Port Mungo (22 page)

How pleasant it was to have Anna with us for cocktails again! She came in just after six as I was pulling a cork. Jack had not yet appeared. She flung herself into an armchair and blew air at the ceiling.

—Jesus I’m knackered.

—This will revive you.

—Gin.

—Yes.

—I have something to ask you.

But at that moment Jack appeared in the doorway. He had been in his studio all day and hadn’t changed his clothes, or even washed, as far as I could tell. He looked utterly unkempt. He stood a moment regarding the happy scene.

—I should like a glass of that, please, he said.

Then in he came, and there we were again, together as we had been before all the trouble started. Jack sat down and gazed at Anna, grinning. I don’t believe I had ever seen quite that sort of a grin on my brother’s face before, all teeth, I mean, distinctly canine. There was an odd fixity about it. It lasted too long, and I saw Anna grow uncomfortable. She glanced at me. The moment passed. We decided to have dinner at the Spanish place, which seemed a declaration that we intended to go on as though nothing had happened. The evening passed off smoothly enough, although Jack was very quiet. I was a little surprised by this, for I knew how profoundly relieved he was to have Anna with us again, and I’d expected him to be animated.

I woke up at two in the morning. Utter silence. I turned on the bedside light. I am a good sleeper, this very rarely happens to me. I knew at once what had awoken me. It was not a sound but a thought. It had occurred to me earlier in the day and been repressed, then it had thrust up into my sleeping mind. Not surprising that I’d been unable to deal with it, or that when my defences were relaxed it would announce itself with enough clamour to sit me bolt upright from a deep sleep.

I padded down to the kitchen and made myself a cup of tea. I knew I would not sleep, and at half past four I took a pill. I woke up some hours later, rather groggy. After a shower and a cup of coffee I called Vera’s hotel but she had checked out. I called her house upstate. There was no answer. I sat thinking what to do for ten minutes, then packed a small bag and asked Dora to please tell Jack and Anna that I might not be back till tomorrow. By eleven o’clock I was out on Sixth Avenue looking for a cab to take me to Penn Station.

An hour later I was on a train going up the Hudson. It is a trip I have taken often, and normally it gives me great pleasure. I consider it one of the best train journeys in the world, although I have little with which to compare it. But this day I barely glanced at the river, or rather I glanced at it, I stared at it, but I barely saw it. My mind was elsewhere. When I got off the train at Rhinebeck I had only the most sketchy idea where Vera’s house was, but the taxi driver at the station knew at once who I had come to see, apparently she was well known locally.

The house stood on a bluff with a distant view of the Hudson far below. A short switchbacked driveway gave off a quiet road that wandered into the hills high above the river, near the site of a skirmish in the Revolutionary War, marked by a plaque at the side of the road. A pickup truck was parked beside a large barn, and off in the trees on the far side of the barn I glimpsed a number of wood-and-metal structures. Art. Sculpture. Somewhere a dog was barking. The day was cold and the sky was blue, with bulky white clouds kicking across it high above the river. The back door of the house opened and Vera stepped out onto the porch, wiping her hands on a rag. Seeing me emerge from the taxi she leaned on the railing, and in her expression I detected no ill-feeling but amusement, rather. And curiosity. As I crossed the yard she shouted at me, had I come all this way to apologize?

—I never called anyone a pompous bitch!

—Gin, I’m sorry about that. You’re not a pompous bitch most of the time.

—It’s a bit damn windy up here.

She took me into a kitchen with a long table down the middle of it. The windows on the north side had sheets of clear plastic stapled over them. She made me a cup of coffee. She didn’t ask me what I was doing up here, nor did I tell her, not straightaway. Somehow it didn’t seem strange to either of us that I was there. We sat at the table with our fingers wrapped round our coffee mugs. I felt as though I were in some rustic restaurant that lacked the benefits of central heating.

—I know why you’re here, she said.

—I thought you might.

She was silent. We heard somebody moving around upstairs. Her eyes flickered to the ceiling.

—Do you know that Anna wants to go to art school? she said.

I remembered the girl saying she wanted to talk to me about something. She probably wanted me to help her out financially.

—No.

—She showed me some of her work.

—Any good?

She paused. She was tentative.

—Promising.

We watched each other as another of her artistic judgements hung in the air between us. This one was less contentious than the last.

—I think she needs some help from you. A loan.

—I thought she might.

—You’re a good woman, Gin.

—I’m very fond of her. So is Jack.

—Yes. Jack.

We were back to it. She sat staring at the table and I just plunged right in, and told her what I knew about the night Peg died. I tried to present it as neutrally as I could, the drunken boat trip, the clouds concealing the moon, the coral head waiting in the dark water, and then I asked her the question that had woken me in the middle of the night. What had she meant when she said that if it hadn’t been for Jack Peg would still be alive?

She was staring at me. She looked stunned.

—Gin, that’s a complete fiction.

In her own kitchen, sitting across the table from this woman I had known all my life, I was not combative. I had lived with my brother’s past for so long it was as familiar to me as my own. I knew his account of his own experience was not rigorously objective, but what account is? Any version of as dense a weave of events and feelings and intentions and effects as a
life
will inevitably be flawed, its stresses and emphases reflecting not the truth—as if there were such a thing—but shapes of bias and denial, rather, crafted by memory in the service of the ego. Jack was no different, locked as he was in the Narcissus posture of the dedicated artist, and I had always taken the pinch of salt, though in fact the appalling guilt with which he had for so long been struggling suggested a mind
unwilling
to distort or erase the past so as to live with itself more comfortably—!

But now I asked myself if I had been deceived. The history suddenly seemed unsound, the entire edifice unstable. The wind rattled against the windowpanes and I glanced out at the sky, and across the valley the bare trees on the hills above the river. It occurred to me that a clarity of vision was possible here that was not possible in the city, I mean not just visually but intellectually, or spiritually, even. There was less noise, less static, somehow, in the atmosphere. Vera was talking and I began to pay attention once more, and in that cold kitchen, with the wintry sky outside the window, and in the silence of this high place, her words had a terrible stark ring as she spoke about how badly Jack had treated her and Peg in Port Mungo. In the city truth is an elusive bird, as flighty in its way as falsehood is sticky. Too much noise in the city, too many clashing accounts of any given phenomenon, so one learns to be tentative and circumspect. Sceptical, ironical, stoic, detached: this is the urban posture. Up here her statement was clear and sincere, and I had no desire to contradict her.

—Go on.

So she told me. I knew my brother for a driven man, I knew what he had sacrificed in order to make his art. Had I ever properly attempted to imagine how it was to live with such a man? I thought I had; in Port Mungo I thought I’d seen what his dedication cost those who lived with him—that ingrown, negative energy—but I hadn’t seen it properly, not in view of what Vera was now telling me. She spoke of Jack’s cruelty. How sneering and critical he was about her work, and later about Peg's. How difficult he made it for anyone else to work under the same roof. I thought of the vision he had so often talked about, of the art partnership, the American Studio—surely it wasn’t possible that the man who dreamed that dream could be destructive of the work of others?

But it was, apparently. He could belittle Vera in front of other people, call her a wash-out, a has-been, a never-was. Alone with him in Port Mungo she found it difficult to sustain any belief in herself.

—Why didn’t you go?

—I did go.

—But not for good. Why couldn’t you go away and not come back? If he was so dreadful.

—Because of Peg and Anna.

—You couldn’t take them with you?

No, she couldn’t. She didn’t know how to look after children. She was not a motherly sort of a woman. She drank too much. She wanted to travel, she wanted to paint. She had no money. As a child Peg was happy. She knew to keep out of her father’s way during his working hours, and if she did go into the studio she knew to keep quiet. And certainly she was better off in Pelican Road than she would have been bumming round the Caribbean with her mother. So Vera travelled to get away from Jack, and came back for her children.

I sat at her kitchen table and did not know what to say. I thought: But she too has her bias. Doesn’t she exaggerate? Men and women argue! Terrible things are said in the heat of anger! Men and women when angry with each other do not speak a truth-seeking language, they speak adversarially—they prosecute, they defend, they make a case—

I made this case to Vera but she shook her head. It wasn’t quarrelling, she said. Again the quiet tone, the words falling in a silent room like rocks into water, one by one. My brother was a cruel man. Selfish, unreasonable, demanding, he stayed in Port Mungo because there he could play the tyrant, and she, beaten down, without money, made frail and rapidly slipping into alcoholism, she could neither challenge him nor abandon him, not while he still had Peg and, later, Anna. And Peg belonged to him, he had made this abundantly clear. He looked after her, fed her, sheltered her: she was his. And when she grew up she was still his. Peg took my place, said Vera, quietly, and I became the weak one. The child. You understand what I’m saying?

This was difficult to listen to. Again we heard the footsteps on the floorboards above. She sat up and turned towards the door, but nobody appeared. She looked at me and blew out a lungful of air.

—Shall we go out? Or are you too cold to move?

—A walk would warm us up.

So we walked along the road and got the blood moving in our veins, and the conversation of the kitchen table seemed somehow less awful out in the open air. How little I knew my brother after all, it seemed. He was cantankerous, yes, and stubborn, and selfish, but no more so than any serious artist, or so I had thought. Life with Jack was quite tolerable, and I said this.

—You don’t threaten him.

This was true. I didn’t threaten him, I indulged him. I supported him. I had supported him all his life. I thought about the paintings he had made since coming back to New York, during the years in Crosby Street, and then in my house, and I saw again that they were filled with rage, but more than that, a sort of bravura, and an empty bravura at that, they didn’t
say
anything: these the paintings that coincided with the gradual collapse of his career. The Port Mungo paintings, the work of his so-called tropicalist period, those at least had fed off the colours of the world rather than the colours of his mind, or of his angry, isolated soul. We walked on in silence. I recognized that we had reached the point where we must talk about Peg’s death. We were at a crossroads, I mean we were literally at a junction, where Vera’s road met a road coming in from the east, and where the roads met, a grassy island with a bench overlooked the river. The view was astonishing. We sat in silence for a minute or two.

—Tell me about Johnny Hague, I said.

—Johnny looked after me.

—Was he your lover?

—Gin!

She said my name sharply, with annoyance, as though to say, Listen to what I’m telling you. She said she needed someone to look after her. At times she needed a doctor, often enough there were bruises and cuts after some squalid drunken fight in Pelican Road. Johnny patched up her cuts and he patched up her spirit. He was tender and protective. He loved her. And yes, he was her lover, for some years, early on, but later he was simply a good friend to a woman caught in a ghastly fix, trapped in a destructive relationship and an addiction to drink and unable to get clear of either.

—He knew Gerald, she said.

—I know.

—They were at King’s together.

—He told me. Was he addicted to morphine?

—He had it under control.

It seemed to go with the territory, to be of the character of Port Mungo, somehow, that the doctor would be addicted to morphine while his friendship, or his unrequited love, rather, sustained a woman driven to alcoholism by an artist too obsessed with his work to pay her any attention.

Suddenly I saw Peg as a scapegoat: an innocent, whose function it was to draw off all these toxins and pacify or even
purify
the community with her death. She purified it to the extent that Jack and Vera became free of Port Mungo, free to come north and begin again, and Anna too—Anna fortunate to get away from Port Mungo before she too was crippled by the squalor and disorder of their lives down there.

—And Johnny, what became of him?

—He got out in the end. He came up here to see me. I have no idea how he found me, I forgot to ask. Probably through Gerald.

I asked her how that visit had been. He was a funny, dear man, she said. He wasn’t young any more. None of us is young any more. But still the same old Johnny, dreamy, muddled, idealistic, good-hearted, self-indulgent. A gentleman, she said, if that means anything at all these days. Unsettled, looking for a place, unable to stay in Port Mungo, which apparently was becoming unrecognizable as the western Caribbean attracted more and more visitors, and resorts sprang up along the empty beaches. Johnny had stayed in the farmhouse for a few nights. They’d talked about the old days.