Her bare shoulders, the red sheet. She was sleeping soundly. He wanted to smooth the hair back from her face, but he didn’t want to wake her. He sat on a soft chair, watching; he’d moved newspapers to the floor and folded her clothes. His right hand kneaded his temple. The first light crept in under heavy drapes, finding dust and a dead white moth. He could still taste her skin on his tongue. Asleep, Darly’s face was a different person’s: it revealed nothing of who she was during the day. Then she grumbled and swallowed, and he knew her again.
Dacres was fully dressed, sitting with one leg crossed over the other like a banker. He was smoking one of her thin cigarettes, exhaling at a low angle so she wouldn’t smell the smoke. Her mouth was slightly open black, and watching the bundled sheets rise and fall he thought: the body works like a machine, it’s an engine. The scratchy yellow blankets she’d pushed away onto the floor. He could hear the first traffic noises as the city slowly came to, and then a van rumbled by up on the main street, and shook the house and shook the two of them. Thinking about what was coming next he had the bright red brick of the Barcelona train station in his head: he was thinking of Spanish railroad red, he was thinking of nudes and sheets and moods. He had been asleep for a long time, but now he felt he was waking.
They’d careened down the hill into town. Then Dacres had made Darly wait in the car, parked all splayed out like a broken bone, while he went in to the King Edward Hotel to see what was what. He’d seen a face he didn’t recognize behind the desk and marched through the lobby, trying to look calm, away from the rotunda, straight to the elevators, following a hunch. He was amazed that he’d driven. He was going to get the biggest suite in the hotel.
He was excited and tense all the way up to the ballroom. Saturday night, ten o’clock, and something was up: a swing band peppering the room. “Have a ball!” the black bandleader finished singing, and then the musicians were swaying left and right quickly, like storm and wash. Over on the dance floor was chaos, a thousand wedding cakes spinning around and around. He’d walked into a festival: perfect. He sashayed giddily between the tables, and the idea of Darly in the car pounded in his groin with each drumbeat. As he passed a table of loud, large men—they were laughing boisterously at something the fattest-faced one had said, they all had the same slicked-back hair—one of them clung at him with a question, but he couldn’t make it out and couldn’t be bothered to hear it twice. They looked like greedy local politicos: you’re nothing, all of you, Dacres said under his breath; I am everything. Spinning away, he almost fell into the arms of a sallow, bald chap leaning against the wall, framed in the diamond pattern. He apologized and the fellow stared at him with uncomprehending eyes the colour of bad teeth, and Dacres pecked him on the cheek to cheer him up. But trumpets flourished, and Dacres took it as his cue to try somewhere else: the dark bar, downstairs. Could even have checked there first of all, he thought. No matter.
Once through the doors with their inlaid green glass border, Dacres shifted his weight from foot to foot; all he saw were a few tables like islands, visiting couples who had been lost there for decades. The bartender was attending to a mannish blonde. It was too quiet here for him—he didn’t want it to slow him. Twitching, Dacres waited at the bar to be noticed. Come on world, he thought eagerly.
“I’m looking for the manager—assistant manager.”
“Is there a problem sir?” The bartender leaned towards him: shorn white hair, purple nose, hard of hearing. “Max Edelweiss? It’s a personal matter.”
Dacres repeated the name.
“He’s not here.”
Dacres cursed, damn and blast, and the barman looked sharply at him.
“I know he is,” Dacres said like a spy. Edelweiss was in his office, or upstairs in his room. The man would soften and call up if Dacres could find the right trick of words. “I know he is. Why don’t you tell him I’m here. Dacres. Edward Dacres. We’re old old friends.”
Though as he said this Dacres almost regretted it: the bartender did look wise and decent, in spite of the hairy boil that disfigured the tip of his nose. If he said no, Dacres thought, he could always leave Edelweiss a note: I know it’s been a while since, a lifetime really since we …
“But he doesn’t work here anymore, sir,” the man was saying gently. “That’s the thing. He took a job in Chicago. He’s gone. Lovely chap, sir, but he’s gone.”
Dacres swallowed.
“English, are you?”
The barman nodded.
“Why are you here? What do you make of it?”
But a waiter was next to Dacres with a drinks order. The barman looked at Dacres blankly, then turned to his colleague.
“Well if you see him, tell him I said hello. Tell him I apologize.”
The man looked back. “I certainly will, sir,” he said. He had to work.
“Edward Dacres.”
He nodded again, avuncular, but he was already otherwise engaged.
Darly looked at him expectantly. Side by side.
“I couldn’t find my friend,” he told her.
“Can’t we just have a drink?” said Darly. He looked for her expression, wondering if she’d already had more champagne than she was used to. Her knee bounced up and down, charged with adrenaline. “I have my purse,” she said. Really she looked delighted.
“You’d run into someone, Darly. I want to go somewhere no questions will be asked,” said Dacres, smiling. “No register to sign.”
“Like Mexico?” she said.
“Right.”
He was putting the car into gear, wondering if they could make it there by dawn, when she grabbed his face and kissed him long and hard. Sandpaper.
Dacres banged at the glass door of the Lion Grill. It was very much closed, but in the half-light through the shutters he could see a slight, slow-moving figure sweeping up between the counter stools. Darly stood a step behind Dacres, then up on tiptoe to look, trying to rest her chin on his shoulder. Each spot on his body she touched burned and sizzled.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
“Not sure,” Dacres replied and banged again. It was the boy, Janusz, who came to the door. It took him a moment to recognize Dacres, but then his features gathered, from unshaped tired plainness into surprise and uncertainty. He was as thin as the broom he was holding.
“Hello Janusz,” said Dacres.
“Ed-ward,” Janusz said. Then he saw Darly, and stared. She smiled and extended a hand in greeting, and introduced herself, and he brought them a few feet into the empty, dark restaurant. They stopped, by the counter, Dacres next to the cash register, Darly nearest the door, and Janusz close to the first empty table. It was completely quiet. Leo liked his place with the radio off; that was all right, there was more than enough music in Dacres’s head. Janusz’s coat lay bundled on the counter like a sleeping cat.
“You shaved off your moustache,” said Dacres. Without it he looked less Slavic. Janusz put his fingers to his lips.
“One month ago,” he said.
“How’s life at the mill?”
“I keep trying to sign up but they say I cannot, because of my heart.” He patted at his chest.
“Sign up?”
“For the forces. For Poland.”
“Oh, of course. Your heart.”
“If things get worse maybe they forget to test me, I think. People say.”
Dacres looked behind Janusz into the grill. His English was better, his accent softer; but Dacres missed its old thick syrupy sound. He didn’t want to slow down too much: he wanted to be spry now, he wanted to keep on the move.
“Janusz: where’s Leo? I have to ask him something.”
“Upstairs. Asleep. Leo is not so well these days. His foot, his stomach … That’s why I, I help him a little. At nights.”
He tilted the broom towards them, then back. They nodded, depressed.
“Janusz, I really am sorry about that awful letter I sent you.”
Janusz’s eyes wondered, waiting for Dacres to say more. When he looked at Darly he did so nervously, like a twelve-year-old discovering bodies and Beauty, though still drawn to his own toys too. Scalded and unsure but having to look, more than once.
“Yes I was sort of mad then and I said all kind of things I really didn’t mean and I just want you to know I apologize.” Dacres was speaking with his hands.
Janusz leaned into the broom handle, resting his face against the cylinder of wood.
“But you didn’t send me letters.”
“I didn’t?”
“You’ve never sent me a letter either, Edward,” Darly chirruped.
“I didn’t send you an angry letter?”
“Well, good,” Dacres said, discombobulated. “Listen Janusz,” he began again.
“You disappear.”
“What?”
“You disappeared. Leo wondered how you are. But you never called, or came.”
“Oh Christ,” said Dacres. “Well in that case I’m sorry about that.”
“It is too bad.”
“Yes, well …”
A car sped past outside at tremendous velocity and they stopped to look. Dacres imagined what was happening at the Burner house now: nervous attacks and police officers, notepads and calmatives. He gulped. Now they were examining his Great Work. The Detective Chief Inspector was unimpressed. His lip curled.
“When someone is a friend,” Janusz began, “he is expected—”
“I’ve met you!” said Darly, and poked Janusz in the arm. “I’ve met you twice—he’s the one who told me to try the hotel! That’s how I found you,” she told Dacres.
Janusz blushed.
“I knew where you were,” said Janusz to Dacres, shyly.
“That was very kind of you,” said Darly more softly, in an almost amazed tone.
“No,” he said.
If we’re quite finished, Dacres wanted to say. The next item on our agenda is—
“How have you been occupied, Edward?” asked Janusz; it sounded like a phrase he’d learned in a primer.
“Listen Janusz,” he said, “this is awkward, but I’m going to be frank with you: we’ve a problem. I need somewhere to hide out for an evening, no questions asked, do you see? I thought Leo could put me up in his back room again. Put us up. Just overnight.” He explained this, “One night.”
Janusz stretched his teeth out wide and shook his head.
“His cousin is here. He is asleep there. Just arrived. There is no space.” This he whispered.
“Damn and blast,” Dacres muttered.
“It’s not such a nice room,” said Janusz, to Darly.
“That doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Who’s his bloody cousin?”
“His cousin Tomas. Maybe there is space for one, on the floor, maybe—but not both.”
He looked from Darly to Dacres uneasily. They were all silent. Darly’s lips pouted forwards.
Then Janusz’s head popped up.
“You could stay in my room,” he said. “I could stay here, on the floor.”
Dacres smiled.
“Would you be comfortable?” Darly asked.
“I just finish and I take you there. I talk to Sofia.”
“Sofia?”
“My landlady. But don’t worry, I promise she will understand: she is as if my aunt.”
“They were driving me mad. Lorne can only talk about the invitations, the guest list. He was being so bridey, and telling me that of course when we’re married I shouldn’t work, why would I? It’s not that, it’s only just that, it’s all the little things that are a part of that. This has been coming for weeks. Months. It’s not tonight. It had to happen. We’ve been in too much of a hurry, I can’t be in a hurry … But I don’t want to talk about him.”
Her voice was quick and defensive and seemed to feed on itself. Dacres wanted to say something to agree with her, but he concentrated on driving, on the cars flowing past. The air in the car was dense with her perfume and there was a dreamlike quality to being behind the wheel, his hands still spattered brown and red with paint and gunk. The occasional wave of terror interrupted the pleasure of the fast lights. He veered between feelings and then looked over at her, luminous in her silver dress with his jacket over her shoulders, and he grinned. He wondered what Janusz would say about this night to Leo, over chess, at Leo’s sickbed. Dacres remembered playing chess with them now: he had forgotten. At Darly’s feet he saw a polka-dot scarf, perhaps Lorne’s, or Lorne’s mother’s. Darly hadn’t noticed it.
“And my father agreeing with him! Agreeing with him up to the hilt, so that it was the two of them against me, telling me what was what.” Her voice took on a darker edge. Dacres wondered what else he’d missed, what else he had been blind to these last months. “And I had a vista, a real vista of my life stretching out ahead, and these two men were like giants, and Lorne was holding my left hand and Daddy was holding my right hand, and they were leading me along forever. Forever, so that I could never let go.”
They arrived in less than five minutes, during which time neither Dacres nor Janusz was able to say a word. Then Janusz pointed right, indicating to Dacres that he should drive the car up on the sidewalk: it was a small narrow street and if he parked on the road there would be no space for other cars. Dacres thought that since it was a cul-desac they needn’t worry. They all got out, Janusz handing Dacres the suitcase he’d brought out of the back, then disappearing into a green doorway. Dacres saw an iron doorknocker in the shape of an eagle and a tiny flap for letters. He leaned back against the door of Lorne’s car, his legs aching. Darly paced back and forth before him, on the move, on parade, taking six steps and then halting, switching her weight from foot to foot, turning and marching back, in his ratty jacket, clutching her purse, delicate. She looked heartbreaking. And she suddenly came towards him and put both her hands in his, holding them at his chest. She was looking into his eyes for something. She still had those little flowers in her hair. Then she broke off and went back to marching.
Dacres thought the new damp in the air might signify that summer wouldn’t last, but it was impossible to be sure. He looked towards the end of the street and saw fencing, a night watchman’s box, a lamp with a halo. He imagined the guard watching them, an old bearded fellow with a stretched-out face from El Greco. Smile, damn you, he wanted to tell the man.
After an age Janusz appeared with a thumbs-up. Darly kissed him on the cheek in thanks and it seemed Janusz might faint. Dacres shook his clammy hand and tried to read what was written on the boy’s face, in the half-light. In the end he patted Janusz’s shoulder and thanked him again. And then Janusz slipped back, and then he was gone.
“After you,” said Dacres. He followed Darly inside.
It was a narrow passageway, at the end of which he could make out a kitchen, with a table, a geranium forgotten on the windowsill. On his right was a hook with four coats, a closed door further down, and after that a flight of stairs. Following instructions, they went up, Dacres behind Darly, trailing his hand along the rough stucco, other hand weighed down by the suitcase. He wondered what time it was. He entered a corridor, he passed a dank bathroom and saw closed doors, doubtless other tenants’ rooms, and Darly’s body ahead of him.
He’d half expected that Janusz kept goats but instead his room was full of books. On the sideboard, on the shelf above the sink in the corner, in long lines on the floor. The titles were full of Cs and Zs and there was a crucifix on the wall but then there were English books too: Darly bent down to pick up two hefty volumes and showed him Gray’s Anatomy and History of the Dominion of Canada.
“Look at this,” she said. Next to the sink there was a counter with a gas burner, beneath the counter a cabinet: she’d opened it to reveal that it was full of books too. She kneeled down.
“How to Play the Clarinet. You Can Be a Dollar Millionaire. He’s generous! But what does he eat?”
Dacres didn’t care. She held his gaze now, watching him warmly with a forgiving, expectant look.
So he went towards Darly and pulled her into his arms. She squealed and kissed him hungrily. His hands moved up and down her bare arms, and then she pulled him across the room, picking at his shirt buttons. They blundered on four legs like a pantomime horse.
He tried to turn her but she squeezed his face together in her hands, urgent and eager, and he felt waves of blood and excitement. His hands wondered if they’d ever felt a greater pleasure. She was awkward and he was out of practice: but we’re very willing, he thought. They kissed and bit and she pressed her tightly shut lips against his. She was too brave and then suddenly timid, like a boy picking up a bow and arrow for the first time, in front of his friends; Dacres felt he was on a new world altogether, orbiting a different sun, a better one. He half-remembered it; only he didn’t quite know his way around any longer. Then he stopped thinking.
In his vest now Dacres unhooked her dress, and kissed the side of her neck, held it between his teeth. She sighed dramatically, and held the silver fabric bunched before her as it came down, and told him to turn the light off—but he said he wanted to see every detail, every line of her. She insisted; he gave in. Coming back from the switch, heart gigantic, he fell to his knees and pushed his head into her midriff.
Then up again and by the bed they kissed and struggled and fell. She unclipped his belt. He suddenly wondered what she’d done with Lorne and asked her if she was sure and she hummed yes, yes instantly, busily. It was the absurd softness of her skin, the body perfected, most of all the living warmth. He kissed her eyes and her nails scratched at his hips. When she lay back her eyes were half-closed, but she stopped, pained, and pulled a small hardcover out from under her and dropped it onto the floor with a clunk.
There was the first difficulty and the first pain; grimaces; and then his belly was banging against her ribs. These sharp ribs, like elephant bones in the desert. She raised her hands and turned them back, fingers down, and pressed her palms against the wall like a contortionist. He saw her painted nails and the flowers on the wallpaper and kissed the water that was coming from her eyes and sliding sideways down towards her ears.
It was all too much: he had to withdraw almost immediately, and spent himself on Janusz’s bedding. He shuddered, dead. Dead. And then immediately heard his mind again, telling him to feel guilty about the poor chap’s sheets; he brushed that thought away, felt the warmth of her again. But then came intimations of a broader, much more sweeping regret. He rolled away, out of her arms, to lie on his back, gasping. He closed his eyes, and then curled forward to reach for something to cover himself up with, and his spine complained.
Darly was sweaty, curious, still panting, with a pink flush all over her neck and the top of her chest. A minute passed and neither of them spoke, their breathing slowing down, listening to the silence of the house. But she leaned on her elbow and pulled at the curly hairs on his chest one by one; two were grey. She caressed at his body a little but there was nothing he could do for now. I’m not as young as you, it’s not so easy, that’s one thing you have to learn about me.
He was falling into sleep but she was excited, full of plans again. She stared happily at him.
“We’ll drive to New York. But first stop city hall: we’ll show everyone.”
“Yes,” said Dacres.
“Show them all.”
He looked at the tulips on the wall: one, two, four, eight.
“You really want to marry an old duffer like me?” he asked, lightly but gravely.
“You’re not old,” she said, in a shocked voice. “Not that old.”
He grinned.
“What’s a duffer?”
“It doesn’t really matter,” Dacres said.
“I’ll join the Red Cross. I’ll be a nurse. You can be a war artist.” He said nothing, and perhaps because she sensed hesitation she quickly started talking about artists’ colonies; she was saying she could volunteer anywhere there was fighting. They’d be free, she said, they could go anywhere at all, anywhere in the world. They could decide. A very enthusiastic smile on her lips. The easiest thing for him to do was agree. And then suddenly, between sentences, she was asleep.
There’s a certain power relation here, Dacres thought, moving his weight uncomfortably in the chair, watching her sleep. I’m awake and dressed, out here; she’s asleep and naked, under the covers. One must be the artist and the other the subject when you’re together in a room. You have to be one or the other, though I’m not sure which: it seems to switch. He thought of Dover, the cottage, drawing the sheets, Evie’s poem. She’s all states, all princes I. Nothing else is.
He got up and went to the dresser. It seemed to do double duty as a desk: there was a hollow-backed wooden chair at its side and papers, a list of words in a language Dacres didn’t speak with what he assumed to be their English translations alongside. Home, Handsome, Hurdle, House, Hotel, Horrible. Janusz wrote in sharp black script, and he had drawn a perfect ink line between the two columns. The corner of the paper was curling, however. Across the room—Dacres moaned silently—there she was, an icon. He looked away from Darly because looking at Darly hurt. There was a magnifying glass on the counter. There was a waistcoat hanging on the back of the chair. A cyclone was sweeping across the continent, he was in its path. On the dresser, Janusz’s metal ruler engraved with a globe and a grid: longitude and latitude. He traced the lines with his finger.
Dacres moved the curtain aside and was looking out of the window at the car, a huge sleeping beetle in the narrow street. Stolen goods. He’d driven it, he thought. Turning away, rubbing his neck, he knocked over a pile of newsmagazines. He looked: the noise hadn’t woken her, but she’d wake up soon. Dacres’s throat was dry. How warm her forearms had been! He didn’t want to be a war artist. Did she really want to be a nurse? When she’d kissed him, she’d held his head in place with her hand. Not something he could forget. It had felt like someone from heaven was stirring him and lifting him into the air; she’d sliced him in two, she’d split him. But he couldn’t stay.
His body remembered: he’d rested his cheek on her collarbone.
Did he want to go to Mexico, he wondered.
Dacres crept to the bathroom silently. Brown lino, the yellowed tub, a stack of comics by the WC. Urine, interrupted by other things, sputtered painfully out; he tried to aim it against the sides of the bowl so as to be quiet. Then all of a sudden he was cold. The sink was orange and blackened under the taps, it stood on wrought-iron legs. A kettle balanced precariously at the wall (he pushed it away from the edge of the sink), a mint-coloured box of soap flakes, a rusty pair of nail clippers.
“Am I wasting time?” he asked himself aloud.
Through the frosted-glass window the size of a breadbasket he could see nothing. He turned the tap and washed his hands in a dribble of water and scrubbed under his nails with industrial-looking soap. He dried his hands on his trousers, though they were still dirty and still smelled of her, and he patted down his shirt collar and even smoothed his hair back in the scuffed mirror, getting ready to disappear.
No: what we’ll do, he thought, is go down to city hall. We’ll find ourselves two toothless old cleaners as witnesses. They’ll be illiterate so they’ll have to sign with an x. After that, what she said: we drive south, south as far as we can, away from Burner and Lorne. Away from everything. New York, she said, Mexico. Or, no: we’ll join up, we’ll save the world, just as she wants. And I won’t drag her down into myself or curse her life before it really begins because there’s something in her that burns all that off.
He nodded to himself in the mirror, trembling. Yes.
She sees something in me, he thought, so she won’t regret it. She won’t regret wasting the time with me that she really needs alone now, to grow. She doesn’t need to grow, she’s decided she needs me. Life will be day after day of bliss: this bliss. And we’ll never part. She’ll want for nothing but me. We’ll win the war, and then we’ll be the toast of Manhattan, and then we’ll go south. She won’t miss the money or the certainty or the happiness because she’ll be my muse. She’ll never feel she wrecked her life in a moment of whim. Then we’ll live together with Spanish names in a tiny town until we die. We’ll die at the same moment and then we’ll be buried together, hand-in-hand, in a tomb that we’ll design ourselves, together. It starts today.
Yes.
Dacres walked very slowly down the corridor, in the dark, trying to suppress the floorboards’ creaking. This is a miserable mean house, he thought, with a closed-in smell; it reminded him of his flat in London. He wondered how his horrible neighbours there were, and whether they remembered him. God, all these things that come into your head, he thought, all these people in a life.
He came back into the blanched room as quietly as he could, though the door complained. Down by his feet was his suitcase; Darly appeared not to have woken. Her face down now, her hair spread over the pillow, her elbows out wide. For a long time he watched her. He wondered if she was actually awake, whether or not she was watching him too, thinking. Woman or girl, he thought. Sometimes you’re asleep but your eye is fractionally open, white, unseeing. He couldn’t be sure without getting closer and if he got closer disasters would follow, he knew that much. He looked away, down at his colourless shoes, and looked back at her.
Well, something else is, Evie, he thought. He thought: it mustn’t happen again.
It took him a while in the blue, dewy light to find his way, walking past shuttered soda bars and boarded-up stores until the neighbourhood improved, and then he was on a street he dimly recognized: King, or Queen. He was passing hat shops and furriers and walking away from the sun. And then he knew where he was: Yonge Street. He turned left.
He’d been worried that Janusz would appear with a baguette under his arm. He’d stopped of a sudden and tried to leave Darly a note on the windshield but couldn’t think what to say. He’d stopped, taken a step back to the house, stopped again, looked up at Janusz’s window. And then he finally walked away.
The city was bright and quiet and cool and almost empty, as if it were his alone. The low buildings waited for something to happen, waited for pigeons and seagulls to bring them the good news. Dacres walked, passing a succession of shoe stores, then advertising hoardings, and there were a few more faces in the city now and more cars. A bit of life. He knew where he was going, at least. He passed places he recognized and places he didn’t, feeling dry inside, feeling determined, regretful, tired, unsure, at peace. He was walking quickly, quickly and in a straight line for the first time since he’d arrived in Toronto. Then he stopped, he turned, he turned again, and started on again. Awnings and jewellers and everything just two storeys high. A cigar store and a fluttering, unexpected Union Jack. Then he was on Front Street, and there was a line of cars, and there was that Roman bank: the train station.
With money taken from Darly’s purse he’d bought a ticket. “West,” he’d said, “west,” and thrust bills across the counter. The man at the window had looked at him doubtfully, and moved slowly, and then had told Dacres to step on it: platform two, he had one minute. He’d tried to run, immediately out of breath, through the vast atrium, then past the milling ladies at the railing, knocking over children, calling out excuses. He’d had to jump through a cloud of smokey steam, into the void, but then breathing hard he’d found his hand was on the door and he was lifting himself up and in as the whistle blew. He’d fallen into his seat as the train began to pick up speed, and had thought for a mad second that he recognized the guard on the platform, the curling moustache. Their eyes had met. But he couldn’t be sure.
Amazed, Dacres looked out of the window. The city: taxis, stock still, waiting for fares. Then warehouses, frozen men disappearing, hats raised in farewell. Empty roads, and then houses, the train starting to hum and accelerate. Other lives and other stories. Hers too, somewhere. Beginning anew? He looked down. He didn’t have a newspaper. He felt the start of a hunger in his belly.
The sight was astounding: gigantic clouds, stacked one over the other against the roofs; the sky behind them perfectly clear.
Dacres searched in his pockets for pen and paper. He found a stubby pencil, yellow, gnawed all the way up and all the way down. He crossed his legs, his ticket was on his thigh. He exhaled, and leaned forward, and in his tight grip the lead waited an inch from the paper. The banging carriage moved his hand up and down; the lead moved closer to the paper, and then further away. And then finally closer.