Goya'S Dog (14 page)

“We have artists to help us,” Emil said when Janusz had explained Dacres's role in life. “Artists have a place in our struggle. We can use a body: you can put your skills to use.”

“No, I don't think so.”

“You can make banners, paint signs; one day I plan for the hall to need a full mural.”

“I'm not really so …” Dacres struggled for a word. “Directed? I'm not sure how much I could do of any worth.”

“Its worth would be solely in its effect.”

“But effects come from …” Dacres trailed off. He felt Emil wanted to take him outside and acquaint him with the might of the workers at first hand.

Janusz interrupted, excited.

“What do you believe in, Edward?” he asked. “You dismiss God, you dismiss the fascists. But you dismiss artists too. What is left?”

“All I want is to be free of all these saviours,” Dacres said instantly.

He met Emil's hard gaze, and for a moment neither of them looked away. They were jostled by groups of short men floridly talking in English and the Cyrillic languages, arguing, all sure that the world would be made a better place if only this or that amendment was seconded. Seeing he could rile Emil and feeling a spicy pleasure at the fact, Dacres made a few sardonic comments about the evening. They
spoke this way for a few minutes, circling, starting to argue, and then Emil took a step closer, and spoke in concluding tone.

“Let us review. Clearly, you are a reactionary. You stand off to the side and cast your aspersions and pretend to be
hors de combat
.” He drove on too quickly for Dacres to respond. “You do not see that you are complicit, that to stand aside is to accept—to endorse—the status quo. Therefore, you encourage exploitation.”

He nodded his head, point proved.

“It's not reactionary, not per se. I'm quite happy for the revolution to come. Chop off the heads of all the aristocrats again. I just don't think things will be any better afterwards.”

“You embody quietism,” Emil said. His tone was monotonously firm.

Dacres thought of all the revolutionaries who had ended badly.

Emil went on. “In fact, Janusz, your ‘friend' is worse than the genuine capitalists because he is their handmaiden: you claim to stand for something else. Parasite.”

“What is a handmaiden?” Janusz asked.

“This is reaction,” Emil said to Janusz.

“Quietism?” Dacres asked. “Last I heard, it was your man and Hitler who were best of friends.”

“The times require extraordinary measures. But the fight continues.”

“You beetle. What are you going to do, have a revolution
here
?” Dacres had to smile at the thought.

Janusz, who disliked conflict, attempted to spread a soothing blanket between them. In his head, Dacres scratched at what Emil had said, that phrase
hors de combat
. He genuinely wondered at it. Then Janusz was finished conciliating them.

“Let's calm down,” Dacres agreed. “Do you really want to know what I think?”

Emil folded his arms, but he nodded redly and Dacres spoke.

“In fairness, I'm quite as opposed to the dictatorship of the aristocracy as I am to the dictatorship of the proletariat. I'm not even sure who has the better table manners. Here though: I can't conceive of the
group, any group, as the object of study. Can't do it. I understand men and women, this one and that one I mean, your bad breath and her heaving chest. That's what I see: not this class or that.”

“
That
is what is reactionary,” Emil said instantly and with heat. “And that is your quietism. You object to a class analysis, oh, because you are unique. You say you are an artist. Your uniqueness is produced! It is denied to others—who have to work and sweat, all so you can have your beautiful feelings. You are a mosquito!”

The angrier Emil got, the happier Dacres felt.

“You pancake. I know what happens when you try to make people improve their lives. It isn't pretty. You killer.”

“Quietism!”

“Leave-me-bloody-out-of-it-ism.”

Janusz had his arms out, palms down, to calm them. Yet Dacres was savouring the situation, even savouring the young man's headstrongness. He'd been missing this, missing argument, missing things to fight against. Thinking that, he only half-heard what Emil was saying. It ended, “You're a child politically. You realize that?”

“And you're an animal.”

A line came into Dacres's head as Emil reddened still further, his cheek twitching.

“Chaff to be swept away. A child.” Emil made the appropriate gesture.

Dacres didn't quite remember but he said it anyway, half to himself: “What am I after all, but a child in love with the sound of my own name?”

“Imbecile.”

“We're all like that, aren't we?” Dacres mused. “You forget, perhaps.”

Another poem, he didn't remember what, another line Evelyn had stamped into his cortex through repetition. In the white bed. Seated on their bench by the Heath ponds, watching the ducks circle. Looking up from her book as he worked:
Study of E. Reading
. Though by now the old type was blurred.

“What are you saying?”

He tried to quote her again: “Did you think there was nothing but a few letters in the sound of your name?”

Emil spat on the floor and walked away in disgust. To Dacres's great surprise, Janusz followed him. Emil looked back over his shoulder to say something more but Janusz put a hand on his back. And so there Dacres remained, standing by himself at the front of an enormous, emptying room.

That night as he walked he mumbled to Evelyn.
I have streaked through society, darling, making a real go of things here, it's been absolutely stimulating in every way. New faces, new friends, and so much work I can barely keep up: my own, commissions, mounting that new show, and all my private teaching. Don't have a minute to myself all day. Really making strides now, creatively, economically, on every front. I can't think of a better place for me, now, than here
.

A car waited: a rug on top of the bonnet to keep the engine warm. The people ran out of the house from the dinner party past him, the man had a hat with earflaps. No one so much as looked at him.

He asked her,
What do you call the opposite of a comet?

He dreamed that he had sunk into a vat of a black, gummy substance. Licorice. It was coating him, drowning him. The more he struggled to be free the more completely he was caught. He woke up choking.

Max Edelweiss

Assistant Manager

King Edward Hotel

King Street East

Rotonto

December somethingth

By hand

Edelweiss you horrid disgusting Swissoid you stole—stole from me—two pairs of socks. When you ungratefully evicted me (what about our arrangement?) you had your disgusting chambermaid rifle through my possessions and take what you fancied. I know it, so don't embarrass yourself with denials, please. Worse than the theft itself is the betrayal, Edelweiss, for I thought you were a man of the world. Truly, I now know how laughable that is. I even thought there was some degree of understanding between us approximating to something approaching friendship—how the veil has been torn from my eyes. You had your eyes on my grey knit socks from the start. But they were a gift! How dare you, you have truly sunk to your appropriate level now, also you owe me $50 for expert art classes particularly sfumato and other advanced oil techniques. And $10 materials. You will never be an artist, you sorry little man, for art requires of us a greater vision than your piddling financial administrative concerns which are frankly petty and dismal—but what an index to the squalid state of your soul. You can expect to hear from my lawyers shortly, damn you. Or I can collect the necessary in bills at your convenience and we'll say no more about it—

Yours,

Dacres

Postscript: Please send me some letterhead.

One more roll of the dice. Heart buried deep in his trousers, Dacres kept his appointment at the college of art. On the way to the job interview he froze, terrified by a scarecrow staring at him in a hat shop window.

Dacres had applied for one job in his life. At the age of thirteen he had wished to be assistant groundsman at his local cricket club, St. Swithin's. The interview had consisted of five minutes' catching practice with the club coach, Hotchkiss. Then his responsibilities
included pulling up the boundary rope at the end of the day's play and wheeling in the scoreboard. It had been a colour-drenched few weeks, most of which he'd spent in the shade of the groundsman's hut or the file of cypresses, constantly sketching—so that Hotchkiss soon gave him his marching orders. He had taught, of course, since: he'd taught privately and in art schools also, in appointments arranged for him by the kind of friends he didn't have in Canada. But he'd never taught very successfully, and he'd never taught for very long. Hotchkiss, he'd later heard, had died at Mons, one of the first to fall.

Walking along the corridors looking for Miss Lung's office he felt he had finally gone mad. There were young men and women dressed as birds, wearing elaborate pink muslin veils. As he ascended the stairs, a seven-foot-tall gypsy ogre with a resplendent beard and gold crown tap-danced his way down, followed by a girl bat in a black outfit so revealing that Dacres had to grip the banister to prevent himself from falling. There were nymphs and satyrs in the corridors as he tried to find his destination, a scent like cinnamon in the air. He couldn't understand what the hell was going on.

He knocked on Miss Lung's door. As he came in the floor swivelled and he lost his footing. She leaped out from behind her desk to help him but then drew back.

“Not to worry, not to worry,” he said peaceably, from the rough carpet. “All's well.”

The door was still open. As he got to his feet Dacres saw a ballerina pass by with a magic wand. He rubbed his eyes.

“I should have told you,” Miss Lung said, on her way back behind her desk. “Tonight's our annual dance. The students have been making costumes all week and some of them can't wait to try them on.”

She laughed and Dacres did not. Falling he had crushed his papers in his jacket.

Miss Lung had a reedy high-pitched voice. She began their meeting aimlessly, telling Dacres about the school, its location, its history, circling around what they were there for as if it were something embarrassing, enveloping him in a circumlocutory fog. He wanted to get to
the point—did she have a job for him or not?—but while he halflistened he studied the glinting of the eyeball-sized pearls around her neck and her auburn hair pulled out and back into a halo. Her hands stayed close to a small notepad open on the table and Dacres tried to keep his eyes on her, rather than being drawn to the window behind, where for some reason she kept her black telephone on the sill.

His attention was drawn to three odd little shapes on her desk, like clay dinosaurs, standing next to a tiny cymbal hanging in a wooden gallows.

“Mexican, are they?” he said, interrupting her.

She smiled but only coldly.

“No … they were made by my nephew.”

She lifted the stegosaurus and pretended it was marching over to the hole-punch.

“Oh,” said Dacres, limp.

She went on telling him about the school and he tried to attend. The white of the window drew his eyes: outside it was snowing, but the snow seemed not to fall but drift left and right, falling up as much as down. Bizarre.

“Now,” she said, “we don't have a need for instructors at present, but you never know when there may be an opening. Would you like to tell me your particular areas of expertise?”

Dacres looked at her desk for some thirty seconds, then up at the wall.

“Mr. Dacres?”

There was a painting, of course: a sub-Derain study of two foals grazing. She'd probably done it herself. He noticed that his shoes were leaving wet pools beneath them.

Dacres handed over his papers. He only had the one copy of the CV and he had left black smudges on it, he saw, which must be from dirty fingertips, which must be from the newspaper. His head was pounding.

Miss Lung leaned forward over the desk and pursed her lips as she went through his qualifications.

“This is an extremely impressive document,” she said at last.

“Thank you.”

“Extremely impressive.”

“Well. I'm so glad.”

She hadn't looked up yet.

“I don't know the Hawskwold Gallery. Where is that?”

She'd found the one part of the paper that wasn't a lie and he spoke easily: “Church Row. Hampstead. Lovely little place run by a Belgian. Hercule Antoine? You wouldn't have heard of him here but he's rather wonderful. He helped me and many others a great deal, back then.”

“You taught at the Slade?”

“Yes?”

“Until … 1937. Two years ago?”

“That's right.”

“It's unusual we didn't meet.”

Oh Christ, thought Dacres.

“I was there for the year myself, you see. Nineteen thirty-four to -five. As a student, of course. But you were teaching?”

“Yes. Teaching.”

“It's strange we didn't meet.”

“I don't remember you …” said Dacres.

“I don't remember
you
,” she replied.

“Maybe I was on leave?”

She stared at him, blank.

“When?”

“It's so hard to keep dates straight.”

“Yes.”

Silence.

“Is it?”

Silence.

“Odd though,” he said. His scalp was sweating.

Miss Lung bit her lip and looked at the paper again with renewed interest.

“Lumbly Vere Graduation Prize?” she asked. “At the RCA?”

“That's right.”

“I haven't heard of that either.”

She stared at him again, quizzical.