Into the surgery, and yes, on this blithe, refreshed morning, holding on to his high spirits of the day before, he was proud of the place, too. Clever design, William. No immediate view of the chair, another little space to sit and talk about it, a corner to turn and a feeling of space. He had hated tiny surgeries. They got in everyone’s face. There was no painting or piece of distraction facing the chair. How long since he had decided on that? When Tina had said there was no need, or because he had realized that, whatever he put there, it would have to be something he liked and it followed from that that someone else might dislike it. The wall in here looked bare. Fussily, busily, getting himself in motion for the day, William proceeded into the hallway and removed Cannon’s drawing of his hands, placed it on the empty hook opposite the chair. Surely no-one could take exception to that. Then he washed his hands carefully, reminding himself of how precious they were. Humming, he admired the order of all he surveyed and pressed the answer-machine button for messages. A sibilant voice, oddly without resonance, hesitant, instantly familiar.
Tomorrow afternoon, Mr Dentist. The whole afternoon. And no-one else there, you get me? No-one but you, or I’ll go as soon as I arrive, and you’ll miss out on all that cash. But I can’t have anyone watching, can I? Smith.
The words themselves were hectoring, but the tone ingratiating, almost pleading, as if attempting an apology.
Click. Beeeeeep. The sunshine seemed to depart from the room. William slumped. Examined his hand for the disappeared mark of a bite. Didn’t the man realize it would all take so much longer without a nurse to record and assist? But then again, how would he know? Sarah would say, Do not do this. You have an awkward patient with high expectations; you never see such a patient alone, especially females. What defence could you offer if he sued? What protection would you have?
I don’t care. I want to.
He looked in the appointments book. It was so much easier than the screen. Five for tomorrow afternoon, the names as meaningless as usual without the notes, all short appointments, no-one booked for more than half an hour. No sedation, no anaesthetist to inconvenience, all capable of cancellation; nothing major. How dare the man give such short notice? Why the hell should he cancel? He hated to cancel, it was unfair and irresponsible, but he knew as he reached for the phone, formulating excuses and unaccustomed lies, that that was exactly what he was going to do. Tell them to come back next week or the one after; they were a biddable lot; so good; so respectful. Tina would be delighted with an afternoon off. Everybody would be happy.
And yet, when he looked at his hands, they were shaking. Long, elegant fingers, shaking like twigs in a breeze. Not nearly as confident as the hands Cannon drew. He was not used to telling lies. His fingertips tingled and grew pink. Sometimes he thought his whole life was his hands.
Cannon had not phoned, had not phoned … had not phoned. The realization repeated itself like a litany. He had rejected the idea of a mobile phone – typical Cannon, rejecting anything that made life simpler. Addicted to complications. And fantasies. He must be sulking in response to the increased scepticism that had come to surround him. Cultivating other credulous friends. Doing something to upset his wife. Making a mess as usual. The bright daylight outside made her angry. She had promised to find him the new place to live; she had fulfilled the promise; and still no phone call. What the hell did he think he was doing?
The small space of her office had the effect of multiplying the anxiety she had tidied away; she felt she wanted to push the walls aside. Maybe the daft bastard had gone on a bender, that was all. Not an entirely unknown phenomenon in Cannon’s unpredictable life.
Lunch-time, at last an excuse to exit. Running downstairs, carefully past Matthewson’s door, avoiding him, too, in case of question – I must account for my time – the green wool coat flowing out behind, such was the speed of her. A pause in the vast reception area with all its empty walls; a nod and a grin to the woman behind the desk. Out into the sunny street with an arm already raised for the taxi. Yes, Cannon was going to bankrupt her. Traffic made her snarl. The taxi-driver wanted to discuss it, as if it was news, but found her aloof and discouraging.
She had never come to the attic in the middle of the day. More often, it had been in the earlier hours of morning, or long after the afternoon dark had taken command. The street was busier than she remembered: she felt conspicuous and told herself she was not. She was an office worker, like all of these coming out into the cold to find sandwiches and dream of going home soon. No-one would notice her entering the only domestic residence in the street, that empty place no-one cared for. It was not her, it was Cannon who would look out of place here, but no more so than the man on the corner selling the Big Issue. If anything, he was smarter than Cannon. She unlocked the door and went in.
The chill was ominous; she could sense from the first floor that he was not there. ‘Cannon?’ The sound of her voice was muffled by dust and the creak of the floorboards. Polish these, mend that, it could be a lovely house, she told herself, as she forced herself onwards and upwards. It was only an empty house with a harmless squatter; the worst that could happen was discovery. I am John Smith’s lawyer, she would say haughtily. He gave me the key. Take me to your master.
‘Cannon?’
The door to the attic at the last set of creaking steps gave easily as she pushed. The emptiness inside was a relief. Half-way up, the vision that had haunted her all morning since Pauline phoned had increased in intensity, become sharper, so that she almost expected to see it. Cannon, dead or dying in here, giving up on his allies because he could sense they were giving up on him. Cannon, lying on the cherry-red sofa, beginning to stink, victim to his despair; the artist artistically disposed in death in his garret, an image he might like. Another image had clashed with the first: she had seen herself coming up here to find there was no roof, that he had blown it all away, leaving nothing but sky and dust. The last thought occurred too late for her to guard against it as she closed the door behind her. He may have booby-trapped the place. Even if he had sworn on his solemn oath never to play with fire, he might have done that. He was mad enough. He kept his cash between the first beam and the roof. The beam sagged dangerously.
There was nothing. A stale smell of nothing, not the sharp smell of turpentine she associated with this place. He had not been messing about with paint in the last day or more. There was none of his leftover heat; no sign of activity. As tidy, in preparation for imminent movement, as she remembered it from last time.
There was the single difference that all the sketches of Johnnyboy’s face had been torn. Ripped across and thrown in a heap, showing signs of systematic, rather than furious, destruction. That was Cannon all over, destroying what he had done, always at war between the making of something and its breaking down. So he had at least been back, then. There was a half-eaten sandwich on a chair. Cannon lived on sandwiches and yet he loved good food.
It struck her with a terrible conviction that no-one with Cannon’s love of light would ever consent to live like this unless they believed it was entirely necessary. Whatever the real nature of the threat posed by his brother, it was certainly real to him. Utterly real, for him to confine his free spirit into this and insist on separation from his wife. She had not done him justice. But he had done some sort of justice to her. Her portrait rested against the easel, turned towards the light from the window in the roof. He had done further work on it, lovingly, it seemed. Toned down the colour of the hair, and then added more of the red. He had caught the likeness in the body and the face; captured something essential in the attitude of careless abandon. It was a sensual portrait, which was not, at the same time, sexual. Not like the Bonnard, which was both. She wondered if he was pleased with it. Moved closer, admiring her mirror image rather than herself.
We form our impression of a face from a distance of three feet, at least, William said. It was only a painting that allowed the impertinence of closer scrutiny, touching, squinting, look
ing for flaws in the skin. He had found hers, the tiny scars on the breasts, slightly whiter marks against sallow skin, not disfiguring but oddly enhancing, like freckles on a sunny face. And she had thought he would not notice.
‘Cannon, where are you?’
A pigeon cooed and tapped on the fanlight, startling her, making her want to run. But she did not run. She found a pencil and wrote a message, ‘Darling, where are you? Phone me,’ and then ran downstairs and into the street, locking the door behind her as if it were her own house.
12
I must account for my time; I must account for my time.
She sat at her desk, facing the screen, typing with disinterested fury. The law required such a vast number of words. There is real life, Cannon, real work: look at it. If I keep on skiving like this, they’ll all lose patience. I won’t be able to help anyone else because I won’t have a job and I won’t have money and I shall never be able to pay for the flat. There are other clients, Cannon, you aren’t the only one.
Where did a man go all day? Where did he disappear?
The afternoon seemed endless, anxiety, as well as anger, extending each minute into an hour. Where would he go with his depressive nature, his capacity for intense joys and miseries? She remembered him running towards that fire, saw it mirrored in the screen; remembered that he had a valuable life but a frail one, and why, oh, why, had she ever taken on the burden of it to neglect it now?
Thinking: trying to remember anything relevant about him, affection sneaking back and catching her unawares. Cannon was at his most unpredictable when he had done something of which he was ashamed; what might he have done this time? Unless that fanciful ogre, his brother, had found him and spirited him away. What did Cannon do with his day?
You can sit as long as you like in the galleries. They’re half full of weirdos like me. Some of them with sketchpads, some of them just sitting. It’s the best thing about London. That’s where you learn.
And which one do you like best, Cannon?
Oh, I circle around. I always come back to portraits. I like the living dead.
This time, leaving the office, she remembered not to run, to look calm and casual as if slipping out to a meeting, even remembered to invent one and write it into the open diary on her desk. Matthewson sometimes snuck up here to see who was hiding. Research into art collection; portraits. He might not believe it, but it was a record all the same and almost true.
Believe in your instincts. The brightness of the day had faded mid-afternoon, and the city began to prepare itself for dark. A pavement artist outside the National Portrait Gallery began to clear away his chalks, regarding his depiction on the stones without sentiment, indifferent to its imminent destruction, counting the takings.
She moved through the vaulted rooms of the gallery quietly, feeling foolish and conspicuous. The few guards were yawning towards the end of the working day. What a job; what sublime boredom. The thought of that made her quicken her step, moving from one incurious gaze to the next, wondering what they would do if she was a thief strong enough to snatch one of these heavy frames and run with it. Surely portraits were too personal for thieves. As if anything were too personal for thieves. She found him finally, sitting, head propped on his hands, staring at a portrait of a bearded Victorian premier surrounded by his family, and the relief at the sight of him cancelled out the irritation. She sat. If Cannon was remotely surprised to find her there, there was no indication: it was as if they had met an hour before and met again by prearrangement. She thought, wryly, that his erratic faith in telepathy must have extended itself beyond its application to his brother, making him assume the same quality in her.
‘Sometimes’, he said, by way of introduction, waving at the noble lord, ‘it does one good to look at a thoroughly second-rate piece of work. Which this is. This painter was doing what he was told, as if someone had said to him you can paint it any colour you like as long as it’s blue. It makes me feel better. If I spent all my time looking at artists with vision who paint like I want to paint, like Bonnard, it would make me feel hopeless. I’d want to go back and white out everything I’d done.’
‘Or tear up your drawings,’ she suggested.
He shook his head in unfeigned surprise, shocked at the suggestion. ‘Oh, no, I never do that. I’m never angry enough to do that. Put them out of the way for a while. Then use the other side of the paper. Paper costs money. Where have you been?’
‘Come on out, Cannon. We can’t talk in here. They’ll think we’re plotting a robbery.’
He followed her, shuffled level with her down the road, into Trafalgar Square. There was the dull roar of traffic, muffled into background noise by the well of the square itself and the sound of the fountains. Nelson, on his column, towered above them. There was a dilatory shifting of people, meeting, greeting, crossing; movement towards buses, trains, entertainment, home. He seemed unnaturally calm for a man who hated crowds, but the space was large enough to absorb them, no-one came close enough to push or to touch.
‘Never mind where I’ve been,’ Sarah said, pulling her coat around her against the cold of the bench, trying to avoid pigeon-shit. There was an enormous Christmas tree in the centre of the square. Another year gone. ‘You didn’t phone. I’m sick of you. We’re all sick of you.’
He nodded in agreement, dull in response. ‘I’m not surprised. I’m sick of me. I just don’t know what to do. So I don’t do anything really.’ He took a deep, shuddering breath.
If he chose this moment to cry, Sarah thought she might hit him. He did not cry; she waited.
‘I go and look at paintings of patriarchs and father figures. Wishing I’d ever had one. Wishing I could be one. A man who was able to look after his own.’ He shoved his hands into his pockets. Even in the cold open air, the coat still smelled. ‘I thought I might just disappear. It would be better for everyone. Better for Julie in the long run. None of this had any point. Johnnyboy’s always known where I was. He’s been up to the attic. He’s been to William’s place. I saw him. He’ll get to you next.’
Oh, nonsense. She did not say it, thought it. What had William to do with anything? William had been protected from knowledge. She didn’t believe in unconscious communication. Nobody would have been to Cannon’s dwelling-place: it was an almost perfect hiding-place. She was sick of pandering to fantasy. Then she thought of the torn-up drawings in the garret. Oh no, I’m never angry enough to do that. Paper costs money. The cold from the bench struck through into her back, chilling her spine.
‘I suppose the other thing I could do’, Cannon was saying, ‘is simply go back there and wait. He’ll be along, sooner or later.’ His hopelessness had a quiet intensity she had never seen before. She did not know quite how to rouse him. It grew colder with the darkness; the lights of the grand buildings surrounding the square began to glow. She did not know if she wanted to humour him or believe him.
‘Pauline thinks Julie may be pregnant,’ she said. No forethought to the statement. It simply emerged as the only positive thing she could think of to say.
‘What?’
‘Your wife. Having a baby. Maybe. I don’t suppose you take condoms on your nocturnal visits, do you?’
She looked straight ahead, not quite wanting to see the effect of her statement, guilty for making it on such shaky information. Pauline might have said it for effect; it might not be the truth. They were none of them masters of truth: they all made guesses and stuck to them. She could sense him uncurling beside her. Moving from his slump with head in hands. Standing with his hands in his pockets. Then, with his arms above his head, locked into a stretch. Then one hand on hip, the other raised as he performed a jig, like a drunken Scottish dancer ignorant of the steps but feeling the tune, hopping from one foot to the other, singing tunelessly, louder and louder as he moved until he stopped, breathless, punched the air and yelled, ‘Yeah!’ in a voice loud enough to slice across the sound of the traffic and the water. The pigeons, which had begun to approa
ch their feet with the constant optimism of pigeons, flew upwards in an untidy arc. Cannon was transformed.
‘Oh, yodleodledeeeeeee,’ he sang, pirouetting with his hands on his head, changing the steps into a kind of hopscotch over the paving-stones, not touching the cracks, as far as the brink of the fountain. She thought he might climb into it, but he put his hands into the cold water, splashed it into his face, hopscotched back, jumped up and down. YES! YES! YES! Sarah leaned forward on the bench and laughed long and loud because he was comical, and out of sheer relief to see him thus: the other Cannon, reminding her of why she had fallen into devotion to him, for all his intensity, his absurdities, his intolerance, his moods, his talent for outlandish joy, latent in his paintings, patent now. She would always love creatures of extremes; the ones impossible for cohabitation; those who saw what she never could. He would weep for a fallen leaf and shout for joy at the colours of a tree. He could make a bomb or paint the soul in a face. She grabbed him and pulled him down.
‘Cannon, I said might be … And it hardly improves the situation, does it?’
She hated to rain on his parade; he had the knack of making her feel cruel for the slightest attempt to restrain him – and how would this man ever stay alive without Julie to direct the dreams?
He sat so abruptly that the solid bench creaked. He was suddenly sober, but his face was still split by his widest grin, which made his mouth look like a cave. A passer-by glanced at him curiously; he glanced back, then pulled his hand down from forehead to chin, as if wiping off the smile with a cloth, pretending to be solemn. It reappeared immediately. Sarah adopted her dictatorial voice, uncomfortably aware that she could sound a younger facsimile of her aunt. Bossyboots.
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