Pravda (22 page)

It was the work of less than two minutes. And it was all she could muster. Her face was burning with the thought of betraying her brother. And she could feel her heart beating against the unforgiving conscience of her sternum. An image of her father careened into her mind—his face livid with the drunken discovery of her and Gabriel trespassing in his office, trying his locked drawer.

She forced herself to return to the top of the screen. For five further minutes she typed one greeting after another, deleting the words as quickly as she entered them: "Dear Dad"; "Hey Dad"; "Dear Nicholas"; "Dad—"; "Hello Nicholas"; "Hello Dad"...Nothing felt right. But nothing had ever felt right. After all the years of silence, she simply did not know what to call the man. She remembered that once, when he had hit her so hard that she could not hear, she had called him a "shoevanist pig."

In the end, fearful that she would lose her courage (or fury, or the need of a child to know, or whatever the hell it was that was driving this), she just left it blank. No greeting at all. Feverishly, she picked up her bag, rummaged until she found the e-mail address that Julian Avery had given her (and what a conversation
that
had been), and typed it in ... And then, for a few seconds, she allowed herself the costly luxury of the truth—that it was actually communication itself that she wanted to establish. That the content was merely a means. And that in this subterfuge she was ... She was
just like her mother.
And that her father, the cleverest man she had ever met, would see through it as surely as if she were made of glass. But—shallow breathing—maybe that didn't matter anymore. Banish thought. Banish games. Banish play. (Another image—of her father swimming with Francis, his friend, in the men's pond on Hampstead Heath while she and her brother stood by the railings, scared of dogs.) The point was to get the journey started. Take the bastard on. Do it. Send.

Why, in the name of heaven's fat white rolling arse, is everything I attempt so utterly wretched? Were I one fraction less indolent, then I might improve. Were I one fraction less idealistic about my endeavors, then I might be content. Were I one fraction less intelligent, then I might fool myself into thinking I was better than I am. Instead, I am triply cursed. And still, after all this cursing, the fact remains: I am bloody awful at portraiture, Chloe. I stand before you as beside the point as a businessman in an orchestra pit."

The pure white canvas had become a wretched oozing swamp. Nicholas had long ago lost sight of the painting itself, so cleanly sketched and proportioned in a deft burnt umber only two hours ago. But now even the local details on which he had fixated were disappearing; his representation of the nose, for example, had turned to sludge; whole patches of the picture were swimming in paint, and the only colors he could conjure were tertiary. He simply could not place his brush with any kind of precision; it was all too slippery and oily. And all the while, nature continued to mock him from where it lay, propped up on its little lilac pillow, feminine beauty indifferent as ever to the effort of man.

In the first few weeks he had felt anxious, dislocated, shaken, and saddened by turn, but these reactions had soon given way to an indistinct but abiding sense of annoyance with everything, and most of all with himself. As if he had been consistently putting off an important job or failing to give up smoking day after day. These feelings were familiar to him, of course—he had suffered from something similar for most of his life, but in recent years he had managed to
block it out, to beguile time with such single-minded commitment to his own amusement and pleasure that the days had not been able to round on him. This was the peace deal he had negotiated with himself and he'd grown accustomed to living contentedly under its terms: in return for a program of unstinting indulgence, he had promised to stop the self-antagonizing. Now, though, even his most tested techniques (of which painting was one) were failing him: distraction, denial, diversion—nothing was working. Life had reneged. Death had interfered. And hostilities with himself were resumed. He saw now what a flimsy little sham of a deal it had been all along.

He suspected that his blood pressure was higher than normal today—whatever normal was. He turned to glance out of the great window behind. Even the light refused to be precise—the morning's watery sun had given way to heavy, sullen cloud, as if Paris were about to enter one of its long winter sulks. The traffic on the opposite bank rushing on, endlessly urgent. But the heavy Seine between was a sluggish thing this afternoon, a sluggish thing of surliness and sullage.

He returned his eyes to the room—or rather, his studio-study (as he called it)—and they carried slowly across the ephemera therein: his stack of canvases in one corner, the desk he never used, magazines and papers, articles unread or unwritten, rags and paintbox, his easel; too small to be a studio, really, and the only thing he had ever studied in here was failure. He held up his brush and squinted. He wanted to scrape the whole head off with his knife, except that long experience had taught him that scraping never worked quite well enough and that at this stage the only thing to do was to wait until the paint stiffened and became compliant. Or start again.

Start again.

How many times must he start again? Blood and sand: surely it was possible to paint what he saw, at least. Those pretty toes pointed toward him, one leg up and bent, her arm above her head, the other arm loosely across her hips, a sort of lying-down contrapposto ... The canvas should
smell
of her naked body. Instead, foreshortening had defeated him—even the basic proportions now seemed wrong, making her look freakish, steatopygous, when she was anything but. And then there was the big problem of the perspective of her face—totally counterintuitive, since her eyes in this pose were almost lower than her nose, itself an odd triangle of nostrils and nothing else. He had found himself transforming the never-ending wonder of animate human features into an ungainly and geometric thing in order to
map it doggedly onto the slimy mulch of his canvas. He shut his eyes completely. All hope of capturing the intoxicating mingle of her expressions had now vanished.

If nothing more, Nicholas was honest with himself on the subject of art: he knew rubbish when he saw or heard it (as he did, often); he could recognize genuine talent even when it was confusing itself; and he saw mediocrity clearly for what it was. His own first and foremost. But like everything else he had done in the past forty years, Nicholas was doing this entirely for himself, so the success or failure of the work didn't matter beyond his own struggle with it, and the fact that he was a profoundly mediocre painter might not have bothered him at all except ... Except that every time he closed his eyes, he could see quite clearly what it was that he wanted to achieve. Except that he did possess artistic vision. And—here, today, again—it was the very fact of this vision that made his abiding lack of skill or talent or stamina (or whatever it was that was needed to render artistic vision into reality) so infuriating, so demeaning. Worse still: this problem was an old problem. Indeed, he sometimes thought it was the defining problem of his life. The artist's vision without the accompanying artistry: the cruelest curse of the gods.

The only way forward was to stop. The only way to stop was to escape. And the only way to escape was to lose himself—physically lose himself—in the very body that was evading him artistically. There was one distraction left to him that never failed.

He addressed his model in French, which, curiously, still included the occasional suggestion of a Russian accent, an echo of the much heavier intonations of his private tutor during those long confined Moscow summers of his childhood.

"Chloe, I think we'll leave it there for today. I am making a mess of it. The paint is too wet. I need to let it dry." He stepped back from his easel, as much for effect as anything. "We can carry on next week. Or in another lifetime, when I have learned how to paint."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Okay, you are the artist."

"I wish that were true. Unfortunately, I am merely yet another commonplace toiler in the mud."

Then the old magic began to happen: as she sat up, she disappeared altogether as a model and became Chloe Martin once again—sometime actress, sometime real estate agent, once a little famous, twice divorced, an auburn-haired bob cut woman of a flat-chested
forty-three, wide-wide mouth, all gum and marching molars when she smiled, freckles, crow's feet, translucent skin (which she ill-advisedly exposed to sun whenever she could), and eyes as green as pale nephrite. And watching her rise, he felt desire surging back to reassert its hegemony over his emotions.

"I'm going to have a drink, Chloe. I think ... something white and chilled. What would you like?"

"Apple juice first. I am thirsty. But bring me a glass of wine as well." She smiled a smile that began sincerely but became false as she caught herself evincing impromptu sweetness and belatedly tried to capitalize—to witness that subtle transformation alone, Nicholas thought, worth the one thousand euros he paid her to be his model. Oh sweet Jesus, the hours he had spent covertly watching people as they so vigorously sought to disguise themselves, while their every expression and mannerism bellowed out the giveaways. It was almost funny. Just a shame there was nobody with whom to share the joke. Not anymore. He put down his brush and rag.

The drawing room was pleasingly Alessandro-less as he entered, and his irritation was further alleviated. The Italian was away in London, pursuing his ambitions in musicals: some audition for some piece of terrible shit based on the terrible shit of some terrible shit's life in a shitty and terrible rock band. The evening's rubber might even be enjoyable—untainted by moping, melodrama, or huff. Nicholas almost smiled as he entered the kitchen: Alessandro could not sing, could not dance, could not act, could not even mime ... and yet, like more or less everyone under thirty-five he met these days, he firmly believed he had talent, a precious and precarious gift that needed sensitive nurturing in order to blossom into the hardy rose of genius. Dear God, who was telling the young all these lies about themselves? The poor fools had no chance. Their serfish heads so filled with false promise and misleading encouragement, their eyes wide with Hermès and Prada.

You are peasants, my friends, of peasant stock and loamy soul, only lately freed from your bonds—muck and ignorance cling to your every desperate venture. Desist. Relax. Go easy awhile. Ease into your emancipation. For I tell you this: the democracy you live by, this freedom, these rights, they are so many cruel jokes being played on you by your old rulers as they snigger and snort behind their latest disguises. They're only pretending you are equal, for their amusement. They
want
to see you struggling with it all—too fat, too
thin, crazed on exercise, crazed on junk food, bewildered and belittled, arms full of ghastly designer shopping (Cambodian tat, I'm afraid) from the pages of their ghastly magazines. It's a cruel, cruel joke. And alas, those values you are so proud of, they're no such thing; they're but a confection of silly little sayings they smuggled in with primetime so that you could be mocked all the more for repeating them. They have you running in all the wrong directions again, my friends; they've set you off on the wrong track as surely as they ever did when they called themselves your bishops and your barons. You must hope for more insightful leaders or plan for another revolution. The world is yours awhile yet, if you would only seize it back. Oh yes—and you, my dear, dear, Alessandro, please try to understand: your gorgeous arse is your one and only card. You have nothing else. So be sure to use it well when Herr Direktor turns his gaze on you, my darling boy.

And yet, Nicholas reflected as he took out two clean glasses, who could blame Alessandro and the millions like him? What was the desire for celebrity but an age-old ache for some kind of externally verifiable significance? Testimony from somewhere other than the self—relief, reassurance, reinforcements—even if the testimony was a vapid and quick-vanishing lie. He bent for the Tokay, which he had been keeping in the fridge for the evening's bridge but which now struck him as far too good to share with anyone but Chloe.

She had that particular female shape to her inner thighs which caused that certain little triangle of space to form between the tops of her legs when she stood up straight, as now, framed in the far doorway of the drawing room, shirt undone, naked otherwise; that certain space, just beneath.

Sexual chaos—that was the only way to describe it, the whole of Nicholas's life from the age of sixteen. One long rolling, roiling, rollicking sea of sexual chaos; magnificent, frightening, awful, sickening, mettle-testing, perilous, heartbreaking, audacious, and glorious by turn. No, his was not the common journey. But, as he had always religiously maintained, who, on their deathbed, actually wished to say (with a satisfied sigh to ceiling and gathered loved ones), "Ah, mine was the common journey—excellent."

The odyssey began in earnest in a grand but threadbare hotel room (that would never recover from the loss of the empire) when he was barely seventeen. He'd enjoyed a three o'clock lid-full of his
mother's secret scotch, and as ever, he was supposed to be studying quietly, waiting for the rest of his family to return, preparing himself to follow in his father's footsteps straight into Cambridge (classics) and the Overseas Service. It was Easter, Max was back from Moscow and in London for the week (some reprimand or other), his mother was God knows where, and his little sister was out spending the money he had stolen from his father's wallet precisely for the purpose of sending her out.

Antonia Grey, his little sister's friend, however, was very much in ... In his mother and father's bed, to be dogmatically factual about it: freshly undressed, sixteen, and giving it the full actressy adolescent treatment. But not for Nicholas's direct benefit. No no no: he'd already had quite enough of the straight stuff from Miss Grey, his first model. ("Toni, I think we should try something. You know we can't paint it unless we see it, unless we
experience
it ... so will you, if I promise to stay quiet?") No. Instead, his sister's friend was faking her way through her second orgasm of the session with Stephen or Jonathan or Benjamin or whatever his name was, captain of rugby or boats or some such. Young Nicholas Glover, meanwhile, captain of nothing but fucking, was stationed in the walk-in wardrobe, looking on from the darkness behind his mother's favorite evening gown with the kind of unqualified attention more befitting a newly fledged heart surgeon taking final instruction from the senior consultant.