[8] The happiness of leaping dolphins

Nature is beautiful, when I look. I stand outside the studio door at dusk, at the base of the church path with my face to the Dream City – hidden by that tree, just –  down there and smoke my church bells pipe. I watch the winter lights twinkle, and when it’s truly silent, I can tell they’re smiling while they sing. Sometimes they’re stars, other times village lights, and up here, when the sky is clearest, you can’t tell one from the other. Colours move – they have as much life as lines do. Colours are liquids, they freeze and they boil. And words are half a centimetre high and a night’s walk long and only travel one way, for which thanks to God I’m not a writer, because I wouldn’t know how to live in two dimensions. I stand there wondering what I haven’t seen yet, and looking for it, because that’s what experience is – what you make yourself see. My paintings aren’t imagined in me – the imagination I use is out there. Then I take what the world has allowed me into the studio, and look for forms to emerge from what I sensed. All the things I wish this world was not, the world is still those, but I’m too empty-headed just then, in the dark beyond the studio door, to screen it with my memories, and it enters me unfiltered. And that’s a wonderful sensation, knowing that I worked hard enough all day to stand where I am, as empty as this, and open myself so entire to this world’s colours and lights.

This studio was once a greenhouse and potter’s shed. Emma says we came here first in 1908, but I don’t know why the year matters. She handles that kind of paperwork. It still smells like loam – is that the word? – here when you close the door and the walls start to breathe. I won’t have colours in here. I need everything black or white, mostly white, and wherever I work I spend the first week punching out walls, installing sheet glass to blast the space with light. If I could throw a chain over the sun and winch it closer, I would. Drawing is different – for that I need the hardest shadows I can make. Where the shadows are right I stop everything to draw.

Emma appears at the studio most nights now to remind me of supper and pour me my crystal, while I’m holding the little man, who I can already tell is going to be as big as me one day. When I kiss his forehead, he wakes up and belts me. Does he lead with his right? We still aren’t sure. She totters like a derrick around the studio, peering under the dropcloths with the tip of her nose, metering my progress like a Senior Inspector. She says nothing. Months later, when memory of effort has faded, she’ll tell me something sometimes. This muse thing – no, not her. We’d both laugh. It’s just that she has access to knowledge I never will, that comes from memories no one can share with her.

Whatever she’s told you, I haven’t left the cottage this winter any more than she has. I need every minute of light where we are, and when it’s dark, I want to be where Johnny is. What she told you about me and the Duclos tin, I don’t know why she said that. Neither of us has broken the seal yet. Direct to the hands. So, really, Emma.

Her mother’s backstairs maid is here to spy on us, though she can’t stop herself from hooking up with the lad, dandling him on her lap while Emma goes off on her laudanum flights (which have ended, mostly). I don’t mind if her mother knows everything, and really, there nothing to report except those tubes on the doors (which will cause a terrible stir of vapours). The maid sees me work through the daylight and beyond while Emma sleeps off her bottle. A mouthful of leftovers at ten and two, brought out to me. Emma wakes up and stands up and finds me. That’s it. If the maid stayed after dark, she’d see us brew tea together and have dinner with it, then I play with Johnny, followed by a few minutes’ soldiering from Emma, thanks, dear. She seems to think that as long as she keeps giving it out, somehow, I won’t go off to the station local after dinner. I don’t know what I’d do, actually – she’s ahead of me with those, the trooper she is. She’s got no reason to be jealous of the world out there – this is where I want to be, with my work, with Johnny, and with her. If you asked me in what order, I’d say, ‘It’s two o’clock.’

I know why she’s watching hawklike for me to be restless up here: when we’re down there, I can’t bear to be home the entire day. I have to get out for an hour or two: there are crowds to swim through, friends to argue with, patrons to meet. I work hard at all that. And then I come home and tell her what I’ve seen. And days I don’t do that, we’re out in the city together just, well, walking, to a coffeehouse or gallery or river park, somewhere where we’re as known as we want to be in that moment, and telling each other what each of us sees and me with my tablet at ready for the shadows. But up here? There she is, and there’s the lad. I know it’s a charmed life, this heaven we’ve built with our own resources. I know. We should never have been this lucky – there must be a law that hasn’t been promulgated yet. It’s meant disobeying the man-gods and forgetting, more often than we should, their version of what must happen some day.

When the maid brought Johnny to the studio the first time, she saw what I was doing and dashed back out, covering Johnny’s head. There are a hundred monographs around the Aaronsons’ apartment full of fleshier nudes than mine, and battle scenes full of pleading and gore. There’s a Goya aquatint in Mr Aaronson’s study – Los desastres, plate 39 – that disturbs even me. My work frightens her because she’s watching me make it, which means these are people she might meet one day (and she might be next). I don’t clean people up much. I might one day, but I keep deciding not to try.

When nobody visits in the evening, Johnny’s smirking and snoring in his crib by eight o’clock, and that’s leaves the two of us and the wind. There’s always a wind after dark, up here. We’ve moved the bed into the front room, where the light is better and it’s warmer. I don’t hang my own work at home, but there’s plenty on the walls, most of it crayon drawings that visitors make as party favours. We tack them up at random.

Moon on snow, pine trees. Working by coal oil the last hour, the shadows throbbing with the draft through the window cracks, black but soft at the edges. I like that burnished yellow light, anciently patinated bronze, I want to harness it somehow. It would take a thinner shellac than I’ve ever mixed, and I wonder how many coats. This winter I need go see the icons in the Imperial Attic, because the Orthodox monks used that effect all the time. [Gus the Painter could just tell him how, but no … – Emma.]

One day I was one thing, now I am this. I don’t know how that can interest anyone. I don’t understand why people want stories and I’m no good at them anyway. Stories are a torment – the sound of the world shouting in your ear. If the future did that, okay … knowing the future would be more useful than remembering your past. Sometimes I wish the world would hold still while I was walking on it, which is what I want more than anything else – to freeze it long enough that I can stare at it.

I love Emma’s grandfather, I do. I thought I was only capable of loving women sometimes, but around him I’ve noticed other kinds, like his for us, and Emma’s for him, so I’m learning I’m capable, though not what I’m supposed to do with it. It’s too much responsibility for me. But at least I know now how Emma learned what love is – from him. In her life, from him. He’s the reason she’s capable of wanting to love, of trying to love back, and so terrified of failing. Love, you only have to feel it once. Once, and after that it would destroy you inside to lose that power.

I’m haunted by the absence of dreams. I’ve never remembered one. The same way that she’s haunted by their waking presence. The things used to swallow her like shark chum, she says – rip, gulp, rip, gulp. They still do sometimes, and she wakes up bloody and torn. I don’t know what pain is – no one has ever hurt me, and I’m no good at inflicting it on myself. Pain – what is it? The best defence against pain is a good attack. If you want to find your real enemies, look inside yourself. Look for what’s in you that’s letting people hurt you. This, okay, is what Emma tells me, and that’s the reason I know. I’m saying that the people who suffer needlessly are a whole other tribe, and it’s Emma who married outside that village.

It was almost too easy for a little while today. Something’s unsettling when it’s too easy. A few minutes of doing something well is all I need, and an hour or so of knowing I’ve made progress; then I can forget how hard it was to make those minutes, that hour. Days they don’t happen for me, I retreat from the day feeling terribly sad. Sooner or later, you can’t get away from it – you have to be alone. You have to speak honestly to yourself. You have to seek out your own doubts and then ways to assail them.

She doesn’t come to me this evening, so when I carry Johnny back to the cottage, it’s later than usual. Soon, Johnny is laughing at us from his crib. The maid has left me half a rosemary chicken on the edge of the stove, with noodles simmering. When I look up next Emma’s still in bed, waiting for me to stare back at her, with the leaking stovelight glittering her eyes. She’s taken off her silk cap and I notice the resemblance, again and always, to the Danae in the bedroom where the dresser mirror would otherwise be – the similarity is uncanny, thank Gus. I watch her staring and hear my own voice telling me: ‘This is new again.’

She’s half-sitting in bed, her comfort position, propped by nine cushions, cloth-of-gold camisole winking at me in the yellow light, her scarlet robe untied at the waist. Her hair has billowed into two clouds, her green eyes smouldering. She opens her mouth as if getting used to the motion again and slurs hello.

‘Feeling the good stuff, little one?’

Not that she’s little. Slim, yes, but not little. Her feet were all she ever used to be embarrassed about – long and skinny – until I cured her this way I got her to try. Tonight she just shrugs with her mouth – you silly man.

‘I drank the last bottle of Freddie’s Tokay,’ she says.

‘There were two bottles,’ I tell her.

She considers.

‘I thought I was seeing double. What do I care? What does anything mean? Tell me that.’

It’s when she’s drinking that I can’t predict her. Not that I feel a deep need to do that. Alcohol lets her demons out, too many of them to count, or possibly they’re the same ones with different faces each time. I’m never sure. She drinks to remember them: hello lust, hello greed, hello gluttony. Show me what you’ve got tonight.

‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ she tells me. ‘Bad, bad, bad, Emma.’

‘Rotten to the core, actually.’

She raises a Reisler’s phial to the light, shows me the unbroken seal. ‘See? None of this today. So don’t say I took any, all right? I want to feel my body tonight. What does it feel like, Paul? Are you scared to touch? Johnny couldn’t kill me, so what makes you think you could? Don’t you want me to die, just a little? Come on, say you miss it.’

Lock an eagle in a cage and poke it with a stick and you’d start to see this same stirring hunger for flesh. Mint-green eyes glowing fire, face flushed just there, mouth askew and fluttering. The best drunk in the world is Count Freddie’s Élite Tokay. Her hand slides under her robe, pointing down.

‘I’ve been out sailing,’ she says. ‘Now I’ll go mad if I stop. Come on, Paul, captain’s orders. All hands tonight. Find what they left, please.’

With one hand she pushes a knee to one side so that I hear the creak, and lets the robe follow, and pushes down her pants just enough for me to see. The scars carve a cruel road across her belly, one broad angry rut, a thin path below it with the stitches still in. Her eyes are glistening like a tide in meadow grass. She trails a finger across one scar, the other.

‘They didn’t cut my sailor out. Will it kill me if you touch? Come on, Paul, see if it does, and then you’ll get yours after me.’

‘How do you want to try?’ I say. ‘Let’s figure it out.’

‘I have. Lie down, then I’ll lie back between your legs.’

I don’t remember the last day we tried. She could tell me exactly, with her head for dates. I only remember that Johnny was already kicking, and it was one of those on our sides from behind nights and I was scared of hurting the little one and she kept saying okay, okay, that condescending way women have of telling you things they know men can’t know.

I help her stand up, lie back down, lean against me. She arranges my hands on her tummy and sighs with momentary relief. I still feel the narrow lump where the broader scar runs through and feel her exhale.

‘All okay?,’ I ask.

‘Can you kiss me from there?’ And she turns her head and I crane mine till I find her lips. The first kiss is a chaste one. Lightning doesn’t strike us. Her fingers, under my own, are already busy.

She’s tilted her bedside mirror towards us. I see when we both look how frightened she is of what she misses so much. She would want me to crush her in my arms near the end, she never wanted a hair’s breadth from me when her storm breaks, but not tonight – squeeze? I just won’t – though her eyes are soon begging the night for release the way they once always did. I just won’t while she’s shivering like this, while she’s gasping for breath in a way we’ve never heard before. She pulls her robe tighter, her hands under it, wanting me to forget what the past month has changed of her. Just … now … When she begins to keen her song, I cup her breasts slowly together and up and feel her lungs fighting my hands. Her knees try to rise, she rocks onto her back, her legs clamp shut on her hand while her face loses its moorings, all its surfaces dissolving as she bursts into silent tears. I’ve missed you, Emma, let me show it. You have to leave her alone after – she’ll come back through the door in a moment. Never the real way, never again, we’ve been told a dozen times to not ever try again (they drew us diagrams, heavensake, to get the point through), but let’s find ways to forget that when we can. When she rises for a long breath, she rubs her hair against my chest – which always burns, the crinkles so stiff – and I give her a minute for the tears to dry and the tremors to stop working through her.

Then I say, ‘You’re still here.’

‘So I do still have a life. I was terrified, Paul.’

‘He’s doing it again.’

She nods, I know, I don’t have to look. But in a moment she rolls half-over and gazes with me through the slats of his crib. He’s already a funny little man. I can watch him for an hour straight, then another, and he’ll be sleeping with little baby breaths in some baby world we’ll never visit again. Then turn away for a moment or less and he’ll have done this – rolled onto his back turned head to toe, with his legs together and his arms spread like wings, one of them clutching a slat of his rocking crib and the other reaching for the other, with his back arched like a diver in mid-flight and his mouth gaping round like a fallen angel’s song.

There are no bottles left in the house, and her tears have gone cool though they don’t stop falling.

‘I held him today when you weren’t here,’ she says.

‘You didn’t drop him, then.’

‘I don’t know how not. More, please …’ I hold her till she stops shivering. ‘I’m a mother, then. Just keep holding me. No, this way.’

[ chapter 9 on 31 january ]