Staring At The Light (16 page)

‘What?’

‘You know what. The Bonnard sketch.’

There was a particular blank space on an otherwise blank wall, marked by a nail. The space had been wiped clear of dust, showing
a cleaner surface and smear marks. Cannon shook his head slowly, like a donkey trying to distract flies around the eyes, sat
down on his bed and motioned her towards the cherry armchair. ‘I’m allowed to make decisions, you know,’ he said resentfully.

‘Of course you are. Everything is your decision. But what have you done with it?’

He stared at the ceiling, hands clasped behind his head, as if the sight of the ominous stains would give him inspiration.
Sometimes it did. ‘I took it somewhere safer. It isn’t safe here. People have been round. I’m sure
he
sent them. I took it to William’s surgery.’

‘Does William know what it is?’

‘No, but he knows it’s beautiful. He’ll look after it.’

‘Cannon, people are in and out of there all the time.’

‘So? People don’t go to the dentist to examine the paintings on his walls, do they? They can scarcely
think
by the time they get there. They sit, frozen, with a magazine, pretending to read it, that’s what they do. And, when you
come to think of it, it has to be the last place Johnnyboy would go. A dentist? Never in a million years. But he might come
here. I feel it. He’ll sense where I am, in time. Johnny has his own satellite.’

It was a long, infuriating speech for Cannon. ‘Does it work the other way round?’ she asked, trying to keep sarcasm out of
her voice. ‘Can you picture where
he
is? Because it would be bloody useful if you could.’ He treated the question with the utmost seriousness.

‘In a vague kind of way, yes. But there’s nothing special about that. I know his regime and his habits, you see. I lived with
him every day of my life until four years ago. He won’t alter, you see. He can’t. So I never know, if I close my eyes and
see him in places where I expect to see him, that it’s because I already
know where he’ll be. He was swimming this morning, wasn’t he? There’s nothing … what’s the word? … telepathic about that.
He always does on a Saturday. Same place, where he can have the pool to himself.’

‘He looked ridiculous,’ Sarah said shortly. ‘About as frightening as a sick porpoise. Cannon, are you sure?’

‘Have I ever told you a lie?’

She looked at him closely. He could look quite guilelessly stupid. The smile revealed the magnificent evenness of his crowned
teeth. William’s work. William had altered Cannon’s life far more radically than she ever could. ‘No. I’m not sure you have
the knack with lies.’

‘Doesn’t make me honest either. Julie says I’m a moral vacuum.’

But not a liar or a thief
. Sarah was prowling again. She picked up the Johnnyboy sketch, bold lines, hangdog features, black teeth. She scrutinized
it. The teeth, which were like bars in the middle of the face, turned the expression into a snarl far removed from Cannon’s
deliberately vacuous smile, and she frowned at the depiction. ‘This is what you think, you see,’ she said finally. ‘Your version,
without him standing in front of you.’ She put the sketch down. ‘He
swims
like a sad bulldog. Cannon, why are we doing all this? All this running and hiding for
this
? He
looks
like a sad bulldog. He
swims
like a sad bulldog. My boss’s wife says he talks rubbish.’

‘That’s only a photo,’ Cannon said.

‘What do you mean, only a photo?’

‘Stupid!’ he shouted, advancing like an avenging
angel, taking the sketch, tearing it in pieces with his big hands. The rapid movement was so violent and sudden in itself
that she might have been afraid, but she had never been afraid of Cannon. The hands were large enough to encircle her throat
and throttle her; they were ludicrously large hands and, like his head, capable of independent movement, as if not connected
by the same driving force of a common brain – even his fingers seemed to waggle free from each other. But nothing of his bizarre
flurries of movement came to anything until he painted, leaning his whole body into it, unselfconscious, like the conductor
of an orchestra, sublimely concentrated. She waved him away. Patted the air with the palm of her hand, dismissing his extremes,
inviting him to sit but feeling impertinent for all that. They were both trespassers in this house.

‘You don’t understand. A proper portrait of a man takes time. It has time in the fabric, time in the paint. Time to watch
the changes. That’s a snapshot. Of one moment in time when I
thought
I could see him, did – do. I loved him, you see. I love him still. I couldn’t even sketch him without
feeling
for him. What have I got, poor bastard?
EVERYTHING
.
Teeth
. A wife who
loves
me. A talent. And what has he got?
Nothing
.’

He sprang to his feet, lit with his own rage, precise with it, suddenly delicate in purposeful movement. He clipped a sheet
of paper to the hardboard on the easel, flurried around for a pen, drew in a few strokes. Took it away and drew another on
a fresh sheet, another, another. It was so frenetic she could scarcely
look. Sheets of drawing paper scattered the floor with the ink drying. His brother; his brother; his brother, drawn without
love in a series of cartoons that made him wink, grin all over his evil teeth, frown for a moment, distend his rubber lips,
crease his brow, purse his mouth into a wavy line, look kindly, look like a savage, look like a photofit, a convict, a mad
saint. It did not help. In the last he looked like a hungry ghost with nothing to feed his jowls. At the last there was love
in the portrait. Her throat was sore and her mouth was dry. Cannon had begun to cough; the kind of polite cough that hurt
but sounded as if it was designed to interrupt a conversation, with no other purpose, turning into a spasm of dry coughing,
even as he worked. ‘See?’ he kept saying. ‘See? See?’

She saw nothing, apart from the spaniel eyes in the sketches and Cannon’s perception that no man was evil incarnate. She had
never met a man who was; not even Charles Tysall, who had tortured her and given her the scars. Evil, to her mind, was a quality
more shocking for rarity. She did not believe in the devil. She looked at the several depictions of the face and could only
see, in her mind’s eye, the clumsy body beneath it, barrelling its way across water with all that pathetic effort, afraid
of witnesses. The sad clown.

‘I’ll paint you a proper portrait from these,’ Cannon was muttering. ‘I’ll do it after dark. He never liked bright light much.’
Suddenly he laughed, sat down abruptly. ‘We used to go out after dark, you know, so no-one could see our teeth and laugh at
us. We never saw the light.’

‘What are we going to do, Cannon?’ she asked.

He liked the
we
, although he resented it. ‘I don’t rightly know. Wait, until the time limit. Believe him. Watch out for him. Guard everything.
Until he accepts the fucking rules he set and finally
accepts
, I’m not coming back.
Can’t
come back.’ Then, more to himself, he added, ‘Oh,
God
, give us a child.’

‘Is that what he wants, the resumption of a love affair?’

Love affairs were ten a penny to her, not to him. It was his turn to prowl, picking up his coat, putting it down uncertainly,
arranging the tubes of paint in neat rows. ‘Yes, he wants that, and a new game. A nice fat explosion. He probably wants to
blow up the Houses of Parliament with me to help. He always said Guy Fawkes was a fool for getting it wrong. Odd, isn’t it?
That’s the only piece of history he ever remembered from school.
When
we went to school, him to history and me to the art class. I went to that. Teacher took me home and tutored me. Johnnyboy
didn’t like that,
nooo
, not at
all
. Beat the shit out of me for a while, then got bored with the effort. There’s always hope. He always gives up in the end.’

‘Perhaps if you gave him the painting?’ she suggested quietly.

‘No,’ he said emphatically. ‘No, I can’t do that.’

‘It’s the proceeds of crime, Cannon. Money you took from him.’

‘It’s the proceeds of
work
,’ Cannon shouted. ‘My work. Johnnyboy wouldn’t recognize something like
that if you shoved it up his nose. Money I took to turn it into something beautiful
he
would never buy. What would he want it
for
? He’d burn it or let it rot. Like his houses.’

Nobody knows him but me
.

She got up and rammed the hat back on her head. He liked the hat. It made her anonymous and less intimidating, a softer version
of herself. Someone perfectly willing to play the fool.

‘Right,’ she said, saluting. ‘I shall continue to assume your paranoia is entirely correct. You’ll need a new place to stay.
I’ll work on it. What else does your brother do with his Saturday?’

He could not understand any more why Johnnyboy so hated women. They were the only people who ever believed a thing he said.
‘He stays at home. Sport on telly, all day. Racing, football, rugger, anything. Saturday’s a stay-at-home day. Too many women
about. Mind, he likes the boxing best.’

‘Ritualized conflict,’ Sarah murmured. ‘While you and I go shopping for
art
.’

‘Do we?’ Cannon said dubiously.

‘Yes. Today you’re a consultant.’

It ebbed and swayed, this almost friendship. They could be silent companions or deeply suspicious. He could move from intense
curiosity about her to indifference, to introspective silence, then shout a remark apropos of nothing, without minding if
she responded. She found it restful to be with someone who had no recognizable code of behaviour: it entailed a certain
kind of freedom in her own. Belief in Cannon was an act of faith.

Today he had all the suppressed excitement of a child taken on an outing: talkative, with thoughts flying into questions half
forgotten before they came out of his mouth, interrupted as they drove with snatches of whistled song. That was what had drawn
her in the first place: the ludicrous smile, the profound capacity for happiness, however temporary; the lack of reserve when
he forgot his own predicaments. The ability to lose himself in the moment. He made her fiercely protective.

‘How much does lovely William know about me?’ he asked suddenly, watching her manoeuvring the car, badly, into a space. Cannon
could not drive: it was a mystery to him. The engine and the vehicle itself filled him with alarm.

‘Nothing. Next to nothing,’ said Sarah. ‘The bare minimum. Unless you told him anything.’

‘
Me
?’ Cannon replied, watching her turn off the ignition as if it were a piece of magic. ‘
Me
? We don’t talk about anything. Nothing personal anyway. It wouldn’t be fair.
Nothing
. ’S why I like him. Accepts you without asking. We talk about everything and nothing, like we do.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ said Sarah, and felt a stab of guilt so sharp it was like a stitch in the side. ‘I’ve asked him
to come along too, but I doubt he will. Says he’s too busy.’

‘Too fucking shy,’ Cannon said. ‘Adores you, can’t admit it.’

Then, as an afterthought, as they climbed the steps, another question: ‘How did you make the house fall down, Cannon? They
say it was a gas explosion.’

He nodded. ‘It was. But that’s all right, isn’t it? I paid the bill first.’

‘You promised Julie you’d never do anything like that again.’

‘Never. Never, ever, ever. But’, he grinned, ‘it was
fun
.’

‘Yes,’ she said, thinking of some of the ugly houses she had seen in her search for a new home. ‘Yes. I can see that.’

As they mounted the steps to the exhibition centre, Sarah knew that this might have been a mistake, one of those occasions
when instinct clearly foretold embarrassment and was wilfully ignored. Cannon did not like crowds: he looked at the populace
pouring through the doors and surrendering bags for inspection as if they were rabid. He shuddered when anyone brushed against
him, refused to part with his coat, placed the entrance ticket between his teeth while he decided what to do with it, settled
finally on top pocket, right.

A vast hall was thronged with separate stands, five corporate art collections immediately opposite the entrance and, on a
separate floor, sixty screened stalls run by dealers, and a balcony above with more. The big works were in the middle; the
smaller round the sides. Paintings large and small, sculptures dotted like mushrooms.

‘Take note,’ Sarah said,
sotto voce
. ‘This is where people come to
buy
. The biggest show of contemporary
art. Next year you will be
exhibited
, but today
you
are a
consultant
. A
diplomat
. You tell me what’s rubbish and what isn’t.’

Saturday-morning hunters and spenders, full of goodwill and ready to be delighted. People with houses and eyes, eschewing
the delights of do-it-yourself for the joy of looking at paintings. The presence of so many about the purpose seemed cause
for celebration rather than for distress, and she tried to tell Cannon that – for the brief moment he listened. Isn’t it wonderful
that so many people want to
see
paintings? Not
wallpaper
. Paintings and drawings. You are my judge, she told him. Tell me what I should notice, tell me what has talent, I don’t know.
There was a hubbub of sound, a draught of heat, the scent of excitement finely tuned, the smell of perfume in a crowded train.

Cannon was immune, unbendable to the will of another. She had learned how a certain crispness of voice and a
rat tat tat
direction got his attention, as long as it sounded like an order, while persuasion, the method she always preferred, was
more difficult to achieve. He nodded distantly, as if they were a pair sent to reconnoitre foreign territory with instructions
to obey nothing but remote signals, and even then at his own discretion. He walked around with his hands clasped behind his
back, the better to control the twitching of his fingers.

The corporate collections tended towards the large canvas of abstract art; paintings with titles suggesting serious concepts,
such as
Life
,
Waste
,
Chaos
. Rather gloomy and colourless things, she thought; things
with bubbling surfaces, cauldrons of paint, or a few spare lines occupying a vast tract of frozen wall. Cannon had to touch,
jump from space to space as if he was avoiding the cracks in the pavement. He wanted to stroke the paint and work out through
his fingertips how it had reached the surface; he wanted to poke at the canvas, lift the frame and stare at the back to see
what had been used. Fashionably suited exhibitors hovered with unctuous politeness. In the corporate collections there was
nothing for sale but reputation, while outside that the customer was God with a credit card, greeted with overpowering charm.
Sarah loved a market red in tooth and claw but dressed in cultured clothes. She stared at buyers; he at the merchandise. William
should have come: he liked a zoo.

It was a market ablaze with enterprise, promise and false promise.
I have been in places like this
, he whispered in her ear.
Don’t condescend to me
. He had sat in places like this, he told her, and also the more permanent public places, national galleries where they let
you sit and copy, see what other painters had done and struggle with the likeness until it emerged like the birth of an animal
out of long, painful and envious perusal. He had lurked in these vaulted rooms, and then on building sites, watching figures
at work; figures at night, hurrying past lit windows in a street, the movement of limbs he yearned to capture and never, to
his own mind, did, quite.
But I know what I have to do … I know how each and every attempt should have the single purpose of capturing a moment of
reality or perish
. He murmured into her ear, like a lover, full of indignation about the prospect of betrayal, the whispers louder and louder,
the fury in him rising fit to bellow. She ran to catch him.

‘Crap,’ he screamed. They were facing a large canvas across which there danced something that resembled a bright blue eel.
On a white background, it had a single, malevolent eye, directed towards the frame it determined to escape; its back was decorated
with minuscule lettering among the blue; a splodge elongated into a creature.

‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘Shhhhh.’

‘That’s what it says,’ Cannon announced indignantly, touching the lettering with a grubby forefinger. She had never seen him
with clean hands; imagined he had been born with hands as stained as his teeth had been, and the darkness of his skin contrasted
nicely with the white background of the eel. ‘
Crap
,’ he repeated, tracing the lettering. ‘
Crap, crap, CRAP!
’

‘Be quiet,’ she hissed, secretly enjoying the row he made.

‘Pretentious
crap
!’ he insisted loudly. ‘Now where’s the bloody truth in that? A poster not a
painting
. It says
nothing
. He’s
crapped
on his own canvas. Does he know how much
paints cost
?’ Spoken while he turned and hissed at the skinny girl with the suit and the bony knees and the winning smile. ‘
Judas
!’ he yelled at her, stabbing the canvas again until the white paint bore the imprint of his stubby forefinger. ‘
Judas! Thirty pieces of silver for this SHIT
!’ And then,
suddenly, he was all charm again, hands in pockets, grinning widely, teeth first.

‘These critics,’ Sarah added, smiling into the eyes of the girl and taking Cannon by the arm to give an impression of safety.
‘So
passionate
, you know. You’d think he was a
consultant
.’ She tried to blame the increasing discomfort of the heat. They moved on, arm held inside quivering arm, hotter and hotter
as they progressed. It was becoming unbearable. ‘One day that person might be your dealer,’ she said reasonably. But he was
gone, far gone; looking at a patch of blue, twenty feet away, anger forgotten, drawn to it like hunger to food; standing there,
rationing a moment of bliss, postponing the possibility of disappointment; relishing the delight; dancing, twisting his hands,
the whole of him in movement.

‘Oh, bless him.
Bless him
,’ he was murmuring. ‘Look at that fucking
blue
. He lives in there. Ohh, isn’t that beautiful? Buy it, Sarah. Buy it.’

She was only conscious of the heat, rising like a tide, stultifying, claustrophobic, and the painting being a very small thing.
Cliffs and an Adriatic sea, caught in some miracle of early evening, outlines blurred, the scale announced by a single, vague
figure in the water, colours as intense as jewels. He bared his teeth at it, ready to consume it whole, swallow it. She watched;
she was born to watch; and, all the same, they were shouting at each other.

‘It’s a lot of money, Cannon. I haven’t got it.’

‘Give it to him, Sarah.
Give it
.’

‘I can’t.’

It was so hot; hot and humid. The painting mesmerized. Sweat trickled down the back of her neck. The hour had passed in minutes.
She glanced at his flushed face and then at the faces of others. There was something unnatural in this stultifying heat; something
far more artificial than mere excitement. A girl fainted; the public address system crackled; an apologetic voice boomed over
the heads. ‘So sorry, ladies and gentlemen, the heating and air-conditioning have broken down. For your own comfort, would
you kindly leave the building by the nearest exit while we fix it?’ No urgency, but a command, nevertheless, creating an uncertain
swell of movement, orderly but resentful. Accompanied children and bored companions sighed with relief; in the slow surge
towards a side door, Sarah lost Cannon and did not mind. The cold outside was sweet relief.

She watched; always second nature to watch, while the tall and the small and the beautiful and the plain gathered in the side-road
and waited in groups, and she thought, with a touch of resignation, that Cannon’s presence always had an uncanny knack of
shifting crowds. The Tannoy had announced free drinks on their return within the hour; an optimistic promise, perhaps, but
the mood was resigned, although those who had surrendered coats huddled and grumbled more than the others and Sarah was glad
now to have kept her own.

A favourite coat, full-frocked, voluminous and definitely green, the warmth appreciated even as the perspiration on her skin
dried inside it, and she
scanned the stragglers still emerging from the building. Cannon was one of the last, his face a picture of injured innocence,
his arms folded crossly across his chest; a man aggrieved to have paid for a ticket only to be expelled. He shuffled towards
her, her red hair drawing him like a beacon, his steps quicker and quicker until they collided and, to her amazement, he kissed
her mouth, hard.

‘I might have been followed,’ he hissed. ‘Here, take this,’ removing the object inside his arms and thrusting it into the
open folds of her coat. Surprise made her obey. She found herself clutching the thing, hands already familiar with the sharp
corners of a frame. Cannon swung his arms in exaggerated fashion, reached into his pocket for a cigarette, which he lit flamboyantly
and held triumphantly, as if for an audience.
Look, I’m clean
. Sarah’s only desire was to run, far and fast, while he smiled his vacuous smile into her white face. ‘You’ve gone pale,’
he said. ‘It’s not so bad, is it, being kissed, is it? You could get used to it.’

She remembered to saunter rather than run. Down the road, around the corner, past the main entrance to the centre where the
crowds were thickest, strolling nonchalantly, waiting for a heavy hand on her shoulder, moving on automatic pilot, and once
the safety of the car was in sight, turning on him and screaming, ‘You stole it … you
stole
that painting. Are you mad? Haven’t you learned anything?’

‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘You might scratch it.’

‘
Scratch
it?’ she yelled. ‘You’re worried about
scratching
it? What about
stealing
it?’

He hung his head without obvious repentance. ‘But you liked it, Sarah. I know you did. It was the best thing I’d seen. You
wanted it and I owe you, so I got it. Don’t you like it?’

The grinding gears of the car signalled her reply. They shot out of the space like a bullet and, for a moment, he seemed satisfyingly
frightened. She drove as if trying to forge a path through a desert in a tank; he clutched his seat-belt with white knuckles.

‘Moral vacuum,’ Sarah muttered. ‘Moral slut. Don’t you
think
? What about the artist who painted this picture? What about getting
caught
? Don’t you
think
?’

‘I did think,’ he protested. ‘I thought when the loudspeaker spoke. It inspired me.’ He tapped his fingers on his knees. ‘I
thought, wait a minute, this is a right mess, and the dealers will be able to claim any losses from the organizers because
it would be their fault, because of the air-conditioning, and there’ll be insurance policies and such, and no-one will really
lose. Not really.’ And he smiled again, smugly satisfied with his own logic.

She braked sharply; his forehead touched the windscreen with an audible tap. ‘I shall have to take it back,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ll
work out a way to take it back.’ And then, as the distance grew between herself and the scene of the theft, wondered whether
she would. Or whether the company she kept, the life she led and the lies she told had entered her very soul.

She could not drive back. She drove on.

*

William supposed he had turned up to this exhibition so late because he had dithered about going at all. Sarah had asked him
to go, but perhaps not quite warmly enough and she hadn’t been specific about the time. He had once tried to count the hours
he had devoted to indecision and found the total depressing. On the other hand, there were days when his failure to commit
himself to any plan led him simply to wander about, to do things he had never intended by sheer accident and thus let his
eyes light upon treasures. He had woken thinking about the paper on twins waiting to be researched, but Saturday was the wrong
day for it. Instead, he had stood by his window, with his tea in hand, watching a fat man walking up and down the street,
pausing and moving on, as if he was walking a dog, as indecisive as William himself felt. He drank more tea and passed the
time. The seventh day of the week was a playground, a day for pleasures, a day for children, and he always felt out of sorts
in it, as if he should be having fun instead of wishing there was work to fill an inconvenient gap. So finally he went to
the exhibition, wishing he had not wasted the morning and the chance of company.

He hesitated on the steps, slightly disconcerted by the presence of crowds and, as he moved forward, the strange feeling of
recognition he had for the fat man standing to the side of the entrance and talking into a mobile phone, looking oddly like
the man he had seen in the street. But there were many fat men, and his memory for faces was poor. Fat men or thin were not
excluded from looking at paintings.

There was envy as well as pleasure in seeing the work of professional painters succeeding where he had failed, but it was
an old disappointment by now and it was the positive element of the envy and curiosity that had made him the haphazard collector
he was. He had collected paintings and drawings ever since he had known he would never be able to make them, and he supposed,
as he mounted the steps to the exhibition, that what he collected revealed what he was like, in the way books on shelves were
supposed to reveal their owners. William shook his head and climbed two more steps, struck by the implications of this. By
their possessions, thus shall you know them. He looked at the people, trying to guess from the colour of a coat what the preferred
taste of that person would be.