Collected Stories

by Bernard Maclaverty

‘Get out what we did yesterday,’ he says. I turn the outermost canvas from the wall to face him. He drops the dog on the floor and comes over to me, his arms out in front of him. His hands touch the surface and skim lightly over it feeling the layers of paint with the tips of his fingers, the direction of the brush strokes.

  ‘That’s the magenta?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s too loosely brushed. I wish you’d sprayed it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘Could you bear to do it again?’

  ‘I suppose so. Jordan, you’re a perfectionist.’

  ‘Oh fuck.’ He cups one hand over his eyes. ‘This is like trying to thread a needle with gloves on.’

  I begin squeezing out some magenta.

  ‘Why do you go on doing this?’

  ‘Somebody’s got to pay the rent – the rents. Two places.’

  ‘Jordan – come on. You get the price of a house for one of these things.’

  ‘Things! You philistine gobshite.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way.’

  ‘It’s the way it came out – it was your tone. A middle-class English whine.’

  ‘The Irish are racists,’ I say and storm out of the barn.

  He shouts after me, ‘It wasn’t us who fucked up half the world.’

  It takes me until midday to calm down.

  ‘Jordan! Lunch!’ He comes out on to the shaded side of the patio to join me. It is easy to prepare. A bottle of chilled Verde, some bread and pâté. He likes the local pâté and I spread each circle of crusty bread with a thick roof of the stuff. Three small pieces on a plate, easily located, easily eaten. The bread crackles as he bites into it.

  ‘Oh for a piece of bread that doesn’t bleed your gums,’ he says, chewing. ‘Right now I’d pay a fiver for a slice of Pan loaf. Something soft that’ll stick to the roof of your mouth.’

  I don’t answer him and there is a long silence. He feels this for a while, then says, ‘With regard to this morning. I still have pictures in my head which have to come out but they are limited by the clumsy technique I have to use. Imagine having to paint – not with a brush – but with an English gobshite.’ This time it sounds funny and he senses my reaction. ‘In the ’fifties I was attracted to Hard Edge. Now it is all that is left to me. I see the way Beethoven heard. For that reason alone we must continue.’

  I am his eyes and his right hand. He will occasionally ask me to describe things. If it becomes a chore he will know from the tone of my voice and stop me.

  ‘The Atlantic today is Mediterranean blue.’ He laughs obediently. ‘And at this moment I can see two yachts, one a mere arrowhead with a white sail, the other much closer, running behind a blue and white spinnaker.’ That kind of thing.

  He will always have a cutting remark to end with, like, ‘It pays to increase your word power.’

  I also read to him. He has become blind so late in life that he is unwilling to learn the new skill of Braille. He likes Beckett – even laughs at him – but I find his prose almost impossible to read aloud and quite, quite meaningless. I come from the kind of house where if my father saw me with a book in my hand he’d say, ‘Can you not find something better to do?’

  Flann O’Brien is also a favourite – especially the pieces from the Irish Times – but my English accent is intrusive and my attempts at an Irish one, so Jordan tells me, disastrous. He appreciates my version of a Home Counties voice reading the test match reports which arrive a day late from England. But because they are always a day late his excitement and anticipation is still the same.

  ‘One of my great regrets is that I’ll never see this fella Botham play.’ This from a man who hasn’t left Portugal for twenty-five years.

  In the winter when cricket reports are scarce occasionally he asks me to read to him from Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack.

  ‘A lizard has just appeared on the wall of your bedroom and is soaking up the sun. Its spine is an S. Why do they never end up straight?’

  ‘We’re all bent,’ says Jordan and gropes for his wine glass. He drains what’s left and stands. I lead him back to the barn and he lies down on the divan for a nap. He claims that he can sleep better during the day than at night. I go into the house to wash up the dishes, tidy and make his bed.

  I first met him while on holiday in the Algarve about twenty years ago. My mother had been recently widowed and dreaded the thought of spending Christmas in the house. She also dreaded being alone and asked me to accompany her. At the time I was a student of Engineering Drawing and the holidays were sufficiently long to allow me to do this without missing anything. Mother and I had been there about a fortnight and were becoming bored with each other. Both of us admitted to a longing to hear English spoken again. We met Jordan coming out of a bistro. Because he was drunk he was speaking in English, shouting it over his shoulder at those who had annoyed him. Despite the fact that his accent was Irish and that he was well on in drink Mother pounced on him, so avid was she for conversation with someone other than me. She brought him back to our hotel for coffee.

  Jordan Fitzgerald was his name. He was then a splendid-looking man in his early fifties, lean and tanned with a beard which was whitening in streaks. Mother simpered before him and asked him what he did.

  ‘I’m a cricketer who paints.’

  She became, if it was possible, more obsequious when she discovered just how famous an artist he was. She knew nothing of painting – for her, degrees of realism were degrees of excellence and all our house in London could boast of was a number of Victorian prints my father had looted from his own mother’s house. Another factor which impressed her was the price his pictures could command. When she eventually got to see some of his work her comment to me afterwards was, ‘I wouldn’t give you tuppence for it.’

  ‘Mother, he is one of Ireland’s greatest artists and has the accolade of having work in the Tate.’

  ‘I don’t care where he’s worked. I wouldn’t hang one of those things on my wall. If your father was alive he could tell him what he was doing wrong.’

  She thought his interest was in her, handsome in her mid-forties, but I knew by his eyes that I was the focus of his attention.

  On the second last night of our holiday we had all been drinking heavily in our hotel and Mother went off to powder her nose.

  Jordan leaned forward and said to me in a voice that was hushed and serious, ‘You are beautiful. Why don’t you walk up the hill later?’

  I nodded and cautioned him with a look, seeing Mother coming back. He added, ‘And I’ll show you my retchings.’ We both laughed uncontrollably at this.

  ‘Have I missed a joke?’ said Mother.

  ‘I was just telling your handsome boy a story which would offend the ears of a lovely English lady like yourself. I hope you’ll forgive me.’

  She smiled coyly – a smile which said they are just men together.

  But I did go to his house later that night. We had sex and I stayed with him the next night as well – or at least slipped back into the hotel at five in the morning. Mother remarked on how tired I looked and I proved it by sleeping on the train until Paris.

  In the spring Jordan wrote to me one of the shortest letters I have ever received inviting me in almost gruff terms to spend the summer with him. In a PS he said that Mother would also be welcome – in September. I had just finished my course with the highest commendation and felt I deserved the summer off before looking for work. Mother agreed both to my going and to her visit later.

  Once I asked him why he had left Ireland.

  ‘It’s no place for a homosexual painter who doesn’t believe in God,’ he said, then added after a moment’s thought, ‘Indeed it’s no place for a heterosexual painter who’s a Catholic.’ But he cherished aspects of his country. He claimed to be able to quote the label on any bottle of Irish whiskey word for word. I tested him when I arrived back from London after Mother’s funeral. I had brought him a bottle of Bushmills and challenged
him to make good his boast.

  ‘The label is black like a church window, with a gold rim. It has a vermilion band like a cummerbund across its middle and beneath that is a scatter of gold coins.’

  ‘Correct. And the words? You have to quote the words before you can sample it.’ He held his head in his hands and screwed up his eyes, smiling.

  ‘Special old Irish whiskey. Black Bush. Original grant to distil – sixteen-’, he paused slapping the top of his head, ‘oh-eight. Blended and bottled by the inverted commas Old Bushmills, close inverted commas, Distillery Company Limited, Bushmills, County Antrim. Product of Ireland.’

  ‘Correct – you’re a genius.’

  ‘There’s more. At the bottom it says “registered label”.’

  He stood and we kissed. He told me how he’d missed me and asked with concern about Mother’s cremation.

  The nearest I could come to that party trick was to recite the French side of the HP Sauce bottle. ‘Cette Sauce de haute qualité . . . etc.’ Jordan made me do it for his friends.

  Afterwards he would always announce, ‘He passed his exams with the highest condemnation.’

  Sometimes I lie awake at night wondering what I will do when Jordan dies. I have given up my career and my life for him. I remember once reading about Eric Fenby, Delius’s amanuensis, and feeling sorry for him. An intelligent man in touch with such talent but devoid of actual genius himself. I have become involved in painting but am useless at it – as useless as Beckett’s secretary is at writing, if he has one – as useless as Beckett is, come to think of it.

  It has occurred to me that I could, with the right amount of secrecy, continue to produce Jordan Fitzgeralds for a number of years to come, and say to the dealer that they came from stock. But that would necessitate getting him to sign blank canvases. I have never plucked up enough courage to ask him to do such a thing.

  I think that Jordan took me on because I would do what I was told – to the letter – exactly. Engineering Drawing is that kind of science. Even then Jordan must have had intimations of his coming blindness. He said a philistine was what he wanted. If I was artistic it would interfere with the translation of his vision on to canvas.

  After I had finished my first painting under his direction he went up to it and looked all over its surface from six inches. He nodded with approval.

  ‘I’ll call you my drapery man.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘An eighteenth-century caper. Portrait painters got a man in to do the time-consuming bits – the lace and the satin stuff. The best of them was Vanaken. Hogarth drew this man’s funeral with all the best painters in London behind the coffin weeping and gnashing their teeth.’

  The sound of the Hoover, even from the distance of the house, wakens him because when I switch it off I hear him calling me. I go across to the barn.

  ‘Are we ready to start again?’ he says.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘If you have fully recovered from your high dudgeon.’

  ‘I have.’

  He puts on a querulous voice and says, ‘Question. What particular altitude is dudgeon inevitably? Answer. High.’ He laughs and slaps his knees.

  ‘Did you take your pills?’ He shakes his head and I have to go all the way back to the house and bring them to him.

  When he has swallowed them he says, ‘I want you to scumble the bottom third with sap green.’

  ‘In a straight line?’

  ‘No, tilt it slightly – like the top side of a T-square.’

  When Mother came down that September I was still living with Jordan, but she thought nothing of it. I had my own room. He had his. Mother always thought sex was something which happened in a bedroom at night when everyone else had retired. I had warned Jordan to be discreet and he only approached me during the early evening when she went for her walk to the cliff top to feel the cool breeze come off the sea.

  ‘It’s my favourite time of day,’ she said.

  ‘Then why do you come here? In England it is that temperature all the time – and even cooler.’ I was annoyed with her because she had made no mention of going home and it was the first of October. When I finally did broach the subject she said that she was waiting for me to go home with her.

  ‘I am staying here.’

  ‘But how will you live? You have to get a job.’

  ‘Jordan is now my employer.’

  ‘And what do you do, might I ask?’

  ‘I help him. Make up canvases. Clean his brushes. Keep the place in order. Do the shopping. Allow him time to concentrate on painting.’

  ‘A houseboy.’

  ‘If you like. In pleasant surroundings at a temperature I enjoy. With one of the great artists of the twentieth century.’

  Before I met Jordan I knew nothing of painting. But he got me interested – gave me books to read, pictures to look at. He would deride his renowned contemporaries – ‘Patrick’s a total wanker’, ‘McGill’s line has all the subtlety of a car skid.’

  All this bewildered me at the time, because I thought them all equally poor. I was more convinced of the worth of the Post-Impressionists. Jordan thought Picasso good enough to envy, and Bonnard. He thought Matisse uneven and as for Manet – he was a disgrace.

  When I have finished scumbling with the sap green Jordan says, ‘Make up a bowl of black and one of turquoise – straight from the tube. A third turps.’ He takes the container of tennis balls and cracks it open. His fingers hesitate on their furry yellow surface. He removes one and lays his index finger diagonally across it. ‘Watch the spin,’ he says and flicks the ball across the barn. It bounces once, breaking back on itself about six inches. Pangur-Ban lurches forward as if to chase it, then decides not to and wags her tail.

  ‘My brother and I used to play cricket, at a time when it was neither profitable nor popular. We had a backyard at home about ten by twelve and we had stumps chalked on one wall. The fielders were buckets – they could catch you out if the ball went in without bouncing. But there were always arguments about when the stumps were hit. We bowled underarm with a tennis ball and solved the arguments by soaking it. Then it left a wet mark on the stumps which could not be denied.’

  Once a year a furniture van, hired by Jordan’s London dealer, arrives and the driver and myself load the paintings on to it. For the last five years it has been the same man. He has no interest in art whatsoever: ‘They’re big this year,’ he says, or, ‘He’s using a lot of green.’

  ‘He’s Irish,’ I say.

  ‘Careful. Easy. He’ll go mad if you scrape one of these things.’ The van-driver speaks to me in whispers, which I find insulting. Somehow his conspiracy makes me no more than a houseboy. I resent this but do not know how to reprimand him. It’s not worth it for once a year.

  Jordan rarely, if ever, goes out.

  ‘There’s no point,’ he says. ‘One darkness is the same as another. The only way you can change the landscape for me is to bring in flowers – or pine cones – or fart, for that matter.’

  The only place he goes is the bank in Albufeira. Once every three months I phone a taxi and take him there. I lead him into the bank by the arm and the manager is waiting to take his other arm.

  ‘Bom dia, Jordan.’ They go into an office while I wait at the counter. He has never told me how much he is worth – I suppose he has no idea himself.

  When I have made up the bowls of colour he asks me to float a tennis ball in each.

  ‘You would be as well to wear rubber gloves,’ he says. ‘Now I want you to press the black ball on that mimosa area to the left of the three masking strips – about an inch out. The outline should be fuzzy. Then I want a pyramid of them – just like the medals on the Black Bush bottle.’

  We ceased to be lovers many years ago but I still feel a sense of responsibility to him. I can’t leave him, particularly now that he is blind. Nobody else would put up with him. I find my release and relaxation elsewhere. The beaches here teem with beautiful bodies – the roads are f
ull of young bare-chested boys who drive about on motorbikes which sound like hornets. But it is becoming more difficult year by year. I am forty-three and beginning to thicken. I have breasts like a teenage girl. I’m sure Jordan knows of my affairs but I have never told him.

  My annoyance with him reaches peaks and I have walked out on him many times. One of the worst was when I asked him – point-blank – if he had screwed my mother and he said in his own defence, ‘Not often.’

  After that I slept on the beach for a week. When I went back he was very kind to me – told me that artists were a race apart. They did things differently because of the albatross of their sensitivity. I think on this occasion he even apologised to me.

  The normal and frequent rows we have end with him yelling at me, ‘Go, go. And good riddance! I am as weak as any other man.’ But I always come back. It is not for the money that I am staying on – if I know Jordan he will leave me a year’s wages and the rest will go to a Cricketing Trust, or Pangur-Ban.

  When I have finished dabbing the tennis balls on the surface of the canvas he asks, ‘How does it look?’

  ‘Fine. Actually it looks really good.’

  ‘Ectually,’ he spits the word out. ‘I wouldn’t have told you to do it if I hadn’t known it would look good.’

  ‘The rubber S shows up negatively in some of them.’

  ‘I knew it would.’

  I lead him to the canvas and kneel him down in front of it.

  ‘I cannot see it but I’m sure it has all the sadness of a thing finished.’ He feels for the right-angled sides of the corner then signs it with a charcoal stick in his highstepping signature.

  He stands with an effort and says, ‘I’d like you to do my beard.’ He stretches and sits again in his canvas chair. I lift the sharpest scissors and begin to cut his beard close. He likes it to look like a week’s growth.

  ‘Pure white,’ I say.

  ‘What past tense as applied to the propulsion of motor vehicles is snow as white as?’

  I think for a while then guess. ‘Driven.’

  He caresses my buttocks and says, ‘You’re coming on.’

  ‘Don’t do that or I’ll cut your lip.’ He takes his hand away from me.