The Painter

by Will Davenport

'He's nowhere in the house and Eric saw him heading out.'

  'Did he?'

  'Strikes me you might know something about that.'

  'Well, I wonder why you should think that?'

  'Come down here and look at me,' he said.

  She climbed down.

  'Thing is,' he said, 'it was all right until you showed up. He was getting along fine. I warned you. We look after Don. He's one of us.'

  And I'm not, she thought. The implication was clear.

  'Now, my guess is he's heading into town,' said the foreman. He had a trick with his eyes that hooked you like a fish. Amy could not look away. That means on foot. You've got your car. You'll maybe catch up with him.'

  'If I was going. Anyway, I might not find him. He might have got a lift.'

  'Oh, I reckon you'll find him.'

  'What about my work?'

  'I'll tell you something. You're going to do this on your own time. I'll tell you something else. If you don't find him, your work doesn't matter because you don't need to bother coming back here again except to pack up your kit, understood?'

  In the drained aftermath of her anger, Amy was unable to summon up anything except dull acceptance. 'But if he's not on the road, where do I look?'

  'Round town.' said the Hawk.

  'It's a big town.'

  'Better get started then.'

  She choked off a reply which would have ended her employment then and there and headed for the door, pushing past him. As she reached the top of the stairs, he seemed to soften a little.

  'Try the Drydock,' he said.

  She stopped. 'What's that?'

  'His mum's place. My bet is big bad Don has run home to Mummy.'

  'Where is it?'

  'Ask around. You'll find it.'

  She went first to the tower to change out of her overalls. Searching her pockets for her car keys, she stopped as she heard a noise in the room next door, a rustle and a thump as something fell to the floor. Was Don back? She went to his door and tapped on it. No answer, just another furtive noise. For a moment, she remembered the first time she had pushed that door open and frightened herself at the unexpected sight inside. She tapped again and he still could not be bothered to respond. Annoyed, she pushed the door open and something huge and white, horribly unexpected – something which seemed to come from a different time and from an altogether different reality rose and came at her with formless arms outstretched. She leapt backwards, slamming the door and trying to bite back a scream. It flapped behind the closed door and once again, she had to work hard to make sense in her head of what she had just seen. An owl, that was all. An owl which had come in through the open window, perhaps looking for the place it had always passed its days before these interfering humans came back to steal its home.

  Carefully, slowly, she pushed the door open again and it was perched on the back of the chair, staring at her, half the size it had seemed a moment before. They stared at each other, woman and owl, but it was better at staring than she was. At least you're not like Don, she thought, and looked quickly around the room. There wasn't much to see. Some of his clothes had gone. Worse, when she went back to her room she found he'd also taken Amelia Dahl's day-book. That added a layer of fury to her concern.

  Don wasn't on the road. She stopped in Paull and tried all three pubs and the shop with no success, then she drove into Hull and found along the way that the very last thing she wanted to do was to confront Don's mother, wherever she might be. Seeing a half-familiar street, she backed into a meter space and realized that the library was only a hundred yards away. The library seemed a good place to ask about the Drydock but, to someone with no great wish to hear the answer, it was also a very good place to avoid the whole issue for a while. She needed silent anonymity and distraction and she found her feet on the stairs up to the Local Studies section before she had consciously made any decision to go that way. Before she pushed open the swing doors she decided to leave it to fate. If there was a spare machine, she would once more get out the microfilm and put the whole matter on hold for an hour or two. If not, she would go and find the Drydock.

  She went in. All the machines were in use bar one and when she asked if she might use it, they told her there was fifteen minutes to spare before the next booking. Amy chose to regard that as a sign. She asked for the film and was rewarded by a half-smile of recognition from the woman who brought it to her. Loading it took only half the time it had before and she spun through the roll of film until she reached late January.

  A day more suited to the season with winds from the north finding places where our roof is not yet sealed quite tight. Up betimes before the sun rose, setting basins in place to save the floor from the drips then, being far from the possibility of renewed sleep I did set myself to bring order to the disarray occasioned below. On throwing open the Kitchen door I did find to my surprise, the limner already abroad and employing my large pestle to grind his dye-stuff. I did give him the old mortar instead together with an account of my distress at seeing my pestle given me by my mother so stained and spoiled but the maddening fellow will but smile when I speak whatever it is that I say.

  It is today that he will start with me and I confess that I am nervous of how it will be done and of, by necessity, being so long in his presence which I find is not at all an easy nor is it a pleasant business due to his habits. My husband is to the town again to speak with the Elder Brethren of his difficulties and Marvell has gone to beard Gilby in his den for his effrontery in seeking to claim Sunk Island for his own.

  Gilby? Amy wondered if there could be any connection. Did Don have ancestors in this story as well?

  Marvell did say he would return to tell me what the limner says. We did start upstairs this noon-time after the limner was satisfied with his preparation, having spilled much Venice-turpentine on the new boards. I do not know if I will stand for the whole of it. It is a vexing business and he will talk so.

  The next day's entry was very faint and whoever transferred it to microfilm seemed not to have understood the finer points of focusing. Amy chafed at the waste of time and went backwards and forwards through it, trying to make sense of it. The section began with a long account of a dispute with a farmer about a boundary fence and a complaint about the difficulty of getting the workmen to listen to her instructions in the absence of her husband, then it turned again to the limner.

  To the Dutchman again and much vexed by the tendency of his chattering. He will seize whatever materials he feels he may need without seeking approval for it. My best linen cloth is utterly spoiled by his wipings. His work is not pleasing but Marvell who is here again says it is but ground work and will be all the better for it with due time. My husband did return towards the evening of the day. To my surprise, my husband directed the man to put into place the panelling which we did bring from the Hull house which was before that in the great room at Linscot before the fire. This to be done while we are in full course in the room. This has occasioned much choler in the limner who opines that the lightness of the room will be spoiled by it.

  Amy made a note of that, to show Parrish that Don had been right. It was 'limner' in the original, but before she had the chance to read anywhere near enough time had run out and the next person was standing at her shoulder waiting for her to vacate the machine. She handed the roll of film back at the desk and said to the man who took it, in that hushed voice which libraries command, 'Do you know a place called the Drydock? It's some kind of project.'

  'It's across the river,' he said.

  She thought for a moment he meant the Humber and recoiled from the idea of crossing that enormous span to the Lincolnshire shore, miles away, then realized that he must be talking about the Hull.

  'It's up this end,' he said, 'You go over the North Bridge and turn right down Great Union Street then take another right, I think. It's got a big sign outside.'

  'What exactly is it?' she asked.

  'I'm not sure. Some sort of night shelter plac
e, I think. You know, for winos and rough sleepers and all that.'

  She thanked him and went back to the car, but a car seemed altogether too hurried a way to approach this difficult next step, so she fed the meter and followed Albion Street in the direction of the river. The directions led her down to an area which seemed to have little life left in it, scraped bare of time and dotted with chain-link fencing and utilitarian warehouses. There was a welding yard and a Post Office depot, straddling a road which seemed too big for them and which went nowhere. It was a bleak place. An old dock, filled with slanting mud which bubbled with something unseen, decomposing deep down, cut in from the river but ended at the road, baffled, useless and outdated. Beyond it was a brick building, the only one in view with any age to it. She judged it to be Victorian at the latest. There was a wooden sign on the front of it and it said. 'The Drydock', She stopped to stare, thinking normally this would be a very out-of-the-way place. No neighbours would be complaining in that 'not in my backyard' way the English do so well about undesirables on their doorstep. Nobody who didn't have pressing business would be hanging around here. Normally, that is.

  Not today.

  Cars were parked nose to tail down the side of the road. A camera crew were heading for the front door, carrying lights and a tripod. Something had happened here.

  Most ominously, there were three police cars right outside the door and as she stood there, disturbed and uncertain, a policeman walked out and saw her there.

  'Can I help you?' he said. 'You look a bit lost, like.'

  'I'm looking for someone,' she said. 'Has something happened?'

  'Depends what you mean. Who are you looking for?'

  'He's called Don Gilby. Do you know him?'

  'Do I know Don Gilby? Oh yes, I certainly do. He's the reason we're here.'

  Oh shit, she thought. I knew something was waiting to happen. Is it me? Have I pushed him over some sort of edge? If I'd shut up, he'd still be at Paull Holme.

  'What's he done?'

  'Plenty.'

  'Is he inside?'

  'No. If he was, I wouldn't be out here looking for him.'

  SIXTEEN

  Thursday, January 23rd, 1662

  I began to paint Amelia Dahl on an overcast Thursday afternoon when the thin cloud was on fire with a glow of flattened sunlight. That light came from everywhere and it was god-given. It was a light you might get, with luck, once or twice in a year and it lasted only three hours before the kind god who gave it took it back into his safe keeping. It filled the room with soft, even definition and I tried to commit to memory and to my palette every nuance of its remarkable effect. What that light did was to give me perfect tone and perfect detail. You cannot imagine the effect of light such as that and when I was young, it would only have produced a variety of despair in me knowing I could never capture its totality in the time it would last. Now I am older, I know better. I already have the index to that light in my memory and I know how to capture certain key tones and textures. A notebook, if you like, for the rest of the painting.

  It almost made me want to paint a landscape, that light, When I was woken by all the noise no more than an hour after dawn, I went to the front of the house where a queue of ox cans waited. They were piled high with earth. Men with long-handled spades were spreading earth across the ground. This required a deal of shouting. Piling fresh earth on a good field appeared to me an unprofitable way to spend money but the lady wants her flat lawn, it seems. She was watching from the window above, looking ready to leap down and grab a shovel herself if any of them did it wrong. Needing a piss, I walked to one side of the hubbub to a place where a low hedge shielded me from view and let fly. Halfway through I looked up at the river and saw what the light was doing. A ship, and no, I don't know what sort of ship it was. Maybe a buss or a pink or a hoy. I don't really understand why ships need such curiously specific names other than to disadvantage those who do not speak that private language. I suspect that in this house, Dahl's house, even the downstairs maid would have its description, home port and probably its cargo right at just one glance. Anyway there was this large tub with masts and sails sitting on the still water like no other ship in the history of ships, suspended in a new medium, a lake of yellow mercury, the ship itself as dense as if it were carved out of coal and so clear that every knothole in its planking could be descried. I was so astounded that I peed on my boots and, an instant later, received a violent buffet to the back of my head and a torrent of what could only have been abuse delivered in a strident female voice. I turned and in doing so, hosed the person who had administered the buffet with a last squirt of urine, entirely by accident. This served to increase the volume of her criticism somewhat. By her dress, her huge size and her floured hands, I understood her to be the cook – a woman I had only come across before through the uncertain ambassadorship of her products. She went on shouting at me and trying to slap me again whilst I mimed incomprehension and dodged out of the way of her enormous hand. When she pointed at the plants I had so recently been watering and mimed eating, I made the mistake of laughing, which earned me another buffet, propelling me into the row of vegetables and fuelling her tirade still further. I was compelled in the end to take to my heels, neglecting to secure my member before so doing and as a result I had to run the gauntlet of laughter and ribald cheering from the shovel brigade though at the time I didn't understand the reason. All that because of one small mistake which meant I did not get another chance to look at the water until I was back at the front door.

  Long ago, when I was starting out, I realized people will pay far more for a portrait than for a landscape. The only way to make landscapes pay is to etch them and sell as many prints as the market will bear. Even then, it is most important that you should remember to keep changing the plate every so often so the collectors will come back to buy all the different variations. I understand the mad itch that drives collectors. I have always been a collector myself. It is hard to resist some objects and my old house, my wonderful Breestraat house, was full of extraordinary items.

  This was not a view for an etching. This light was made for painting but, though I had an unusual desire to set down that other-worldly river, I had an altogether stronger desire to get to grips with Amelia Dahl in the room upstairs. It was that thought which made me aware that the area around my yard, my pintle, my member, whatever you choose to call it, was somewhat cooler than it ought to have been, thereby explaining the raucous reaction of the shovel brigade. This was a timely discovery to make before coming into her presence and I was able to secure myself in time. Half of me hoped she had not noticed my state of exposure from her window above, occupied, as she clearly was, by her vision of the perfect garden. The other half hoped she had.

  The moment at which Mrs Amelia Dahl, the lady of the house, the proud possession of an autocratic husband, the fire and life of Paull Holme Manor, finally sat down in the chair was a moment with the potential to change everything. What power is given to the artist. As soon as a man starts to paint a woman, the usual conventions disappear. He has every right to stare at her, to walk around her, to touch her so as to adjust her posture. He is a painter. That is what painters do. He can get away with almost anything in the course of practising his art.

  Not only that. Her beauty, her most precious asset, is in his hands. How can a woman see herself? Only in a mirror or in a painting. A mirror most decidedly does not tell her how the rest of the world sees her. It shows her transposed from side to side and whatever tricks she may try with other mirrors subtly arranged at angles to each other, she can never catch herself properly the right way round. Does it make a difference?

  Yes, of course it does. However pleased or displeased she may be at what she sees in the glass, it is not her as others see her.

  Only in a painting can she hope to find that truth.

  Truth, eh? The truth is in the hands of the painter. So this is the top and the bottom of it. She has delivered her most precious secret, the
secret of what she really looks like, into the hands of the painter and she is utterly beholden to him, in thrall for the entire time it takes to produce that painting. The painter is a priest. He is in charge of a mystery. That is perhaps why the process of painting takes on the character of the confessional. Leave a pretty woman hanging between heaven and hell, immobile in that chair in front of you and within thirty minutes she will start to bare her soul. However haughty she may be at the start of it, she will need to get you on her side, to draw you in so that you are kind to her because she has no idea, sitting there, whether the paint going on to the hidden canvas is kind paint or unkind paint. All she knows is that the picture is a judgement. It is not only a judgement that she will see herself but everyone who comes into her house will be paraded in front of it by her husband, not necessarily because he is proud of her but because he is proud of the picture, the artefact and what it says about his ability to pay for such things. It will haunt her, this picture whose back she is staring past as she sits and sits and sits.

  She sat there in front of me, did Amelia, and she lost ten years of age and inner certainty immediately she sat down. I looked at her so hard that I found I could move her face with the force of my gaze. I stared at her left eye, wondering just how to do justice to its pure blue brightness, and the eyelid began to flutter. I transferred my gaze to the right eye which was rendered a shade greener by the light reflecting from the wall and its eyelid also blurred with irresistible movement. I ran my eyes, like the gentlest brush, slowly down the angle of her cheek to the very corner of that tremendous mouth and found the lips moistening for me. I came out from behind the easel made for me by the joiners on Marvell's say-so, and saw both eyes widen as I approached her. I was unable to resist taking her shoulders gently in my hands and moving them just a little round to the light and then just a little back again to where they had been before. When I took my hands away, she spoke, I have no idea what she said but it was obviously a question from the intonation. Probably something like, 'Am I sitting wrong?'