Goya'S Dog (4 page)

It was the May Hotel, it was next door to a cinema. They stopped, and Dacres stood ten feet away, leaned his shoulder on a telegraph pole.

“Why's he going in there, Bury?”

“So we can get a drink, man.”

“In the hotel.”

Bury's pockmarked cheeks drifted back to his conversation.

Why didn't the ballerinas come? Dacres wanted to ask Gorren.

He was looking at a water tower silhouetted on the roof across the street. He would have liked someone to ask to hear a little story of himself: once in Spain I told a peasant I was a painter, and he told me he thought someone should paint the village water tower, and I agreed that it was a beautiful structure; and it wasn't until I was in bed that night, sweating and grabbing at flies, that I realized he meant it needed a new coat. Evelyn laughed at that until she couldn't breathe.

Rueful, now. Easy.

They were in the hotel and he crossed the street to follow. The cellar proved a dark and desperate place with ugly wainscoting, and the décor affected their mood. Nelda complained about the hotel towels, Dacres grimaced at the talk of returning home. He noticed Violet listening to everything they said too, all she needed was her little red notebook. Bury had a hip flask: Gorren poured Scotch under the table into their watery beers, one by one.

Dacres said, “Please, don't let us talk about the war anymore. I can't bear to talk about it, I can't bear to think about it.”

No one responded, but he expected that now. He'd offended each of them in turn on the liner so that they would leave him to himself. He found them trivial, predictable: Pear lived fat off an annual set of views of Venice, Nelda was all false languor. Better by far to be hated by this lot, he'd told Gorren, who'd agreed, and yet somehow managed always to keep one foot in and one foot out. Diplomat. They were sitting around a table that was much too small, their legs touched, Gorren had to sit quite far back.

“When are you going to allow your lovely wife to teach me Italian?” Dacres asked Pear's scowl. Huffily, Pear told Nelda to excuse him: Gents. Short and purple-faced, he went off in search of the plumbing. He had spent five years apologizing for his wife, Gorren had told Dacres.

Dacres turned to speak to her.

“Tell me: why did you marry him? Masochist?”

She snorted and looked away.

“Or did he spirit you out of Palermo in a carpet? I would. Name the day.”

“You'll have to do something better than that,” she said; but in her mouth English sounded immeasurably foreign. Her voice made him want to eat out of her hand. Everything changed.

“Oh-ho,” he said.

She'd worked as a model in a department store, Gorren had told him lasciviously. If it were a dance, he thought, they could play a waltz, and then we could kiss.

But the room was too hot, humid and smokey, like a furnace, like a mine. At the next table bearded men were singing a vile Dickensian shanty. Gorren announced that he was going to teach them a Dadaist classic, “Bim Dindrzo Bingle Zop,” lead them in a singalong. He rose and strode over. They were burly men with dust on their trousers: bakers. Plasterers; they belonged in the cavern.

“So,” said Dacres. “My room: when?”

“Never,” said Nelda's dark lips. She blew smoke in his face.
“Jamais
.
Nunca
.
”
Her black hair dropped in front of her eyes. Could she see him?

“Mai?”

“Mai.”

He edged closer, draped his hand over her knee. They looked up at Gorren returning, pale and clammy cheeked.

“Not my most receptive audience,” Gorren began.

“Your husband drinks out of the side of his mouth,” Dacres whispered to Nelda, close against her ear. “Why doesn't he like life? He won't open his gullet.”

Nelda watched him with surprised eyes.

“You're absolutely wasted on him. He orders steak then tries the mashed potatoes first.”

“Why are you saying this?”

He raised his hand to hold her stone chin and draw it closer as if he were studying her.

“Stop,” she said, and he felt the jaw muscles move against his fingers.

A pair of beige trousers in his peripheral vision: Pear standing above him. His fly was tight. Nelda removed Dacres's limp hands singly and prepared to enjoy the show.

“Stand up, Dacres,” Pear said. “What the hell do you think you're doing?”

My drink, Dacres thought.

“What the hell are you doing here at all?”

Dacres looked up to see Pear swivel back. He was still saying “Wait” when Pear punched him hard, hard in the eye. Falling back off his chair Dacres was sure he heard joyous laughter. And no one sprang to his rescue.

“At least you like me, Grace,” he said.

“I don't like you,” she told him. “I'm just trying to reduce the swelling.”

“Are you even trained as a nurse?”

She didn't acknowledge.

He had ice, wrapped in a handkerchief, against his cheek. It came from the golden bucket at the corner of the bed, he noted approvingly, disappointed, however, that it was empty of everything but ice. He was sitting on the bed edge, turned to her, and she sat next to him.

He'd read that morning about a boy who'd died after stepping on a nail.

“Am I going to die?” he said sorely.

“No.”

“Never?”

“Eventually, yes.”

“But from this? Is the infection going to spread?”

“For heaven's sake be quiet and let me work.”

Me miserable, he thought.

“That bastard Pear, what a squalid little gnome.”

Gorren was in the room. So whose room was Dacres sitting in? He had no idea.

“What was that, Dacres?” Gorren smiled. Through his one eye Dacres could see Grace's cheek, beyond was Gorren's dark-lined form, elbows making triangles. To which figure should you give priority? Look here, look back.

“He's a pitiful rat and his wife's a maniac,” Dacres muttered. “Probably nymphomaniacal.”

Gorren backed away.

“This whole escapade is a farce,” Dacres said bitterly. “This whole farce. An escapade.” Gorren had gone through a communicating door into the next room. Dacres could hear him talking, but couldn't hear what. He badly wanted a drink.

“What?” Dacres called. “Gorren, what am I doing here? They're all idiots. The Lady's deranged, thinks she's heading for beatification. I want no part of it. She's very very ill. It's the clubbiness that's fatal. She wants us all to be friends. That we'll improve together. It's fatal. And her assistant's straight from the Gestapo.”

The nurse sighed again.

“Grace, what am I doing here?”

He pushed past her, talking. He was going to find Gorren, he was going to find a bottle of Scotch.

“These are horrible people,” he went on. “Talentless. Trebs is like some kind of poetry-killing device. Bury's etchings should be banned. City views, in this day. Are you listening to me, Gorren? I have to do something.”

He was at the communicating door, one hand on his face; he blundered in, still talking. Then through his one eye he saw Violet, Nelda, Trebs, Bury, seated, silent. Gorren, at least, was smiling.

Lady Dunfield was talking about Michelangelo and Beethoven.

“When is this bloody train going to bloody move?” said Dacres again suddenly, and Lady Dunfield's neck puckered. “I'm going to see what it's all about.”

There were many faces on the platform. Men in uniform with crying
women of all ages, and equally feckless pigeons. All milled and parted. He couldn't find anyone to complain to, and lit his last cigarette. He was standing next to the train and felt its digestive grumbling: he did not want to walk into the station proper. He missed soaring girders; he didn't appreciate this North American conception of the train station as marble temple. There was a stone in his belly and he wondered what Windsor would be like. Someone had said they would be going past London; not that London. Dacres didn't look in through the train windows. He could breathe here, much more easily. Though he was unwilling, the shapes of passengers through glass impressed themselves on him, made him shiver. He couldn't bear to think any further about his future, about the next stop, about the journey.

So perhaps it was then that the whim took him.

He flicked the full white cigarette down into the train's trench and turned on his heels. Quickly he pulled himself back up into the carriage and marched down to his compartment. He burst in on Lady Dunfield, who was still looking for him out of the window like a Sicilian widow. His cheek pulsed, but he had both the case from the floor and the one from above in his grasp before a puzzled whimper could escape her. Then he was out in the corridor.

He was at the door. The crowd had thinned.

“This is madness,” he said.

The guard he'd argued with earlier watched him from the platform.

“All set, sir?”

How had Dacres not noticed his white half-moon moustaches?

Dacres nodded, feeling futile, and the guard slammed the door shut tight in his face.

A whistle blew, and then slowly, reluctantly, the train heaved, groaned, and shook. The platform began to move.

Sweating again, and heart pounding, Dacres looked down the corridor and then lurched forward to grip the metal door handle. Then he stood on the steps, one suitcase below him and one above. A voice called out to him but he ignored it, he was elsewhere, he was watching the motion of the earth, waiting.

“Mr. Davis!” Harsh shrieking. And there she was, the black harpy, claws out to pull his soul back; he couldn't remember the last time he'd seen such rage. Dacres mumbled a frightened apology and leaped. His ankles held, one case waved out into the air, the other crashed into his shin. The door swung open as the train moved away, and the guard set off racing after it, blowing his whistle wildly. Soon all Dacres could see were flecks through the window. Gorren, Nelda, Pear, flecks. Bury and Trebs and Webster, flecks. Like Sisley. Then the train was gone.

Dacres looked left and right. There were specks in the air too. At first he fancied it was snow and was delighted; but it was only ash and soot.

CHAPTER TWO

Initially it felt like success. Dacres wandered the city dazed, unaware of himself for the first time in years, absorbing. Toronto waited for him each morning like a fresh pair of socks. The weather was warm if slightly muggy, and the American voices grated on him, and there wasn't even an underground, but it was all new to him: for a week, he simply explored. He walked, and read the newspapers. Close to the lake were red brick warehouses; far from the lake he found leafy enclaves. He took streetcars for twenty-five cents and discovered that it didn't take too long to reach the end of the line and come back into the downtown again. He wasn't thinking much: he was spongy, he scouted like a spy. He noticed things: the list of preachers in the Saturday paper; an advertisement on a street hoarding for a Proms concert. Milling in the streets, Canadians seemed never to be in any hurry. As Dacres studied a raspberry neo-Romanesque monstrosity, the municipal buildings, gentlemen twice approached to ask if he needed directions. So very helpful. He bared his yellow teeth to scare them away. British men eighteen to forty-one had been conscripted, he learned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This war would be no little show, a man on King Street said.

Dacres was amazed by the number of people wearing smoked glasses. But the harshness of the light affected him too, and he thought about buying a pair. He let his eyes open only narrowly, and wondered where all the clouds were. This country was primary colours, it seemed. He'd heard all the tales of winter, of course—all he knew about Canada was tales of winter—but if snow came, he thought, it must come out of an empty sky. He found himself missing precipitation and watercolourists. He walked, an innocent: he couldn't think what lay behind the storefronts and revolving doors. Passing by clerks and executives, he couldn't picture their past or their parents, their sitting rooms or underwear. Men came out of offices and nicely coiffed ladies went into Simpsons. There were garment factories on wide Spadina Avenue and a Chinese laundry on Elizabeth Street: what were the lives like there? He pasted his English examples and knowledge onto them but perhaps the people came from farms outside the city, perhaps they had been born in the slums at its heart, perhaps they had stepped off trains like him. He didn't know. A parade of kilted soldiers marched by, led by a bloody piper. Children sat on the curb and stretched their legs out to watch. He looked on bemused.

He sneezed and sniffed a little as he walked. When the conquistadors came they brought their diseases with them, but North America had unusual pollens to take revenge with now. He developed a very rough map: here was the anodyne financial district; here were the nasty Irish; here the hostile seamy wards. The pompous Rosedale houses of engineers made good. It wouldn't take long, he felt, to see everything: then soon he would be able to slide the whole town into his shoe. Anywhere residential, jet-black rats with bushy tails leaped down from the trees to terrify him. In the centre of town the streets ended without surprises because the city was built on a grid in decent Enlightenment fashion. He imagined the redcoats charting it. But he found a neighbourhood in the northwest full of alleyways where you could wander around garages and rubbish bins without seeing a main road. That was the closest thing to the medieval warrens he liked,
streets of nooks built to frustrate archers, names like Shoot-Up Hill and Bobbidge Lane. You drift towards what you know. Although, he remembered, Spanish alleys were redolent of urine, weren't they? There was nothing like that here. Looking in vain for pubs and cafés, he discovered instead lunch counters in the rear of variety stores. One afternoon he bought a tin of corned beef and five-cents-worth of bologna and stared at them as if they were meteorites.