up. The sense memory of tobacco came flooding back at all hours—he said he could
taste
the bloody things! What old association was this now clamouring for closure? He allowed himself to be absorbed by the conflict—to smoke or not to smoke—he said it kept his mind off Anna. Then there was the portrait. If he stared at it a few more hours, would he learn anything new? Marks, daubs, the work of his own hand—what trace there of anything outside his own consciousness? The lingering vapour of another being, perhaps, but the vapour faint already and growing fainter with every minute he gazed at it. And if cigarettes tempted him, what of the old photographs—should he haul them out and render himself weakly liquid staring at faces of people frozen in time, with their mistakes still waiting to happen? No. No. And he came to see this as the work he would make of those misty days, this his performance art, to smoke no cigarettes, to look at no old photographs, to be as spartan, as minimal, as severe in his appetites as it lay in his power to be, which meant one glass of wine a night, no more. Fruit and salads, one glass of wine, there was madness in the house, he could feel it, he said, he was vulnerable to it, and to remain immune to it he must seal his psyche tight: become Fort Jack, this was how to stay sane and healthy in a time of unease and disorder—and yes, I thought, hearing all this, and profoundly bewildered by it, there is madness in the house, and I know where it’s coming from. But I said nothing.

So the strange days passed. Jack became ever more silent as the ascetic mood deepened and his blood-sugar level dropped. Dora was like a ghost moving through fog at the periphery of vision. The house was quiet. The city was quiet. Even the park was quiet, Jack said; he walked there most days. Somewhere Vera was talking to Anna. She was answering her questions. She was telling her the story of Peg’s death, and I didn’t know why that made Jack so anxious. What did he have to fear—that she was telling Anna the story she had once told Johnny Hague?

I asked Jack why he was worried. He was leaning against the window frame, watching the street—he seemed always now to be watching the street, I did not have to ask him why, and he nodded. His answer was curious. Anna had come to New York to find out about her sister, he said, but he had wanted to prepare her before he told her. Not merely by establishing the context of their lives in Port Mungo, but by allowing her to get to know
him.
Only when she properly knew
him,
he said, would she properly understand the circumstances surrounding Peg’s death. This I could understand, I suppose. My brother was not young, and with the years he had accumulated layers. He could not reveal himself to the girl over a weekend. He had facets, dimensions, carapaces—selves—a thousand moving parts constitute the coherent machinery of a mature human being. Let her get to know him, this was his idea, and then she could begin to make sense of her sister’s death.

It was growing dark outside, and I asked if he wanted his glass of wine now, but no, he didn’t. Nor did he want the lights on. The shadows thickened in the sitting room. What he feared, he said, was that Anna would get a botched version from Vera, who would long ago have constructed an account that lessened or even eliminated her own responsibility for the accident. She would then have clung so tenaciously to her account that she would now be genuinely unaware that it was untrue. Vera disliked uncertainty or ambiguity, he said. She always needed the
gesture,
and could not tolerate any delay in the making of the gesture. When she painted, he said, it was not hard to see the same impatience, the same inability to linger over a decision, the pressing necessity to decide the thing at once and then move on. That’s how she would have made a picture of Peg’s death, a few bold strokes to give it a shape, a form—

All this I heard as Jack paced the floor with his fingers twitching and clenching, and I could not tell him what I feared—that the few bold strokes Vera made for Anna would be the same ones she’d given Johnny Hague. I had begun to suspect that that was precisely what Jack feared too.

We talked no more about it that night. I think we were both exhausted. I had certainly had enough. In the old days we would have gone out and got very drunk, and Jack would have evacuated the complicated contents of his brimming heart as I listened sympathetically and made sense of it all, and in the morning we would not remember much except the feeling that painful matter had been spilled, though whether it had been swept away in the spilling was another question. But we did not behave like that now, Jack and I. Not simply because getting drunk was far more expensive, physically, than it once had been, but also because we understood that it would serve no purpose. Things truly important to people of our age are not susceptible to alcohol, alcohol changes nothing. It is good for everything else however.

So our state of suspense continued. We would not be able to move on, or to move back, rather, to our normal life until Anna returned and we learned what Vera had told her. How sad it was, I thought, that this guilt of his was without any real foundation in reality. Poor Jack. All these years, tormenting himself with the question—if I had done this, or that, would she be alive today? Useless thinking, but impossible to abandon so long as some undying spike of powerful emotion attached to the idea that Peg might have been saved, and himself the one who could have done the saving.

And then I asked myself: And Vera’s position in all this? Was it her doing, the undying spike of emotion that kept alive my brother’s guilt? Did she collude in this guilt, connive at it, stimulate and sustain it? And with that thought the figure of Vera rose up in my mind, loud, talkative, alert, fearless, engaged—yes, drunk—yes, selfish and irresponsible—and I stood her beside my brother, my serious, secretive, fierce, driven brother—my self-deluded, narcissistic brother—and I thought: There is only one person in the world who can live with Jack Rathbone, and that is me.

We began to wonder if Anna would ever come back. She had left nothing behind, only her guitar, which I’d found in its hard black case under the bed. I’d opened the case, and found it was an expensive-looking instrument with a mother-of-pearl inlay in the neck. I ran my fingers across the strings. We had never heard her play it. Surely she would come back for it. I watched my brother wandering around the house, distracted, and I was suddenly reminded of the days after Peg’s death, when he was in that same state of grief and loss. He was in mourning for Anna just as he had been in mourning for her sister twenty years before, and finally I understood why he so fervently insisted on the girl’s resemblance to Peg. It was because Anna had
replaced
Peg. She had brought her back to life, and a deep pain in Jack had at last begun to ease, and in his soul he had felt a sort of peace. All this she had awoken in him, I had seen it with my own eyes, although I had not properly understood it until this moment: Anna had become a double of her own sister, sufficiently like her that Jack was able to flesh her out, emotionally, as it were, to the scale of Peg. The full-length portrait was his declaration that just such a substitution had occurred.

But for this—what?—this simulacrum, this
ghost
?—to die, figuratively—what did this mean? How could a ghost die? What did it mean to talk about the death of a ghost? But this it seems was what my brother was mourning during those empty days, he was mourning the death of a ghost. Is he going mad? I thought. Is he mad already? I began to be seriously concerned.