And that’s how she got into the house.
Chapter Thirteen
Having Anna with us soon changed the way Jack and I rubbed along together, this was one of the first changes I observed. When we were by ourselves in the big room downstairs we both listened for her key in the door, her step on the stairs. And although I did not admit this to him for some time, I began actually to enjoy her presence, and was disappointed if she was out! Jack was worse, he was soft and doting, quite unlike himself, and I think even Dora was infected with the new atmosphere in the house, like us she was susceptible to the inimitable vital perfume which fills the air with the mere presence of youth. Anna was an unusual youth, dour and serious and to my mind profoundly mysterious, I think because she communicated so little of what she did outside the house. She implicitly declared that she had a private life, would we please respect that, and of course we did. Of course we did.
I discovered how to navigate the awkward silences she seemed to generate. They never seemed to occur when Jack was present, as he was entirely at ease with her now. But with me the girl was not at ease, and if we were alone together she would soon find some reason to leave the room. The answer was not to try and find a neutral topic to talk about, but rather to talk about her. Youth is profoundly obsessed with its own dilemma, which crudely put is the problem of going forward with the appearance of sure-footed confidence into what looks like a morass of uncertainty and risk. One day I asked her if she had any plans. She seemed startled by the question. She had a job of some kind in a bar, which kept her out several nights a week, but beyond merely surviving in New York we had heard of no specific schemes or goals or ambitions. I suspected at the time that she was here solely to know her father again, possibly her mother as well, though for some reason she was reluctant to say so. I had no patience with any of that. What is it, I asked her, that you want to do here?
Again she was startled, and I felt I had intruded on her privacy. But I persevered. Was there a career she wanted to pursue?
Expression of distinct relief. Oh that’s what you mean. What else would I mean? Shyly she told me she wanted to do something creative.
—You want to be an artist, Anna?
—Yes.
—A painter like your father?
—No, not like him.
This came out with what to my surprise sounded like disdain, contempt almost. Certainly with a charge of fierce feeling that I couldn’t interpret at the time. Perhaps she believed that painting was dead, I thought, and wanted to be a conceptual artist. But she said no. At least we had managed to have a sort of conversation, and it was easier between us after that. She even started talking to me about Eduardo.
For the first time in many months Jack began to work in the afternoons, not on the portrait of Anna, that was the morning’s work, but on the large canvas, which he had begun to call A Dream of the Lower Waters. As soon as I heard the title I knew the painting would be a reworking of his old motif, what he called the “Narcissus posture”: a figure leaning over a surface in which he finds a distorted reflection, and the reflection clawing up at the leaning figure through a web or latticework of some kind. It had not escaped me that there was a grim correspondence between this and the macabre picture I held in my mind’s eye of the Port Mungo fisherman who’d leaned over the side of his boat one day, out among the mangroves, and discovered to his horror a drowned girl gazing up at him from a tangle of underwater roots.
These fresh energies of Jack’s I attributed entirely to Anna’s presence in the house. I saw that she was beginning to assume the role of muse to her father. She continued to sit for him in the mornings, and by now they had established a routine: she came to him three times a week from ten to one. She let Dora know when she would be eating with us and when not, and by the end of the month I believe we had all adjusted to our changed circumstances. As for our having to entertain the girl, I was not aware of making any particular effort myself in that direction.
I was surprised to learn that Jack had not yet talked to her about her sister’s death, nor had he decided what he would say when he did. But he had at least told her something of the early years in Port Mungo. I asked him how she’d responded, and he said he didn’t know, she gave away so little. More to the point, he said, he’d also been waiting to hear what she thought of his catalogue. The day after he’d given it to her she had come into the studio and gone straight to the large canvas, and frowned at it as though she had formed ideas about his work overnight and was testing them against the work in progress. Since then of course she’d moved into the house with us, but still she’d said nothing about the catalogue. I knew it was troubling him, so I made a point of asking every evening if she’d mentioned it yet. I was still a little angry that he’d failed to consult me before inviting her to live with us.
—Not a word.
—Must be awkward.
—It’s extremely bloody awkward. I feel as though she’s come upon me fast asleep, and she’s inspecting me, and I’m naked.
—Jack, it’s your work she’s looking at, not your body.
—It feels the same.
I suppose I understood this, but why didn’t he just ask her? Oh no. That wouldn’t do. He didn’t want to put pressure on the girl. So he continued to fret. But the work went forward, and I understood that by this time he had completed a number of sketches and had begun a full-length study.
—What size? I said.
—Sixty by twenty-four.
That was big. Or tall, at least. I wondered who’d stretched the canvas. Jack used to have an assistant but he’d let him go, there simply wasn’t enough for him to do. I asked him if he was stretching his own canvases now.
—Anna’s helping me.
A little later he told me it had been Anna’s suggestion that he employ her as his assistant. She was apparently intrigued by what went on in a painter’s studio.
—Not surprising, he said, with all the artists in the family. I think she might be one herself.
He described how every morning they’d have a cup of tea in the kitchen, then go upstairs. He said he liked to watch her in the studio, for he recognized that the role she assumed there was his role, the artist’s role, and that in her imagination the studio had become her studio, herself the one who came into it every day to struggle with her demons and out of such conflict bring ideas to life on canvas, or whatever it was she thought he did up there. He said she strode about quite confidently now, no longer awed as she had been at first—there had been something reverent in her manner the first few times, as though the studio were a sanctified place, a chapel, but now she strutted about in front of the Dream with a vaguely proprietorial air, and he could almost hear her address the painting, very much as he himself would before he started to work, or interrogate it, rather, ask it where it all seemed inclined to go—what it was he must do next—this the throb and thrill of the thing, he said, but also the fraught danger every morning: starting again, that is, on work left the day before in a state of incompletion.
As she peered and pondered she seemed to be playing out some such script in her head, and perhaps her imagination was adequate to the task. Perhaps she did understand what it was Jack did in his studio every day. It was another mark of her growing confidence that she often initiated conversation after they had begun working. She stood naked in front of a large drape of black velvet, gazing off blankly as Jack stared and stared and dabbed and dabbed. Then out it came.
—Gerald said my sister should have been sent to England to be educated. He said he couldn’t understand why she wasn’t.
—Never been a shortage of things Gerald couldn’t understand.
It was the quick bitter riposte of a distracted man at an easel. But he saw her flinch, and reminded himself she had had no word of her sister that had not come from Gerald. She was ripe for the dismantling of the construction of events she had been given since childhood, and he knew he must not hold her responsible for received ideas, no matte
r how grotesque. In the struggle for Anna’s mind and heart Jack had the advantage now. He must not show his teeth like this, it did not help.
—Gerald had no idea what our life was like.
—Did she get educated, then?
—Sure she got educated.
After a fashion, he might have added; his fashion. He didn’t tell her that the girl practically ran wild.
—So she could read and write.
—And she could paint.
At this she turned towards him, and he told her sharply to look straight ahead.
—You taught her to paint?
—I don’t know that we did much teaching. She just imitated what she saw going on around her.
—Was she any good?
No answer from Jack.
—Do you have any of her work here?
—No.
A long silence now, and not an easy one, the room thick with questions, the most insistent of which was where this sudden anger of his had come from, why such a spiked denial?
—Sorry, he said.
She waited for more but that’s all there was.
—It’s just I don’t know what to say and what not to, she said.
—It’s not your fault.
Another silence.
—I drowned my puppies, she said.
—Oh yes?
—Yeah. I finished it.
Throughout this she stood there unmoving, her arms by her side, her head turned away, her eyes fixed on a point outside the window. He was behind the easel with his head down. The atmosphere grew more relaxed. More time passed in silence. I have seen Jack at work with a model, more than once he has painted me. Touch the canvas, lift the eyes, look hard; touch the canvas again. Mix the colours on the glass, rub the canvas with a damp rag, wash the brush. Jam the brush between the teeth, draw well back to inspect, gesture at the sitter with the brush, then repeat the gesture on the canvas.
Take another long, hard look. Wash the brush, remix the colours, criss-cross dabbing, touch the canvas with a Q-tip, change the brush, stick the old one in a jar of turps, take a swig of tea, and so on and so on and so on—
—I just wish I’d known her, she said. Oh god Jack, maybe this is all a waste of time. It only makes you angry and me confused. We should just say she’s dead and leave it at that, not try and bring her back to life.
She poured this out to the window and began to turn towards him, then thought better of it.
—I think we shouldn’t give up, said Jack.
—Why?
—I don’t think she would want us to.
Hard to argue with that.
Peg in Port Mungo. He wanted to impress on Anna that the girl was born there, delivered into the world, it is true, by an Englishman, but she never knew Europe. The two times Jack brought her to New York she was not happy, she soon became restless and was eager to get home. She was a native of Port Mungo and knew it in a way that he and Vera never would. She grew up with the children of the town, she was in and out of their houses every day of her life, it was of no significance to her that her skin was white while theirs might be any one of a dozen hues between bone and coal. She spoke the patois that Jack had never troubled to learn, she ate what Jack remained too fastidious to eat, in short she encountered none of the barriers between herself and the place that even after years Jack had not crossed. And she ran wild, by which he meant that after a couple of hours of schooling in the tin-roofed building behind the marketplace she had little else to do all day but mess about in leaky boats. Jack saw no harm in it.
And she painted, of course. She loved to paint. They let her use their stuff, Jack said, and encouraged her as much as they could.
Anna stood frowning at the window as Jack talked on, and he was aware, he told me later, that while he worked—and he seemed able to work fast when he talked about Peg, though he was not sure what prompted what, the painting the talking or the other way round—he was aware of a flow of reactions across her face, still turned away from him in quarter-profile, as she took hold of this picture of her sister’s childhood. Did it conform to what Gerald had told her? He tried to see it through Gerald’s eyes, and glimpsed a dark, primitive world where a white-skinned girl scampered half naked with the native children and grew up without benefit of civilization or culture—
—Was she a bad girl?
Curious question. It said much about her, I thought, when Jack told me, and the unresolved complications of her view of herself, I mean this evident attempt to make sense of her own life through an understanding of her sister's. Jack tried to tell her that the concept of badness was not an easy one to apply in a place like Port Mungo. She was always home before dark, and this may have been the only rule they had. Night falls fast in the tropics.
—What about my mother’s drinking?
Here Jack heard the distinct rumble of his brother’s ponderous moral lucubrations.
—What about it?
—Did it affect her?
They let her drink a beer with them when she was eight. When she was seven they let her smoke. There was smoking and drinking in the house every night, no point trying to hide it from her. She was curious, she wanted to know what it was all about, this thing her parents did with such ritualized enthusiasm every evening, and Jack had long been anticipating the day he could sit out on the deck with his daughter, the pair of them drinking beer as they talked about whatever it is that fathers and daughters talk about.
Another lengthy silence.
—Were you a bad girl? said Jack.
Good big grin in response to this question. The English certainly have this distinction, their dentistry is the worst in the world. Already yellowing with tobacco, those chipped, irregular teeth like a set of tilting tombstones in a neglected country churchyard, and the girl barely into her twenties—it was extraordinary that she should be so beautiful, and her teeth so bad. I certainly thought her beautiful, and I know Jack did too. Was it merely youth that lent her beauty in our jaded old eyes? Perhaps, but I think not. That fine head, the swan’s neck, the gaunt, towering frame—the architecture of the creature was so very fine, her flesh so white and her hair so black that it gave me the best sort of pleasure simply to watch her, she reminded me of Jack at that age. I noticed one evening after dinner how his eyes followed her as she moved around the room, and I was aware that mine did the same. Was she aware of it? She didn’t show it, but she must have known what was happening. It was not good, something ghoulish, surely, these two old crocodiles feasting on the beauty of a tall pale girl with bad teeth—!
—Quite bad, she said.
—Oh?
—Nothing very dramatic. I didn’t like to worry them.
—You were discreetly bad.
—I suppose so. Were you bad?
—I was wild till Vera came along.
A little later they were sitting over coffee in the kitchen, talking comfortably, intimately, the lunch things not cleared away. Jack asked her if she remembered which room she had stayed in when she first came to the house as a little girl. She didn’t know. He told her it was the same room she’d chosen two weeks ago.
—That’s so weird, she said.
—Why is that weird?
—To not remember the room, but to recognize it. I must have recognized it, right?
—That’s not weird. What’s weird is that you should want to move into the room you lived in when your world had just collapsed.
—I guess I felt safe there.
—I guess you did.
She sipped her coffee. She pushed her chair back from the table and crossed her legs. She flung an arm over the back of the chair, turned towards the window and coughed. He stared at her frowning profile. She reminded him of a photograph he had seen somewhere recently. She turned back and looked straight at him.
—Did my sister kill herself?
Poor dear foolish Peg—I could hear Jack saying it—she had her mother’s knack for finding trouble though not her skill at gettin
g out of it. Too ready to follow, too eager for the good time, never any pausing to consider the consequences. It was her nature, and this being so, Port Mungo was probably the best place for her in all the world. But it was no paradise, and Jack was always emphatic about this, there were forces at work on the river that were darker and more complex than the sunny surface of tropical life would admit—oh, all this oblique stuff, which raised more questions than it answered, yet I imagined it flickering through his mind as he and Anna stared at each other in the kitchen, silent but for the ticking of the clock above the cooker and the muffled roar of the city beyond.
—No.
She dropped her eyes and then her head. She was sat square to the table, an elbow planted either side of her plate and her forehead clamped in the heels of her hands, with her fingers sticking up through her hair. Without moving a muscle, without lifting her eyes, she asked him was he sure. She asked the question in a hollow tone, black empty yawning hole of a question, the way she said it: Are you sure? So hollow it wasn’t even a question. It was just what had to be said.
—Yes.
The hands flopped onto the table, the head came up. She looked suddenly exhausted. She cast a quick fierce sidelong glance at him.
—Gerald said she did.
This now becomes painful in the extreme. When Jack told me what she’d said—“Gerald said she did”—I felt a distinct lurch of horror, and it was all I could do to conceal it from him. He was watching me carefully. He asked me what I thought the girl was talking about. She’d seemed upset, he said. I said I had no idea. He said he didn’t either, but he hadn’t pursued it, he’d let it go, lacking the mental wherewithal to attack yet again Gerald’s skewed idea of what happened in Port Mungo.
But I did know, I knew exactly what Gerald was talking about, or rather, I knew what Gerald thought he knew. It was the terrible day he took Anna away from my house. That afternoon I’d gone to the Park Plaza Hotel, where he was staying, but without telling anyone. So much of what had happened earlier in the day was mysterious to me that I felt I couldn’t simply let him carry Jack’s child off to England without at least hearing why he was doing it. So for the hour before they had to go to the airport we talked in his room, and Anna played with her doll on the carpet between us.
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