"The Lost Dog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kretser Michelle de)

Sunday

In the weeks that followed his lunch with Esther Kade, Tom read everything he could ﬁnd about Nelly’s work. What began as curiosity ended as need. His book on James lacked only its conclusion, yet he neglected it, led on from catalogue to periodical to website. Obsessive as a gun dog, he tracked the glimmer of her, not caring if it led him astray.

It was easy enough to ﬁnd reproductions of Nelly’s more recent work; easy to reconstitute the stages of her career. But Tom soon realised that no visual record of the Nightingale suite existed. He had a copy of the exhibition catalogue, but it reproduced none of the controversial works; as if wily Posner had anticipated the furore.

More than one critic lamented the loss of the paintings, reporting that Nelly had destroyed them as soon as the show closed. But surely, Tom thought, surely they couldn’t be gone altogether? He thought enviously of Esther, whose memory held their trace.

Five years after the Nightingale debacle, an exhibition of new work by Nelly Zhang opened at Posner’s gallery. It marked a turning point in her career.

The new show consisted of photographs of original paintings. The catalogue essay was signed by a critic called Frederick Vickery, whose crumpled jowls and rectangular, black-rimmed glasses had since enjoyed mild notoriety on a late-night television arts programme. Zhang confronts us with work that follows Barthes in presenting realism as secondary mimesis, wrote Vickery. That is, not as a copy from nature but as the copy of a copy.

The essay went on to explain that once photographed by a professional photographer, the paintings were destroyed. It struck Tom as a re-enactment of the fate of the Nightingale suite, part protest, part catharsis; the deliberate repetition that controls trauma but refuses appeasement. Or so he reasoned, while ﬂinching at Nelly’s destruction of her paintings, at the calculated violence of the act.

He had heard Nelly and the other artists talk about Vickery. While there was a coolness between him and Posner now, the critic had once been integral to the dealer’s set. His essay had Posner’s spin all over it, decided Tom, noting its concluding sentence: Here is an artistic practice that denies the market’s lust for the original, offering an endless multiplicity of likenesses instead.

Tom examined images of freeways, multi-storey car parks, supermarkets, fast-food outlets. Nelly painted the strange, assertive beauty of constructions essential to the functioning of large cities. She painted hospitals, those non-places where modern lives begin and end. She had a fondness for changing light and liminal hours, for the theatricality of sunset and the frightening blue of certain dusks.

What was curious was the change she worked on her subjects. Inanimate things glistened and appeared to move in her pictures. The ugly musculature of an overpass or a high-rise estate turned dreamily vaporous under her hand. Hung about with the huge blackness of night, concrete and steel grew ectoplasmic. Tom clicked on a link in an online art journal and was confronted with a shining tendon that might once have been a road.

These were images that had the quality of apparitions. Others struck Tom as forensic. A deserted railway platform suggested CCTV footage; a desolate mall might have been ﬁlched from the photo-board in an incident room. He found himself looking at a city envisioned as the scene of a crime.

He made notes on technique, composition, the use of colour and space. It was a methodology that had served him well as a student, the close scrutiny and faithful recording of what was before him producing gleams of insight, bright ﬁssures opening in his mind. Noting the featureless architecture and nondescript vistas Nelly favoured, he believed he saw why she was drawn to these anonymous elements. She lived in a city deﬁcient in visual icons, a place without a bridge or harbour or distinctive skyline. It lacked an image. From that lack, Nelly had fashioned a style.

Tom analysed and speculated. He had been trained to perform these operations. He sat in his study before shining windows, and ﬁlled them with words. It required connective tissue, conclusions; since one thing leads to another in narrative. He was aware of a degree of wrenching entailed. But a story need not be true to be useful. He was happier in those weeks than he had been in years.

A photograph called Secured by Modern showed tramlines, a half-demolished ofﬁce block, the Victoria Street neon sign that advertised Skipping Girl Vinegar.

The metal sky-sign modelled to resemble a skipping child was one of several forms in Nelly’s work that recalled the human. There were efﬁgies in a shop window, a plastic-sheathed jacket on a dry-cleaner’s rack, shadows thrown by invisible bodies, two silhouettes entwined on a dance studio’s sign. But there were no people in Nelly’s scenes. They suggested dramas from which the actors had ﬂ ed.

As his intimacy with her work grew, Tom noticed the evidence of decay Nelly included in her streetscapes. Rubbish overﬂowing a bin, weeds pushing through concrete, broken or missing tiles. The cracked, outdated faces of seventies and eighties buildings. These signs told of a city that was neither ancient nor exactly new, but mutable. Inscribed within them was the memory of the maggoty cheeses and rotten fruit once painted into still lifes as warnings against excess and reminders of the transience of earthly splendour.

The conﬂation of work and author is an error into which novices fall; so Tom Loxley believed, and sought to impress on recidivist students. It had the inadequacy of all law. How could his obsession with Nelly’s work be distinguished from his desire for her? He was governed by a hunger for possession, images serving to paper over a bodily absence.

It was a substitution he literalised. In one of the regular sessions he devoted to Nelly, he lay in a darkened room, gazing by the unsteady light of a tea candle at a photocopied page. When he had ﬁnished, the ediﬁce of her imaginings was tagged with his luminous urgency.

Iris’s eyebrows, long vanished, reappeared every day as two greasy, coquettish arcs. The bronze puffs over her skull showed white at the roots. The events of Wednesday had caused her to miss her appointment at the hairdresser and she would not pay the extortionate prices of Thursday and Friday.

At the sight of Tom, her mouth unscrolled like a scarlet ribbon.

She was delivered to his door on Sunday morning by Audrey. A horn sounded and Tom went into the street with an umbrella to extract his mother from the car. As soon as he reached for her, ‘I’m falling,’ cried Iris. ‘I’m falling.’

Braced between the car door and her son’s arm, she staggered upright at last. Many of her parts still worked, but she had been obliged to renounce high heels. With her feet crammed into pink ballet shoes suitable for a six-year-old, she knew herself to have grown old.

Expertly assessing the room for recent acquisitions, Audrey declined a cup of tea. She was running late; Iris had misplaced her eyebrow pencil that morning.

Audrey patted the back of her head: ‘I can’t imagine why you use one in the ﬁrst place. People should age naturally, if you ask me.’

She stood before them, the product of skilled professionals-hairdresser, manicurist, orthodontist, podiatrist-and delivered herself of this view.

Iris Loxley, née de Souza, had triumphed over pain, rain-slick pavements and the treachery of bucket seats to accomplish the repositioning of her ﬂesh from her living room to her son’s. The successful completion of any journey represented a victory. A girl who moved like water was present in her thoughts from time to time, but in the detached way of an actress familiar from a long-running serial.

Her double-handled handbag of imitation leather on her lap, Iris sat motionless as an idol. A picture was sliding about in her memory of a grey stone half sunk in tough-bladed grass. Matthew Ho from next door squatted on his heels in front of it, reading aloud. His stubby ﬁnger, moving over the writing cut into the stone, was green-rimmed from scraping moss. Iris could see the ivory silk ribbon threaded about the hem and pockets of her blue batiste dress. She could hear Matthew saying, Snowﬂake. Then he said, A Merry Companion. She could remember a date, 1819. One hundred years before she had been born.

By the time Iris was seven, that part of the de Souza compound had disappeared under concrete. Matthew said the stone had marked the place where a small dog was buried. He said that the labourers working on the new extension had dug up its remains. He had seen them, he said. ‘Three bones. And an eyeball.’ He put his face close to Iris’s: ‘Now its ghost will haunt you forever,’ he hissed.

Audrey, disliking waste, never disposed of a grievance that had not been squeezed dry. She wished to impress upon Tom that his mother had inconvenienced her that morning; and so, following him into the kitchen to complain of delay, delayed further.

He said mildly, ‘We’d be lost without you, Audrey.’ And added, ‘Shona coming over for lunch?’

Audrey was eyeing a circle of French cakes on a plate. ‘Cost an arm and a leg.’

‘Help yourself. Please.’ Tom was wondering where he had put the empty food containers. In Audrey’s codebook, takeaway was an offence that compounded proﬂigacy with neglect. Love merited the effort of indifferent home cooking.

‘No time, thanks, Tommy. I’ve got to get my lamb in the oven.’ She picked up an oval dish, turned it over to check the brand name, replaced it on the table. ‘You know what Shona’s like about her Sunday roast.’

Tom spooned leaves into a wicker-handled pot.

Audrey observed that there was nothing wrong with bags in her opinion. She lifted the lid of a saucepan.‘I knew I smelled curry. That’s the thing about curry, isn’t it: the smell. Gets into the soft furnishings. I suppose you don’t notice if you’re born to it.’

Still she would not leave. Tom slid pastries ﬁ lled with vanilla cream into a paper bag and offered them to her, setting off an operetta of surprise, remonstrance, denial and a ﬁ nal yielding.

Yet at the door she came to a halt. She had remarked the absence of the dog.

Misfortune brought out the best in Audrey, providing scope for pity tempered with common sense. She was twelve years younger than Arthur, and the great regret of her girlhood was having missed the war. Clean gauze bandages, wounded ofﬁ cers wanting to hold her hand: she could have managed all that, she felt. She had trained as a nurse for six months before her marriage, and for the rest of her life would check a pulse against a watch, lips professionally tightened.

Audrey was always quick to extend what she called a helping hand; and, ﬁnding it grasped, to detect exploitation. Muggins here; a soft touch: so she described herself. Debit and credit were computed with decimal precision, each benign gesture incurring a debt of gratitude that could never be paid in full.

Her brother’s death she judged a piece of characteristic foolishness; yet it opened pleasant avenues for dispensing favours. There she might stroll, vigilant and loved as a guardian angel. She was of a generation that had attended Sunday School and the word raiment came into her mind. She pictured it as a kind of rayon that cost the earth.

It was decided that Arthur’s widow was to stay on in Audrey and Bill’s annexe; Bill wouldn’t hear of Iris moving, said Audrey. In time it would transpire that he would not hear of Iris cooking curry more than once a fortnight, and then only if all the windows were open; would not hear of Tom turning up the volume on the radio, nor of replacing the orange and green paper on the feature wall in the living room with white paint. It was a catalogue dense with prohibitions communicated piecemeal by Audrey. Bill, the silent source of so much nay-saying, took Tom to the Test every Boxing Day, and slipped him ﬁve dollars now and then, with a ﬁ nger laid along his nose and a music-hall wink.

Charity, as those who have endured it know, is not easily distinguished from control. Audrey gave Iris and Tom a lift to a multi-storey shopping centre on Friday evenings. Here, everything from cornﬂakes to ﬂannelette sheets could be acquired with Audrey’s approval. Brands were crucial, a novel concept; the Loxleys’ vocabulary expanded to take in Arnott’s and Onkaparinga. They were grateful for guidance. Iris, ﬁ ngering pale wool, was informed that cream was not a winter colour. Silver escalators carried them to new heights of consumption.

A few of the girls in Filing invited Iris to join them for tea in a coffee lounge in the city after work the following Friday. Audrey asked how Iris was going to get her shopping done; or did she imagine that Bill and Audrey would rearrange their whole timetable to suit her? Iris ventured the notion that she might walk to the shops on Saturday; a street two blocks distant containing a butcher, a baker and so on.

Audrey concentrated on economics: the wastefulness of eating out ampliﬁed by the extravagance of neighbourhood shopping. Did Iris realise the delicatessen was run by Jews? She possessed the despot’s talent for representing oppression as benevolence, and was herself entirely swayed by the performance. The pain she suffered at the prospect of Iris squandering her resources was genuine; but its source, the bid for independence she sensed in her sister-in-law’s plan, exceeded her diagnostic skills.

It was a pattern repeated in Audrey’s dealings with all she encountered. In the theatre of her mind, as in the classical drama, brutality occurred offstage. What was on view, above all to herself, was only the aftermath of invisible carnage. So Tom observed, with the cold-eyed scrutiny of adolescence. It left him resolved to be clear about motive. Which, admirable when directed inwards, strengthened his cynicism about motive in others.

That was the impress his aunt left on the minds around her. Audrey had the inquisitorial approach to innocence: subjected to enough stress, it was bound to crack.

Sixteen-year-old Tom, dazzled by Julie Vogel who had just started at the newsagent’s, discovered in himself the desire for new plumage. He bought a T-shirt: rich blue, trimmed with scarlet at the neck and sleeves. It was a garment pleasing in form and hue. It would in any case have drawn his aunt’s eye, for everything the Loxleys acquired was by deﬁ nition not Audrey’s and therefore resented.

‘That’s a nice T-shirt, Tommy. Looks expensive.’

‘Four bucks.’ Tom’s thoughts were busy with the golden Vogel but he knew what was required, Audrey pricing every

item that entered the Loxley household.

‘That’s good value for money. Where’d you get it?’

He told her.

‘I might get one for Shona. Did they have other colours?’

‘I think. Yeah.’

‘Do they come in girls’ sizes?’ Then, with a bright little peal, ‘Although you could hardly be called manly.’

The annexe was reached by a path that led past dwarf conifers and a yellow-ﬂecked shrub before turning down the side of Audrey’s house. The next day, approaching an open window in soundless sneakers, Tom heard his name.

‘… conveniently vague. I could tell at once he was lying. So I took the bus up there this morning, and sure enough they were ﬁve dollars. Five, not four. He’s been out of the house, avoiding me, all day.’

The boy turned and went out again into the street. There was the summer evening smell of barbecued ﬂ esh. Minutes before, he had been joyful: for Julie had smiled at him when he bought a green biro from her; and again when the newsagent’s closed and she emerged to see him absorbed in a window where teddy bears and bootees were displayed. He had made up his mind to speak to her the next day. Now he was trembling. The gulf between his feelings for shining-haired Julie, the image to him of all that was pure and ﬁ ne, and his aunt’s caricature of his soul was hideous. In that chasm he glimpsed the edge of his species’ capacity for needless harm.

Anger quivered up through his body, liquid rising to the boil. He raged at his mother in an undertone. ‘We’ve got to get

out. I can’t stand it any longer. She’s such a bitch.’

‘Don’t use that language, child.’

‘It’s Audrey’s language you should worry about. Calling me a liar. Sneaking around, checking up on me. I don’t know why those T-shirts were ﬁve dollars today. I paid four. I’ve had it with her. I’m going to bloody tell her so.’

‘Don’t upset her, Tommy. What will happen if she gets angry with us?’

‘We’ll be rid of her and this dump for good.’

It ended the usual way, with Iris in tears.

Now and then Tom would stand before his aunt, his voice rising in denunciation. There would follow a period of intricate punishment for Iris. Before giving herself over to those slower pleasures,Audrey would observe, with mingled triumph and righteousness, that if, after everything she had done, matters were not to the Loxleys’ satisfaction, they were always free to leave. It was, she assured them, no skin off her nose.

But who voluntarily relinquishes a victim? In the wake of an argument, Audrey related stories of perverts who preyed on widows; circled reports of inﬂationary rents and extortionate landlords in the newspaper she passed on to the Loxleys.

After Iris was made redundant at the department store, Bill found her a job cleaning ofﬁces. She rose in black dawns and dressed before a single-bar radiator in a series of mufﬂ ed clicks and taps, so as not to wake Tommy, a presence sensed rather than seen in musty darkness traversed on her way to the door. At the corner of the street it might occur to her to doubt whether she had switched off the radiator; there followed agonising indecision over returning to check or missing her tram.

There was fear, and its twin, safety; their relationship was mirrored, ﬂuid. Iris looked out of the window of the tram and saw the compartment in which she sat hovering golden and unﬁnished in the dark street, inhabited brieﬂy by towers or trees. She shifted on her seat, giving a little expert kick at a nylon or trousered shin in the process. The ensuing interlude of apology and forgiveness conﬁrmed her anchorage in the world.

Her knees held up until the day after Tom was awarded a university scholarship. At least now he was off her hands, as Audrey said, reducing Tom to a stubborn stain.

Iris had been taught to darn by French nuns, but that was scarcely a marketable asset in an economy where the notion of mending rather than replacing was already as quaint as madrigals.

In India, ﬁnding herself in need, she would have had recourse to a web of human relationships. Here goodwill, or at least obligation, was impersonal and administrative, though no less grudged. She was grateful for sickness beneﬁts; later, for the pension. A savings account hoarded every spare cent. She did not wish to be a burden. It was one of Audrey’s mantras: I wouldn’t want to be a burden. Love was represented as a load; one saw tiny ﬁgures broken-backed under monstrous cargos.

Iris took comfort in having a roof over her head. It was a phrase she liked; it brought to mind the plump-thighed cherubim on her father’s vaulted ceilings. Beyond it lay Australia: boundless, open to the sky. ‘As long as we stay with Audrey, we have a roof over our heads.’ ‘What can go wrong if you have a roof over your head?’

‘It can fall in and crush you,’ said Tom.

Towards the end of her son’s last year at school, Iris spoke now and then of renting a ﬂat with him after his exams. The idea was vague and constituted nothing like a plan; it was also what Tom had urged on her in the past, seeing in his mind a bare space that was his alone. A compact, neat teenager, he had blundered, again and again, into the clutter of the annexe, his shins encountering varnished wood, his knuckles grazing a long-necked, stoppered bottle of warty yellow glass, an object both ugly and useless. At night, when he lay swaddled before the TV’s grey eye with the metal underpinnings of his sofa bed ridging his spine, a room-lofty, pale-walled, ﬂ oored with grooved boards-formed in his mind.

In those years all his unadulterated energy was spent on the captive’s instinctive lunge towards light and air. Books furnished him with a daily, spacious refuge. Later, looking back, he would see swift water widening; his mother a diminished ﬁgure on the shore.

By the time Tom’s university offer came through, Iris had become part of what he was intent on leaving. Of this small, cataclysmic shift in his thinking he was unaware. All the same, a lie slid polished from his tongue. He told Iris that his scholarship was conditional on his moving into student housing; ‘a university regulation’. When he had lifted the last carton of books into a friend’s car and kissed his mother-‘So long, Ma!’-he was light-headed with the sense of having got away with something.

On the day before he moved out, Tom waited until he was alone in the annexe. Then he carried the hated yellow bottle into the kitchen. There he broke its neck. When Iris returned, he told her he had accidentally smashed the bottle when packing. The pieces of thick glass, wrapped in newspaper, were already in the pedal bin. But he had removed the leaf-shaped stopper before hitting the bottle against the sink, and had somehow failed to dispose of it. Thereafter, whenever he opened a certain drawer in his mother’s kitchen he would see a malicious amber eye lolling among place mats and paper napkins.

In the last weeks of their shared life, Iris suddenly said, ‘When you were small you used to follow me everywhere. In and out of rooms all day.’ She must have been to the hairdresser that morning because Tom could still remember the brownish smears of dye on the tops of her ears. He had refrained from remarking on them, pleased with this proof of his restraint.

Informed at last that the dog was lost, Iris said,‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ She spoke formally; the calamity might have befallen an Australian.

Tom, having dreaded a storm, was goaded by calm.

The contrary arithmetic of his relations with Iris converted it at once into lack of feeling, and added up to the need for brutishness. So that he paused, in the act of serving out his mother’s lunch, and said, ‘He’s probably dead, you realise. Choked to death on his lead. Or run over.’

‘Ah,’ said Iris. And with quickened interest, ‘Don’t serve so much.’

‘Christ! Can’t you think of anything but yourself for a minute? And what does it matter if there’s too much? Just leave what you don’t want.’

Her ﬁlmy eyes rose to his face. She had the familiar sensation of striving to decipher a riddle in a foreign language; failure meant Tommy would be angry. The small hillock of saffron rice surmounted by curries and surrounded by pickles had brought to mind a white-haired skull protruding from mud-coloured rags on a pavement, an image glimpsed and only half understood in childhood. It had ﬂoated to the surface of her thoughts buoyed by the word waste.

Tom found his tongue stuck to his palate. Lowering it unclenched his jaw. He set his mother’s laden plate before her, having thwarted the impulse to do so with force. ‘I’m just worried about what might have happened,’ he said. He was accustomed to knowing better than his mother, so apology was not a coin readily available to their commerce.

Iris picked up her spoon and fork and began to eat. Some minutes later, halfway through a mouthful, ‘I have my unfailing prayer to Saint Anthony,’ she said.

The Meg Ryan video in front of which his mother was dozing after lunch penetrated Tom’s study in irritating little swells. He opened and shut drawers, at last ﬁnding the earplugs in a hollow glass cube that held paperclips and stamps.

The familiar contention that modernity is concerned with the differentiation and autonomisation of the aesthetic sphere … Tom switched on a lamp, as the afternoon darkened. Light lay obliquely on a page, highlighting dull prose with gold.

He was reading the lectureship application sent in by a recent DPhil from Bristol, who had appended a strenuous article on Edith Wharton to her CV. She had only one refereed publication and minimal teaching experience. But she was the student of a famous James scholar, a woman who wielded academic power. Tom thought of his book; of the weight the Englishwoman’s endorsement would carry with publishers.

After a while he realised he had stopped reading and was constructing a tale. ‘Nelly and I go looking for him whenever we go up there. Oh, I know it’s hopeless now. Not knowing what happened is the worst thing. But I tell myself he was doing what he loved best, following a scent.’

This ﬁction, queasy with the play of desire and disloyalty, was interrupted by a speciﬁc memory: the dog, plumed tail held high, absorbed in tracking a moth around the room, breathing on it.

Internal windows in Tom’s study gave onto a narrow sunroom, where a long, gridded window overlooked the yard. The effect, when he looked up from his desk, was of a bright, pictorial glow ruled with black; a Mondrian fashioned from iron and light. The impression of clean modernity carried through to his study, a geometric, dustless space. Here books were ranked like soldiers on dark metal shelving that rose against pale walls. Lamps leaned at acute angles. Surfaces gleamed. There was a rug from Isfahan on the boarded ﬂoor, its pink and slaty blues smudged with white, for naturally the dog was in the habit of singling out its sumptuousness, and Tom could not at present bring himself to rid the room of that animal residue.

He was, in any case, habitually tolerant of traces of the dog’s passing, of grit, earth, fur, a warm, sweetish reek. His forbearance had called forth the light mockery of his wife; for the streak of dried sauce Karen left on a kitchen counter or the pink-stained toothpaste she neglected to swill from the washbasin were tiny barbs on which Tom’s temper quickly unravelled.

His disgust was disproportionate, its blossoming rooted in childhood. In scrubbed Australia children know the causal chain that links dirt and disease as a cautionary tale. In India, the word was made ﬂesh. Skin peeled, or ﬂared with ominous pigmentations; burst to reveal its satiny red lining shot through with gold. Distended or racked bodies were everywhere on public view. Even a child’s eye could perceive the fatal, webbed relation between the ﬂies sipping at a sore and the black crust that crawled over sweetmeats on a stall.

Therefore years later Tom recoiled from dishes accumulating in the sink; from the clotted handkerchief his ﬁ ngers encountered under a pillow.

Around the time of his thirtieth birthday, he grew conscious that the narrowing of his life had begun. Karen and he still took pleasure in each other’s company, sought it in each other’s ﬂesh. They were working hard, starting to make money. But from time to time there would swim into Tom’s mind a page from a book he had owned when very young. Within the book, paper tabs could be pulled or rotated to bring illustrations to life. One of them had stirred the child’s imagination with special pungency. It showed a cottage with two front doors set in a garden ﬁlled with ﬂowers and birds. A tab on the left ﬂipped open the corresponding door and pushed out an apple-cheeked boy in blue breeches; the right-hand tab produced a girl in a gingham pinafore.

Again and again, the child Tom trundled out the boy, the girl; singly, together. They were Boo and Baby. He conducted complicated conversations with them. Sometimes he punished one or the other, Boo’s door or Baby’s remaining shut all day. He would stroke the relevant tab, shift it a fraction; then withdraw his hand. The satisfaction he knew at such moments was intense.

But in years to come the page struck Tom as a terrible foreshadowing of his ordered existence. Each day was a sum with a red tick beside it. Intellectual curiosity, love’s huge anarchy: he had succeeded in taming even these. There he came, the bright-eyed boy, one arm raised in merry greeting; the plaything of a shuttling machinery.

Into these broodings arrived the dog.

The dog hid blood-threaded bones down the side of a couch. He tore open a pillow and clawed the paint from a door. He sprang into a neighbour’s ornamental pond and swallowed a goldﬁsh. There was his ecstatic fondness for rolling in ﬁ lth.

He would dig in his ear with a hind foot; extract the paw and lick it. Now and then while snufﬂing along a footpath he would hastily eat a turd. His desires were beastly. At his most docile, he remained an emissary from a kingdom with enigmatic laws.

And slowly, slowly it dawned on Tom that the animal acquired to please his wife spoke to a need that was his alone. All giving is shot with ambiguity, directed at multiple and paradoxical ends. A gift might exceed thought and desire. It might be epiphanic.

The dog was handsome, sweet-natured. It was easy to love such a creature. Nevertheless, his core was wild. In accommodating that unruliness, Tom’s life ﬂowed in a broader vein.

Late for work while the dog danced out of reach, followed his own imperatives through mud and weeds, Tom was conscious of anger ticking in him like time. It didn’t preclude elation. For ﬂeet minutes, a rage for control had been outfoxed.

Matted fur drifted against skirting boards. Even as he worked a soft grey clump from the bristles of a dustbrush, Sucks to you, Boo, thought Tom.

It was not the end of disgust, which is an aversion to anything that reminds us we are animals. But the dog unleashed in Tom a kind of grace; a kind of beastliness.

Sundays were ritualistic. Morning tea, lunch, a video, afternoon tea; then Tom would return his mother to Audrey.

He was transferring sugar from packet to bowl that afternoon when he became aware of an unambiguous organic stench.

He lived in what had once been a capacious family house, one that had offered pleasure to the eye in a way that was commonplace before architects discovered their talent for brutality. Later two dentists had run their practice on the ground ﬂoor. Later still, the building had served as a rooming house. Finally, it had been converted into ﬂats. This last rearrangement had taken a lavatory situated outside the back door of the original house and placed it between Tom’s laundry and sunroom with doors to both. The old-fashioned seat there, marginally higher than the one in the renovated ensuite, was preferred by Iris.

Tom hovered in the sunroom. Rain had pooled, trembling, in the lower corners of the windowpanes. He raised his voice: ‘Ma, are you OK?’

‘Yes, yes.’

He heard her moving about. Water gushed. A ripeness ﬁlled his nostrils.

After some minutes, she called, ‘Tommy?’

‘Yes?’

‘Can you come?’

On the ﬂoor near the seat lay part of a large turd; the rest had been tracked over the linoleum. Faeces and wadded paper clung to the sides of the lavatory bowl. The seat, imperfectly wiped, showed pale brown whorls.

Tom’s ﬁrst thought was of a child: of a monstrous infant soiling its pen.

His mother said, ‘There is a piece of shit.’

She said, ‘Don’t be angry, Tommy. I can’t pick it up.’

She was clinging to the edge of the basin; because the handles of her walker were soiled, realised Tom. He reached around her, ran the tap over a facecloth, used it to wipe the handles clean.

It was difﬁcult to manoeuvre in the constricted space. With inﬁnite care, he led his mother to the door, trying, with his hands over hers, to steer the walker clear of the ﬁ lth; trying also to avoid stepping in it.

He was murmuring, ‘It’s OK, don’t worry, it’s OK.’

In the laundry he kneeled and, one at a time, lifted Iris’s heels and eased off her ballet slippers. For a small woman, she had broad feet; he had to tug to dislodge the shoes.

All the while, ‘Wait, wait,’ shrieked Iris. ‘I’m falling.’

‘You’re ﬁne. It’s OK.’

She was wearing nylon knee-highs. ‘These stockings are slipping.’ Again she screamed, ‘I’m falling.’

‘I’ll walk you to your chair, Ma. Just hang on a sec.’

Tom checked the wheels on her walker; ran the facecloth over them.

‘Have you washed your hands?’ he asked; and caught, again, the echo of childhood.

‘Yes, yes.’

Iris let herself be steered along the passage to the living room. Her chair waited in front of the TV. She lowered herself onto it by degrees, with creaks and sighs. When she looked up she saw a face that had slipped from its bones in the grey depths of the screen. It was a moment before she recognised her reﬂ ection.

She said, ‘Give me my bag.’

While she was foraging in it, Tom went into his bathroom. He washed his hands, thinking that it was the ﬁrst time he had heard the word shit from his mother. It was out of place in the realm of the ladylike, which admitted only big job, kakka, number two.

When he returned to her, Iris was checking her lipstick in a hand mirror: pressing her lips together, pushing them out. About to snap her bag shut, she said, ‘Better see that I’ve got my key.’

‘You have. You checked before lunch, remember?’

Iris went on pulling pills, spectacle case, tissues, rosary from her bag. ‘My God, what’ll happen if it’s lost?’

‘It’s not lost, Ma. How could it be?’

‘But how will I get in?’ Her voice had risen. She was close to tears.

‘Your key can’t possibly be lost. Think about it. If it is, I’ve got a spare. And so has Audrey.’

‘What if she’s not there?’

Tom felt he might scream with her. He said, ‘Ma, I’ll be driving you home. I’ve got a key. And in any-’

‘Ah. Found it.’ Her agitation subsided on the instant.‘Thank God for that.’ Then she said, ‘These tissues are all wrong now.’ She began refolding them, all her attention concentrated on the ﬂimsy pink squares.

Tom was reminded of his own intense involvement, as a child, with his immediate surroundings. A segment of a forgotten day came back to him: he was sucking up a ﬁ zzy orange drink through a straw, sometimes letting the liquid in the anodised metal tumbler subside before it reached his mouth. While this was going on, the sun moved in and out of clouds, and there was the pleasure of light alternating with shade on the side of his face.

He handed his mother a small, silver-capped bottle.

‘What’s this?’

‘ Cologne.’

‘What for?’

‘You might like to put some on.’

‘What?’

‘Put some on!’

Deafness, conducive to imperatives, discouraged nuance. Tom said, ‘How about a cup of tea?’

Iris, absorbed in perfuming herself, ignored him.

‘Tea!’ he bellowed.

A tray held a milk jug and sugar bowl, a white cup, a pastry cloud on a blue-glazed plate. The mother inspected these objects. The son braced himself for criticism.

Praise was rare on Iris’s tongue. When Tom, as a child, presented her with his school report, she would scan it for deﬁciencies. ‘What is this 87% in Geography? Why are you second this term?’

She had her father’s sixth sense for inadequacy. No servant had lasted long in the de Souza household: Sebastian reached automatically for the smudged tumbler on the credenza, Iris’s ﬁnger trailed over the undusted ledge. The dhobi’s fortnightly bundle of spotless laundry unfailingly lacked a sock or a pillowcase.

But her son overrode Iris’s instinct for shortfalls. In the last month of her conﬁnement, gripped by premonition, she had prayed daily that the child would be spared Arthur’s nose. Then he arrived, furiously protesting the breach of their union. Iris saw a slimy, dark, curiously elongated organism that was whisked from her at once. She began to cry, because she had beheld perfection.

Her son was healthy; he grew up handsome and clever. Of course she feared for him. There was the evil eye. If a neighbour remarked that the child was looking well, Iris assured her at once that he was sickly. When Arthur heaped praise on the boy, she cut him short and crossed her ﬁngers behind her back. Calamities, like moths, are drawn to the light. To speak glowingly of Tommy was to risk the wrong sort of attention. Jesus bids us shine with a pure clear light, piped the massed infants of St Stephen’s; and Iris, radiating pride in the front pew, thought how men, even the best intentioned, so often missed the point.

It became her habit to call attention to her son’s limitations. Disparagement might mean the opposite of what it says; it might be a form of love. Only, it is difﬁcult for the disparaged to construe it as such. How was Tom to distinguish between the ﬂaws his mother discovered in his best efforts and her fault-ﬁnding with the world? ‘She doesn’t mean it,’ Arthur would say; but like so much Arthur said, it was easily discounted.

When Tom was older, he might have been capable of unravelling Iris’s ruse; but if so, he would have scorned it. ‘It’s superstition, Ma! How can you be so irrational?’ Thus he greeted the pinch of salt his mother ﬂung over her shoulder, the pin over which she bent stifﬂy in the street. It never occurred to Tom that superstition might be an expression of humility: an admission that knowledge is limited and possibility inﬁ nite. Rooted in the desire to free his mother from unreasoning fear, his loving impulse ﬂowered as criticism. ‘Ma, that’s totally dumb!’ Of course Iris, recognising her own strategy at work in her son, paid no attention to his belittling. Besides, the devil lurked in spilled salt. Besides, See a pin and let it lie, / All the day you’ll have to cry.

And so: the tray, the milk and sugar, golden tea in a cup, a miniature éclair on a blue plate.

Tom’s breath caught in anticipation.

‘That looks absolutely nice,’ said Iris.

Tom assembled gloves, lavatory brush, disinfectant, cream cleanser, water, mop, wipes, what was left of the roll of paper.

Afterwards, while the ﬂoor was drying, he took his nailbrush and Iris’s shoes into the yard. There he turned on the hose and scrubbed dark, gummy excrement from their soles, using a twig to gouge it free where necessary.

He washed his hands again and soaped his arms all the way to the elbow. There was the tang of lemon verbena. And behind it, the fragrance of faeces.

It went on and went on, like a terrible dream. Floor, bowl, seat, lavatory brush, paper-holder, washbasin were spotless.

The soiled towel had been replaced with a fresh one. His nails gleamed, but to be safe he dug them into the wedge of soap. With his hand on the tap, he saw a few brown grains stuck to the chrome.

At the back of the deepest drawer in Tom’s desk was an object unlike any other he owned. In the Loxleys’ last week in India, he had spied a small, lilac-bound book among the rubbish in a wicker wastebasket. It was his mother’s old autograph album. He retrieved it straight away and secreted it under three starched white shirts in his suitcase.

It was an unfathomable action. For weeks Tom had watched the unwitting objects that had furnished his life-dessert spoons, mattresses, a treadle sewing machine, a carom board- sold or given away. This dismantling of the past, which had seemed so solid and was now shown to be as ﬂimsy as a painted backdrop, had caused him no grief. He had known he was witnessing something at once terminal and cathartic. He met it with the grave exhilaration that was its due.

Yet there was his bafﬂing rescue of the autograph album. As a small child he had turned its pastel pages carefully, drawn by their delicate, water-ice hues. Later, when he had learned to decipher handwriting, he read the verses the album contained; but only as he read everything that came his way. Years had passed since he had troubled to look inside it. Autograph albums were a girlish amusement. Twelve-year-old Tom Loxley held them in scorn.

From the wreckage of the past he might have salvaged a favourite toy, a book. But these he relinquished with never a pang, pressing them on friends or neighbourhood urchins, muniﬁcent as a maharajah. He watched old exercise books curl and blacken in the mali ’s bonﬁre with glee. The little album with its dinted spine remained his only souvenir of India. No one knew it was in his possession; or so Tom believed. In fact Karen, for one, had pondered the anomaly it represented with some curiosity.

From time to time Tom ﬂicked through the album. Signatures made him pause. Childhood mythologies uncoiled from certain names; others sank back into the faceless, unimaginable swarm of those who had known his mother when she was young. Be good, sweet maid, and let who will / Be clever. So Sebastian de Souza’s exquisite copperplate enjoined his daughter.

With time and rereading, Tom had the autograph album’s contents by heart. He didn’t wish to retain vows of undying friendship, mildly salacious witticisms, exhortations to virtue and remembrance; but the album had taken possession of him. He could never be rid of it now.

Details of Nelly’s pictures would blend with Tom’s dreams, spawning brilliant ﬁgments lost to ham-ﬁsted day. When he woke his eyes looked wider in the mirror, sated with images.

There was a nebulous quality to him in these months. Women were susceptible to it. In strange bedrooms he proﬁ ted from their interest. He was ghostly; his rapture precise, embodied.

He speculated about the transformation of Nelly’s work after Atwood disappeared. The change to showing photographs of her paintings, too radical for evolution, suggested extremity. Tom was inclined to read it as a fable of loss: Atwood as categorically absent and mourned as the paintings Nelly destroyed. Photography was a form of willed remembrance. Tom was wary of it: this spectral medium, tirelessly calling up the past. Sometimes he shrank from a spread of Nelly’s photos as from a collection of gravestones, each a loving memorial to her marriage.

He brought up the topic with Brendon. Who said, ‘I’ve always ﬁgured showing photos is Nelly’s way of paying tribute to painting. To that whole inheritance that’s been nudged aside by new ways of thinking about art. I’d say it’s about photography as a memory of painting.’

Nevertheless, Tom divined the play of the erotic in Nelly’s choice of medium. In its early years, photography had caused trepidation. The little likenesses it fabricated were so uncannily exact, it was feared they would drain vitality from their subjects; a vestige of the older, Romantic dread of the double who was believed to destroy a man’s true self.

The suspicion lingered, in attenuated form, well into the twentieth century. But it was symptomatic of an era in which photographs were few, the power of the copy deriving from its relative rarity. By contrast, the postmodern plethora of images struck Tom as enhancing the particularity of an original. An array of photographs standing in for a subject only accentuated what wasn’t there. Desire swelled for the absent ﬂ esh, the real elsewhere. In substituting a photograph for a painting, Nelly raised the temperature of interest in her work. There was shrewdness in her method, decided Tom. Her photos tantalised with the promise of something more that was always deferred.

The painted landscape he had ﬁrst seen in Posner’s gallery possessed a quality entirely absent from what followed. Trying to identify it, Tom thought of innocence. Then, as his mind played about the little oblong, he realised that its aura was also a lack. It was an image that knew nothing of time.

As the year lengthened, a development escaped Tom’s attention. His copious stream of notes was dwindling; growing costive. On a night in October, an hour spent with Nelly’s work produced only this spiteful trace: Photography is a result of the desire to freeze time. A photograph is always a record of a failure.

One evening, Nelly and he watched an old video of The Innocents; which was, they agreed, not nearly as disturbing as The Turn of the Screw. Afterwards, as Tom walked her back to the Preserve, Nelly kept returning to the standard, unsolvable enigma of James’s ghosts. ‘I mean, you’re shown them in the ﬁlm. When what’s so creepy in the book is you can’t tell if they’re there or just something the governess imagines.’

The dog was with them that night, clicking along the pavement. From feathery plots of wild fennel by the railway line, he emerged odorous with aniseed. He cocked his leg at every opportunity, writing his chronicles in urine. He was drawn by unmown grass and the pellety excrement of possums. Ramshackle paperbarks detained him for minutes with their aromatic folds. He was attuned to an invisible world; to the redolent leavings of bodies that had once populated these spaces.

Nelly said, ‘This is going to sound a little crazy.’

‘Yeah?’

‘About ﬁve years ago I was on this tram, and I felt someone watching me.’ It was delivered in Nelly’s usual sporadic style: talk as faulty machinery. ‘You know that feeling between your shoulderblades?’

On the opposite side of the unlit street a block of ﬂ ats rose over a pillared car park. Something pale was astir in its darkness. Tom looked away.

‘The tram was packed, and I couldn’t see anyone I knew, and everyone was just doing that staring into space thing. But I was sure Felix was there.’ Nelly said, ‘I knew he was watching me. It went on for a couple of blocks and then it was gone.’

A little later: ‘Another time it happened in the supermarket. He was there, but he wasn’t.’

Tom glanced across at the car park again, and saw only parked cars.

He summoned reason to the scene. ‘Wouldn’t Felix have tried to get in touch with Rory if he’d come back?’

A cold breeze had arisen. The dog was straining forward on his leash. Nelly drew a length of knitted wool from her pocket, folded it, placed it about her throat, passed the ends through the loop. It was the ﬁrst time Tom had noticed this way of tying a scarf, although it was much in evidence that year.

He spent Sunday evening in blessed solitude, putting together his shortlist for the lectureship. At the last minute he added the DPhil, with a question mark against her name. Afterwards he downed two whiskies, fast.

When the doorbell rang he was sure it was Nelly. He went swiftly to the door and opened it to Posner.

‘There you are.’ Posner spoke with a trace of impatience, as if Tom had been slow to answer a summons. ‘Bloody awful weather.’

He thrust a crumpled black wing at Tom and glided past. There was an odour of damp cloth from the umbrella; nothing else. Posner had no smell.

In the living room he said, ‘You’re in the phone book,’ as if it were a breach of taste. Then, without a glance at his surroundings, ‘Quaint little place.’

Tom heard shoddy and cramped.

The ﬂat was heated by electric radiators but Posner crossed to the ﬁreplace and stood with his back to the empty hearth. It conjured country weekends; the sense of well-being that comes from killing small animals. Yet Tom realised that his visitor wasn’t altogether at ease. It was the hint of disdain; assured, Posner had set himself to charm.

The umbrella was a wounded thing dripping between them. Tom said, ‘Whisky?’ and left the room before Posner could reply. When he returned, Posner had shifted to the sofa. He had taken off his leather jacket and sat with one leg cocked, ankle resting on the opposite knee.

In Posner’s hand the tumbler looked child-size, the tilting liquid calculated and mean. His moon gaze drifted about until he aimed it at the ceiling.

Tom was thinking of rooms so casually perfect they might have been assembled for the camera; of paintings lining a hall, of polished wood in which a lamp might be reborn as a star. Other images intervened in these remembered frames. Iris’s kitchen cupboards, covered with yellow-ﬂ owered contact paper, hovered above Posner’s mirrored mantelpiece. The vinyl concertina door that separated her living area from her bedroom now barred the access to his stairs.

Absurd to blame Posner for the contrast. But the net of Tom’s feelings for his mother was not woven with reason. Even as his eye fell on the jacket slung beside Posner, what took shape in his thoughts was Iris’s double-handled vinyl bag. It was an object her son could not see without pain.

He sat down, and the pale circle turned to him. A black-clad arm unfolded itself along the sofa, conﬁdent as a cat. ‘A word seemed in order,’ said Posner.

He might have been addressing an underperforming minion across a desk.

In the silence that followed, some echo of his tone must have communicated itself to the dealer. His manner altered. He uncocked his leg, and ran a hand over his silver scalp.‘You’re a literary man, of course.’

A minute earlier, it would have had the ring of accusation. But Posner had hung out his imitation of a smile. ‘You must know the story of Virginia Woolf ’s marriage?’

Tom swirled whisky around his glass.

‘Her family had no illusions about the severity of her illness. They had witnessed the clawing, the howling, every grubby detail of it. But when Leonard wanted to marry her, the Stephens made light of what he was taking on. The merest sketch. Well, he was a godsend, naturally. Most of all to Vanessa, who’d have been stuck with nursing a madwoman if her sister hadn’t married.’ Posner paused. ‘You know the story?’ he asked again.

‘The merest sketch.’

‘You can’t help thinking they’d never have had the nerve if they’d been dealing with one of their own. Instead of a Jew-boy from Putney.’

There crept over Tom the sensation, marvel tinged with awe, that attends the sight of a great painting. It accompanied the realisation that Posner might still pass for a handsome man.

‘Of course only a Jew-boy from Putney would have stuck it all those years.’ Posner said, ‘One of my grandmothers was a Jewess. It makes me sensible to the deception.’

His gaze was very intent. But it was apparent to them both that Tom couldn’t tell what was wanted of him.

‘These headaches of Nelly’s.’ There was a light, feline tread to Posner’s words.‘They leave her so very…drained. She doesn’t always recollect the intensity of an episode, you see.’

Minutes passed.

At last Tom said, ‘Does she know you go around suggesting she’s mad?’

‘Dear boy! Such vehemence! I would speak,’ said Posner,‘of heightened colours. I would speak of broadened effects.’ He patted the sofa beside him. When this failed to draw a response, he pulled his jacket across his lap and ran his ﬁngers over the soft black skin.

‘There is such pressure on artists to be contemporary. A loathsome notion, frankly risible. But there it is. Painting, landscape, ﬁguration… In certain not uninﬂ uential quarters these choices are condemned as inherently old hat.’ Posner sighed. ‘I wonder if you have any idea of the depths of Nelly’s self-doubt. Her fear that her work lacks legitimacy. The intolerable strain. Nelly is a dear, dear friend,’ insisted that thin voice. ‘So marvellous. So moving as well.’

‘Don’t forget mad.’

And still Tom could not be sure that he had understood what Posner had come there to say. He had the impression, ﬂeeting but forceful, of something waiting close at hand, something that might yet twitch loose and tear up the room.

‘Tom, such wilful misconstruction…’ But Posner broke off, shaking his large head. He studied the ceiling and said, ‘I knew this would be a painful conversation. I put if off for as long as I could. But I’ve known Nelly a long time. Now and then there comes… someone entirely charming.’ He was folding back the tip of the jacket collar, and folding it back again. ‘Someone who overcomes Nelly’s resolution to avoid excitement. And then-’ Posner let the leather spring free under his ﬁ ngers.

‘There are so many aspects to Nelly.’ A white hand lifted, ﬂuttered. ‘There’s a painting by Cézanne: Les Grandes Baigneuses. In the old days I’d go to Philadelphia just to look at it. It’s always reminded me of Nelly. Something about the way the ﬁgures melt into and out of each other, so that your perception of them keeps shifting. But out of that ﬂurry of mufﬂ ing and displacement, what emerges is singularity. Oh, it’s brilliant, utterly brilliant,’ said Posner severely, as if the point were in dispute. ‘Also unsettling. And sad.’

‘Piss off, Carson.’

Posner shifted in his seat. His hand brushed the jacket, sliding it from his knees. It might have been accidental. But Tom thought he could see a swelling in the dealer’s crotch.

He couldn’t have sworn to it. Posner was wearing black, and his body was in shadow. But Tom shifted his gaze at once. And said, ‘Tell me: have you shared your opinion of his mother with Rory? Not that I imagine he gives a fuck about you anyway.’

He was intent on cruelty. But was unprepared for the stillness that came over Posner’s face, rendering the eyes twin caverns in that pallid waste.

He thought, My God, he really loves him.

By the time Posner left it had stopped raining. In his study, Tom reached for a book.

It was a massive work, Les Grandes Baigneuses, its scale and the frontality of its handling closer to mural than easel painting. Tom had once written an essay about it. Had traced its precursors, described the way it vitalised the worn grammar of naked women in a rural setting.

The man leaning over the book had forgotten most of what he had argued.

What he remembered were the bodies. They ﬁ lled the picture plane: preposterous, lumpish. Nor would they stay still, as Posner had remarked. A woman kneeling at the far right of the canvas was also a striding ﬁgure, the torso of one forming the buttocks and legs of the other. Observing this, the mind shimmered between two meanings, as in a dream.

Tom recognised the hurtling sensation: his sense of the duplicity of images. A trace of nausea-stiffened with excitement-worked in him still. The grotesque treatment of the bodies had the effect of rendering ﬂesh itself inorganic. It was a painting in which something mechanistic grated at the heart.

But it was the ﬁgure facing out who now held Tom’s attention. Or rather, it was the blue line spurting at its groin. He took in heavy breasts, the speciﬁc marks of femaleness, and what he was seeing for the ﬁrst time: a countering, ambiguous penis.

It was what had passed between him and Posner, Tom knew, that had opened his eyes to that doubleness. He thought, It’s a painting about him, not Nelly.

The phone shrilled him out of sleep.

‘Tom, it’s Yelena. Sorry, I-’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s Osman.’ She began to cry. ‘He’s back in hospital.’

‘Saint V’s? Give me ten minutes.’

‘No, no.’ He heard her gulp; then a loud, snorting sniff. ‘They’re ﬁlling him full of morphine. He will be out of it completely. I’m on my way home. Brendon is with him, and Nelly. He wanted you to know.’

‘How bad is it?’

‘They are doing tests and so forth in the morning.’ Her voice was quavery again. ‘But it looks like it’s no longer in remission.’

‘Oh, God.’

‘Nelly said to say you should still come and get her at the Preserve tomorrow. And, Tom, this is terrible also about-’

But Yelena couldn’t go on.