by Pat Barker
Nick begins working his way down over Fanshawe’s waistcoat, leaning over Miranda, who’s kneeling between his feet.
‘Oh, look –’ she says.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
He can hear in her voice that she does. He bends down and peers into the space she’s created. An erect penis springs from the unbuttoned flies, as thick and pale as the decaying cabbage stalks in the kitchen garden. Gareth looks across and sniggers.
‘Well,’ says Nick.
Fran says, ‘It’s horrible.’
‘Oh, I don’t know…’
‘No, I mean the whole thing’s horrible.’
Nick’s begun to feel that too. His early excitement’s giving way to dismay, as it becomes clearer, minute by minute, that the portrait’s an exercise in hate.
Gareth’s scraping away at the bodice of the seated woman. ‘Boobs,’ he announces triumphantly.
The woman’s breasts are great lard-white footballs, covered by a canal system of blue veins.
Fran winces. ‘I wonder what other surprises he’s got in store?’
At the centre of the group, uncovered last, is a small, fair-haired boy, whose outstretched arms, one podgy fist resting on the knee of either parent, forms the base-line of the composition. Patches of wallpaper still cling to the painting like scabs of chicken pox, but even so its power is clear. Victorian paterfamilias, wife and children: two sons, a daughter. Pinned out, exhibited. Even without the exposed penis, the meticulously delineated and hated breasts, you’d have sensed the tension in this family, with the golden-haired toddler at its dark centre.
Their shadows half obscure the figures on the wall.
‘Come back behind the lamps,’ Nick says.
They move back, until only the flickering moths move across the surface, casting shadows as big as birds.
‘Who do you suppose did it?’ Fran asks.
‘The boy,’ says Nick.
‘It could’ve been one of the workmen,’ Fran says, sounding defensive. But why defensive? ‘I don’t suppose they’d be doing their own decorating.’
‘No, it’s the boy,’ Nick insists. ‘Look at his eyes. He’s the only one who knows he’s in a painting.’
Fran stares from face to face. ‘Yes,’ she says at last.
Silence. The living stand and gaze at the dead. Probably the same thought occurs to all of them, but it’s Miranda, her voice edging up into hysteria, who finally says what they’re all thinking. ‘It’s us.’
Nick opens his mouth to contradict her, but no words come out.
‘No, it isn’t,’ Fran says gratingly, in a voice she scarcely recognizes as hers.’ She’s not pregnant.’
FOUR
Upstairs Fran drops a nightdress over her head, and takes off her bra and pants under the cover of its folds. She doesn’t want Nick to see her naked, can’t bear her reflection in the mirror even, and all because of that obscene thing downstairs. She saw how Gareth stared at the breasts and then at her. The penis wasn’t so bad somehow. There was nothing satyr-like about it, nothing comic or sensual or friendly. Phallus as weapon, pure and simple, but she didn’t think Nick had felt attacked by the portrait. Not the way she had. She’d been wounded by those breasts.
She lies on the edge of the bed, her hands cradling the bag of drowning kittens her stomach’s become. ‘We’ve got to cover that thing up.’
‘Can’t be tomorrow. I’ve got to see Geordie.’
‘Can’t you leave it another day?’
‘No, he’ll be conscious tomorrow.’
Silence. He waits for her to try again.
‘Did you see how upset Miranda was?’
Yes, he’d also seen how upset Fran was. He gets into bed and touches her shoulder. ‘We could have a cuddle.’
‘I’m too tired. Sorry.’
A pause. ‘All right.’ He turns away and lies on his back in the darkness. ‘I did mean a cuddle.’
No reply. After a few minutes he can tell from her breathing that she’s asleep.
Monday he’ll start getting the rest of the paper off. Make that the first job. Fran’s right, it can’t be left like that, but tomorrow he has to see Geordie.
His hands throb. The extraordinary thing is that although every inch of the paper had been a struggle to remove – and he has blisters on the palms of his hands to prove it – his last impression, before he drifts off to sleep, is that the portrait had risen to the surface of its own volition, that it would have been impossible to keep it hidden any longer, rather as a mass of rotting vegetation, long submerged, will rise suddenly to the surface of a pond.
Miranda waits for the house to be quiet before she gets out of bed. Her room’s dark, because it overlooks the back garden, darker than her bedroom at home, which has a street lamp outside. Thick velvety black that threatens to suffocate her. Every night she lies awake, waiting for the girl to come in, knowing all the time she won’t, and yet waiting anyway.
Only now the girl has a face. She has to see her again. She slips her hand into the drawer of the bedside table and finds the torch. She’s not sure it makes things better, because everything outside the wobbling circle of light becomes blacker, but she needs it to find her way downstairs.
On the landing she listens. Dad snoring, bed springs creaking, no sound from Jasper’s room, a constant flit-flit from Gareth’s, which means he’s on the computer again. She starts to walk downstairs, eyes lowered, looking at nothing but her feet, which become more and more weird as she watches them, like small nocturnal animals creeping about.
The door to the living room’s closed. She switches off the torch before she opens it, in case the light could be seen from the road. Somebody might think the house is being burgled. Moonlight, reflected from the daubed white sheets that cover the floor, gives enough light to move around by, though she sees the figures in the painting only as patches of darkness against the pale plaster.
Close to the wall she switches the torch on again, and instantly, like the pupil of an eye contracting, the room recedes. Now there’s only the faces and her fingers on the torch.
One after another the point of light summons them back from the dark. The father, the mother, the elder brother and the little boy. She leaves the girl till last, because she’s the one Miranda dreads seeing most. When at last she shines the torch into those eyes, she notices that the minute cracks in the plaster look like lines in the iris.
The room’s cold. She backs away from the portrait – it’s too powerful a presence for her to feel comfortable with it behind her. Only at the last moment can she bring herself to look away, pulling the door closed as quietly as somebody leaving a sick room.
In the room that has always been the nursery, Jasper sleeps in the cot he’s almost outgrown. His hands, raised on either side of his head, are curled like new fern fronds. A cloud begins to drift across the moon, a shadow encroaches on the pillow, and Jasper whimpers as it passes over his face.
The moon sails clear. White light falls on the choppy sea of dust sheets covering the living-room floor. The Fanshawes, visible again, though now there’s no one to see them, gaze through the french windows over the lawns, the rose beds, and the rhododendron bushes of the garden that had once been theirs.
FIVE
Slim and sexy, Queen Victoria gazes out from her plinth to where the wrinkled Tyne crawls beneath its six bridges. Above her head seagulls squeal like abandoned puppies.
Craning his head back to see her face, Nick realizes again how long his grandfather’s life has been. This Victoria, broader in the beam but awesomely stable, still sat on the throne when Grandad took his first steps. Now, inside the hospital named after her, older than Victoria on her deathbed, older than most of us will ever be, Geordie sits on a plastic chair beside the window and looks out at a few blowzy roses dropping their petals on to the wet soil.
The last rose of summer, Nick thinks, left blooming alone, though blooming’s hardly the right word. He’s
wearing a white gown, the kind that slips on at the front and ties at the back. They’ve wedged a white cellular blanket between his back and the chair, because he’s already showing signs of bedsores.
It’s unusual to find him alone like this. Usually he’s one of the few old men on the ward who’s found somebody to talk to, grumble to rather, complaining he misses his midday pint, he’s all bunged up with that stuff they gave him for the X-rays, he’s dying for a fag. Grousing–an old soldier’s version of stoicism. He’s a health educationalist’s nightmare. He’s had his telegram from the Queen, framed it, hung it over the mantelpiece. Cigarettes have never hurt him, he says, and what’s more there’s nothing beats a Woodbine for bursting lice eggs in the seams of your shirt – though at this point the person he’s talking to generally starts to edge away.
‘Hello, Grandad,’ Nick says, putting a bunch of green grapes on the table beside the bed.
Geordie looks at the grapes with suspicion, thinking the pips will insinuate themselves between his dentures and his gums, and wreak havoc.
‘Seedless. How are you?’
‘Middling.’
‘Fair to middling?’
‘No, if you must know, middling to bloody awful.’
Nick sits on the end of the bed. ‘Is this the first time you’ve been out of bed?’
‘No, they had me up for an hour last night.’
His cheeks are furrowed over naked gums, the neck protruding from the gown is thin and scaly, there’s several days’ growth of beard on his chin, but he doesn’t look inconsiderable or pathetic. He looks like Caravaggio’s portrait of St Jerome.
‘They haven’t shaved you, then?’
‘They offered. I can’t stand the chewing.’
‘Might make you feel better.’
‘It’s all very well for you,’ Geordie flashes back. ‘You don’t have to cope with young bits of lasses shoving their fingers up your arse every verse end.’
‘They are doctors, Grandad.’
‘Aye’ – doubtfully.
He looks so lost that Nick impulsively bends down and hugs him: a brief embarrassed collision of rough chins that has Geordie pulling away at once. It’s not rejection. It’s just that nothing must be allowed to disturb his position, which is very finely calculated to keep the pain asleep.
‘Bloody torture, this is,’ he says, grunting, after Nick’s straightened up.
‘Pain? You should–’
‘Ask them for more of yon stuff? I will not. I don’t know where I am with it.’
They sit in silence for a moment.
‘Anyway, I didn’t mean that. I meant the fags. Do you know I have to walk all the way down that corridor if I want a fag? Can’t smoke in here. I says, “Can’t I nip out the french windows and have one?” No. Anyway if I stand up I show me arse. Have you seen this?’
He pulls at the shift to show the string fastenings at the back and the movement wakes up the pain. For a moment he says nothing at all – just fights it silently.
When it seems to have died down a bit, Nick asks gently, ‘Does it matter?’
‘’Course it bloody matters. See that lad over there?’ He’s pointing at one of the nurses. ‘Ian. Nice lad and all that but a nance if ever I saw one.’
The nice lad’s dispensing lunch from a trolley.
‘Are you allowed to eat now?’
‘Allowed yes. Whether I can’s another matter.’
He seems entirely clear mentally, better than he was before he went into hospital, though his bearing’s not as erect as it normally is.
‘Are the stitches starting to pull?’
‘They are a bit.’
‘Do you mind if I have a look?’
Using the white blanket as a screen, Geordie pulls up his shift to reveal the red centipede crawling up his stomach, past that other scar, the one he brought back with him from France.
‘It’s healing well,’ Nick says.
Geordie’s penis, retracted into the brown rugosities of his scrotum, looks like a rose in a bed of dead leaves.
‘Itching’s supposed to be a good sign, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I think it is.’
Nick wonders how much Geordie understands. How much he minds. Other people don’t respond to this illness as they normally would. They say things like: ‘Oh, well, he’s had a good innings,’ as if so many years of cheating death must automatically mean he’s reconciled to it now.
But is he? Perhaps he’s as rebellious and afraid as Nick himself would be? He’s had so much longer than most people can hope for – he’s almost not allowed to want to live.
‘You sleeping all right?’
‘Not bad.’
He’s looking along the ward now, watching Ian’s slow progress from bed to bed. Despite saying he can’t eat, he’s looking forward to his lunch, though perhaps only because mealtimes give shape to the endless amorphous hospital days.
Ian reaches the bed. He’s a pink-skinned plump lad with fair wavy hair and a buoyant manner. ‘Do you want it there, Mr Lucas, or would you rather have it in bed?’
Seeing his chance, Geordie says, ‘Bed. I can’t manage it here.’
Ian on one side, Nick on the other, they lift him as gently as they can and yet he’s hurt badly, biting his lip, grunting, finally letting his head fall back against the pillows. They leave him for a while, then straighten his legs out.
Ian hesitates, looking at the five beds he still has to do.
‘Put it on the table,’ Nick says. ‘I’ll help him.’
It’s a few minutes before Geordie can take any interest in food at all, and when he tastes it he’s not thrilled. ‘Iron filings,’ he says, not grumbling, he knows perfectly well the taste’s in his mouth.
‘Try to eat a bit.’
Nick watches him chew, thinking that any nourishment now can only prolong the agony and that perhaps he ought to be encouraging him not to eat. He thinks of Paul Morel diluting his mother’s milk so that it won’t nourish her. Finally poisoning her, partly in compassion, partly in unconscious revenge because her milk had poisoned him. And that sets off another train of thought about ambivalent relationships and the dangers of euthanasia. Then he realizes what he’s thinking and drags his thoughts back to the ward. It seems unforgivable, when there’s so little time left, to wander off like that.
Geordie’s getting tired. Nick takes over, spooning mashed potato and gravy into the toothless mouth. Sometimes the pap’s regurgitated, and has to be caught on the spoon and reinserted. It’s like feeding Jasper; he’s an expert. He gets half a dozen spoonfuls in before Geordie waves him almost angrily away. ‘That’ll do,’ he says.
Nick pushes the wheeled table to the foot of his bed and settles him back more comfortably on the pillows. ‘Tea?’
‘Aye, go on.’
Nick tips the beaker and a little dribbles into Geordie’s mouth. He watches the bulbous Adam’s apple jerking as he drinks.
‘That’s enough, son.’
Son, Nick thinks. Yes. Fair enough.
*
When Nick was growing up Grandad’s silent presence in the house had been only one more oddity in the way their lives were lived.
Nick’s father was the Headmaster of a small preparatory school; his mother was the Matron. As a small boy he was always aware of another world on the other side of the door in the hall, though until he was seven he was forbidden to enter the school.
Every Sunday, in term, half a dozen boys would come to tea, sitting out on the lawn in summer on their best behaviour, making polite conversation in high-pitched self-confident voices. Once when Nick was almost seven one of the boys met him accidentally in the hall and gave him a Chinese burn. Not for any reason. He just did. Nick’s eyes watered. ‘Don’t tell,’ the boy said, going out on to the lawn. Nick stared at the red marks left by his fingers and pulled his sleeve down to hide them. Then he went and sat at the table and watched the boy’s mouth moving delicately up and down as he chewed a piece of cake. He
didn’t say anything, and when Mummy came in to say goodnight he didn’t say anything then either. He lay in the dark, not bothering to wonder why the boy had done it. It was just something that happened. He hadn’t known that before, but he recognized it now.
When he was seven he went through the door in the hall and into his father’s school and the door closed quietly behind him, with a small puff of sound.
The two worlds smelled different: furniture polish, Mummy’s scent, good cooking, clean carpets one side of the door; custard, boiled cabbage, gym shoes, Jeyes fluid, grey wool, small-boy smell on the other. His father, who was immensely tall and towered over the bed when he came upstairs to say goodnight, became an even taller man on a platform saying prayers. When you met him in the corridors you had to remember to call him Sir. For the first few weeks he was ‘Da-Sir’, but Nick learned quickly. He had to. ‘Mummy’ was more difficult because it started with the same letter as Matron. He never called her Mummy at school, but he often called her Matron at home, once at a family tea party and all the aunts and uncles laughed. Nick didn’t think it was funny. (Forty years on, with children of his own, he knows it wasn’t funny.)
Life was full of traps. Nick’s father had the essential apparatus of a good disciplinarian: eyes in his arse. He knew about the smoking in the copse behind the school, he knew which boys slipped out between prep and dinner to lay bets at the local betting shop, he knew who was being bullied and who was doing it, just knew, but the boys didn’t believe that. Nick was always suspected of telling tales, though he said nothing, clammed up about school as soon as he was safely on the other side of the door. All the temptations to betray were the other way round.
Very few boys were prepared to risk the charge of ‘sucking up’ by becoming his friend, and he was desperate to belong. Once, when he was eleven, they were all talking about sex. Did the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh do it? No, they unanimously decided. The Vicar and his wife? No. Mr Halford and Matron? Sidelong glances at Nick, giggles.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I heard them.’
Later, one of the boys, the one he most wanted to have as a friend, said, ‘You shouldn’t have said that.’