Port Mungo (21 page)

The household, as I say, was in a state of suspension and there was little I could do but wait and watch—wait for Anna to come back, or at least to let us know where she was, and that she was safe—and watch Jack. Watch
over
Jack. Watch over him as you would any grieving person, vigilant, ready to step in with balm and comfort as required. It was as a result of this watching that I realized that the man was bereaved, and that he’d been thrust into emotional territory he had occupied before.

Every night I took him out to one or another of the restaurants in the neighborhood, usually the Spanish place, but he grew less communicative with each passing day. I asked him if he was doing any work. A shrug, a baleful glance flung across the table as he picked listlessly at his food. Jack had that same power Vera had, he could create an atmosphere around himself, and his silences now were freighted with spiritual significance. A kind of gloomy majesty attended him in his despondency, and though I was perfectly capable of puncturing the mood I did not. My task, at this point, was simply to be vigilant until the crisis passed.

I was curious about a couple of things. I wanted to know what was going on upstairs, between him and the portrait of Anna. Was he glooming over it like some decrepit obsessive in a dingy romantic novel? Or had he turned it to the wall? I asked him if he’d turned it to the wall. Loud bark of laughter, and diners at nearby tables turned to see what had so amused the tall silent man in the corner. This was the most vivid manifestation of life I’d seen in him in days.

—Barely ever look at it, Gin. Don’t need to turn it to the wall.

I didn’t believe him for a moment.

—Still think it’s wrong?

—It’s not the picture that’s wrong, it’s her. There’s nothing there.

—What do you mean?

For a moment I thought he had penetrated his delusion: there was nothing there
of the sister.
But I was wrong.

—There’s nothing to her. Well, is there, Gin? Did she ever say anything that stuck in your mind?

Plenty, I thought, but I was more interested in his own thoughts. I made an ambiguous noise and said nothing.

—Empty, really, like a child. All those black clothes—just a frightened kid from Surrey. All Gerald’s fault. No impress of experience, do you see? Locked up tight in her narcissism. She won’t amount to anything.

Shaking his head, he attacked his lamb.

—It’s there in the painting? I said.

—It’s there in the painting, he said, chewing vigorously. Or, rather, it’s not there.

Devalue the object of desire and the pain of loss diminishes. That at least is the theory. The poor man must have been hurting very badly indeed if he’d been reduced to this. There was some truth in what he was saying, but it was not apparent to him. He was speaking the truth even as he was telling himself lies. The other matter I was curious about was to do with Vera, and what he’d been thinking about her these last few days. I asked him.

—Do you think her mother’s reached the same conclusion? I said.

—Pah!

Clatter of cutlery, more turning of heads. Jack glared at his neighbours and the heads turned away.

—Listen, he hissed. You know her. She’s a devious woman. This isn’t about Anna.

—It isn’t?

He shook his head, drank off some red wine, ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth and went at his roast potatoes with a will. You’d have thought he hadn’t eaten for a week. Something was newly released in him, some pent energy, and he needed fuel.

—It’s about me.

I wiped my mouth with my napkin so as to conceal the smile that sprang to my lips. Locked up in narcissism indeed. Anna was worthless and Vera was using her to plot against him, was this it?

—How is it about you?

—Oh come
on,
Gin, you’re not such a fool as that. Of course it’s about me. Everything Vera does is about me, you know that. She didn’t fool you too, did she?

His eyes blazing at me in the candlelight, mad, quite mad. What to do, encourage him to spill it all, or pin this nonsense to the floor where we could see it for what it was?

—You think she’s going to pour some fiction into Anna’s ear so as to turn her against you, so as to get back at you—for what, exactly—?

—Oh Gin.

This was murmured by a man who seemed to have nothing more on his mind than clearing every last morsel of food from his plate and draining every last drop of wine from his glass. I waited, feeling the first stirrings of annoyance. He was cocky in his madness.

—All right, I said, enlighten me.

He finished eating and wiped his mouth, though the supercilious smirk remained. This wasn’t Jack, this sneering paranoid—madness cheapens people, I suddenly thought, makes a man one-dimensional, a tawdry caricature of himself. Then I saw something else in his face, and it was as though the current had suddenly been reversed. The madman’s anger crumbled like a cardboard mask, revealing only pain.

—She blames me for Peg, and I can’t bear it any more. It’s too much for me, Gin.

I was on the point of saying, Oh, but that’s absurd—but I did not. Instead I waited. All I saw was turmoil, and I knew I was right: he blamed himself, and had struggled with the guilt for twenty years, and now he was too old to bear it any more. He was more fragile than he appeared. I had protected him from the world for years, but now the world, the past, had slipped in under my defences and a blade was at his throat. All this I saw in that old man’s panic.

—But
how
does she blame you? Jack. Listen to me. What is it that she blames you
for
?

He couldn’t answer. He was overcome with emotion. He lifted his napkin to his lips. How was I to help him if he wouldn’t tell me the truth?

—Jack, she’s older too.

Piece of string to a drowning man, this, but he seized it all the same and hauled himself up onto a dry place.

—That’s true, of course. She might be kind—

At that moment his jaw fell open, his expression was transformed. Now he was gazing past me, and rising to his feet, absently thrusting his napkin onto the table. I wheeled round in my chair to see what it was he was looking at, and there in the doorway of the restaurant, her eyes raking the place, stood Anna.

Chapter Seventeen

She hadn’t seen us. Then she saw Jack, standing over the table with his arm lifted, a beacon of hopeful welcome. She moved towards the corner where we sat in the shadowy recess we had always occupied—until, that is, she came into our lives and moved us near the bar, where she could smoke. Lips pursed, frowning, she negotiated the narrow channel between the tables, and diners glanced up incuriously as she pushed through to the corner where the two elderly parties had been having rather an emotional dinner. I half rose off my chair, aware that I was wreathed in smiles and filled with a pleasure stronger by far than I would have liked—in fact I was very displeased with the girl—and annoyed with myself for being such an old fool, but delighted all the same to be an old fool now that she had come home. Had she come home? I glanced at my brother. My delight was as nothing to the silly fondness turning his crusty features to the consistency of custard. She sat down and looked from him to me and back to him, grinning.

—Hi, she said.

Jack’s long fingers had closed on hers and held them fast.

—You are a wicked child, he said, to run off without a word like that—and dear god there were tears in his eyes, in the candlelight you could see them glistening!

—Do you think they’ll let me smoke? Everybody’s stopped eating.

—Smoke, smoke, said Jack, smoke your little lungs out, just don’t go off without telling us again.

—You weren’t really worried.

—I was out of my mind.

—Gin, was he out of his mind?

She turned to me and whatever apprehension she may have had about facing the pair of us, it had quite evaporated in the warmth of her reception. She was softer in her manner than I’d ever seen her. It seemed entirely sincere.

—He was, I said. We both were.

—Well I’m sorry.

—So where were you? Account for yourself. More wine, I think. Where’s Luis?

—Hasn’t touched a drop since you left, I murmured, the pair of us now complicit in the joke of Jack going out of his mind with worry.

—I was at my mother's.

—Wrong. We phoned your mother several times. No answer.

—We thought it was you. We decided not to pick up.

So it was going to be all right after all, I thought. If she believed the worst of Jack she wouldn’t be behaving like this, playful and affectionate, almost flirtatious. The relief was washing over him like a shower of rain. He looked ten years younger. Luis appeared, and at last Jack let go of her hand, and ordered more wine: a good bottle this time. Luis saw we were celebrating, and without a change of expression produced an ashtray from his pocket and slid it onto the table.

But what was to happen now? Now that we’d all expressed how nice it was to see one another again? What had she learned from Vera, and how had it affected her feelings towards Jack? And how were we to begin to talk about any of this?

—I didn’t know my mother taught you how to paint.

The tact of youth. But Jack was far too well tempered to bridle for even a second.

—That’s what she told you?

—Yeah.

She grinned at him through a cloud of cigarette smoke. Jack lifted his wineglass and for a few seconds his proud head, with its blade of a nose, and the soft love in the hooded old eyes, was the head of my father. It was many years since I’d seen such tenderness in him.

—It’s true, he said.

He was so tender he was honest.

—I took a lot from her, he said. I mean I stole a lot from her. I took it when she wasn’t looking.

—She told me.

—What else did she tell you?

I was silent as this went forward. We were serious now. Jack laid his hands flat on the table and was staring at them, frowning, as though they displeased him in some way. Anna was suddenly off balance, unsure of herself.

—She said you took her canvases and worked them over.

Dear god I hadn’t heard that one before! Jack continued to stare at the table. A few long seconds ticked by. He lifted a hand as though about to make a solemn declaration, then laid it gently back down on the table. He regarded Anna with an expression of mild injury.

—I only did it once.

Even so!

—Well, twice.

—That’s very bad, right? For a painter.

She knew nothing!

—It’s pretty bad, said Jack.

Then he explained how he’d been desperately stuck in his work, and he’d gone into Vera’s studio and found a canvas on the easel, and for the first time in weeks something had moved in him, so he took the canvas into his own studio and carried on where she’d left off, and that got him going again.

—She was pissed off, right?

—Oh, she was pissed off, said Jack.

I wasn’t as brave as Anna. I didn’t ask him how he could have done it again. I presume in identical circumstances, with identical results. It must have been worth it. Perhaps he felt justified by his vision of a family partnership in art. But it was quite enough for one evening, and he didn’t ask her what else Vera had said about him. The point was, Vera had spared him. She had not turned the girl against him, and she so very easily could have done.

—What are your plans? I said.

—Can I stay at the house a bit longer?

I glanced at Jack.

—I think that might be possible.

—I’ve got an idea but I don’t want to talk about it yet in case I jinx it, do you know what I mean?

Yes, we knew what she meant, and we left the restaurant soon after, doubtless to the relief of Luis, what with all the smoking and shouting that had come from our table. How strange it was to come up the steps to the front door, the three of us together again, and how different our mood from what it had been just two hours before. And Jack, instead of mourning a ghost, was emanating a profound contentment. He was himself again, and this was a source of no small comfort to me, for I had been seriously concerned that he was losing the ability to distinguish the fictions of his own mind from the truth.

The next morning I came downstairs to the kitchen to find Anna on the phone to her mother. She hung up. She told me that Vera had travelled down to the city with her.

—Gin.

—Yes.

—I know I’ve upset your life but I’ll be gone soon.

—You’re very welcome, Anna. I mean that. You must stay here as long as you want to.

A little later I called the hotel from my study and asked Vera if we could meet.

We met in a busy coffee shop at Broadway and Chambers which displayed in the window framed photographs from the 1950s of various holders of the Miss Subway title. It was a nice day in early April. The morning was pleasantly cool, the sky a cloudless blue. By day Chambers Street is crowded, teeming, the traffic dense and noisy. Vera was sitting in a banquette with a pot of tea and an English muffin in front of her. It made me smile. I thought her more a neat-scotch-rare-steak sort of a woman. I said so.

—Gin, it’s ten in the morning.

—And?

She allowed me my joke.

—We had a lovely time with Anna last night, I said.

—She told me.

—I wanted to thank you.

—Why?

—I think you know why.

—Tell me.

So I told her. I said that Jack’s relationship with Anna was very important to him. He’d be badly upset, I said, if the girl were to take against him. Vera regarded me coolly. In the light of day I was able to get a good look at her at last. Extraordinary that all the hard living had failed to ravage her utterly. She could pass for fifty, or less, and it was only when she turned her head to the window and the sunlight flooded her face that I saw the work of the years stitched into the skin around her eyes and mouth. The jaw was firm, the teeth were white, more or less, minus the one still missing in the top row to the left. Her hair was threaded with silver now and heaped in an untidy bun pinned with combs and pencils. Silver rings on her fingers, several with turquoise stones from New Mexico. She had been sober for some years. She wore a baggy black sweater under a denim jacket with various pins and brooches on the breast.

I wondered was her lover a man or a woman. Women our age often tire of the male. We opt instead for the tenderness and candour and faithfulness of our own species. It’s all we want, really. And to be made to laugh.

—I’m glad you appreciate it, she said.

—I hate to see him distressed. He’s quite frail.

Then to my astonishment she bridled.

—The hell with that, she said,
frail
!—and she leaned in toward me, tapping a fingernail smartly on the tabletop.

—I didn’t tell Anna everything I know about your brother, she said, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t tell you.

—I know my brother.

—Gin, you know nothing.

I was certainly startled by this turn in the conversation. I had wanted simply to do the woman the courtesy of thanking her for her discretion, but it seems I’d enraged her by referring to Jack’s frailty. I was on my guard at once. I thought: She may be sober but she’s as volatile as ever. I didn’t think I wanted to know what she apparently intended to tell me, but I had little choice in the matter.

—Jack’s not
frail,
she barked.

—He spent twenty years in Port Mungo raising your daughters while you were running around.

—That’s what he told you?

—I saw for myself.

She eyed me silently for a moment or two then glanced out the window. Pedestrians streamed by. Some blocks away a siren wailed. She wheeled back, and spoke fast, barely drawing breath, the Glasgow thick in her voice and the eyes sparking, the fingernails again tapping an angry tattoo on the table. She told me that Jack only ever wanted one thing from her. Knowing she was better than he was, he took whatever she had, and for him that’s what life was all about, she said, stealing ideas from other people because he was a third-rate artist himself.

—And I suspect you know it, Gin, she said, but you two have this myth of Genius Jack. Well that’s a crock. He dragged me down there because he couldn’t bear to see me succeed up here. He was all eaten up with jealousy, and I truly think he found it absurd that a woman could have more talent than he did and that’s why he wanted me down there in that dump, so I’d be invisible. Why do you think he wanted babies? It kept me quiet while he got his painting lessons.

There was a grain of truth in all of this, but not much more, I knew Jack’s history. She hadn’t finished. She got restless, she said, of course she did, what woman wouldn’t? She had lost her way, turned into a lush and screwed up a promising career.

—But if you think Genius Jack stayed down there all that time out of discipline or perseverance or whatever, you’re wrong. He stayed down there because he was scared to show his stuff where it mattered, and that’s the only reason he was around for Peg, fear. That’s right. Simple as that. And if you think he did well by Peg then think about this, Gin. If it wasn’t for him she’d still be alive.

She stopped as abruptly as she’d started. We stared at each other for several seconds, and her words hung in the air between us like a bad smell. I didn’t know where to start, I was reeling.

—So his work’s no good—

The appalling tension she’d created slackened off markedly. She was brutally dismissive.

—Everybody knows that.

—And the shows? His success, his name?

—He got lucky. He came back here with that neo-primitivism, or neo-tropicalism, or whatever the hell you want to call it, and it struck a chord. There was a ton of rubbish out there then, and a ton of money too. He was very clever. He convinced a lot of people he was Gauguin come back from the dead. It was a hoax, and if you had an eye, Gin, you’d have seen it.

—Sour grapes.

—Oh don’t be so ridiculous. Jack wrecked my prospects long before that.

—I thought you had more . . .

I couldn’t think of the word.

—So did I. You think I’m proud I let him derail me? He knew what he was doing. He used me, Gin, he took whatever he could get—

It astonished me, and it saddened me, to hear her blaming Jack for her own failure. I was silent. She was staring out the window again. Then she hauled her bag up into her lap and groped around inside it, and though she kept her face down I could see the tears falling. The stories we tell ourselves so as to go on living and not go mad. She hated Jack because he had succeeded where she had failed, and she blamed him for that failure. Suddenly up came a tear-streaked face with both eyes blazing.

—Don’t you feel sorry for me—I know you, Gin Rathbone!

—I don’t think it’s Jack you’re blaming here.

—No, you think it’s all me. You’re wrong. I’m not too happy with how things have turned out but I do okay. I just thought you should know your brother’s a fraud, worse than a fraud.

I gazed at her. I shook my head sadly. There was a reason she’d made such a mess of things, as an artist, as a woman.

—You’re just like him, aren’t you? she said suddenly.

She spoke in a tone almost of wonder, as though a light had been lit in her mind. I saw at once what was happening.

—So I’m a fraud too.

Here she snorted with laughter.

—You don’t have an attic full of bad painting to show for it.

I rose to my feet.

—I’m sorry you feel this way, Vera, I said. I only wanted to thank you for keeping your feelings to yourself while Anna was with you. The effort was clearly too much for you.

—Gin, you can be such a pompous bitch, you know that?

—Goodbye, Vera.

With that I left, and not until I was out on the street did I allow the rage to rise, and for a moment I could not move. I stood there on the sidewalk, and the crowd parted round me as though I were a rock in a stream. Then I looked for a cab.

There is something
viscous
about a lie. One knows it for the lie it is, but all the same—something sticks. I have said that there are two large pictures in the big sitting room downstairs, Jack’s
Narcissus
and Vera’s massive
Vandal at the Gates.
Each has a wall to itself. The house was empty when I got back, and I went into the big room and stood first in front of Jack’s painting, then in front of Vera's. Then back to Jack's. For fifteen minutes I went back and forth. At the end of that time I had convinced myself that Vera’s scabrous critique of my brother’s work was motivated by envy and nothing else. All the same a whisper of doubt troubled me, until this idea of viscosity occurred to me. One knows a lie for what it is, but all the same, something sticks.