I Could Love You (33 page)

Like a slap in the face. She stares at him.

‘Are you saying I want my father to fuck me?’

‘No. You want him to love you.’

Alice feels her legs go weak beneath her. She slips down until she’s sitting on the pavement, her back to the house wall. The flagstones are winter-cold. Her hands have gone cold too.

He’s right. Of course he’s right. All childishly obvious when you think about it. That’s what your dad is for, to tell you how pretty you look, to be proud of you, to make you feel like you’re the girl the boys desire. Guy was always a rubbish dad. But then, it was never his idea in the first place.

She pulls out her phone, calls his mobile. He’ll be on the train somewhere. Probably near Haywards Heath.

‘Dad,’ she says. ‘Sorry.’

‘Oh, sweetheart. I feel terrible.’

‘No, I was wrong. You know what it is? I was jealous of Chloe. That’s all. It’s not incest or anything, don’t worry. I just sometimes wish so much I was your girl.’

Silence on the other end. Then:

‘You are my girl, babe.’

‘Okay. Thanks.’

She knows he doesn’t mean it. But at least he said it. Then his faraway voice on the phone.

‘Listen, sweetheart. This isn’t the moment, et cetera. But if I’ve not been up to much as a dad it’s not because I don’t love you. I have a whole mountain of guilt about Liz and you, to tell the truth. Maybe one day I’ll get out from under it. Then I’ll really show you how much I love you.’

‘Oh, Dad. Please. Don’t.’ She’s crying again.

‘Sweetheart? Tunnel coming up. Don’t give up on me. You’re my girl. My only girl.’

And he’s gone into his tunnel. But it’s enough. It’s good.

She looks up. There’s Jack, hopping from foot to foot, getting cold.

‘Jack,’ she says. ‘You’re amazing.’

‘Am I?’ He sounds surprised.

‘Can I bottle you and keep you in the cupboard for emergencies?’

‘Aren’t you cold? I’m frozen.’

‘Yes. I can’t feel my fingers any more.’

‘So we should get out of this wind.’

They go back into the house. Alan and Cas are sitting at the kitchen table looking for names for dogs. Alan has printed out a list from the Internet of top dogs’ names as compiled by an American pet insurance company. Max is number one, followed by Buddy.

‘Wuffles,’ proposes Cas.

‘Too wuffly,’ says Alan.

‘Gruffles.’

‘It’s got to be friendly but strong,’ says Alan. ‘He’s the hero of the movie.’

‘Superwuffles,’ says Alice.

Jack looks at the printout. He’s affronted to find his own name comes at number twenty on the list.

‘Jack’s not a dog’s name.’

‘I can’t call him Rocky,’ says Alan. ‘That’s been done.’

‘Snuffles,’ says Cas.

‘Cody? Rusty? Murphy?’

‘Murphy’s good,’ says Jack. ‘Shades of Beckett.’

‘I don’t think I want shades of Beckett. This is a talking sheepdog who turns out to be a financial wizard.’

‘Oh, okay,’ says Jack. ‘Call him Rockefeller.’

Alan is startled.

‘That’s genius!’ he says. ‘Rockefeller! I’d go and see a movie called
Rockefeller
. Jack, you have christened a new franchise. I expect to be at work on
Rockefeller 7
while in my old folks’ home.’

‘See,’ says Alice to Jack. ‘I told you you’re amazing.’

34

Anthony Armitage lays down his brush and takes a step back from the easel. He gazes on the painting with intense concentration for a few moments. Then he gives a slow shrug of his shoulders and turns away, as if disowning it. He fumbles round in a shadowy corner of the room, pouring himself a whisky into a handleless mug. He takes a drink of the whisky and looks back once more at the painting, this time with a gaze of fear and loathing.

‘Fucked up again,’ he says.

Carrie, sitting patiently in the chair by the window, does not take this performance too seriously. In the four sittings she’s endured, such displays of high emotion have been commonplace. His relationship to his own work is that of a lover. He adores the canvas, and lavishes it with his obsessive attention. He pleads with it, and is wounded by its indifference. He spurns it, and rejects it, and sits in a corner and sulks.

This time, however, there is a new development. He starts to pack away his tubes of paint and his brushes. He says nothing to her. This too she has become used to. In a sense she has ceased to exist for him, her reality transferred to the canvas.

‘Have you stopped?’ she says.

‘Can’t do any more,’ he replies. ‘I’m finished.’

He doesn’t say, It’s finished. He says, I’m finished. He sounds infinitely weary.

‘So can I see it now?’

‘If you like. See it. Take it away. Burn it.’

He pours himself more whisky.

Carrie gets up and goes to look at the painting: the portrait of her, who the artist has called beautiful.

The girl in the painting is not her, and is not beautiful.

‘But that’s not me,’ she exclaims in surprise.

‘There you are,’ he says. ‘Missed again.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Does it matter? I suppose I’ve wasted a few hours of your time. Sorry about that. But you’re young. You’re rich in time. You can afford it.’

Carrie goes on gazing at the portrait. She can see that in certain external details it does represent her. There’s the navy blue top that he first saw her in, that he insisted she wore to every sitting. The hair is pulled back into a scruffy ponytail, as hers is. The chair, though only roughly sketched, is the chair in which she has been sitting; the window beside her is oddly bright in what is otherwise a muted dark-toned canvas, but it is recognizably the same window. But the girl at the centre of it all – a woman, not a girl – is so old, so sad, and so … so something else, something unknown that she can’t quite define. It looks distantly like the face she sees in a mirror, but like a self that has been aged and harrowed. And the eyes! The eyes are shining with what could be tears and could be a wild abandoned anger. Yes, of course: that’s what it is. The woman in the portrait is consumed with anger. She’s defeated, pale with the loss, but she’s angry.

Carrie looks from the painting to the old man and back again. He’s painted himself, she thinks. He’s put all his own feelings into my face.

‘It’s you,’ she says. ‘It’s not me, it’s you.’

‘That’s how it works,’ he says. ‘Didn’t you know?’

‘No. I don’t understand.’

‘All great artists do it. Even shit artists like me do it. You paint what you see and what you feel. I can see you but I can’t feel what you feel, I can only feel what I feel. So I latch on to the little clues I get from your face that take me to my own feelings. Perfectly simple, really.’

‘But then it’s not me and it’s not you.’

‘It’s a portrait, child. It’s what was once called art.’

‘But who’s it a portrait of?’

‘I don’t know. Does it matter? It’s a portrait of suffering humanity. One in a long, long line.’

Carrie looks at it again. She stops trying to see how it resembles her. She looks at it as if it’s nothing to do with her. That’s when she sees how magnificent it is. That bleak stripped-down angry face is shockingly powerful.

‘Well, whoever it is, it’s wonderful,’ she says.

‘It’s shit.’

‘Don’t say that! Why do you say that?’

‘It’s not got close. I thought I might get there. One last shot. But I’ve missed it. Missed again.’

‘Missed what?’

‘Oh, Christ, you know. It. How it is.’

The odd thing is that Carrie does know. She knows what he means by
it
even though she couldn’t explain it. But she also knows he’s wrong.

‘You haven’t missed it,’ she says. ‘You’ve got it. It’s here.’

She looks at the painting again. It’s so raw it hurts.

Of course it’s me, she thinks then.

That’s scary. But not all bad. The woman in the painting isn’t beautiful but she’s no victim. She’s not feeling sorry for herself. She’s trying to hold it back, but she’s bursting out with her own power. Look at those eyes!

‘You like it?’ he says. ‘Have it.’

‘I don’t know whether I like it or not,’ she says. ‘It scares me.’

‘Scares me too.’

‘You kept on telling me I was beautiful. She’s not beautiful.’

‘What!’ He roars out his astonished, outraged refutation. ‘Not beautiful! She burns with beauty! She’s the eternal breaker of hearts!’

So Carrie looks again. Every time she looks the portrait has changed. This time the woman in the portrait has become beautiful. It’s just not the kind of beauty that anything in Carrie’s life has prepared her for. That haunted face is neither pretty nor glamorous. It’s mesmerizing. Her power lies in her refusal to please. She stares out of the canvas, challenging you, defying you to want her to be other than she is. Yes, I’m unhappy, she says. Yes, I’m in pain. So what? I’m alive and I’m who I am and you can all go fuck yourselves.

That’s one hell of a way to be beautiful.

‘Can I really have it?’

‘Take it.’

He’s been watching her closely, she now realizes. Tracking the changes in her response to the painting.

‘You don’t want it for your show?’

‘I’d rather you had it.’

Now he’s smiling at her.

‘You’re not just beautiful,’ he says. ‘You have innocent eyes. I didn’t think I’d ever find such a thing again.’

‘I don’t think I want to have innocent eyes.’

‘Yes, you do. For you the joy of seeing all things fresh-made. We live in an age of visual debauchery. The eyes are glutted and dulled by a ceaseless barrage of images. Seeing so much, so often, they see nothing. A world gone blind. So no one believes what they see any more. They wait to be told.’ He mimics imaginary voices in a comic pleading whine. ‘What am I seeing? Is it good? Do I admire it? How much is it worth? Will it make me look smart if I hang it on my wall?’

He points a paint-stained finger at her.

‘But you – you see with your own eyes. Thank you. Thank you. In our end is our beginning.’

He takes another pull from his mug.

‘So what do I do?’ she says. ‘Just carry it home like that?’

‘Just carry it home. Frighten the family.’

She laughs.

‘Why can’t I come to your show? I’d really like to.’

‘My show is for the professionals. You, thank God, are not a professional. But you can have a preview if you want.’

‘I’d really like that.’

He creaks to his feet.

‘Remember the crockery smashing?’ he says.

‘Yes.’

‘He smashed up his own art.’

‘Who did?’

‘Joe. The boy who made it.’

He points to a newspaper on the table. It’s folded open to a picture of the Hayward Gallery: a heap of broken fragments, a crowd standing round. ARTIST DESTROYS OWN INSTALLATION, says the headline.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘He smashed it up, and they’re still coming to see it. Even more than before. Sharp as a tack, that boy.’

‘Why would anyone want to see a smashed-up table?’

‘Ghouls,’ says the old man. ‘They feed on pain, and destruction, and death.’

‘Well, I don’t.’

‘Come on, then. We’ve lost the daylight now. We’ll have to take a torch.’

He picks up his torch and shuffles laboriously out to the barn. Carrie follows, thinking how awkwardly he walks. As if just walking hurts. The outside world is bitterly cold.

He leaves the barn door open. Inside the barn it’s as cold as outside. For a moment he stands there with her, not switching on the torch, letting her sense the space. She can make out the shapes of the paintings on the walls, and the beams and rafters that frame the barn roof, and the old armchair she helped to bring out.

‘Twilight,’ he says. ‘Between light and dark. Good for seeing.’

She sits in the armchair.

‘So you’ll sit here, won’t you?’ she says. ‘Like a king on a throne.’

‘Like a king on a throne, yes.’

‘And they’ll all look at your paintings and tell you how wonderful they are.’

‘No doubt the usual lies will be told.’

He turns on his torch and lights up one of the paintings. The face of his one-time wife, Nell. Then the circle of light moves on to another painting. The face of an ugly laughing man. In this way he shows his works to Carrie like magic lantern slides.

She finds her view of his painting has changed. The process of looking and re-looking at her own portrait has sensitized her gaze. She is deeply moved. Everything he paints seems to her to reveal men and women in a new light: more real, more truthful, and above all, more beautiful. Painting after painting, his life’s work, passes before her eyes.

She speaks this simple discovery aloud.

‘You make everyone look beautiful.’

He says nothing. She can’t see his face in the twilight.

‘This is what you’ve been doing all your life.’

‘Yes,’ he says. He coughs a little as he speaks. ‘How to waste a life, eh?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘This is just great. Your life’s been great.’

Poor words, she knows, but her own life so far has supplied her with too few words. Something else she never knew till now.

‘It’s not been a bad life,’ he says. ‘But then you get old.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Bummer.’

‘Remember that, child.’ He coughs again, a series of little choky sounds. ‘I can take all the rest of the shit. The failure, the hypocrisy, the self-doubt, the posturing of fools. But in the end it’s getting old that fucks you. No escaping that one.’

They go back into the cottage. He lights a lamp, and by its glow he searches out a plastic bag to put the portrait in, so she can carry it home.

‘Is it worth a lot?’ she says.

‘Millions,’ he says.

‘It’s the best present anyone’s ever given me.’

He gives his dismissive shrug.

‘Paint’s still wet,’ he says.

‘I’ll come back after your show’s finished,’ she says. ‘Help you get the chair back into the house. I know the show’ll be a huge success. You’ll be so proud. So will I.’

‘The show doesn’t matter,’ he says. ‘I’m glad you like the portrait. It’s not what I wanted it to be, but then, nothing ever is.’

She goes out into the cold once more, clutching the canvas in its plastic bag. One look back to wave. He’s standing in the doorway, framed by the triangle of lamplight, his hair awry, one hand raised as if in blessing. She sees the scene as he might paint it, noting the way the low angle of the light turns the uneven plasterwork of the wall behind him into a moonscape of mountains and craters. And the way his face is dark but his white hair and beard have an aureole of amber light. And his shadow falling onto the overgrown path to the gate.