[85] Eternal circling of souls in flight

Call them colours if you want, but they’re textures. They’re surfaces of light. I’m always climbing up from someplace dark towards that light. Something or someone throws me into a well every day at sunrise and I spend every minute of sun finding a way up towards this pinhole that heaven leaves me. I thrash and I claw. I succeed sooner or later, most of the time. Every day forces a different start that leads to a different end. Most of the time the right way was something I tried a few hours or days before. It was something I did with a drawing that I haven’t looked at for days.

It’s a process and a result, it’s how and what, never all one or all the other, and the mix changes every moment. My mind pounds on intuition, looking for a way to force it open. Nothing just happens. Sometimes the brushwork gets to be automatic, which is a kind of cynicism, and then I stop, no matter how early in the day. I stop and do something else, as far from the canvas as I can look. I’ll take my drawing tablet out into the human weather, I’ll draw faces in a coffeehouse I don’t know, or I’ll just open a file of old drawings. (Or these days I’ll go play with Johnny, who is seeing everything for the first time, lucky lad.) I look for a hole in the world that I can squeeze through. I try as hard as I can and then sometimes that’s too hard and I have to retrace.

Things just grow in my mind. They’re alive or they’re not, they breathe or they don’t. The ones that breathe, or sing … well, look. I never see a finished painting in my head, but I know when there’s something there, waiting for me to expose it to the sun. That’s when the drawing tablet comes out. I don’t like letting a painting go until I can tell myself every part of it has come out. What other people see is out of my power. All I can promise myself to do is remember that first slim crack in the world and look through it somehow.

This spring’s canvases were hatching in my mind well before Johnny’s Big Day. (That trio portrait of me and Emma and the guy? I’d roughed it before he was born, as something I was hoping at the time.) When I draw in the evenings these days – my escape from colour – I start with birth metaphors and then I try to see where they take me. That’s a long way. I’m beginning to draw the world he’s going to meet. I always did, but nowadays I hear myself expressing it that way. Johnny’s turned into an escape from whatever angers and worries me. There’s no story in his head yet, no forward or back, there’s only his stare and his bubble smile, so, nothing in him to read that could anger or worry me. He won’t allow it; instead, there’s this protectiveness that almost overwhelms me when I look at him longer than he actually needs. It astonishes me how self-contained the three of us can be when we’re together. He’s still an empty-headed little lad, and it’s frightening to know that it’s us two who are going to fill him in. A world like this, how can you create someone who wants to be free? Someone who wants to grow wiser by choice?

The night Emma took off part of my head with a candlestick, I expected her to tell me what the horrible thing was, the thing that must have happened, whatever it was. The moment that must have been about the pale-eyed one or someone like him, the one Mr Rosemeyr calls Wolfie. But she still hasn’t yet. No story there for me, not yet. Sometimes when she isn’t careful she bottles things up so tightly that when they finally come out, even she doesn’t notice how much she’s twisted them.

For example, she doesn’t want me to look for him, now that he’s invaded her life if only as a refreshed memory. That’s what she told me even before I asked: ‘I don’t want you to do anything about him, Paul.’ But there’s the mystery, do you see? This has brought me right to edge of the part of her I don’t know after all this time. She didn’t tell me why not, so it’s possible I’m supposed to find him without telling her. There would be plenty of chances for that. After all, when I walk, she never asks me where I’m going. And while I’m figuring it out, she’ll be – I know this – she’ll be sitting at home, telling herself, ‘I bet he’s doing what I told him not to do.’ Which I won’t be, not this time. Not yet. You have to pick your moments to override Emma like that, and this time, no. I just don’t have the information. But sometimes she’s going to be thinking I’ve looked for him, and any argument we have about it will be over something else.

The maid has left for the day. The maid was a good idea, not that I see her much, the hours she keeps. The flat looks tidy mostly in Emma’s way, things placed how she likes, but it’s all shifted a little, and the light is different. The maid is part of Emma’s new world. I don’t notice them bonding much, and I hope Emma isn’t ashamed of having one or something like that. She has trouble handling shame. Shame makes her angry, when she has the energy. And when she doesn’t – like this spring – it collapses into her and feeds on her, which is worse for everyone.

But when we’re out those nights, you know, in the maze of the lamp-lighted streets, transfiguring the pavements with our blended shadows, I’m always stopping to light my pipe again, and there’s a bench on the canal bank to the east of us, in a copse of trees and with a view of the Pleasure Park where it slips down towards the canal. We sit there and rock Johnny in his perambulator and smile hello to the other parents with babies, and chat up the ones we recognize by now, then back to the Singing Swan for coffee and something. I know that bench is as far as she can walk most evenings. When she knows I can tell how tired she is, she’ll turn around slowly without my asking. Till then, while we’re sitting there, I try not to watch her face too much, because she won’t like the questions she sees when she looks back. How are you, Emma? She’s too proud to say, but I see her looking for ways to do it.

She’s in the kitchen right now doing something with Johnny, not with him but doing something while he’s with her. I could have left out the with-the-baby part. The tightness between them – I don’t want it to ever wear off. She looks cruel these days. Johnny brings out her mad dog look for everyone else, this vigilant pride. I’m feeling damned inconvenient these days, since he learned to flip over on his tummy. I get about an hour of most of her days, but since we never know when Johnny’s going to nap, I never know which hour. Just time enough for a hug and a talk about the day and some soldiering to keep me indoors when I need a night like that, and how’s work, dear, as if she isn’t watching everything I do in the studio. She’s getting brisk about soldiering these days, as if I’m one more diaper to change; she’s brisk about her sailoring, too. ‘Paul, do something,’ and she leans back in her armchair or against the bed frame and raises her knees a little. Every thirty-six hours. Thirty-six? Johnny’s brought out the efficient side of her. The animal side. You think at first glance that animals aren’t very efficient, but I tell you, they are. They really are. That hopping around in trees, that flapping of wings, there’s a purpose to every instant of it. Animals don’t waste a minute on anything, and then when there’s nothing for them to do, they don’t do anything. No wonders or regrets, no doubts. When her and Johnny are alone, they’re living in animal time – that is, outside all time but their own.