Sheer Blue Bliss (20 page)

‘Meaning?' He imagines raising his fist, thumping the table, screaming it into her face –
meaning?
She is not frightened. She should be fucking frightened. If she knew. The girl he didn't mean to kill that he did kill, served time for. Served time, time the master. There was no intention. No guilt on that score. But the anger came and Christ, she was so soft, her voice in his ear, her skin silkier than silk, her armpit – his index finger slipping under her arm and the surprise of soft hair there, soft and damp where women should be shaved. Somehow that got to him, the sort of trust of it, giving him her body as it was, no make-up, perfume, a childish smell of soap, baby powder or something like. Tenderness and the backlash. How it is. Tenderness is danger. It has to be whores, the rougher the better but he can't trust them to be clean. Who could trust a whore? So he's stuck. Tenderness is the danger, oh yes that eruption of anger that screws his fists, his gut, floods his mouth with the taste of metal, that blinds him.

‘Shall we have a cup of tea?' Benson says.

‘Meaning?'

‘Simply that he was far from perfecting …'

‘But he got some way?'

‘If you read you know …'

‘And what … where are they … what there is?'

‘Went with him.' He watches her run the horny edge of her thumbnail along the grain of the wooden table. He sits down on the chair that is frail as her bones, that feels like it will snap under his weight.

‘With him where?'

‘Wherever he went.'

‘He went on the day I was born.' He waits but she says nothing. She is so fucking tiny, her head about the size of a grapefruit. ‘So you don't have anything?'

‘If I did?'

‘I would ask you to give them to me. I need …'

‘Need?'

‘I would ask you.'

‘And do you suppose I would give?'

He stares at her.
I'd fucking take them
, he says with his eyes but he can't stare her out, those bright eyes, maybe they can't see, maybe he's out of focus to her. Maybe to himself he is out of focus. It's sinking in that he has come to the end of the trail, lost the scent. Needs to think, to get this sorted in his head,
what
then? what
now?
From behind the table Patrick smirks. The portrait of Patrick that she painted, this woman, famous painter. If this is famous! Living like this in a sink hole. Which he will leave. Leave her, leave her to rot and crumble and fall through the floor. Done nothing wrong, he can leave now. Stop this.

Must get clear. For years there's been the plan, dream,
trust
– that is the worst of it – that he will find the elixirs, that in this way Patrick will save him from himself. But no. Patrick fucked off out of it and took whatever there was with him. So now what? Nothing. Nothing to keep him, nothing to … head for. He loved Patrick. Patrick has let him down. Smirking down there in the shadow.

‘Would you carry him up for me?' Benson has followed his eyes. ‘Only I'd like to get him settled back.'

He shrugs: Gets up. ‘OK.' Lifts the painting, averting his eyes from Patrick's that surely are taking the piss.

‘I'll go up first and switch on the lamp,' she says. ‘No big light up there.' She climbs up the ladder, kind of like a child, putting both feet carefully on each rung. He waits at the bottom looking at her stupid shoes, like kids' party shoes, watching those thin shins that disappear inside a green dress, thinking once
he
must have watched those legs and lusted. Thinking very dully. No anger, that is good, odd, but good, no anger no, just a kind of letdown, like a scaffolding's gone.

The light comes on up there and he goes up after her. Hangs the painting on the hook she indicates.

‘Welcome back, darling,' she says. The light is just a pool on the floor so Patrick still looks shadowy. Shady. Tony almost trips on something.

‘Mind,' Connie snaps.

He looks down at the brown-paper parcel, an actual brown-paper parcel tied with string. ‘Paints,' she says, ‘new paints.'

It reminds him.

‘Would you paint me?' For maybe that is it. Yes, that's it. She paints him, immortalises him in the way Patrick is immortalised. The portraits can hang side by side. Someone would pay a lot of money for a new portrait by Constance Benson. A portrait of Tony. Next exhibition there he'd be, at the view, up there in the light, never mind shut out in the cold and the rain. He'd be up there, he'd be someone, someone among all the Patricks. It's as if all the particles of him jump together at the thought. Yes, that's it. And the elixirs, she could be lying about the elixirs for all he knows but if he sticks around … Who knows? Maybe the truth will out.

‘No,' she says.

‘What?'

‘No.'

A long pause. ‘What are you saying?'

‘I'm saying no.' The light shines up from the floor so that her face is a dark mess of angled shadows, lines, eyes gone.

‘No?'

‘I don't paint, dear. Not for a long time.'

‘You do paint. These are paints.' He kicks the brown-paper parcel.

‘I buy paints because I love paints. I can't not buy them, all the colours. But I don't paint. I'm going down.'

Tony watches her. His hands hang by his sides, loose fists that could beat the shit out of her no trouble, but he lets her go, the thin wisps of the top of her head disappearing last. When she's gone he turns to look at Patrick. It's only paint on a flat canvas but his head seems to turn slightly, can't, and the eyes seem to blink. Is that a wink? No. Come
on
, Tony, get a grip. She says no. But nevertheless she will paint him. That is the new idea. He will stick around and she will paint him and maybe the elixirs will come to light, the truth will come to light.

He kneels and unties the string, unfolds the brown paper. In a wooden box are tubes and tubes of paint. In the dim light he holds them close to his eyes: cadmium yellow, ultramarine, veridian. He presses between his finger and thumb, unscrews the lid of one tube and squeezes. The colour that comes out looks blackish in the poor light, a worm of black on his hand, an oily rich smell. He rubs it round his palm, a wet dark hollow. The paint on his hand is fine at first but then it starts to feel like mud or shit. It's dirt and he needs to wash it off, quick, quick, to get that feeling off his skin. He goes down the ladder and to the sink.

‘You been messing with my paints?' she says, she's sitting at the table swigging whisky. It makes a kind of creaky gulp as it passes down her throat. He turns on the tap. ‘You won't get it off with water.'

‘What then?' She takes her time, wipes her mouth on the back of her hand. He splays out his own fingers, can't bear the sticky feel of them pressing together. ‘What?'

‘Turps, under the sink.'

It makes him almost want to get rid of his hand, the feel of that paint clinging. He pulls back the bit of raggedy curtain, soggy cardboard cartons and cylinders of Dreft, Ajax, Flash, a bad damp smell of clean gone wrong. But there is a plastic bottle of turps, he pulls it out, unscrews it and splashes some on his palm, rubs his hands together so the paint thins to a stinking runny brown. He puts his hands under the cold water, squirts Squeezy on them, making shit-coloured suds in the sink.

‘Raw sienna,' she remarks.

He rubs and rubs in the water that feels icy until the stain has gone, until his hands are raw and red.

‘Finished?' she says.

Don't laugh at me
. Tony sits down opposite her, reaches for the whisky, pours himself a drop, just a drop. Tosses it down his throat without touching the glass to his lips. Waits for her to say more but she says nothing, stares into her cup with a far-away kind of smile, makes some awful clicking swallowing sounds.

‘I want you to paint me,' he says. A clear and reasonable enough request. After a pause he even adds, ‘Please.'

She shakes her head. ‘Oh no. No question of that.'

‘You don't understand,' he says, staring at her face wondering
does
she,
does
she understand? ‘I'm not asking, as such.' He pauses. ‘I'm telling.

She snorts. ‘Let me get this straight. You,
you
are
telling
me to paint you?'

‘Yes.'

There is a long silence. Not silence of course, it rarely is, there are all the sounds of the sea and sky and room and the two living bodies inside it. But still, the not speaking has a resonance all of its own.

‘And I am saying no.'

He rubs his cold hands on his thighs. He shrugs, smooths his hair back, feeling the blue light in it crackle against his hand. It's nearly dry now. He picks the rubber band, all stuck with broken-off hairs off the table, and snaps it on his hair.

‘We'll start tomorrow.'

‘I'm off to bed,' she says.

‘And we'll start tomorrow at … nine?'

She goes to the sink, picks a foul discoloured toothbrush from the windowsill and fishes in the drawer for some toothpaste. She puts a finger in her mouth and flips out her dentures. He shudders. She runs the tap, scrubs at the pink gums and ivory teeth and plops the whole denture in a cup with a fizzing tablet. She scrubs the same toothbrush round in her mouth and spits in the sink. She lights the gas under the kettle again then she goes out of the door letting in a fresh blast of rainy air. While she's gone he listens to the fizzing of the dissolving tablet, the dripping of the tap, the racing of water approaching the boil, the far-off rush of the toilet flushing. She comes back in acting like he's not there which he fucking is. She stoops down and from under the sink, brings out a pink hot-water bottle. She fills it from the kettle and, holding it against her chest, goes to the bottom of the ladder.

‘I'm sleeping up there,' Tony says.

She opens her mouth at him, no teeth, her little face folded even smaller now, her mouth a ragged O. She looks at him for a moment, but says nothing, turns and shuffles off into the bedroom. The door closes behind her with a hard click.

‘Good-night,' he calls. But he doesn't climb the ladder. He opens the outside door and steps out, rubbing his cold hands on his jeans and looking at the rips in the cloud through which the stars sing, icy-clean and unimaginably far away.

SIX

The bed is damp, of course it is, not slept in since … Connie hates to come into this room. The memory of Patrick, not the painted Patrick but the real physical Patrick, the flesh and the bones, is so strong in here that it makes her cold. Not ordinary cold, but as if the air around her clings wetly, condenses on her warm live flesh and trickles down.
Stop it
. The bulb is dead and she stumbles to the dressing-table and wrenches at the sticking drawer, pulls out a damp tangle of woollen underwear, frowsty with her own smell. She fumbles at her clothes, takes some off, pulls on the long-johns and a cardigan, some socks that are his woollen socks knitted by Sacha and still good. A sudden memory of Sacha asleep in the conservatory, sun on her lined face, knitting dangling from her lap. Hard in the darkness to dress but she's not having that door open with him out there.

The hot-water bottle has warmed a space on one side of the bed. She curls round it, stomach burning through all the wool. Movement outside, the outside door opening, him in or out. No lock on this door, if only he would leave … oh Patrick who she needs, bloody bugger that he is, was, is. Paint him indeed! Paint him. As if he can threaten her. As if she's anything to lose. Not asking but telling!

The blankets on top of the sheets are heavy with damp, an awful smell. Last time she slept in this bed it was with him, his long body angled round hers, warm, warm. And now he is only bones. She is uneasy in this room, hates to think of the cold under the floorboards, that deep cold sand.

And sheets not changed for thirty years! Thirty years! She finds that she is sniggering. Sniggering! With that lunatic at large.
Stop it
. These sheets almost stuck together at the edges with the damp, mould probably. There must be some of Patrick left in this bed, some old skin cells, hairs. She can almost feel the arthritis starting up again in this damp. The floor nearly as soft as the bed itself. Face facts, Connie, the place is deteriorating faster than you are. Built as temporary in 1945, lived in for over fifty years, not bad, not bad at all. Patrick and his improvements. Crazy when he built the studio. Impossible said the architect who used to come and bring a different woman every time only they were all practically identical: slim, dark, wavy hair, you couldn't risk calling them by name – Sue, Lou, Pru – whatever it was he was searching for in them he never found. Patrick going ahead, hardly a one to take advice, she grins in the dark at the idea of it, built a floor, a window in the roof and he was right, it worked, and if the place is starting to lurch now well, who's to say it wouldn't be lurching, in any case?

Hard edge of the rubber bottle against her, slosh of water as she moves. Someone moving in her home, some other mind thinking what? Planning what? Is this fear? A heart that she can hear and feel beating, a body curled round a rubber bottle, head under the mouldy sheets, smell of rubber, the heating of damp cloth, almost a kind of steam and her own whisky breath rebreathed. Her back is to the door but she doesn't dare turn over. Aware of the door through the blankets and the sheet and the slab of dark behind her, but her body is locked now in position, can't move. It's as if the hot-water bottle is beating like her own huge heart ripped out to which she clings. He could open the door and come in with a knife, an axe, a brick, and the light within her would be smashed. Would there be pain … that is almost of more concern … not afraid to be dead, only of dying, afraid only of the knowing and the pain.

How will she sleep and how will the night ever pass? The moment returns when she thought, crazy for a second, that he was Patrick. No, she never really could have thought … Patrick, Paddy, my love, take me. Oh that would be a joke if she could go tonight, float off, of natural causes they would say. Is fear a natural cause? What a turn it would give whatsisface, waiting for his nine o'clock
appointment
, if she didn't emerge. What would he do, bring her tea in bed, kick open the door and yell? And there she'd be, stone cold.