Pulse (17 page)

The limner had finished his broth and was warming himself before the fire – an element Mr Tuttle was not generous with elsewhere in the house – when an idea came to him. He drew a charred stick from the edge of the ashes, touched the garden boy on the shoulder to make him stay as he was, then pulled a drawing book from his pocket. The cook and the hired girl tried to watch what he was doing, but he held them away with a hand, as if to say that this particular trick, one he was offering in thanks for the boy’s own tricks, would not work if observed. It was a rough sketch – it could only be so, given the crudeness of the implement – but it contained some part of a likeness. He tore the page from the book and handed it to the boy. The child looked up at him with astonishment and gratitude, placed the sketch on the table, took Wadsworth’s drawing hand and kissed it. I should always paint children, the limner thought, looking the boy in the eye. He was almost unaware of the laughing tumult that broke out when the other two examined the drawing, and then of the silence which fell when the collector of customs, drawn by the sudden noise, entered the kitchen.

The limner watched as Tuttle stood there, one foot advanced, as in his portrait, his mouth opening and closing in a manner that did not suggest dignity. He watched as the cook and the girl rearranged themselves in more decorous attitudes. He watched as the boy, alert to his master’s gaze, picked up the drawing and modestly, proudly, handed it over. He watched as Tuttle took the paper calmly, examined it, glanced at the boy, then at Wadsworth, nodded, deliberately tore the sketch in four, placed it in the fire, waited until it blazed, said something further when in quarter-profile to the limner, and made his exit. He watched as the boy wept.

The portrait was finished: both rosewood piano and collector of customs gleamed. The small white customs house filled the window at Mr Tuttle’s elbow – not that there was any real window there, nor, if there had been, any customs house visible through it. Yet everyone understood this modest transcendence of reality. And perhaps the collector, in his own mind, was only asking for a similar transcendence of reality when he demanded more dignity. He was still leaning over Wadsworth, gesturing at the representation of his face, chest, leg. It did not matter in the least that the limner could not hear what he was saying. He knew exactly what was meant, and also how little it signified. Indeed, it was an advantage not to hear, for the particularities would doubtless have raised him to an even greater anger than that which he presently felt.

He reached for his notebook. ‘Sir,’ he wrote, ‘we agreed upon five days for my labour. I must leave tomorrow morning by daybreak. We agreed that you would pay me tonight. Pay me, give me three candles, and by the morning I shall work such improvement as you require.’

It was rare for him to treat a client with so little deference. It would be bad for his reputation in the county; but he no longer cared. He offered the pen in the direction of Mr Tuttle, who did not deign to receive it. Instead, he left the room. While waiting, the limner examined his work. It was well done: the proportions pleasing, the colours harmonious, and the likeness within the bounds of honesty. The collector ought to be satisfied, posterity impressed, and his Maker – always assuming he was vouchsafed Heaven – not too rebuking.

Tuttle returned and handed over six dollars – half the fee – and two candles. Doubtless their cost would be deducted from the second half of the fee when it came to be paid. If it came to be paid. Wadsworth looked long at the portrait, which had come to assume for him equal reality with its fleshly subject, and then he made several decisions.

He took his supper as usual in the kitchen. His companions had been subdued the previous night. He did not think they blamed him for the incident with the garden boy; at most, they thought his presence had led to their own misjudgement, and so they were chastened. This, at any rate, was how Wadsworth saw matters, and he did not think their meaning would be clearer if he could hear speech or read lips; indeed, perhaps the opposite. If his notebook of men’s thoughts and observations was anything to judge by, the world’s knowledge of itself, when spoken and written down, did not amount to much.

This time, he selected a piece of charcoal more carefully, and with his pocket knife scraped its end to a semblance of sharpness. Then, as the boy sat opposite him, immobile more through apprehension than a sitter’s sense of duty, the limner drew him again. When he had finished, he tore out the sheet and, with the boy’s eyes upon him, mimed the act of concealing it beneath his shirt, and handed it across the table. The boy immediately did as he had seen, and smiled for the first time that evening. Next, sharpening his piece of charcoal before each task, Wadsworth drew the cook and the hired girl. Each took the sheet and concealed it without looking. Then he rose, shook their hands, embraced the garden boy, and returned to his night’s work.

More dignity, he repeated to himself as he lit the candles and took up his brush. Well then, a dignified man is one whose appearance implies a lifetime of thought; one whose brow expresses it. Yes, there was an improvement to be made there. He measured the distance between the eyebrow and the hairline, and at the midpoint, in line with the right eyeball, he developed the brow: an enlargement, a small mound, almost as if something was beginning to grow. Then he did the same above the left eye. Yes, that was better. But dignity was also to be inferred from the state of a man’s chin. Not that there was anything patently insufficient about Tuttle’s jawline. But perhaps the discernible beginnings of a beard might help – a few touches on each point of the chin. Nothing to cause immediate remark, let alone offence; merely an indication.

And perhaps another indication was required. He followed the collector’s sturdily dignified leg down its stockinged calf to the buckled shoe. Then he followed the parallel leg of the piano down from the closed keyboard lid to the gilt claw which had so delayed him. Perhaps that trouble could have been avoided? The collector had not specified that the piano be rendered exactly. If a little transcendence had been applied to the window and the customs house, why not to the piano as well? The more so, since the spectacle of a claw beside a customs man might suggest a grasping and rapacious nature, which no client would wish implied, whether there was evidence for it or no. Wadsworth therefore painted out the feline paw and replaced it with a quieter hoof, grey in colour and lightly bifurcated.

Habit and prudence urged him to snuff out the two candles he had been awarded; but the limner decided to leave them burning. They were his now – or at least, he would have paid for them soon. He washed his brushes in the kitchen, packed his painting box, saddled his mare and harnessed the little cart to her. She seemed as happy to leave as he. As they walked from the stable, he saw windows outlined by candlelight. He hauled himself into the saddle, the mare moved beneath him, and he began to feel cold air on his face. At daybreak, an hour from now, his penultimate portrait would be examined by the hired girl pinching out wasteful candles. He hoped that there would be painting in heaven, but more than this he hoped that there would be deafness in Heaven. The mare, soon to be the subject of his final portrait, found her own way to the trail. After a while, with Mr Tuttle’s house now far behind them, Wadsworth shouted into the silence of the forest.

Complicity

W
HEN
I was a hiccuping boy, my mother would fetch the back-door key, pull my collar away from my neck, and slip the cold metal down my back. At the time, I took this to be a normal medical – or maternal – procedure. Only later did I wonder if the cure worked merely by creating a diversion, or whether, perhaps, there was some more clinical explanation, whether one sense could directly affect another.

When I was a twenty-year-old, impossibly in love with a married woman who had no notion of my attachment and desire, I developed a skin condition whose name I no longer remember. My body turned scarlet from wrist to ankle, first itching beyond the power of calamine lotion, then lightly flaking, then fully peeling, until I had shed myself like some transmuting reptile. Bits of me fell into my shirt and trousers, into the bedclothes, on to the carpet. The only parts that didn’t burn and peel were my face, my hands and feet, and my groin. I didn’t ask the doctor why this was the case, and never told the woman of my love.

When I divorced, my doctor friend Ben made me show him my hands. I asked if modern medicine, as well as using leeches again, was also going back to palmistry; and if so, whether astrology and magnetism and the theory of humours could be far behind. He replied that he could tell from the colour of my hands and fingertips that I was drinking too much.

Later, wondering if I had been duped into cutting down, I asked him if he had been joking, or guessing. He turned my hands palm upwards, nodded in approval, and said he would now look out for unattached female medics who might not find me too repugnant.

The second time we met was at a party of Ben’s; she had brought her mother. Have you watched mothers and daughters at parties together – and tried to work out who is taking care of whom? The daughter giving Mum a bit of an outing, the mum watching for the sort of men her daughter attracts? Or both at the same time. Even if they’re playing best friends, there’s often an extra flicker of formality added to the relationship. Disapproval either goes unexpressed, or is exaggerated, with a roll of the eye and a theatrical moue and a ‘She never takes any notice of me, anyway’.

We were standing there, in a tight circle with a fourth person my memory has blanked. She was opposite me, and her mother on my left. I was trying to be myself, whatever that might be, and at the same time trying to make that self acceptable, if not actually pleasing. Pleasing to her mother, that is; I wasn’t bold enough to try to please her directly – at least, not in company. I can’t remember what we talked about, but it seemed to be going OK; perhaps the forgotten fourth helped. What I do remember was this: she had her right arm down by her side, and when she caught me looking in her general direction, she inconspicuously made the smoking gesture – you know, the first two fingers extended and slightly parted, the other fingers and thumb bent away out of sight. I thought: a doctor who smokes, that’s a good sign. While the conversation continued, I got out my packet of Marlboro Lights, and without looking – my activity, too, was at waist level – extracted a single cigarette, returned the pack to my pocket, took the cigarette by the filter tip, passed it round her mother’s back, felt it being taken from my fingers. Noting a slight pause on her part, I went back to my pocket, took out a book of matches, held it by the striking end, felt it being taken from my fingers, watched her light up, exhale, close the cover of the book-matches, pass it back behind her mother. I received it, delicately, by the same end I had given it out.

I should add that it was perfectly obvious to her mother what we were doing. But she didn’t say anything, sigh, give a prim glance, or rebuke me for being a drug-peddler. I instantly liked her for this, assuming she approved of this complicity between me and her daughter. She could, I suppose, have been deliberately holding back her disapproval for strategic reasons. But I didn’t care, or rather, didn’t think to care, preferring to assume approval. Yet this isn’t what I was trying to tell you. The point wasn’t about her Mum. The point was those three moments when an object had passed from one set of fingertips to another.

That was the nearest I got to her that evening, and for weeks to come.

Have you ever played that game where you sit in a circle and close your eyes, or are blindfolded, and have to guess what an object is just from the feel? And then you pass it on to the next person and they have to guess? Or, you keep your guesses to yourselves until you’ve all made up your minds, and then announce them at the same time?

Ben claims that once, when he played it, a mozzarella cheese was passed round and three people guessed it was a breast implant. That may just be medical students for you; but there’s something about closing your eyes which makes you more vulnerable, or drives the imagination to the gothic – especially if the object being passed is soft and squishy. In the times I played the game the most successful mystery item, the one guaranteed to freak somebody out, was a peeled lychee.

There was a production of
King Lear
I went to some years ago – ten, fifteen? – played against a bare-brick backdrop, with brutalistic staging. I can’t remember who directed it, or who played the title role; though I do remember the blinding of Gloucester. This is usually done with the earl pinioned and bent back over a chair. Cornwall says to his servants, ‘Fellows, hold the chair’, and then to Gloucester, ‘Upon these eyes of thine I’ll set my foot.’ One eye is put out, and Regan chillingly comments, ‘One side will mock another; the other too.’ Then, a moment later, the famous ‘Out, vile jelly’, and Gloucester is pulled upright, with stage gore dripping down his face.

In the production I saw, the blinding was done offstage. I seem to remember Gloucester’s legs flailing from one of the brick wings, though perhaps that is a later invention. But I do remember his screams, and finding them the more terrifying for being offstage: perhaps what you can’t see frightens you more than what you can. And then, after the first eye was put out, it was lobbed on to the stage. In my memory – in my mind’s eye – I see it rolling down the rake, faintly glistening. More screams, and another eye was tossed out from the wings.

They were – you guessed – peeled lychees. And then this happened: Cornwall, lanky and brutish, stamped back onstage, tracked down the rolling lychees, and set his foot on Gloucester’s eyes a second time.

Another game, from back when I was a hiccuping boy at primary school. In the morning break we used to race model cars in the asphalt playground. They were about four inches long, made from cast metal, and had real rubber tyres which you could roll off the wheels if you felt like simulating a pit stop. They were painted in the bright colours worn by the racing marques of the day: a scarlet Maserati, a green Vanwall, a blue … perhaps something French.