I’ve met him many times, old Freddie, but he keeps forgetting who I am. I had a curious and distinctly unnerving encounter with him one day shortly after I had returned to the town and settled in my fine house on Fairmount Hill — far finer, I may say, than Hyland Heights. The yearly fête was being held, and a big marquee had been put up in a field lent for the occasion by Freddie himself. There was to be a raffle in aid of the squadrons of technological workers who in recent years have been laid off — how pleasant in these times the world is without the incessant false-teeth clatter of those now obsolete little communication machines it required so many drones to manufacture in their so many millions — and in a burst of public-spiritedness I had contributed a set of sketches as first prize in the draw. Freddie had consented to open the event. He stood on a makeshift dais in the way he does, with one shoulder up and his head inclined at a pained angle, and spoke, or sighed, rather, a few barely audible phrases into a microphone that squeaked and whistled piercingly, like a bat. When he had finished he surveyed the crowd with a strained, uncertain gaze, then stepped down to a scattering of manifestly sarcastic applause. Shortly afterwards, making my way to the temporary jakes at the back of the tent — I had drunk three glasses of vinegary wine — I encountered him emerging from one of the cabins, buttoning his flies. He wore a three-piece tweed suit with a watch chain across his midriff, and brown brogues the toecaps of which glowed like freshly shelled chestnuts — he’s a great admirer of the sartorial style of our gentlemen cousins across the sea, and when he was young used to sport a monocle and even for a time a handlebar moustache, until his mother, who had the carriage of a Prussian general and was known as Iron Mag, made him shave it off. At his throat was that floppy article of dark-blue silk, a cross between a cravat and a necktie, which it seems he invented for himself and which the more epicene young men of the town, I notice, have discreetly adopted as a badge of their confederacy. We stopped, the two of us, and confronted each other somewhat helplessly. An exchange of words seemed called for. Freddie cleared his throat and fingered his watch chain in a vague and agitated fashion. From a distance he looks much younger than his years, but up close one makes out the dry, greyish pallor of his skin and the fine fan of wrinkles radiating from the outer corner of each eye. I made to pass by, but noticed him giving me a closer look, as a gleam of recognition dawned in his ascetic’s long, coffin-shaped face. “You’re the painter chap, aren’t you?” he said. That stopped me. His voice is thin, like a wisp of wind rustling in the blue pine-tops of a snow-clad forest, and he has a slight stammer, which Polly fairly swoons over, of course. He said he had taken a look at my drawings while he was waiting for things to be set up for his speech. I replied politely that I was pleased he had noticed them, thinking the while with a guilty pang of my poor dead father, glaring down at me from one of the lesser halls of Valhalla. “Yes yes,” Freddie said, as if I hadn’t spoken, “I thought they were very interesting, very interesting indeed.” There was a tense pause as he cast about for a more telling formulation, then he smiled — beamed, even — and shot up an index finger and arched an eyebrow. “Very inward, I should say,” he said, with an almost roguish twinkle. “You have a very inward view of things — would you agree?” Startled, I mumbled some reply, but again he wasn’t listening, and with a curt but not unfriendly nod he stepped past me and walked off, looking pleased with himself and whistling, faintly, tunelessly.
I was more than startled: I was shaken. In a handful of words, and in a tone of mild, amused raillery, he had struck to the heart of the artistic crisis in the toils of which I was even then writhing, which was
—
Caught, by God! Or by Gloria, at any rate, which in my present state of guilty dread amounts to much the same thing. She has guessed where I’m fled to. A minute ago the telephone in the front hall rang, the antiquated machine on the wall out there the palsied belling of which I hadn’t heard in years, and which I had thought was surely defunct by now. I started in fright at the sound of it, a ghostly summons from the past. At once I rushed from the kitchen — I’ve been using the old wooden table under the window for a writing desk — and snatched the earpiece from its cradle. She spoke my name and when I didn’t answer she chuckled. “I can hear you breathing,” she said. My heart in its own cradle was joggling madly. I’m sure that even if I had wanted to speak I wouldn’t have been able to. I had thought I was so safe! “You’re such a coward,” Gloria said, still amused, “running home to Mother.” My mother, I might have told her coldly, has been dead for nigh on thirty years, and I’ll thank you not to speak mockingly of her, in however oblique a fashion. But I said nothing. There really wasn’t anything I could say. I had been run to earth; collared; caught. “Your boss telephoned,” she said. “He wondered if you were dead. I told him I didn’t think so.” She meant Perry Percival, Perry short for Peregrine. Some name, isn’t it? Not real, of course, I made it up, like so much else. Calling him my boss is Gloria’s idea of a joke. Perry is — how should I describe him? He runs a gallery. We used to make a lot of money for each other. He was the last person I wanted to see or hear from just now. I made no comment, waiting for something more, but Gloria was silent now, and at last, slowly, with a soundless sigh, I replaced the earpiece — when I was a child it always reminded me of a tiddlywinks cup — clipping it on its hook beside the Bakelite horn, the thing for speaking into. It looked absurd, that little horn, sticking out like that, like a mouth thrust out and pursed in amazement, or shock. You see how for me everything is always like something else? — I’m sure that’s part of why I can’t paint any more, this shiftingness I see in all things. The last one who had used that phone was my father, when he called to tell me he had been to see the doctor, and what the sawbones had said. Probably a trace of him is inside the receiver even yet, a few Godley particles he breathed into it that day, in one of the first of his last breaths, and that lodged there, and linger still, more tenacious than he ever was himself.
Will she come here, Gloria, and beard me in my lair, I whose beard has been tugged so sorely and so often in recent times? The possibility of it leaves me in a trembling funk — what a coward I am — and yet, oddly, I feel a little fizz of excitement, too. At bottom one longs, I say it again, to be seized upon and captured.
—
In Polly’s dream of the Prince, which recurs three or four times a year, so she says, he comes to her for tea. When I heard this I laughed, which was a mistake, of course, and she took offence and sulked for the rest of the afternoon. The dream-tea that she lays on for her illustrious caller, according to her, is really a children’s game, with a toy tea-set and cut-out squares of cardboard for sandwiches and buttons for cakes. I enquired mildly at what point in the proceedings does His Princeliness get round to making a grab at her, and she laughed and crooked a forefinger and struck me on the breastbone with a very hard knuckle and said it wasn’t that kind of dream — yes, I didn’t say, and I suspect he’s not that kind of man, either, not that kind at all. Instead I apologised and at length she grudgingly forgave me. After all, she and I also were at play.
When she told me her dreams — and the one with Freddie the Prince in it was by no means the only one I heard about in detail — her face would take on an expression of somnambulant concentration, which had the effect of intensifying her slight squint. Despite my protestations to the contrary, perhaps I am being unchivalrous in harping on her imperfections, if I am harping on them. But that’s the point: it was precisely for her imperfections that I loved her. And I did love her, honestly. That’s to say, honestly, I did love her, not I did love her honestly. How treacherous language is, more slippery even than paint. She has rather short legs, and calves that a person less well-disposed than I am might say were fat. There are, too, her pudgy hands and blunt fingers, and that slight jelly-wobble in the pale flesh on the undersides of her upper arms. Indulge me, I am, was, a painter, I notice such things. But these were, I insist, the very things I treasured in her, just as much as her shapely bottom and cherishably cockeyed breasts, her sweet voice and glossy grey eyes, her geisha’s little delicate feet.