Port Mungo

by Patrick Mcgrath

  —Vera pretends that life’s a comedy, he said, but deep down she knows it’s tragic. That’s because she feels.

  —Toad, don’t be profound. I’m not in the mood.

  —It’s the sign of a generous spirit.

  —What is?

  —Sparing your companions your tragic view of existence. More people should try it.

  By nine that night it was clear Anna had forgotten our dinner plans. I told Jack I was going to check her room. Up the stairs I went, along the corridor, and knocked on her bedroom door. No answer. I went in. It was as I suspected. In fact it was as I dreaded, for I had grown more and more certain that she had gone. The black leather bag she had slung up on top of the closet was not there. Her underwear drawer was empty, as was her bedside drawer, except for a subway token. Nothing hung on her hangers. I sat on the bed a moment before going back downstairs.

  —She’s gone, I said.

  I picked up the phone, and while I waited for the hotel to answer I said: You’re not surprised.

  He shook his head and walked to the window.

  —Is Mrs. Savage still with you? I said.

  Jack turned from the window and faced me from across the room. I nodded as I heard the answer, then hung up.

  —She’s gone too.

  Anna did not make contact for more than a week, so we had only our imaginations to provide any picture of where they might be. The house seemed very empty. We both, I think, felt abandoned, spurned. Vera had left her phone number in the country and we rang it several times, but there was no answer, nor was there in the days that followed. Could they have gone to Port Mungo? It was, in a way, plausible, but no. Ageing painter takes lost girl to jungle paradise where lost girl was born. In Nature’s Womb both healing and redemption occur. Lost girl emerges whole, artist dies happy. Credits roll to the sound of violins.

  Thus my thoughts as I paced the big room, and Jack shifted about in an armchair, frowning, tapping his fingernails on the side of his wineglass.

  —Dear god I wish I still smoked, he said.

  Unable to contact any public authority—to say what, that she’d gone off with her mother without telling us?—unable to do anything but wait and fret—these are the kind of hours, said Jack, that the gods of anxiety intended for the smoking of a great many cigarettes. But he resisted, and continued to resist, and so, day after day, we moved about the house in silent despond, and the weather mirrored our mood. I told Dora what had happened, and she, dear woman, as always was a rock. No word from anybody. Even in New York, where communication fizzes through circuits of connection as dense as the root systems of a potato patch, inexplicable lulls do occur and one grows oddly becalmed. The phone doesn’t ring all day, nothing appears in your mailboxes and you wonder if the equipment is faulty—but no, it is just systemic lull. The city, as though to echo and amplify the deafening silence from mother and daughter, became silent too. There were mists, those salty mists which drift into New York in the early spring and remind you that this is after all an Atlantic seaport, and though it has since become the capital of practically everything you can think of, in the beginning what mattered was the harbour and the ocean. And so, fogbound, with no signals reaching us, our thoughts turned in abstract circles which soon became knots, tedious knots, knots of tedious solipsism.

  Jack spent many hours in the studio that week and seriously debated buying a pack of cigarettes. He said it was like the first days after giving up. The sense memory of tobacco came flooding back at all hours—he said he could taste the bloody things! What old association was this now clamouring for closure? He allowed himself to be absorbed by the conflict—to smoke or not to smoke—he said it kept his mind off Anna. Then there was the portrait. If he stared at it a few more hours, would he learn anything new? Marks, daubs, the work of his own hand—what trace there of anything outside his own consciousness? The lingering vapour of another being, perhaps, but the vapour faint already and growing fainter with every minute he gazed at it. And if cigarettes tempted him, what of the old photographs—should he haul them out and render himself weakly liquid staring at faces of people frozen in time, with their mistakes still waiting to happen? No. No. And he came to see this as the work he would make of those misty days, this his performance art, to smoke no cigarettes, to look at no old photographs, to be as spartan, as minimal, as severe in his appetites as it lay in his power to be, which meant one glass of wine a night, no more. Fruit and salads, one glass of wine, there was madness in the house, he could feel it, he said, he was vulnerable to it, and to remain immune to it he must seal his psyche tight: become Fort Jack, this was how to stay sane and healthy in a time of unease and disorder—and yes, I thought, hearing all this, and profoundly bewildered by it, there is madness in the house, and I know where it’s coming from. But I said nothing.

  So the strange days passed. Jack became ever more silent as the ascetic mood deepened and his blood-sugar level dropped. Dora was like a ghost moving through fog at the periphery of vision. The house was quiet. The city was quiet. Even the park was quiet, Jack said; he walked there most days. Somewhere Vera was talking to Anna. She was answering her questions. She was telling her the story of Peg’s death, and I didn’t know why that made Jack so anxious. What did he have to fear—that she was telling Anna the story she had once told Johnny Hague?

  I asked Jack why he was worried. He was leaning against the window frame, watching the street—he seemed always now to be watching the street, I did not have to ask him why, and he nodded. His answer was curious. Anna had come to New York to find out about her sister, he said, but he had wanted to prepare her before he told her. Not merely by establishing the context of their lives in Port Mungo, but by allowing her to get to know him. Only when she properly knew him, he said, would she properly understand the circumstances surrounding Peg’s death. This I could understand, I suppose. My brother was not young, and with the years he had accumulated layers. He could not reveal himself to the girl over a weekend. He had facets, dimensions, carapaces—selves—a thousand moving parts constitute the coherent machinery of a mature human being. Let her get to know him, this was his idea, and then she could begin to make sense of her sister’s death.

  It was growing dark outside, and I asked if he wanted his glass of wine now, but no, he didn’t. Nor did he want the lights on. The shadows thickened in the sitting room. What he feared, he said, was that Anna would get a botched version from Vera, who would long ago have constructed an account that lessened or even eliminated her own responsibility for the accident. She would then have clung so tenaciously to her account that she would now be genuinely unaware that it was untrue. Vera disliked uncertainty or ambiguity, he said. She always needed the gesture, and could not tolerate any delay in the making of the gesture. When she painted, he said, it was not hard to see the same impatience, the same inability to linger over a decision, the pressing necessity to decide the thing at once and then move on. That’s how she would have made a picture of Peg’s death, a few bold strokes to give it a shape, a form—

  All this I heard as Jack paced the floor with his fingers twitching and clenching, and I could not tell him what I feared—that the few bold strokes Vera made for Anna would be the same ones she’d given Johnny Hague. I had begun to suspect that that was precisely what Jack feared too.

  We talked no more about it that night. I think we were both exhausted. I had certainly had enough. In the old days we would have gone out and got very drunk, and Jack would have evacuated the complicated contents of his brimming heart as I listened sympathetically and made sense of it all, and in the morning we would not remember much except the feeling that painful matter had been spilled, though whether it had been swept away in the spilling was another question. But we did not behave like that now, Jack and I. Not simply because getting drunk was far more expensive, physically, than it once had been, but also because we understood that it would serve no purpose. Things truly important to people of our age are not susceptible to alcoh
ol, alcohol changes nothing. It is good for everything else however.

  So our state of suspense continued. We would not be able to move on, or to move back, rather, to our normal life until Anna returned and we learned what Vera had told her. How sad it was, I thought, that this guilt of his was without any real foundation in reality. Poor Jack. All these years, tormenting himself with the question—if I had done this, or that, would she be alive today? Useless thinking, but impossible to abandon so long as some undying spike of powerful emotion attached to the idea that Peg might have been saved, and himself the one who could have done the saving.

  And then I asked myself: And Vera’s position in all this? Was it her doing, the undying spike of emotion that kept alive my brother’s guilt? Did she collude in this guilt, connive at it, stimulate and sustain it? And with that thought the figure of Vera rose up in my mind, loud, talkative, alert, fearless, engaged—yes, drunk—yes, selfish and irresponsible—and I stood her beside my brother, my serious, secretive, fierce, driven brother—my self-deluded, narcissistic brother—and I thought: There is only one person in the world who can live with Jack Rathbone, and that is me.

  We began to wonder if Anna would ever come back. She had left nothing behind, only her guitar, which I’d found in its hard black case under the bed. I’d opened the case, and found it was an expensive-looking instrument with a mother-of-pearl inlay in the neck. I ran my fingers across the strings. We had never heard her play it. Surely she would come back for it. I watched my brother wandering around the house, distracted, and I was suddenly reminded of the days after Peg’s death, when he was in that same state of grief and loss. He was in mourning for Anna just as he had been in mourning for her sister twenty years before, and finally I understood why he so fervently insisted on the girl’s resemblance to Peg. It was because Anna had replaced Peg. She had brought her back to life, and a deep pain in Jack had at last begun to ease, and in his soul he had felt a sort of peace. All this she had awoken in him, I had seen it with my own eyes, although I had not properly understood it until this moment: Anna had become a double of her own sister, sufficiently like her that Jack was able to flesh her out, emotionally, as it were, to the scale of Peg. The full-length portrait was his declaration that just such a substitution had occurred.

  But for this—what?—this simulacrum, this ghost?—to die, figuratively—what did this mean? How could a ghost die? What did it mean to talk about the death of a ghost? But this it seems was what my brother was mourning during those empty days, he was mourning the death of a ghost. Is he going mad? I thought. Is he mad already? I began to be seriously concerned.

  The household, as I say, was in a state of suspension and there was little I could do but wait and watch—wait for Anna to come back, or at least to let us know where she was, and that she was safe—and watch Jack. Watch over Jack. Watch over him as you would any grieving person, vigilant, ready to step in with balm and comfort as required. It was as a result of this watching that I realized that the man was bereaved, and that he’d been thrust into emotional territory he had occupied before.

  Every night I took him out to one or another of the restaurants in the neighborhood, usually the Spanish place, but he grew less communicative with each passing day. I asked him if he was doing any work. A shrug, a baleful glance flung across the table as he picked listlessly at his food. Jack had that same power Vera had, he could create an atmosphere around himself, and his silences now were freighted with spiritual significance. A kind of gloomy majesty attended him in his despondency, and though I was perfectly capable of puncturing the mood I did not. My task, at this point, was simply to be vigilant until the crisis passed.

  I was curious about a couple of things. I wanted to know what was going on upstairs, between him and the portrait of Anna. Was he glooming over it like some decrepit obsessive in a dingy romantic novel? Or had he turned it to the wall? I asked him if he’d turned it to the wall. Loud bark of laughter, and diners at nearby tables turned to see what had so amused the tall silent man in the corner. This was the most vivid manifestation of life I’d seen in him in days.

  —Barely ever look at it, Gin. Don’t need to turn it to the wall.

  I didn’t believe him for a moment.

  —Still think it’s wrong?

  —It’s not the picture that’s wrong, it’s her. There’s nothing there.

  —What do you mean?

  For a moment I thought he had penetrated his delusion: there was nothing there of the sister. But I was wrong.

  —There’s nothing to her. Well, is there, Gin? Did she ever say anything that stuck in your mind?

  Plenty, I thought, but I was more interested in his own thoughts. I made an ambiguous noise and said nothing.

  —Empty, really, like a child. All those black clothes—just a frightened kid from Surrey. All Gerald’s fault. No impress of experience, do you see? Locked up tight in her narcissism. She won’t amount to anything.

  Shaking his head, he attacked his lamb.

  —It’s there in the painting? I said.

  —It’s there in the painting, he said, chewing vigorously. Or, rather, it’s not there.

  Devalue the object of desire and the pain of loss diminishes. That at least is the theory. The poor man must have been hurting very badly indeed if he’d been reduced to this. There was some truth in what he was saying, but it was not apparent to him. He was speaking the truth even as he was telling himself lies. The other matter I was curious about was to do with Vera, and what he’d been thinking about her these last few days. I asked him.

  —Do you think her mother’s reached the same conclusion? I said.

  —Pah!

  Clatter of cutlery, more turning of heads. Jack glared at his neighbours and the heads turned away.

  —Listen, he hissed. You know her. She’s a devious woman. This isn’t about Anna.

  —It isn’t?

  He shook his head, drank off some red wine, ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth and went at his roast potatoes with a will. You’d have thought he hadn’t eaten for a week. Something was newly released in him, some pent energy, and he needed fuel.

  —It’s about me.

  I wiped my mouth with my napkin so as to conceal the smile that sprang to my lips. Locked up in narcissism indeed. Anna was worthless and Vera was using her to plot against him, was this it?

  —How is it about you?

  —Oh come on, Gin, you’re not such a fool as that. Of course it’s about me. Everything Vera does is about me, you know that. She didn’t fool you too, did she?

  His eyes blazing at me in the candlelight, mad, quite mad. What to do, encourage him to spill it all, or pin this nonsense to the floor where we could see it for what it was?

  —You think she’s going to pour some fiction into Anna’s ear so as to turn her against you, so as to get back at you—for what, exactly—?

  —Oh Gin.

  This was murmured by a man who seemed to have nothing more on his mind than clearing every last morsel of food from his plate and draining every last drop of wine from his glass. I waited, feeling the first stirrings of annoyance. He was cocky in his madness.

  —All right, I said, enlighten me.

  He finished eating and wiped his mouth, though the supercilious smirk remained. This wasn’t Jack, this sneering paranoid—madness cheapens people, I suddenly thought, makes a man one-dimensional, a tawdry caricature of himself. Then I saw something else in his face, and it was as though the current had suddenly been reversed. The madman’s anger crumbled like a cardboard mask, revealing only pain.

  —She blames me for Peg, and I can’t bear it any more. It’s too much for me, Gin.

  I was on the point of saying, Oh, but that’s absurd—but I did not. Instead I waited. All I saw was turmoil, and I knew I was right: he blamed himself, and had struggled with the guilt for twenty years, and now he was too old to bear it any more. He was more fragile than he appeared. I had protected him from the world for years,
but now the world, the past, had slipped in under my defences and a blade was at his throat. All this I saw in that old man’s panic.

  —But how does she blame you? Jack. Listen to me. What is it that she blames you for?

  He couldn’t answer. He was overcome with emotion. He lifted his napkin to his lips. How was I to help him if he wouldn’t tell me the truth?

  —Jack, she’s older too.

  Piece of string to a drowning man, this, but he seized it all the same and hauled himself up onto a dry place.

  —That’s true, of course. She might be kind—

  At that moment his jaw fell open, his expression was transformed. Now he was gazing past me, and rising to his feet, absently thrusting his napkin onto the table. I wheeled round in my chair to see what it was he was looking at, and there in the doorway of the restaurant, her eyes raking the place, stood Anna.

  Chapter Seventeen

  She hadn’t seen us. Then she saw Jack, standing over the table with his arm lifted, a beacon of hopeful welcome. She moved towards the corner where we sat in the shadowy recess we had always occupied—until, that is, she came into our lives and moved us near the bar, where she could smoke. Lips pursed, frowning, she negotiated the narrow channel between the tables, and diners glanced up incuriously as she pushed through to the corner where the two elderly parties had been having rather an emotional dinner. I half rose off my chair, aware that I was wreathed in smiles and filled with a pleasure stronger by far than I would have liked—in fact I was very displeased with the girl—and annoyed with myself for being such an old fool, but delighted all the same to be an old fool now that she had come home. Had she come home? I glanced at my brother. My delight was as nothing to the silly fondness turning his crusty features to the consistency of custard. She sat down and looked from him to me and back to him, grinning.

  —Hi, she said.

  Jack’s long fingers had closed on hers and held them fast.