III
WONDERFUL WEATHER WE had for the funeral, yes, a positively sumptuous day. How callous the world can be. Foolish to say so, of course. The world feels nothing for us — how many times do I have to remind myself of the fact? — we don’t even enter its ken except perhaps as a stubborn parasite, like the mites that used to infest Gloria’s myrtle tree. It is late November and yet autumn has come back, the days smeared all over with sunlight dense and shiny as apricot jam, heady fragrances of smoke and rich rot in the air and everything tawny or bluely agleam. In the night the temperature plunges and by morning the roses, flourishing still, are laced with hoarfrost; then comes the sun and they hang their heads and weep for an hour. Despite gales earlier in the season the last of the leaves have yet to fall. At the faintest zephyr the trees rustle excitedly, like girls shimmying in their silks. Yet there is a tinge of darkness to things, the world is shadowed, dimmed as it seems by death. Above the cemetery the sky looked more steeply domed than usual, and was of a more than usually intense tint — cerulean? cyan? simple cornflower? — and a transparent wafer of full moon, the sun’s ghost, was set just so atop the spire of a purple pine. I never know where to position myself at funerals, and always seem to end up treading on some poor unfortunate’s last long home. Today I hung well back, hiding among the headstones. Made sure I had a view of the two widows, though — for there are two of them, or as good as — standing on opposite sides of the grave, avoiding each other’s eye. They appeared very stark and dramatic in their swoop-brimmed black hats, Polly, with a markedly bigger Little Pip — how they grow! — who looked self-important and cross — children do hate a funeral — while Gloria stood with a hand pressed under her heart, like I don’t know what: like the Winged Victory of Samothrace or some such grand figure, damaged and magnificent. There was no coffin, just an urn containing the ashes, but still they dug a grave, at Polly’s insistence, so I’m told. The urn made me think of Aladdin’s magic lamp. Someone should have given it a rub; you never know. Still the penchant for tasteless jokes, as you see, nothing will kill that. They buried the urn along with the ashes. It seemed in bad taste, somehow.
There is a constant ticking in my head. I am my own time bomb.
It strikes me that what I have always done was to let my eye play over the world like weather, thinking I was making it mine, more, making it me, while in truth I had no more effect than sunlight or rain, the shadow of a cloud. Love, too, of course, working to transform, transfigure, the flesh made form. All in vain. The world, and women, are what they always were and will be, despite my most insistent efforts.
We have had quite a time of it, quite a time. I move, when I move, in a daze of bafflement. It’s as if I had been standing for all my life in front of a full-length mirror, watching the people passing by, behind and in front of me, and now someone had taken me roughly by the shoulders and spun me about, and behold! There it was, the unreflected world, of people and things, and I nowhere to be seen in it. I might as well have been the one who died.
Yes, quite a time we’ve had of it. I don’t know if my heart is in good enough shape for me to go back over it all, or all of it that seems to matter. In terms of duration it’s not much, weeks at most, though it might as well have been an age. I suppose I owe it to us, to the four of us, to give some sort of account, to record some sort of testament. When I was young, barely in my twenties though already puffed up with stern ambition, I had a memorable experience late one night, I hardly know how to describe it and perhaps shouldn’t try. I hadn’t been drinking, though I felt as if I were at least halfway drunk. I had started work at first light and didn’t stop until long after midnight. I worked too hard in those days, driving myself into a state of bleak, bone-aching numbness that at times was hardly distinguishable from despair. It was so difficult, sticking to the rules — I was no iconoclast, whatever anyone says — while at the same time struggling to break out and get beyond them. I didn’t know what I was doing, half the time, and might as well have been painting in the dark. Darkness was the adversary, darkness and death, which are pretty much the same thing, when you think about it, though it’s true I’m speaking of a special kind of darkness. I worked so fast, so feverishly, always terrified I wouldn’t survive to finish what I had started. There were days when the ruffian on the stair came right into the room and stood beside me at the easel, bold and insolent, jogging my elbow and whispering suggestively into my ear. Mind you, it was no symbol but death itself, the actual extinguishing, that I daily anticipated. I was the hypochondriacs’ hypochondriac, forever running to the doctor with a pain here, a lump there, convinced I was a terminal case. I was assured, repeatedly and with increasing exasperation, that I wasn’t dying, that I was as sound as a bell, as a belfryful of bells, but I wasn’t to be fobbed off, and sought second, third, fourth opinions in my doomed pursuit of the death sentence. What was it all about? What did I think was coming to get me? Maybe it wasn’t death but failure I was afraid of. Too simple, that, I think. Yet there must have been something wrong with me, to feed and nurture such a morbid obsession.
Anyway, back to that night at the weary close of a long day’s work. At the time I was embarked on something historical, what was it? — yes, Heliogabalus, I remember, Heliogabalus the bulbous boy. For months I was fascinated by him, that extraordinary head like a ripe pomegranate about to burst and shoot out its seeds in all directions. In the end I turned him into a minotaur, who knows why; you see what I mean about darkness. Where was I living at the time? In that festering den on Oxman Lane I rented from Buster Hogan’s mother? Let’s say it was, what does it matter. This was long before Gloria — have I mentioned how much younger than me she is? — and I was running after a girl who wouldn’t have me, another one out of Hogan’s harem, as it happens. Lot of water under that bridge, let’s not drown ourselves in it. There I was, with pins-and-needles in my painting arm and my legs like petrified tree trunks from standing for so long in front of Helio’s shining head, when suddenly it came to me, namely, the true nature of my calling, if we can call it that. I was to be a representative — no, the, I was to be the representative, the singular, the one and only. This was how it was put to me — put to me, yes, for it did seem to come from somewhere else, the injunction, the commission. At first I was nonplussed, that’s the word. The Virgin herself, discovered at her devotions by the genuflecting youth with flaxen wings, could not have been more at a loss than I was that night. What or whom was I to represent, and how? But then I thought of the caves at Lascaux and that famous prehistoric hand-print on the wall. That would be me, that would be my signature, the signature of all of us, the stylised mark of the tribe. This wasn’t, I should say, good news. It wasn’t good or bad. In a way, it wasn’t even to do with me, not directly. Stags and aurochs would leap from my brush, and what say would I have in the matter? I would be merely the medium. Yet why me? What do I care about the tribe, what does the tribe care about me? That, I suppose, was the point: I was no one, and still am. Just the medium, the medium medium, Niemand der Maler.
I think of these days, these present days, as the post-war period. The sort of exhausted calm that has descended has a lingering whiff of cordite, and we who did not die have the shocked air of survivors. My second return home, no more than a matter of weeks ago, was a démarche for peace. That’s how it is with me. I’m like an artilleryman who every so often glimpses through a rent in the flying cannon smoke a devastated landscape where wounded figures stumble blindly, coughing and crying. Sometimes you have to surrender, just walk out on to the battlefield with your hankie tied to the barrel of your musket. At the beginning, I mean at the beginning of my homecoming, I felt myself to be a displaced person, a refugee, one might almost say. After the débâcle at Grange Hall and that subsequent grisly confrontation with Polly — bloody skirmishes on all sides — I hid for a few days in the studio, bunking down as best I could on the love-stained sofa, where sleep was impossible and all I could manage were intervals of fitful dozing. Oh, those ashen dawns, when I lay under the big bare window in the roof, skewered to the worn plush, like a moth pinned to a pad, watching the rain falling in swathes and the gulls wheeling, and listening to their forlorn screechings. It was worse when I heaved myself over on to my front, for then my face was pressed into the worn green velvet that smelt so pungently of Polly.