Bring Larks and Heroes (9 page)

8

Ewers had never painted for an ornithologist before. He had thought that such work was done from embalmed specimens. But Daker would not risk embalming the creatures of his fame yet; not until winter, anyhow.

He showed Ewers the kingfisher, which drowsed in a wicker cage.

‘
Alcyone beryllus
is his name,' the surgeon explained. (His Excellency had forgone the pleasure of being the creature's godparent.) Daker spelt out the name three times. ‘Paint him first! He is a gem. You must get his colours absolutely accurate, and as for his stance and the line of his head and body, they must all be exact. Have him on a branch. A branch of peppermint or cedar would look excellent. Show him from the front, but slightly to the left. It doesn't matter to
me how long you take, so long as you carry my breath away, as he did.'

How do you carry the breath away from a Lazarus-like man?

For a start, you take a close view of the subject – or Ewers did, anyhow. He worked standing, with charcoal and cartridge-paper, about eight feet back, and, despite the intervening slats, tried for perfection of line. When the bird fidgeted or turned his back on him, as kingfishers will in a small cage of cane, he chased it until he saw it from the front and to the left again. He stared at the line he wanted and carried it like a cup of brimming vitriol, that is, perilously, back to the easel.

At first, he had a sense of working well. The day was not intolerably hot, and he had shade from a box-brush. Only feet away, a cageful of finches extolled him, Caledonia's sublimest limner in the nether-world.

But, as was fated to happen, Mrs Daker came walking in her garden by mid-morning. Like a decent mother of some parish, she wore a dissonant yellow and a straw hat and carried a parasol.

‘Ah,' she said, seeing the number of very fine sketches Ewers had done, ‘when do you mean to start using your colours?'

‘Almost immediately, Madam.'

He became occupied then with a bogus coughing fit. For women alarmed him proportionately as their bearing and manners departed from Aunt Norris's.
It behoved a woman to bear her womanhood as a curse, as Aunt Norris bore it. The nausea, the pallor, the pains in the head, the loutish insolence of nature. She was an incarnate, indelible, unsearchable, valiant smile, sitting above an arrant obscenity. Therefore he froze before a woman into whose face the fust of her desires had worked, the fust, if you like, of all the closed rooms and open secrets of her career. He could not find her desirable in any way. Because of a peculiar bemused squeamishness, he could not look at her. He could talk with her, but not anything like adequately.

‘Does he behave himself, this bird? Does he sit still?'

‘Yes, he's quite passable, Madam,' said Ewers.

But at that moment the kingfisher turned its back on him, making sharp, indolent notes with its throat. Ewers rushed to the bird's new front.

‘Why don't you simply turn the cage whenever that troublesome thing turns his back?' Mrs Daker wanted to know. The voice was edged with laughter. On Ewers' account, she thought artists such endearingly silly people.

The artist's prerogative was not to answer, even not to answer ladies. He went on frowning at the green shape. ‘Well, why don't you?'

‘It would make me come in too close to the bird, Madam. It would confuse my sight.'

His sight was clear now, but though he began to
tread back to the easel, he knew she was about to nudge the corner of his mind, to make him spill his vision.

‘Don't you think it's an indifferent bird, Ewers?' asked Mrs Daker, between pouting twice at the cage.

‘You know my name, Madam?'

How it disturbed him that she had approached him as a person with a name which she knew. It impressed him, rightly or wrongly, in the same way that a lightning manoeuvre impresses an old-fashioned general – more or less as an unfair trick.

‘Don't you think it's a very poor bird?' she asked.

They both looked at its hunched back. Ewers wished it to turn. It wouldn't be wished into turning.

‘It's far too stocky a bird to bear the grand name, kingfisher. Its stance is not handsome at all. It's hardly a true green at all, is it? Except by the standards of this country.'

He felt infallibly that the lady would applaud him if he said, ‘They tell us, Madam, that an ugly stance and a greenness of complexion are not altogether unknown amongst kings.' To take offence at slighting remarks about the monarch was almost certainly not within the perimeter of her vices.

So he said, ‘They tell us, Madam . . .'

The lady applauded him, and he blushed and darted away to take another sight on the bird.

‘I had an uncle,' the lady remarked at last, under the general topic of art, ‘who was a famous draughtsman. He
worked at a shipwright's in Portsmouth. He was marvellous with ships. Of course, that is far more just a matter of lines.'

Coming back to his easel, Ewers thought that so was this a matter of lines, if only people wouldn't blur the lines with talk.

‘Madam,' he realized all at once, ‘would you care to sit in the shade?'

‘Thank you.'

Her faded yellow whispered as he let her down into the chair he had not been using.

So positioned, they must have seemed a caricature of the Pastoral landscape. The sky was so enamel, so hard, so high, so bald. Well within this firmament, brown hills rose, worn teeth in an old jaw, perhaps a dead jaw. There was no deep, moist shade, and the leaves on the evergreens flapped rather than rustled, flapped brown side, grey side, brown side, grey, fruitlessness showing both its faces. And amongst half a dozen poor coops of wire and a few wicker cages like lobster traps, Mrs Daker and himself, both vestiges of the northern world, centred their attention in a chunky member of the
Halcyonidae
family.

‘Uck!' muttered the kingfisher, and sidled along his perch like a parrot. ‘Uck!'

‘He can't sing, either. Neither can these others. There is hardly a good note between all of them. What sort of a song is
Uck
for a royal bird?'

‘Once more, Madam, it has been known for kings to be guttural as well as a sick shade of green.'

Mrs Daker reeled.

‘Oh, what a waste of good wit,' she cried, ‘to have you here, Ewers.'

Her amazingly cordial giggles warned him it was time to let his yea be yea, his nay be nay, and to add few words to either.

‘What are you Ewers? I mean, what was your crime?'

‘Forgery, Mrs Daker.'

In the ensuing silence, he wondered was she disturbed by his frankness.

‘What an interesting crime,' she said at last. ‘Anyone can steal a beast or write a threatening letter. But forgery must take such skill.'

‘That I'm here, Madam, is an indication that I didn't have quite the necessary skill.'

Hand clenched on her forehead, Mrs Daker swayed. Ewers saw her amusement out of the corner of his eye, saw the yellow form doubling.

‘
Droll
is the word for you, Ewers. Yes, definitely!
Droll.
'

‘Uck!' said the kingfisher. It had a talent for supplying affirmatives for Ewers, which was an admirable courtesy he had found in none of the birds of the northern world.

At the midday drum, she left him alone. He had
been painting and enjoying it, and had managed to mix exactly the right green, so that he didn't stop work now. There was only short shade across the passive dust, however, and he felt bound in mercy to break some branches off the box-brush, one of the more tree-like trees of the region, and lace them through the top of the cage. As he worked at this the bird jigged up one of the uprights and struck at him with its beak. He stepped back frowning at a neat pit of blood in the heel of his hand. Back on its perch, the bird had adopted an air of perfect repose and inculpability.

‘You'll get blood on your own silly portrait,' Ewers told it.

For it had pecked out a deep sliver of flesh, and Ewers' good blood, sedulously free of scurvy, flowed too well. He bandaged the wound with a handkerchief and returned to the easel.

During that noon hour, Daker visited him. The surgeon frowned at the bandage, was full of concern if not commiseration; and again ordered him not to rush the work.

Ewers, not accustomed to such consideration, and feeling that the Arts were perhaps beginning to come into their inheritance in this colonial back-garden, smiled shyly at Mrs Daker when she returned later in the afternoon. She carried two blue tumblers, and a carafe whose contents were a secret inside raffia binding.

‘I have some lime cordial here, have had it since the
last transport came in. I have had the bottle cooling in the river since I left you this morning. You must surely like a glass, Ewers.'

Ewers surely did. He had been gaping at his work with his mouth open, since his shattered nose did not function. A westerly wind had come up and dried him right down into the pit of his throat; and as Mrs Daker placed the glasses on the chair and poured out the lime, he moved his tongue clumsily around his palate, feeling out the lay of his thirst now that it was about to be quenched.

He had very nearly finished an excellent water-colour of the surgeon's gem. But he lingered on it for Daker's sake, to flatter Daker's idea that here was so distinctive a shape, so individual a green and a sable hardly less so, that any artist would be indefinitely extended by them. Between sips from the glass which Mrs Daker kept for him, he pencilled in Daker's fond name for this kingfisher somewhat far from being exactly beryl.

Mrs Daker asked him questions, which he could scarcely refuse to answer in view of her kindnesses. She had never been to Scotland, she had never been beyond Winchester. Did they get great storms in Dumfries? No, she had never heard of Solway Firth. Could you see to Ireland on sunny days? What was Dumfries market like? Was he a Jacobite?

‘How is it possible,' she asked, ‘that people will
not tend to admire a forger, when the essence of his crime is his craftsmanship? In his art, the forger is superior to his judge.'

‘As I've said, Mrs Daker,' Ewers amended, ‘not too superior; otherwise I would have remained free, though guilty.'

Certainly, as he'd said before. Yet now he said it from motives of companionship, and because the lady was so canny. The officials of Dumfries Circuit Court though were not so canny. He'd been herded in with sheep-thieves, suffered the arrogance of the court to the same extent as sheep-thieves.

By half-past four, he found himself about to look evenly at molten Mrs Daker and her running, molten laughter and her dusk-blue skin. Here was an incontrovertible friendship.
Look, I cannot desire her
,
he told himself delightedly, flexing the muscles of whatever appetites he possessed. The piquancy of friendship with someone so distinctive, with what you could call a perceptive harlot, excited him, so that half that night he was to lie awake and think of areas of conversation for their meeting the next day. Now he was willing to put the full weight of his wit into the encounter and he felt a vigorous desire to expose Mrs Daker to Aunt Norris, a Madonna propitious even at a hemisphere's remove.

When she went away then, with her almost empty carafe, Ewers saw calmly her flecked brown eyes and their pouches grey from the heat of the afternoon watch
the two of them had kept. He experienced a unique quality of gratitude, but all he used, however warmly, were the accustomed words. For, still, he found her awesome.

The painting was finished. It behoved him to sit tautly, however, on his chair, as if
Alcyone beryllus
still taxed him. By concentrating on the scalding sun through almost closed eyes, he was able to terrify himself in a titillating way. He saw the hills list upwards into the bottom of his vision, he became aware of the movement of the earth like a lost child in the groves of heavenly darkness – an awareness which takes the gloss off the ermine of kings but exalts the lowly.

It has also been known to give the lowly headaches.

When Daker arrived, Ewers was rubbing his forehead and had his eyes fully closed. Against the reedy boredom of his birds' voices, the little surgeon made his entry soundlessly.

‘Just what I wanted, Ewers,' he said with, if anything, a hint of querulousness. ‘Just what I wanted.'

He unfastened the painting and bore it and the wicker cage away.

Ewers, despite the movements of the heavens and all the larger sanities, felt bereaved, being left at dusk without pay or praise. He had worked all day to demand, and now his work was appropriated, and even his subject was locked away. He shared the sunset
with starlings, wheeling in to sift the futile dust for grass seed. He frowned at the raucous yearnings of the caged birds.

Yet, incontrovertibly, he had a friend.

‘Let's us attempt yet another one of our friend,
Beryllus
,'
the surgeon decided in the morning. ‘Take a higher view of him from the right, to show the solidity of his head.'

The solidity of his head was no problem, Ewers wanted to tell Daker. Solidity, even the solidity of
Halcyonidaes
'
heads, happened to be the stock in trade of the artist. The lines of Daker's creature bored him this morning: he had spent so long learning them yesterday. He settled down to make a number of sketches for Mrs Daker's delight, if she should come that morning.

She came. She had no parasol, the day being cloudy, promising neither rain nor glare. She had the carafe again, since there lay such a weight of hot cloud over the village.

‘Artists mystify me,' she sighed, staring at his preparatory work.

But she moved about in a desultory way and spoke fitfully. Her eyes never looked at him and she maundered around the bird-cages making effete noises at the captives. This mood of hers gave Ewers leisure to study her without any danger of misunderstanding.