‘It reminds me of my own bedroom, sometimes, not all the time,’ Elisabeth said. She stood up, curling her spine, her legs straight, bending from the waist, supple. He did not seem to have heard, looked beyond her to the third canvas, propped face inwards against a chair.
‘Please don’t think you have to rush. There’s all the time in the world.’
‘I can’t rush,’ said Elisabeth. ‘Look at me. I can’t rush, I’m not made for rushing. Even if my bedroom does sometimes look like this.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ he said, almost flirtatiously. ‘About not being able to rush, I mean. And I always imagined – I mean, do imagine you – to be, rather tidy. I mean, you are here. Very tidy.’ He was flustering, glad of her back to him. Freudian slip, Thomas boy. Watch the words: you are not supposed to have thought of this woman, much, before you met her. She was nothing but a name in a mouth; you imagined, in the past tense, nothing about her at all.
‘Do you need anything?’ he blundered on, slowing his voice to a crawl. ‘I mean, materials, anything you haven’t got here? Even if not immediately, something you may need another day … Tell me while you remember. I’m going shopping.’
She paused, reflectively, considered.
‘A sable fan brush, sometime,’ she murmured. ‘I might need it if I have to in-paint much of this fur collar. Can’t think of another brush which would do, but no worry. I’ll get mine when I go home.’ It was two days since she had last mentioned that. Somehow the need for home was being obviated, eroded hour by hour.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine. See you later.’
I shall buy her more paints, he said to himself. Tubes and tubes of paint. And other gifts.
In his departure, she realized again how the footsteps, the one two click, had faded from her mind. There was no scope for footsteps in the vastness of this place, the soft carpet, the warmth, the silent toing and froing. She had not heard a telephone, not even vaguely muffled through doors, the sound of washing machine, flushing cistern, anything. Her right hand throbbed painfully, the cut from the glass stem grasped in the aftermath of the quarrel with Francis exerting a delayed revenge for lack of treatment, protesting at the constant squeezing of finger and thumb round soaked cotton wool, the white spirit a deterrent to healing. In the last few days, she had become habituated to the colours of flesh, round the neck of the olive-skinned woman, so oddly restored before, to give her a new, disparate necklace, or to hide some unsightly scar. Elisabeth had stopped on that painting out of caution. It was unwise to tire the eyes with the same palette, time to refresh them with another.
There was something amiss with the madonna. How much amiss she had yet to find. The unease, soaped away by concentration, filtered back. She gazed at the room in the second painting, willed herself to forget the first, but she was suddenly restless. Thomas in the flat was that rare kind of presence which did not disturb, who gave her the impression she was in all senses entirely alone, the way she liked to feel, although she knew he was there, sitting, reading, telephoning or whatever he did to ensure his invisible means of support, his endless tranquillity. But there was still a different sensation when he went out, an extra depth of emptiness. Guiltily, she remembered she had not even seen the inarticulate Maria today or yesterday; had not asked about that bandaged wrist, forgot her existence. A door, Thomas had said shaking his head sadly. Maria never makes way for doors: she keeps her hand inside until she knows it should be elsewhere. I have never known a woman so clumsy, but then I have not known many women. Poor Maria.
Was she poor Elisabeth? Did he pity her? Was that the reason for all this solicitude, the extension of the kind of pity he gave Maria, whose talents as cleaner and dog walker he otherwise bemoaned? There was a routine in the dog walking, a rigid routine to this life of his which had gradually impressed itself upon her. Butler was guard and loving companion, but theirs was an indoor friendship like something clandestine; they rarely crossed the portals to the outside world together: Thomas stayed in when Butler went out, twice in the day, with Maria, his escort. And then, when Thomas went out, the black and white mongrel stayed indoors, or had for the last days, as far as she noticed. An unprotesting, ever affectionate dog; even his bladder was regimented by love and obedience.
‘Butler?’
Elisabeth wandered into the corridor outside what had become her room, her light-filled, colour-filled, excitement-filled domain, the second home, but, suddenly, no replacement for the hard-won first. ‘Butler? Walkies?’ There was this sudden and overpowering desire to go, simply go. Out, home, collect a sable fan brush, come back, but go out first, walk alone, stretch legs, telephone, go shopping, behave like a person less freakish than what she knew she had become. Post the letters she had written last night, all brief, all cheerful, but vital for herself. Back in time for Thomas and the freshly unfrozen food, the lush warmth, the light, the reflections from her glass. Go home. The dog answered her call, tail wagging, with a slow, ambling gait from a rug in the kitchen, effortful, dutifully resigned. Until she went to the cupboard in which she had seen Thomas hang her coat.
‘Walkies, Butler? Would he mind, your lord and master, if you came too? I feel as if I knew him once, Butler, years ago, but I might be wrong, I usually am, better we forget it. I was smaller then and he was much bigger, that man. I doubt he’s the same. Are you coming with me?’
Her hand on the nicely underpolished handle of the cupboard door, she bent to stroke: she had been made so familiar here. Thomas said the dog would mourn her departure; he said that the night she arrived. This dog with the ugly face and the limp, the dampish jaw placed on her lap in utter abandonment, was now snapping and snarling, dancing like a tribal man psyching himself for war, a mad dog with drawn back lips and large, yellowed teeth an inch below startling pink gums. The colours of custard and rhubarb, varnish and vermilion. Elisabeth backed away. When she took her hand from the cupboard handle, the snarling lapsed into a low, rumbling growl.
‘Silly, what’s the matter? Listen, I’m not stealing anything, promise. Silly thing. I’m only going home, for a minute. I need to go home, Butler.’
It was if the dog had anticipated her reluctance to say as much to Thomas. The rumbling increased, the mouth parted, more details of the gums and teeth were displayed. The big, soft, odd-shaped ears were back; the speckled muzzle bore no resemblance to a friendlier self. She had never noticed the potential savagery of that large head, and retreated away from the door. A spare set of keys to her flat was, as always in the pocket of her smock, additional to those in the pocket of her coat: she kept them there always after having once locked herself out, to avoid that unimaginable helplessness which had begun to inflict her now. She could feel them solid in her hand.
The dog growled. Perhaps he wanted to play, but the hand she extended towards him was more in plea than invitation. As she edged to the door, not too cold to run as she was, surely, two or three pound coins rattling in the back pocket, all the human soul required, keys and the fare home. Butler was not convinced. The door to the outside world was more guarded than the door to the coat cupboard. He stood across it with the hair raised into a ridge along his back, showing fangs. It was the first intimation of imprisonment. Looking at the system of buttons to push before the door would open, she realized she was totally ignorant both of how the lock worked and of the combination to work it. The dog was superfluous to such simple detention: he simply reinforced it.
‘Maria! ‘
Was she there? It was difficult to tell. Coffee had been left. The kitchen floor was clean, the carpets pristine, but there was neither sound nor trace of her presence.
‘Maria?’ Elisabeth’s voice rose in a signal for help.
From a scullery room Maria appeared, soft-footed in old carpet slippers, heralded only by the rattling of the rosary hanging round her neck.
‘I want to get out, Maria. Butler won’t let me out and I can’t work the lock. How do I get out?’
Maria shrugge
d with a rare elegance. You and me both, she seemed to be saying. She walked to the door, pointed at the buttons on the lock, shrugged again. Her wrist was still bandaged and she carried a duster. Elisabeth thought she received the message she was supposed to receive. Only Thomas could open the door, and he would be back whenever he was back: it all depended on him. The grin on Maria’s ugly but amiable face seem to indicate that none of this was particularly important. If she accepted this regime of dependence, why should anyone protest?
‘Oh, I see. Listen, are you taking Butler out afterwards? Whenever? Looks like he needs it. Yes? Will you post these for me?’
Maria nodded happily. The letters were transferred from Elisabeth’s hand into the bosom of Maria’s overall, the rosary beads hanging against them. Elisabeth turned away, obscurely embarrassed. Even the paper for the letters and the stamps were Thomas’s own. She had taken them from the stock in the north-facing room, next to where the telephone had been. She glanced into that room again now. The phone was no longer there.
Knowing what she did, being what she was, Elisabeth took it with grace, rather than rebellion. Once she was back in her room with the cotton wool and those strewn clothes of the second picture, Butler came in behind her, wagged, dribbled, sat in adoration, rewarding her for good behaviour, the same old docile, ugly dog. Elisabeth remembered the bandage on Maria’s arm, and wondered how it was the woman had caught her wrist in a door, rather than her fingers.
Go home tomorrow, do not confront today. Be the coward you have always been in the face of a bully, even a canine bully with a misguided sense of protection, yes of course that was what it was. As if she needed any excuse not to confront, to do what she had always done and hide instead. Darkness had fallen: Thomas seemed to wait until the brink of darkness before his expeditions. The sky was a cloudless Windsor blue, lightened by pink into a subtle glaze, the transition so sudden it was almost tropical. She turned on the daylight light, studied the fur collar, calm now, allowed herself to be compromised, her eyes restored by the colour.
I am immune from loving and needing, Thomas told himself as he walked up the street, but not from wanting. She will have her chance: if she will not take the generosity, if she spurns what I offer her, then she must accept the revenge. Why should she resent imprisonment, she who consigned me to exactly that? She had better not resent it, is all I can say: she’d better not. All my ill fortune stems from her, all my disabilities. She does what she wishes: she believes she has that right. I once believed that, too. From the day I met Elisabeth Young, I have never had that right, nor have I ever handled a brush, although I tried. I broke my heart against that wheel: I made room for the stroke which paralysed what was left and had the women feed me like a baby. I collected all the paintings I could not make: I had people who left me rich, but it was no compensation. She will learn. She must be my share of perfection: she owes me that; we owe each other.
He took some satisfaction in the steadiness of his stride. All those years in the wilderness, learning how to walk again, how to speak: how would she ever know, in her rude health, her unselfconscious beauty, what that was like? Sometimes he wondered if she were actually stupid, with her deliberate ignorance of human motives, her shying from emotion so evident in any conversation. No wonder she had never learned, could not bear to see a human being stripped. Yes, his walking was a work of art. He needed the umbrella or one of his fancier sticks as much for a talisman as a support. He needed it for walking, but not all the time and he needed it now to feel power. One two click, one two click, tapping out the sound of his firm steps which had been so frail, one two click, an efficient, business-like sound. The tip of his Victorian umbrella was polished silver, glinting in the dark, a small ferrule of metal and rubber covering the point which was as sharp as a Toledo dagger, less obvious than the swordsticks of the same age, highly ingenious.
Approaching the correct number in the correct street, he paused and removed the ferrule into a pocket, adjusted the burden he carried under his left arm, increasing the sense of power. The tip of the blade caught the light from a passing car. He took off the smoked-glass spectacles; they impeded his ability to see with the one eye like a cat in the dark. Thomas with one eye, who walked the streets, drove his car rarely and sat at home rationalizing his life in a series of muttered monologues, was highly adept at putting his foot inside the door, and with his little bit of armoury, his umbrella blade, there was nothing he could not do.
Enid responded to the summons by bell, dark though it was. Curiosity always overcame caution: she believed herself immune to threats and every call for attention was confused with the possibility of company. This time, no fringed rug impeded her progress down the hall although she still registered its absence with guilty surprise. Her hair was not tortured into the nightly helmet: too early, by hours. Apart from the stockings she had taken off to mend a minute hole in the toe, she was dressed and prepared to speak, prompted by a dreadful and aggressive conscience. It wasn’t my fault, she kept repeating to herself: I had to do it. The cat and her taps, I’ll say something to her like that, but I won’t be asked, whoever would ask. I had no choice, none at all.
The man at the door did not want her. Rang her bell, but did not want to see her, only wanted something from her.
‘I’ve come to deliver a parcel to the young lady downstairs. Her uncle, madam.’
No, he had told himself: he was not a burglar, nor a particularly good detective, neither now nor when he had stooped to examine the names listed at the side of the door, finding small clues in the dark, smudged letters.
‘I’ve telephoned and rung the bell,’ he went on conversationally. ‘No joy, though. All right if I just go down and deliver this, leave a message? She’s given me a key. In case she was away.’ Underneath his left arm, clumsily gripped, he carried the rug from the hall.
He was inside and moving towards the stairs. From the evening conversations with Elisabeth, from his knowledge and intensive observation, Thomas had guessed the geography of Elisabeth’s house, the relation of one part of it to another. Enid began to shake her head violently like a demented parrot. No one possessed Elisabeth’s key; Elisabeth would have died rather than part with it, but it was not that aspect which alarmed her. She had not intended discovery so soon, or in a manner like this: she had rehearsed often, but the prospect was bleakly terrifying, forcing her too late into shrill haughtiness.
‘Certainly not. Absolutely not. Who do you think you are?’
‘Her uncle, I said. Don’t be ridiculous. I only want to leave a note. And this rug.’
The familiar colours of the hall rug, the fringe dripping out of the crook of his arm, shook her more than anything else. It was a passport of awful credibility.
‘Give it to me. I’ll give it to her.’
They stood in the glare of the badly shaded light, facing each other like gladiators, she fascinated and repelled by the one, blue eye which stared beyond her and widened. At the very moment Thomas caught sight of the cat on the stairs crouching ready for flight, the light went out. There was a faint thud as the cat hit the hall, raced for the freedom of the door which both of them held half open and half closed in a silent battle. An invisible touch of soft fur brushed Enid’s bare, braced legs. She screamed loudly, hoarsely, twisting and hitting out at the wall in an instinctive search for the light, beat the time switch with her fist on the third, frantic attempt. Suddenly they were safe again, all fears suspended in that moment of illumination. Enid moaned and trembled. He controlled his own tremor, patted her arm and felt the additional quiver in response. She was shocked by the strength behind his touch. Something ailed her far more than fear of cat or stranger.
‘I’ll just go on down, then.’
‘No, no,’ she shouted. ‘No, no, no. She never …’
But he was beyond her, taking the stairs with ungainly, shuffling speed down to Elisabeth’s apartment. A table by the door, dusty: no shade on the light, no nameplate, an anonymous little lobb
y. And a red door, scratched around the uncomplicated lock, showing traces of the yellow paint beneath. Provoked by the sight of that minimal, colourful damage, he bent to examine further. Enid reached his side, panting, one arm stretched before as if she had slithered down the last few steps and was still determined to pull him back.
‘No, no, no … Oh!’
‘What happened, lady? My niece been burgled? Or was it the cat did this?’
His voice was sharp as a claw. Enid’s face passed from sickly pale to crimson. The outstretched hand fell to clasp the other one in an agony of supplication.
‘I didn’t mean to … I mean the cat was sick … No, the tap was dripping, something leaking in her bathroom. I had to, I had no choice. Really, what else could I do?’
He saw in that face all the cupidity, envy, fear, hatred he had ever seen slide across faces far more intelligent than this. Of course there had been a choice or why would she hide, why this compulsive twisting of hands, this look of dementia tinged with guilt.
Thomas struck the door with his umbrella, scoring the paint with the knifelike end, the flash of a blade. Then he hit with the handle, a casual blow with instantaneous effect. Held only by the latch, the door swung open into the dark corridor beyond. A faint scent emerged, the smells and warmth of the departed occupant, perfume, turpentine, calamine, cat and trespass. He turned back to Enid, catching on her face an expression of cowed shame frozen in the instant the light went off again.
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