When Don Lethbridge came (why? had Rhoda sent for him?) the light was long past its best.
‘Going for the colour again, aren’t you?’
This was not criticism, nor—more odious—encouragement. Each realized it was communication pure and simple, which required no answer. And after Don had helped him down from the block, words might have stumbled. Important to conserve strength: it was going to be a long trudge to the Elysian Fields.
In spite of the continued whispering overheard through walls and from distances, he worked for weeks on this same painting. It wasn’t by any means his last testament, but might grow eventually into what he saw as his compendium of life. Sometimes memory fed him, more often, intuition: insights of such intensity he felt he should have been able to relate them to actual experience; but in this he failed mostly. For instance: the blood horses wallowing in sea shallows at dawn, milky water filling the satin troughs between belly and thighs as they shimmy on their lovely backs, before lunging to their feet, to shake their barrels, all feathered with light and motion, flinging into the used sea the beads of water from their stringy manes. Where had he seen these bathers? He must convey something of the horses, not themselves, their spirit. In the same way the girl in the crushed pink hat and cotton frock strumming out of an old banjo all the remembered songs: fingers, nails blunted by the strumming sanded texture of the arms, tremors of the breasts inside the gritty dress. As the girl entered the trees, her skin brindled by light and shade, the old banjo made a papery thump thump trailing behind her through the tussocks. Because of course this was a self-indulgent work, not what he intended or what he was intended to paint once he had mastered himself, he was also this girl with whom he might or might not have slept. Lying under the paperbarks, he identified the shammy-leather skin, the goose-pimples growing in it, the sand tasted on interchangeable mouths. Now it was himself alone watching the great pantechnicon driving for what reason through the shallows. And the essence of smoky cat slipping through long grass at dusk looking for a kill, at the same time to curl her tail around some something in the name of love. Everything private perfect reduced to a kill if not by time the super-cat by the khaki klan of killers. Tear off a hand or leg it doesn’t belong to you anyway for ever and blood is made to bleed. Like letters.
My dear Cat.
He composed letters just as he painted pictures in his mind and lost them before he could get them down. Everything comes back though, like the homing pigeons pensioned men keep in their yards. Stalagmites of white droppings, lacy scribbles in pigeon shit, a coral scratching over worm-eaten boards.
My husband my God took me by the windpipe and shook it to buggery after the spaghetti on toast.
From where did he know the horses, the shammy-skinned singer, the pigeon-loft held together by the rusty ends of kero tins? He didn’t know. But he knew. Where and when doesn’t in the end matter.
Though some of it was actually near actual. Himself the near stroked on encapsulated in a spatial bus with Mrs Volkov the stroked and stroking pseudo-mother because of course Kathy hadn’t been born she had sprung like himself. Even so Mrs Volkov and Himself co-creators were blowing bubbles at each other which didn’t contain the words. Whoever pricked the empty bubbles first, it was Mrs Volkov who got down at Foy’s, her grey worsted and long groping shoes.
Often the martyred tubes of paint would retaliate by toppling off the adjustable table; once a peanut-butter glass fell, splintering splashing its content of muddy water.
The archangel appeared before he had been summoned; or perhaps Rhoda had sent for him according to some conspiracy.
Best ignore.
Don ignored: always the soul of stillness.
So it was you who had to ask when the silence could no longer be left to ping: ‘D’you make anything of it?’
Almost at once Don replied: ‘Sure.’
Oh God, nothing easy is ever anything but crap. If crap is easy. Not always, nowadays.
But try him out. ‘What, then, Don?’
‘Well, just about everything—hasn’t it?’
‘What d’you mean by everything?’
‘Well—the whole of life.’
Good Christ, better give up! ‘What do you know about life?’
‘I dunno. You just
know.
’
How jealous can you become of the truth when unborn children know? Only the permutations are fresh—or so you like to kid yourself.
‘Is it finished, Mr Duffield?’
‘Yes, it’s finished. You who know so much ought to know that. It’s finished. Help me down, Don. Normally I don’t need.’ you never needed: your body did when the flow was interrupted. ‘I’ll want you to stand the board over there. So I can look at it. It’s not what I set out to paint. I didn’t get there—I can see that already. But I’ll want to look—on and off—see how I might’ve done better. I can’t stay painting the same painting for ever, can I?’
Pity Don had seen. Pity you hadn’t a big enough blanket to cover up the whole mess. Or uncover at night. It was good: ‘The Whole of Life’. That is, it wasn’t too bad. (Nobody need know how rich you are till you’re dead. If they did they might whack into you and love you, which could be more disastrous, creatively, than their hate.)
Sign it tomorrow. Or leave them guessing.
‘Thank you, Don. I’m grateful. I’d also like to mention I’m remembering you in my will.’
Poor Don, blushing amongst the down and pimples, the remark was in such bad taste: his father a carpenter, his mother a waitress at The Slap Up, himself dedicated to art and Duffield.
‘I’ll come, Mr Duffield, any time Miss Courtney sends for me.’
‘Why Miss Courtney? Who’s my master I’d like to know? My sister’s no connection.’
Don Lethbridge smiled back, perhaps even murmured something, and went away.
When she sent for them to come and stuff him in his coffin, that was where Rhoda would take over: wind up the Punch-and-Judy show with her own little song-and-dance act.
That winter, as they sat in the grey asbestos kitchen, amongst the broken eggshells she hadn’t yet gathered up, the picked-at bacon rinds, the pots of Gentlemen’s Relish and Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade—no substitutes, Harry Courtney always insisted—he had never felt closer to Rhoda. At breakfast at least, half the rules mightn’t have been written.
He was at peace, almost.
He might ask: ‘Did you forget to turn the gas off, Rhoda?’ and she would answer, fairly gentle: ‘No. I’m pretty sure I turned it off. Well, perhaps there’s a trickle—only a slight one.’
‘That’s the way people get gassed.’
‘I don’t think so, Hurtle. Not if they’ve developed the fresh air habit and left the window open.’
Here Rhoda made a show of inhaling the mixture of gas and chilly air; the window was certainly open on a pale, moted sunlight and the smell of what passed for earth between Flint Street and Chubb’s Lane: a compost of rubble, flowerpot shards, rusty tins, tamped tightly together and dew-cold.
Rhoda’s theory finally made her cough. ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said when she had recovered, ‘a gas man once told me: when they’re called to investigate a case of gassing, more often than not it’s been deliberate.’
‘Yes, but there are also the old people we read about.’
‘Oh, of course there are the
old
people. That’s different. But we aren’t as old as
all that.
And still have our minds with us.’
Rhoda was wrong more often than not, but here he was inclined to agree with her. ‘No. We’re not quite senile.’
They both laughed.
Although he no longer bothered with the papers, Rhoda made a point of reading bits aloud: murders, rapes, adulteries; each of them, he suspected, rather enjoyed the experience.
She developed also the less agreeable habit of reading aloud from the deaths column.
‘Hold hard!’ he protested at last. ‘Who wants to read about death?’
‘It’s real, isn’t it? It concerns us, doesn’t it? And what about the murders? You like listening to the murders, Hurtle. They stimulate you.’
‘Murders don’t concern us personally.’
Nance? But Rhoda his sister, drifting round London in her broderie anglaise, with Maman and that ‘stepfather’, wouldn’t have heard about it.
‘Take the names of the dead,’ Rhoda couldn’t tear herself away from the last page, ‘haven’t they a kind of poetry? Even the most grotesque are an attempt at it. And on the practical level, you might come across someone you have to do something about—send a wreath—or write to the family.’
He admired her for her knowledge of procedure, which men didn’t have to worry about: they left it to wives who had learnt it from mothers.
He hadn’t had a wife who knew, only mistresses troubled by the state of their souls; till here was Rhoda.
Rhoda said, on a morning of cold floating greenish blurs of light and vines, or birds’ wings opening and closing in frail but convinced sounds of ascent: ‘Do you remember Mary Challands? ’
‘No.’ He was more interested in the parallels between light and sound. ‘Who is Mary Challands?’
‘She was one of the girls who used to come to Sunningdale. I shared her governess later on, after the Hollingrakes gave up theirs, after Boo went to Tasmania to recover from Andrew Thingummy’s death.’
‘No. Apart from Boo, they were just a mob of girls. I can’t sort out one from the other.’
‘Mary was pale and thin. Compared with most of us, distinguished-looking. She was said to be anaemic. They expected her to die young. She was forced to do—oh, the most
disgusting
things! She had to drink blood!’
‘What made you think of her now?’
‘I’ve just read she’s died.’
How Rhoda persisted: as if she were trying to test him; when there was this morning of increasing light, full of the frilly sounds of birds; when there was this painting upstairs which the archangel had named ‘The Whole of Life’; when she had seen entire walls at the Retrospective covered with affirmations. But Rhoda had no eyes for paintings. If he had fathered a child, if somebody had offered him a godson, if he had adopted—say, Don Cuppaidge, he might have evoked life for Rhoda and diminished Mary Challands’s triumph.
All the while Rhoda was carrying on: ‘Jolly lucky I remembered her married name. Otherwise they’d wonder why I hadn’t sent a wreath.’
‘Would they—whoever they are?’
‘Oh, yes. I don’t doubt she would have mentioned me in conversation with her husband. Here he is in the column: “beloved wife of Leicester Mildmay”. I’m sure Mary would have referred to someone as—as different as I. And when you’re living with a person everything comes out in time because you’ve got to find something to say.’
‘Hmmm.’
‘Mary became a Roman Catholic—surely you remember that? Converted while still a young girl.’
‘It seems to have done her good. Or else it was all that blood she drank. To be dying only now.’
Years earlier, he might have painted Mary Challands Mildmay. He could see her corpse so clearly: the bones of her transparent feet, the skin of a pale fish-saint—possibly skate.
‘Oh yes, you can laugh, Hurtle—you, a sceptic!’
‘But I thought you were the sceptic?’
‘Oh, yes—I am and I’m not. Fancy—poor Mary Challands!’ Rhoda kept her nose on the Deaths, practically guzzling the page in her desire to do what she had been taught: the Right Thing.
He would have liked to comfort his sister with some kind of faith, but had never gone over to one. He sat staring at his paint-stained hands.
Rhoda was determined to carry on: ‘He was in insurance, I believe—a bachelor with a fine collection of old silver. They married later in life. Mary told me, while we were still in correspondence, he “left her alone”, and they were very happy together. ’
‘Oh God, Rhoda, then it
was
the blood and the Roman Catholicism which sustained her! It wasn’t life!’
‘I don’t know.’
Some of the empty eggshells had bounced off like ping-pong balls. Rhoda bent to scoop them up. She bumped her nose on the edge of the kitchen table.
Because he felt to blame, he began protesting: ‘I don’t want to criticize the dead.’
‘Nobody’s criticizing anybody. Everybody’s free to hold their own opinions.’ The bump had made her eyes water.
He went out after that: to loose the warm stool he had been nursing inside him as a comfort, to let it uncoil into the Pit, under the
Bignonia venusta.
Who was winning? He still hadn’t finished the inscription on the dunny wall. Most likely it would finish him.
When he had girded himself again he decided to go very quickly upstairs to have no more truck with Rhoda, but she waylaid him in the hall.
‘Last night I had to go out in connection with finding a home for a cat. One the way back I looked in at Mrs Volkov’s, and as I was leaving she gave me this letter for you.’
‘Why on earth should Mrs Volkov write me a letter. What’s it about?’
‘She didn’t offer to tell, and I was too discreet to ask.’ Rhoda gathered her gown around her, and retired into the asbestos kitchen.
He was tempted to leave the letter lying on the bracket of the bamboo hatstand where she had let it fall. Most letters are suspect because they make demands: most suspect a letter from Mrs Volkov, whom he had never considered as a writer of letters. It could only be a huge demand, though nothing material, he imagined: which made it more disturbing.
He took the letter, however, and went upstairs. The faint hope that a person like Mrs Volkov, with her reputation for peculiar powers, might reveal something of the substance of her letter through the envelope, made him fumble at it through his pins and needles, unusually painful that morning. On the half-landing he tripped with his ‘dead’ foot over the hem of his gown. He heard the tear only distantly.
On reaching the top-front he was conscious of a stream of ice-green light pouring through the araucaria, with the waters of the bay in the distance a glistening pale sunlit white.