Staring At The Light Page 15

  She saw nothing, apart from the spaniel eyes in the sketches and Cannon’s perception that no man was evil incarnate. She had never met a man who was; not even Charles Tysall, who had tortured her and given her the scars. Evil, to her mind, was a quality more shocking for rarity. She did not believe in the devil. She looked at the several depictions of the face and could only see, in her mind’s eye, the clumsy body beneath it, barrelling its way across water with all that pathetic effort, afraid of witnesses. The sad clown.

  ‘I’ll paint you a proper portrait from these,’ Cannon was muttering. ‘I’ll do it after dark. He never liked bright light much.’ Suddenly he laughed, sat down abruptly. ‘We used to go out after dark, you know, so no-one could see our teeth and laugh at us. We never saw the light.’

  ‘What are we going to do, Cannon?’ she asked.

  He liked the we, although he resented it. ‘I don’t rightly know. Wait, until the time limit. Believe him. Watch out for him. Guard everything. Until he accepts the fucking rules he set and finally accepts, I’m not coming back. Can’t come back.’ Then, more to himself, he added, ‘Oh, God, give us a child.’

  ‘Is that what he wants, the resumption of a love affair?’

  Love affairs were ten a penny to her, not to him. It was his turn to prowl, picking up his coat, putting it down uncertainly, arranging the tubes of paint in neat rows. ‘Yes, he wants that, and a new game. A nice fat explosion. He probably wants to blow up the Houses of Parliament with me to help. He always said Guy Fawkes was a fool for getting it wrong. Odd, isn’t it? That’s the only piece of history he ever remembered from school. When we went to school, him to history and me to the art class. I went to that. Teacher took me home and tutored me. Johnnyboy didn’t like that, nooo, not at all. Beat the shit out of me for a while, then got bored with the effort. There’s always hope. He always gives up in the end.’

  ‘Perhaps if you gave him the painting?’ she suggested quietly.

  ‘No,’ he said emphatically. ‘No, I can’t do that.’

  ‘It’s the proceeds of crime, Cannon. Money you took from him.’

  ‘It’s the proceeds of work,’ Cannon shouted. ‘My work. Johnnyboy wouldn’t recognize something like that if you shoved it up his nose. Money I took to turn it into something beautiful he would never buy. What would he want it for? He’d burn it or let it rot. Like his houses.’

  Nobody knows him but me.

  She got up and rammed the hat back on her head. He liked the hat. It made her anonymous and less intimidating, a softer version of herself. Someone perfectly willing to play the fool.

  ‘Right,’ she said, saluting. ‘I shall continue to assume your paranoia is entirely correct. You’ll need a new place to stay. I’ll work on it. What else does your brother do with his Saturday?’

  He could not understand any more why Johnnyboy so hated women. They were the only people who ever believed a thing he said. ‘He stays at home. Sport on telly, all day. Racing, football, rugger, anything. Saturday’s a stay-at-home day. Too many women about. Mind, he likes the boxing best.’

  ‘Ritualized conflict,’ Sarah murmured. ‘While you and I go shopping for art.’

  ‘Do we?’ Cannon said dubiously.

  ‘Yes. Today you’re a consultant.’

  It ebbed and swayed, this almost friendship. They could be silent companions or deeply suspicious. He could move from intense curiosity about her to indifference, to introspective silence, then shout a remark apropos of nothing, without minding if she responded. She found it restful to be with someone who had no recognizable code of behaviour: it entailed a certain kind of freedom in her own. Belief in Cannon was an act of faith.

  Today he had all the suppressed excitement of a child taken on an outing: talkative, with thoughts flying into questions half forgotten before they came out of his mouth, interrupted as they drove with snatches of whistled song. That was what had drawn her in the first place: the ludicrous smile, the profound capacity for happiness, however temporary; the lack of reserve when he forgot his own predicaments. The ability to lose himself in the moment. He made her fiercely protective.

  ‘How much does lovely William know about me?’ he asked suddenly, watching her manoeuvring the car, badly, into a space. Cannon could not drive: it was a mystery to him. The engine and the vehicle itself filled him with alarm.

  ‘Nothing. Next to nothing,’ said Sarah. ‘The bare minimum. Unless you told him anything.’

  ‘Me?’ Cannon replied, watching her turn off the ignition as if it were a piece of magic. ‘Me? We don’t talk about anything. Nothing personal anyway. It wouldn’t be fair. Nothing. ’S why I like him. Accepts you without asking. We talk about everything and nothing, like we do.’

  ‘That’s all right, then,’ said Sarah, and felt a stab of guilt so sharp it was like a stitch in the side. ‘I’ve asked him to come along too, but I doubt he will. Says he’s too busy.’

  ‘Too fucking shy,’ Cannon said. ‘Adores you, can’t admit it.’

  Then, as an afterthought, as they climbed the steps, another question: ‘How did you make the house fall down, Cannon? They say it was a gas explosion.’

  He nodded. ‘It was. But that’s all right, isn’t it? I paid the bill first.’

  ‘You promised Julie you’d never do anything like that again.’

  ‘Never. Never, ever, ever. But’, he grinned, ‘it was fun.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, thinking of some of the ugly houses she had seen in her search for a new home. ‘Yes. I can see that.’

  7

  As they mounted the steps to the exhibition centre, Sarah knew that this might have been a mistake, one of those occasions when instinct clearly foretold embarrassment and was wilfully ignored. Cannon did not like crowds: he looked at the populace pouring through the doors and surrendering bags for inspection as if they were rabid. He shuddered when anyone brushed against him, refused to part with his coat, placed the entrance ticket between his teeth while he decided what to do with it, settled finally on top pocket, right.

  A vast hall was thronged with separate stands, five corporate art collections immediately opposite the entrance and, on a separate floor, sixty screened stalls run by dealers, and a balcony above with more. The big works were in the middle; the smaller round the sides. Paintings large and small, sculptures dotted like mushrooms.

  ‘Take note,’ Sarah said, sotto voce. ‘This is where people come to buy. The biggest show of contemporary art. Next year you will be exhibited, but today you are a consultant. A diplomat. You tell me what’s rubbish and what isn’t.’

  Saturday-morning hunters and spenders, full of goodwill and ready to be delighted. People with houses and eyes, eschewing the delights of do-it-yourself for the joy of looking at paintings. The presence of so many about the purpose seemed cause for celebration rather than for distress, and she tried to tell Cannon that – for the brief moment he listened. Isn’t it wonderful that so many people want to see paintings? Not wallpaper. Paintings and drawings. You are my judge, she told him. Tell me what I should notice, tell me what has talent, I don’t know. There was a hubbub of sound, a draught of heat, the scent of excitement finely tuned, the smell of perfume in a crowded train.

  Cannon was immune, unbendable to the will of another. She had learned how a certain crispness of voice and a rat tat tat direction got his attention, as long as it sounded like an order, while persuasion, the method she always preferred, was more difficult to achieve. He nodded distantly, as if they were a pair sent to reconnoitre foreign territory with instructions to obey nothing but remote signals, and even then at his own discretion. He walked around with his hands clasped behind his back, the better to control the twitching of his fingers.

  The corporate collections tended towards the large canvas of abstract art; paintings with titles suggesting serious concepts, such as Life, Waste, Chaos. Rather gloomy and colourless things, she thought; things with bubbling surfaces, cauldrons of paint, or a few spare lines occupying a vast tract
of frozen wall. Cannon had to touch, jump from space to space as if he was avoiding the cracks in the pavement. He wanted to stroke the paint and work out through his fingertips how it had reached the surface; he wanted to poke at the canvas, lift the frame and stare at the back to see what had been used. Fashionably suited exhibitors hovered with unctuous politeness. In the corporate collections there was nothing for sale but reputation, while outside that the customer was God with a credit card, greeted with overpowering charm. Sarah loved a market red in tooth and claw but dressed in cultured clothes. She stared at buyers; he at the merchandise. William should have come: he liked a zoo.

  It was a market ablaze with enterprise, promise and false promise. I have been in places like this, he whispered in her ear. Don’t condescend to me. He had sat in places like this, he told her, and also the more permanent public places, national galleries where they let you sit and copy, see what other painters had done and struggle with the likeness until it emerged like the birth of an animal out of long, painful and envious perusal. He had lurked in these vaulted rooms, and then on building sites, watching figures at work; figures at night, hurrying past lit windows in a street, the movement of limbs he yearned to capture and never, to his own mind, did, quite. But I know what I have to do … I know how each and every attempt should have the single purpose of capturing a moment of reality or perish. He murmured into her ear, like a lover, full of indignation about the prospect of betrayal, the whispers louder and louder, the fury in him rising fit to bellow. She ran to catch him.

  ‘Crap,’ he screamed. They were facing a large canvas across which there danced something that resembled a bright blue eel. On a white background, it had a single, malevolent eye, directed towards the frame it determined to escape; its back was decorated with minuscule lettering among the blue; a splodge elongated into a creature.

  ‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘Shhhhh.’

  ‘That’s what it says,’ Cannon announced indignantly, touching the lettering with a grubby forefinger. She had never seen him with clean hands; imagined he had been born with hands as stained as his teeth had been, and the darkness of his skin contrasted nicely with the white background of the eel. ‘Crap,’ he repeated, tracing the lettering. ‘Crap, crap, CRAP!’

  ‘Be quiet,’ she hissed, secretly enjoying the row he made.

  ‘Pretentious crap!’ he insisted loudly. ‘Now where’s the bloody truth in that? A poster not a painting. It says nothing. He’s crapped on his own canvas. Does he know how much paints cost?’ Spoken while he turned and hissed at the skinny girl with the suit and the bony knees and the winning smile. ‘Judas!’ he yelled at her, stabbing the canvas again until the white paint bore the imprint of his stubby forefinger. ‘Judas! Thirty pieces of silver for this SHIT!’ And then, suddenly, he was all charm again, hands in pockets, grinning widely, teeth first.

  ‘These critics,’ Sarah added, smiling into the eyes of the girl and taking Cannon by the arm to give an impression of safety. ‘So passionate, you know. You’d think he was a consultant.’ She tried to blame the increasing discomfort of the heat. They moved on, arm held inside quivering arm, hotter and hotter as they progressed. It was becoming unbearable. ‘One day that person might be your dealer,’ she said reasonably. But he was gone, far gone; looking at a patch of blue, twenty feet away, anger forgotten, drawn to it like hunger to food; standing there, rationing a moment of bliss, postponing the possibility of disappointment; relishing the delight; dancing, twisting his hands, the whole of him in movement.

  ‘Oh, bless him. Bless him,’ he was murmuring. ‘Look at that fucking blue. He lives in there. Ohh, isn’t that beautiful? Buy it, Sarah. Buy it.’

  She was only conscious of the heat, rising like a tide, stultifying, claustrophobic, and the painting being a very small thing. Cliffs and an Adriatic sea, caught in some miracle of early evening, outlines blurred, the scale announced by a single, vague figure in the water, colours as intense as jewels. He bared his teeth at it, ready to consume it whole, swallow it. She watched; she was born to watch; and, all the same, they were shouting at each other.

  ‘It’s a lot of money, Cannon. I haven’t got it.’

  ‘Give it to him, Sarah. Give it.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  It was so hot; hot and humid. The painting mesmerized. Sweat trickled down the back of her neck. The hour had passed in minutes. She glanced at his flushed face and then at the faces of others. There was something unnatural in this stultifying heat; something far more artificial than mere excitement. A girl fainted; the public address system crackled; an apologetic voice boomed over the heads. ‘So sorry, ladies and gentlemen, the heating and air-conditioning have broken down. For your own comfort, would you kindly leave the building by the nearest exit while we fix it?’ No urgency, but a command, nevertheless, creating an uncertain swell of movement, orderly but resentful. Accompanied children and bored companions sighed with relief; in the slow surge towards a side door, Sarah lost Cannon and did not mind. The cold outside was sweet relief.

  She watched; always second nature to watch, while the tall and the small and the beautiful and the plain gathered in the side-road and waited in groups, and she thought, with a touch of resignation, that Cannon’s presence always had an uncanny knack of shifting crowds. The Tannoy had announced free drinks on their return within the hour; an optimistic promise, perhaps, but the mood was resigned, although those who had surrendered coats huddled and grumbled more than the others and Sarah was glad now to have kept her own.

  A favourite coat, full-frocked, voluminous and definitely green, the warmth appreciated even as the perspiration on her skin dried inside it, and she scanned the stragglers still emerging from the building. Cannon was one of the last, his face a picture of injured innocence, his arms folded crossly across his chest; a man aggrieved to have paid for a ticket only to be expelled. He shuffled towards her, her red hair drawing him like a beacon, his steps quicker and quicker until they collided and, to her amazement, he kissed her mouth, hard.

  ‘I might have been followed,’ he hissed. ‘Here, take this,’ removing the object inside his arms and thrusting it into the open folds of her coat. Surprise made her obey. She found herself clutching the thing, hands already familiar with the sharp corners of a frame. Cannon swung his arms in exaggerated fashion, reached into his pocket for a cigarette, which he lit flamboyantly and held triumphantly, as if for an audience. Look, I’m clean. Sarah’s only desire was to run, far and fast, while he smiled his vacuous smile into her white face. ‘You’ve gone pale,’ he said. ‘It’s not so bad, is it, being kissed, is it? You could get used to it.’

  She remembered to saunter rather than run. Down the road, around the corner, past the main entrance to the centre where the crowds were thickest, strolling nonchalantly, waiting for a heavy hand on her shoulder, moving on automatic pilot, and once the safety of the car was in sight, turning on him and screaming, ‘You stole it … you stole that painting. Are you mad? Haven’t you learned anything?’

  ‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘You might scratch it.’

  ‘Scratch it?’ she yelled. ‘You’re worried about scratching it? What about stealing it?’

  He hung his head without obvious repentance. ‘But you liked it, Sarah. I know you did. It was the best thing I’d seen. You wanted it and I owe you, so I got it. Don’t you like it?’

  The grinding gears of the car signalled her reply. They shot out of the space like a bullet and, for a moment, he seemed satisfyingly frightened. She drove as if trying to forge a path through a desert in a tank; he clutched his seat-belt with white knuckles.

  ‘Moral vacuum,’ Sarah muttered. ‘Moral slut. Don’t you think? What about the artist who painted this picture? What about getting caught? Don’t you think?’

  ‘I did think,’ he protested. ‘I thought when the loudspeaker spoke. It inspired me.’ He tapped his fingers on his knees. ‘I thought, wait a minute, this is a right mess, and the dealers will be able to claim any losses from the o
rganizers because it would be their fault, because of the air-conditioning, and there’ll be insurance policies and such, and no-one will really lose. Not really.’ And he smiled again, smugly satisfied with his own logic.

  She braked sharply; his forehead touched the windscreen with an audible tap. ‘I shall have to take it back,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ll work out a way to take it back.’ And then, as the distance grew between herself and the scene of the theft, wondered whether she would. Or whether the company she kept, the life she led and the lies she told had entered her very soul.

  She could not drive back. She drove on.

  *

  William supposed he had turned up to this exhibition so late because he had dithered about going at all. Sarah had asked him to go, but perhaps not quite warmly enough and she hadn’t been specific about the time. He had once tried to count the hours he had devoted to indecision and found the total depressing. On the other hand, there were days when his failure to commit himself to any plan led him simply to wander about, to do things he had never intended by sheer accident and thus let his eyes light upon treasures. He had woken thinking about the paper on twins waiting to be researched, but Saturday was the wrong day for it. Instead, he had stood by his window, with his tea in hand, watching a fat man walking up and down the street, pausing and moving on, as if he was walking a dog, as indecisive as William himself felt. He drank more tea and passed the time. The seventh day of the week was a playground, a day for pleasures, a day for children, and he always felt out of sorts in it, as if he should be having fun instead of wishing there was work to fill an inconvenient gap. So finally he went to the exhibition, wishing he had not wasted the morning and the chance of company.