Then she was disgusted.
—Why?
This was not easy for her. Her fingers were knotted together and twisting round and round. Her head was down, she was frowning. Her eyes flickered to mine and then away again. From where she stood she couldn’t see him properly, she said, he liked to put the easel close to her and at an oblique angle. But out of the corner of her eye she could see what he was doing.
—What was that?
—He had it out.
—What?
She made a gesture. She was lying.
—No, I said.
—Yes, Gin. Yes.
She was suddenly so angry!
—Then what?
Then she put her bathrobe back on, in spite of him shouting at her not to move. Couldn’t she see he was working? She tried to leave the room but he stood with his back to the door. She shouted back at him.
—You shouted back at him?
—I really shouted at him.
—You weren’t afraid of him?
—No! Dirty old man. Christ.
All she saw, she said, was a contemptible, pathetic, dirty old man. Then what?
—He started crying. He kind of slid down the door. Pathetic. I just stepped over him and came downstairs. Got dressed. I called my mother, but she said you’d left.
—Did you tell her what happened?
—No.
I began to think about going upstairs. My breathing was coming very fast now. I felt hot, and rather nauseous. I had to sit still a little longer.
Then what?
—I got a knife from the kitchen drawer and sat down here waiting for you.
—So what makes you think Jack’s dead?
It took an effort for me to say it. There didn’t seem to be enough oxygen in the room. This conversation had shifted from being entirely unreal to being too real and now it had shifted back into unreality again.
—I went back up.
—Why?
—I don’t know. I got bored, I guess.
Twenty minutes later I went upstairs with Anna. Climbing the last flight up to the attic I was not strong, and more than once I had to pause for breath. At the door she waited for me. We stood a moment outside the closed door to the studio, the only sound my panting.
—Okay, I said.
She opened the door. It was dark, only a dim glow seeping in from the outside. There was a strange unpleasant smell. On the far side of the studio something lay on the floor. Anna hit the switch, and for a second or two the room was flooded in brilliant white light.
—Enough! I shouted, and she turned it off.
The thing lying on the floor was my brother Jack in a pool of blood: flat on his back, naked from the waist up, hands clawed. Long skinny white body. The wounds were under his elbows, each of them now a clotted, crusty mess. His eyes were wide open and so was his mouth, as though he was utterly astonished. His large feet splayed off to either side. Like a huge dead bird. Above him hung the portrait of Anna, and he seemed to be staring up at it. In the clawed fingers of his left hand was a razor blade wrapped in black electrical tape.
Much later, after the police had come and gone, and the medical people, and the body had been taken away to the morgue, Anna and I sat downstairs together. I had made a number of phone calls—Vera, Eduardo, Jack’s doctor, one or two others—then Dora returned home and found strangers in the house, and on being told why they were here, became hysterical for five minutes. Then she pulled herself together and made coffee. We could hear her sweeping the stairs and the hallway now. For several hours I had acted the competent householder as I’d dealt with the cops, and then the doctor and the paramedics. Anna stayed with me throughout, and remained as calm as I was. Not even the sight of two men in white jackets bringing Jack’s bagged body down the stairs to the gurney in the hall disturbed our grave, unflappable demeanour. Now we sat each with a large whisky, and our demeanour had not yet begun to show any sign of crumbling.
—How did you do it?
—Do what?
There was no need for her to pretend with me but I didn’t say a word.
—Do what, Gin?
More silence. Dora appeared and in an unsteady voice asked if there was anything else we needed. I told her there wasn’t. She went back into the hall, closing the door behind her. We heard the vacuum cleaner. The studio was locked. I didn’t know if I could ask Dora to wash the floor up there. Perhaps I would ask her if she knew anybody who’d clean the studio, then she could say if the task was too painful for her. After that I would have to see to his things. So many paintings he had up there! I read somewhere that you can never get blood out of floorboards, not completely. They always stay pink.
—I guess I should feel sad or something, said Anna, but I don’t feel anything.
—You will.
When I told Vera, she had shrieked with dismay. Eventually she could not speak any more. She said she would come down to the city tomorrow.
So Anna and I sat glumly in the sitting room.
—I was glad when Gerald died, she said. He was suffering such a lot.
—You think Jack wasn’t suffering?
She got up without a word and ran out of the room. I thought of Rothko then. Jack’s hero. I was living in New York when he died, and I remembered how he’d cut himself with a razor blade, not his wrists but the brachial arteries under his elbows. So there was a derivative quality to Jack’s death, it lacked originality. Say the same about his paintings, I suppose. I began to laugh. I was feeling a little giddy. I think I may have been close to hysteria. I wondered how she’d managed it, how she’d convinced him to do it, I mean, or perhaps what happened was that she’d convinced him to let her do it—a ritualistic sort of a thing, ritual vengeance. Ritual parricide, long contemplated, deliberate in execution: all that would come out, I thought. Not publicly, of course, not in a court of law, I mean here in the house, where she’d be safe. For we would have to protect her, Vera and I, and Dora too, we women would have to keep her safe so nobody would ever know that Jack Rathbone did not commit suicide, no, he was put to death by his own daughter. Thinking this, I began to feel the grief rise in me and as it did I became aware that in the toilet down the hall Anna was being violently sick.
Then all at once I could hear Jack laughing! From somewhere up at the top of the house, the lovely wild laughter I remembered from my childhood, and dear god it did for me, it did for me utterly, and as the floodgates opened my poor heart burst and the pain poured out of me like a river—
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
No man is an island, apparently, but by the middle of a book most writers get to feeling distinctly peninsular. In this we are deluded. We go into the room alone, and we stay in the room alone, but what happens there to a great extent depends on the web of support we enjoy outside the room. Here are the names of some of the people who, during the writing of this novel and its aftermath, have given me love, help, encouragement—recreational companionship—and to them I give my heartfelt thanks. Maria Aitken. Pempe Aitken. Max Blagg. Marti Blumenthal. Liz Calder. Peter Carey. Catriona Crowe. Jack Davenport. Gary Fisketjon. Michelle Gomez. Edward Hibbert. Sonny Mehta. Andrew O'Hagan. Ann Patty. Alexandra Pringle. Deborah Rogers. Edward St. Aubyn. Betsy Sussler. Lynne Tillman. Colm Tóibín. Binky Urban. Stewart Waltzer. And of course Helen, Steve, Judy and Simon McGrath.
ALSO BY PATRICK MCGRATH
Blood and Water and Other Tales
The Grotesque
Spider
Dr. Haggard’s Disease
Asylum
Martha Peake
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2004 by Patrick McGrath
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Part of chapter 3 previously appeared in slightly different form in Bald Ego.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGrath, Patrick, [date]
Port Mungo / Patrick McGrath.
p. cm.
1. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 2. Greenwich Village (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction.
3. British—Honduras—Fiction. 4. London (England)—Fiction.
5. Parent and child—Fiction. 6. Women painters—Fiction.
7. Art students—Fiction. 8. Honduras—Fiction. 9. Death—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.C3663P67 2004
813'.54—dc22 2003065898
eISBN: 978-1-4000-4302-6
v3.0
Port Mungo Page 23
