“Look here,” Perry said, putting on a bluffly fraternal tone, “what’s the matter with you, exactly, will you tell me that?” I laughed, a sort of wild hee-haw. Brother donkey! Perry was not to be put off. “Is all this about some woman?” he said, trying not to sound overly incredulous. “I hear you’re having an affaire, or had. Is that the trouble? Tell me it’s not.”
One of the things from my painting days that I sorely miss is a certain quality of silence. As the working day progressed and I sank steadily deeper into the depths of the painted surface, the world’s prattle would retreat, like an ebbing tide, leaving me at the centre of a great hollow stillness. It was more than an absence of sound: it was as if a new medium had risen up and enveloped me, something dense and luminous, an air less penetrable than air, a light that was more than light. In it I would seem suspended, at once entranced and quick with awareness, alive to the faintest nuance, the subtlest play of pigment, line and form. Alive? Was that life, after all, and I didn’t recognise it? Yes, a kind of life, but not life enough for me to say I was living.
I wished Perry would go away now, just go away, be taken up into the air, and leave me here, alone and quiet. How tired I was; am.
Perry was prodding exploratively with the toe of his shoe at the wreckage of my poor painting. There it lay all in a heap in the corner, a tangle of wood and torn canvas, my final masterpiece. I was reminded of the giant kite that when I was a lad my mother paid Joe Kent the hunchbacked cobbler to make for me, from laths and brown paper, in his cave-like workshop down Lazarus Lane. It turned out to be too heavy, and I threw it on the grass and danced on it in a rage when it refused to fly. Yes, breaking things, that has been for me one of life’s small consolations — and maybe not so small — I see that clearly now.
“Have you nothing at all to show to me?” Perry asked, sounding both peevish and plaintive, eyeing again the dusty stacks of canvases against the walls. Yes, I said, I had nothing. I could see him losing heart; it was like watching the needle of mercury in a thermometer sliding down its groove. He consulted his watch yet again, more pointedly this time. “Such a shame,” he said, “to destroy a painting.” The pleasures of acquisition are well known — says the thief, the former thief — but who ever mentions the quiet joy of letting things go? All those botched attempts stacked there, I would gladly have stamped on them, too, as long ago I’d stamped on Joe Kent’s flightless kite. When Perry went, there would go with him my last claim to being a painter — not that I claim it, but you know what I mean — he would be yet another bag of ballast heaved out of the basket. You see how, with these figurative tropes, my fancy turns on thoughts of ascent and heady flight? And indeed, an hour later, when Gloria had driven Perry and me out to Wright’s field, and Perry had strapped himself into his neat little craft and was taxiing along the grassy runway, I had a sudden urge to race after him through the twilight and grab on to a wing and swing myself up into the seat behind him and make him take me with him to France. I imagined us up there, whirring steadily through the night, suspended above deeps of blue-grey darkness, the clouds below us like motionless thick folds of smoke and overhead a sky of countless stars. To be gone! To be gone.
We stood beside the hangar, Gloria and I, and watched the plane climb the murky air until it vanished into a cloud, the same one, it might be, that we had seen it descend from that morning. The shroud of silence that had fallen over the darkening field spoke somehow of deserted distances, forgotten griefs. Far at the back of the hangar a bare bulb was burning, and one of the Wright boys was hammering finically at something, making a metallic, melancholy tinkling. The night massed around us. I shivered, and Gloria, putting her arm through mine, pressed my elbow tightly against her ribs. Had she felt my sense of desolation, and was it comfort she was offering me? We walked away. I thought of Perry, bustling out of the lavatory after a final visit there, kneading his damp hands and giving me a disapproving, disappointed, frown. Yes, he had washed his hands of me. He need not have bothered: I had already washed my own hands of my own so-called self.
—
One day on my aimless rambles about the town — yes, I’ve become quite the walker, despite myself — I dropped in to see my sister. She is called Olive. I know, outrageous, these names. I don’t often have cause to visit her, and didn’t have that day. She lives in a little house in Malthouse Street. The narrow thoroughfare, hardly more than an alley, falls away at either end, but there is a rise in the middle, where her house is, and this, along with the fact that the footpath outside her door is very high, for what reason I do not know, always gives me the impression that access to the house entails a desperate scramble, as though it were a shrine, a fabled outpost, the way to which had been purposely made arduous. At the far end of the street is the malt store, long disused, a squat building of pinkish-grey granite with low, barred windows and big medallion-like rusted iron braces sunk into the walls. When I was little it was a place to avoid. There was always an unpleasant sour smell of malting barley that made my nostrils sting, and sounds of shifting and scurrying could be heard from within, where the rats, so Olive enjoyed assuring me, swam freely about like otters in the knee-deep stores of grain.
The tiny house is made tinier still by Olive’s great height. She’s much taller than I am, though that’s not a hard thing to be, and moves at a slow stoop, looming in doorways or at the foot of the stairs with her head thrust out and her bowed arms dangling behind her, so that her progress seems a permanent state of incipient toppling over. Of the four of us she is the one who most resembles my father, and as the years go on and her few womanly lines become ever less pronounced the likeness grows more and more marked. Her nickname in school, of course, was Olive Oyl. What an emblematic contrast we must have looked, she and I, back then: sceptre and orb, wishbone and drumstick, whip handle and little fat top. In her young days she had a reputation for outrageousness and rebellion — she wore a jacket and tie, like a man, and for a while even smoked a pipe — but in time all that became mere eccentricity. The town has many Olives, of all genders and varieties.
“Well well, if it isn’t the genius of the family,” she said. Answering my knock she had put her head around the front door cautiously and peered at me out of my mother’s — mine, too — large, blue and, in Olive, incongruously lovely eyes. She wore an apron over a brown cardigan; her skirt was hitched crookedly on the two knobs of her hip-bones. Someone should introduce her to Polly’s mother, they would make a matching pair, like Miss Vandeleur’s porcelain beauties, only in reverse. “What brings you down among the common folk?” She always had a sharp tongue, our Olive. “Come through,” she said, walking ahead along the hall and flapping a hand the size of a paddle behind her to beckon me on. She chuckled phlegmily. “Dodo will be delighted to see you.”
The house inside was redolent of fresh-cut wood and varnish. My sister’s latest hobby, as it would turn out, was the cutting and assembling of miniature crucifixes.
In the kitchen a wood stove burned with a muted roar, and the soupy atmosphere was heavy with heat. The smell here, where the air seemed to have been used many times over, was a medley of stewed tea, floor polish and a tarry reek from the stove, and came straight at me out of childhood. A square table covered with patterned oilcloth took up most of the room; it stood there on its four square legs, stubborn as a mule, to be edged around awkwardly and with caution, for its corners were sharp and could deliver a painful prod. There were dented pots and blackened pans on hooks over the stove, and on the windowsill stood a jam-jar of flowers, which, even though they were made of plastic, somehow managed to appear to be wilting. The ceiling was low and so was the metal-framed window that gave on to a concrete yard and a mean-looking stretch of overgrown garden. Windows are so strange, I find, seeming no more than a last-minute concession to the incarcerated, and always if I look for long enough I will seem to make out a trace of the missing bars. “See who’s here, Dodo,” Olive said, or shouted, rather. “It’s the prodigal brother!”