Port Mungo Read online

  Ten years ago Jack left the Crosby Street loft and came to live with me on West 11th Street, this at my suggestion. I saw him change during his last years in New York, but the changes were superficial. A certain wild shyness, that famously farouche quality—it became more tempered—he began to guard his fire, hold his best energies for the studio. He stopped going out and his appearance grew distinctly odd, as he came to resemble a kind of urban Apache, with his hair turned silver and bound up in black headscarves, and the baggy clothes flapping about his lanky frame, all dark blues and blacks, and his long bony face, burnt and weathered from the tropics, ever more scraped and taut and hawklike. He restricted himself to wine, apart from the one cocktail at six, and managed to give up cigarettes. Superficial changes, as I say; what remained constant was the discipline of work, the daily return to the studio, the finality of the closing door. . . .

  In his later years, then, my brother lived like a recluse and towards the world sustained a posture of indifference and even outright hostility. By day he painted, and I did not disturb him. His studio was at the top of the house, with a window from which he could look down into the garden, one of those narrow city gardens condemned to perpetual gloom because it was sandwiched between taller buildings which hogged the light. I let it grow wild, rather like a Russian garden, though on a smaller scale of course. I thought of it as pasture. But Jack was high enough to get good light from the north, and he also had a view of the street, and when he closed the door behind him no telephone rang, no voice spoke unless it was his own; here he could think. I remember saying this to him once, and—“think?” he said—“no, not thinking, Gin”—I can still hear the bite in his tone, that hint of the fang—“Sinking, rather, into regions of the mind”—and here he paused, I remember, and made a steeple of his fingers, and set his chin there, frowning, as he uttered this solemnity—“where I submit to imperatives alien to all worlds but art.”

  They hung trembling in the air a few seconds, those portentous words, and then with a bark of laughter he scattered them to the winds. He was not a pompous man.

  But a large part of my brother’s life was spent in creating precisely the conditions in which this “sinking” could occur. And he did this despite the demands of other people—I mean the clamour of domestic responsibility and the claims of intimacy. I now believe he paid a terrible price for this daily turning away, but I also know it was as necessary for him as oxygen. Deprived of it too long, he became a nightmare. He needed to sink, he said—to immerse—so as to grope towards some primitive understanding of what he was about. What was he about? Impossible to say, exactly, but Jack once told me he believed art to be primarily a vehicle for the externalization of psychic injury. Certainly a great part of his own activity was the attempt to master the disorder aroused by the emotional turmoil he had come through—loss and pain, guilt, failure, rage—master all that, yes, and in the process find a little truth. Which I suppose is what I am after too.

  As for the pattern of our days, at six we would meet downstairs and talk. That’s what we did of an evening, Jack and I, when he’d finished in his studio, and I’d mixed us a nice cocktail, we would sit in the big sitting room and talk, largely about the past. I say the past, I should say Jack’s past, for his life was a good deal more eventful than mine, in fact the most remarkable event of my life has been Jack himself! He travelled more than I did, he accomplished more, and he certainly suffered more—in short, he had more memories than me. Almost all his stories I had heard rather often but I mustered an interest every time, and occasionally I even made him see himself afresh, which provoked in him a kind of affectionate sarcasm. He liked to say that he’d known a number of women like me, bohemian kinds of women, dilettantes, he’d say, dabblers, wary of experience but at the same time curious about life: women who would rather think about life than go to the trouble of actually living it.

  This stung, but I did not argue with him: there was a grain of truth in it. I am a tall, thin, untidy Englishwoman, I drink too much and yes, I suppose I am rather—oh, detached—distant, aloof—snobbish, even, I have been called all these things, also cold, stiff and untouchable, though those who think me untouchable never saw me when I was perfectly touchable indeed! I should also say that I have an independent income, which has been quite adequate for my own needs and also, I should add, for Jack's. Which is why it always impressed me that until the very end he continued to work. Not with the fervour of his youth, of course, or with the sustained intensity of his middle years, but he worked, he worked every day, and I took a close interest, inasmuch as he would let me. I admit this was partly out of concern for his health. He was plagued by arthritis, and while through will-power alone he could usually ignore the steady grumbling ache of it, and the sporadic stabs of pain, the restriction of movement in his knuckles was a sore trial. At times it was debilitating. We were told the cause was uncertain, but that it might have been a sustained allergic reaction to his own tissue, which was ironic, to say the least. Curiously his old malaria medicine from Port Mungo would control the inflammation when it got too bad.

  I have perfectly healthy hands, in fact my hands are my best thing. I used to say to Jack that if there were some way of making a hand exchange, I would do it at once.

  Chapter Two

  It is probably true of most children that they are not aware of the character of their upbringing until much later, when they can look back and regard it with some objectivity. This was never the case with Jack and me. We were born into an old family, and we knew at the time that our childhood was privileged, also that it was eccentric in its lack of structure, largely because our father, emotionally speaking, was almost entirely absent. Our mother died when I was three years old, and Jack just an infant, so neither of us had any real memory of her. My father did not remarry, nor could he ever speak of that “perfect woman” without becoming maudlin and tearful, which Jack and I found embarrassing and faintly ridiculous. Gerald was five years my senior, but we never saw much of him as he always seemed to be away at school or off on a trip.

  When I think of my father now I am ashamed how little I appreciated him when I was a child. He may have been distant but he was kind and gentle and tolerant, and I was surprised after his death to discover how well loved he was by those who knew him. He had a special affection for me, I suppose because I was his only daughter, but I don’t remember that I returned it until much later, being in thrall as I was to Jack, who had nothing but scorn for the old man. I think children are uncomfortable with sadness, Jack certainly was.

  It was a foible of my father’s not to send Jack and me away to school but rather to employ a series of private tutors, the most memorable of whom was a young woman with the improbable name of Helen Splendour. Miss Splendour taught us German literature and Irish history, though her real achievement was to awaken in us a passion for art. She was a small, slim woman who dressed in brown worsted stockings and neat earth-colored tweeds and brought an intense earnestness to every activity she instigated. She was interested in the history of our family, and it became great sport with us, as we hiked along deserted Suffolk beaches on blustery autumn days, and then sat shivering in the dunes making watercolour studies of the sky, to see who could invent the most outlandish tale to tell her about our ancestors, many of whose portraits hung in dusty galleries back at the house.

  It was Jack who invented the Curse of the Rathbones. This was an ancient malediction which he claimed had afflicted successive generations of our family for several hundred years. Jack had a precocious sexual imagination when he was a boy, and he could always bring a blush to Miss Splendour’s soft cheek with stories of rapacious Rathbones of unbridled appetite and an utter dearth of moral fibre. He would describe some brutal deflowering in a barn, or in the woods, and the catastrophic consequences which ensued; all of which would have Miss Splendour shuddering with delight, to think of such ravages being perpetrated on the local women.

  At night we lay in front of the fire
on the schoolroom floor with books of reproductions from my father’s library spread out on the carpet. I remember we loved Hogarth for his grotesques and Blake for his flea. For a short period we venerated the Pre-Raphaelites above all others. Then we discovered the German Expressionists—a painting of Kokoschka’s gave us special delight, Murderer, Hope of Women—and we decided that this was it, this was our calling, one day we would attend art school in London and live unorthodox lives and become real painters. And as the years of our childhood passed the dream did not fade, but grew stronger, driven as it was by Jack’s determination and the enthusiastic encouragement of Miss Splendour.

  Every summer my father took us to the west of Ireland, where he made his annual pilgrimage to the grave of William Butler Yeats. We were left to ourselves, Gerald always being off on some school trip to the continent, so with Miss Splendour leading the way in her stout brown brogues and brown worsted stockings we climbed the hills of Corraun and Achill, settling on windy outcrops of rock where we attempted to render the sweep of the coast, and the bay beyond, and the holy mountain of Croagh Patrick in the distance. Jack had a real talent, this became apparent early on, whereas my own abilities were more modest. But under the bright eye of Miss Splendour I became proficient, more or less, at sketching and watercolours.

  One summer my father bought a small boat with an outboard motor from a local fisherman. I can see it to this day, or rather I can smell it, for whenever I think of the boat I seem all at once to have petrol fumes and seaweed and peat smoke in my nostrils. There was one condition attached to our using the boat, which was that Jack was never to go out in it without me. Jack was known to be reckless; I was the sensible one. There was a narrow shingle beach half a mile from the back of the house, and that’s where we kept the boat, chained to a tree.

  I retain one incident from those years with a clarity that I now regard with some suspicion, for I fear it may be a compression of a number of incidents involving Jack and me and the boat. But one day, when the sky was threatening rain, and the wind freshening from the west, Jack for perverse reasons of his own wanted to go out in the boat but Miss Splendour said it was not a good idea and I supported her, for Jack was often foolishly contrary simply because he was thwarted. I can still see the three of us standing on the beach beneath a dark, spitting sky, and Jack saying loftily that he was going out whatever anyone said about it, and Miss Splendour in passionate tones—practically in tears!—telling him not to, and me shouting at him, calling him a bloody idiot. He didn’t listen. He dragged the boat to the water’s edge as Miss Splendour tried to hold him back, and I looked on in a state of mounting consternation. Jack soon had the boat in the water, and as he started the engine I ran into the surf and climbed in with him, so compounding the poor woman’s distress.

  There was an island in the bay about a mile off the south shore of Achill called Ghost Island, nothing on it but a roofless derelict croft where we’d build a fire and squat beside it smoking cigars stolen from my father’s study. This particular day we went out in light rain and reached the island without mishap. But an hour later we were huddled by the sodden ashes of the fire, cigars extinguished and ourselves soaked to the skin by the rain now driving like nails through the rafters. Jack gazed up at the black clouds rolling low overhead and confidently declared that any minute now it would clear.

  An hour passed, or what seemed an hour, and by then it was starting to get dark. Jack said the storm was almost over, and the wind did seem to be dying down, so we scrambled across the rocks and dragged the boat into the sea. Almost at once we were bucking and plunging in black choppy water. I was sitting up in the bow, chilled to the very marrow of my bones and never so miserable in all my life. Through the rain I could just see the house a mile or so across the water, a long, low whitewashed building partially obscured by a scrim of rain and with gray smoke blowing horizontal from the chimneys. Jack hauled at the cord, cursing it to hell, but the engine only sputtered as the boat rocked helplessly in the waves.

  Then, with a roar, and a belch of smoke, it caught, and began to chug, and Jack shouted that we were all right now, and I can still see him, bolt upright in the stern, all lit up with excitement, his hair plastered to his skull and the rage of a second ago quite gone and forgotten. So I sat up and tried like him to believe that this was a grand adventure we were having, and for a while I almost succeeded. But Jack didn’t even have to try.

  The sea grew rougher as we pulled away from the shore but what with the wind and the rain I couldn’t hear the chugging of the engine any more, and as our progress was almost nonexistent, the black waves coming at us from every side, and Jack steering into them so we wouldn’t be swamped, I never knew from one moment to the next if we had stalled. Then came a huge wave, and I remember a sudden panic rising into my throat, and I closed my eyes and hung out over the wildly rocking gunwale praying to God to see us safe home, as we somehow climbed over the wall of water and plunged down the other side. I knew I was going to be sick and so I was, quite violently sick, and it was terror as much as the motion of the boat. It was horrid, the sensation of choking, and my hair all over my face, and my stomach heaving again and again until there was nothing left in it, and my eyes running, my nose running—and in the course of all this becoming aware above the roar of the wind that Jack was howling with laughter, and it was because I was being sick! And the more I was sick the louder he howled, he was like a madman, streaming with water and shrieking his crazy laughter into the sky, and I have never forgotten it. Then he began to sing.

  We were two hours crossing a stretch of water that normally took us no more than fifteen minutes, and Jack later declared that had the engine cut out we’d have been swept clear into the Atlantic. He said it was the best afternoon of his life so far. I do remember that as we drew near to the beach behind the house we saw the small wet figure of Miss Splendour waiting for us on the shore, and I have never seen anything quite so pathetic in my life.

  I have one other memory of that time which I feel must be included here. One evening I went upstairs to get a book and as I came along the corridor I heard voices inside the schoolroom, though no light showed under the door. When I opened it I saw Jack on the carpet in the gloom, leaning back on his hands, his legs stretched out in front of him, and Miss Splendour lying beside him on one elbow, a few strands of hair drifting free of the neat tight bun at the back of her head. They turned towards me, Miss Splendour abruptly sitting up, startled and alarmed, as well she might be: my brother’s penis was up out of his trousers, emphatically erect, and I’m quite certain that a second before I opened the door Miss Splendour had had it in her hand or in her mouth, or both. It was huge, this I do remember from the glimpse I had of it as I went in to get my book. When I left the room I banged the door very loudly behind me.

  Miss Splendour never said a word to me about what I’d seen that night, and behaved the next day with her usual brisk bright-eyed energy, quite as though nothing at all had happened. In fact she left us within a few months, though whether the two events were connected I never did find out. Jack on the other hand was eager to talk about it. He would have been about fourteen at the time, and me sixteen or so. I told him to keep it to himself, but this seemed only to egg him on, and with devilish grinning persistence he demanded to know what I’d thought when I opened the door and saw him there beside Miss Splendour with his thing out. I told him I thought it was pretty bloody silly. What if I had been Daddy, or Mrs. Croke? This was our housekeeper. Jack laughed loudly at the idea of old Mrs. Croke finding him with his thing out with Miss Splendour.

  —You think it’s funny, I said, but I don’t.

  —That’s because you’re a girl.

  —So what?

  He had no answer to that. But what I am trying to suggest is that my brother’s sexual curiosity, or appetite, rather, though it may have been active at an early age still had a certain, oh, frank wholesome openness about it, at least as it pertained to our relationship. There was n
othing furtive there. He always showed me his erotic drawings, which were very graphic indeed, and we talked about sex as we might talk about what we’d had for dinner, such was the easy intimacy we enjoyed throughout our childhood, and which persisted until the day he ran off with Vera Savage. Nor were we the least self-conscious about it. We were brother and sister, Jack and Gin, why would we hide anything from each other? That came later.

  Jack by this time was seriously committed to becoming an artist, and it was far from an unrealistic ambition. His early promise showed every sign of maturing into a solid talent, and he had begun to paint in oils, the bold streak in his character evident in the way, at times, he practically attacked the canvas with a loaded brush. But he could also be quiet and slow, as though the act of painting stilled or soothed the emotions of his turbulent young heart. My own enthusiasm was meanwhile on the wane, though I said nothing of this to anyone, not even to Jack. I had recognized that he was a far better artist than I would ever be, but I didn’t want to be left behind. I suppose in a way I was in love with him. We were impatient to get to London, and my father, having resisted this plan of ours for some time, at last gave in, relieved, I think, to be rid of us, for we had become troublesome to him through various alcoholic escapades. He settled a generous allowance on us, which was mine to administer as I saw fit, about which Jack fulminated, naturally, but to no avail.

  Then came London, and St. Martin's. We had spent so much of our childhood with only each other for company that I was apprehensive about what our fellow students would make of us. We were tall, beaky youths, rather birdlike in appearance, like pale storks, I used to think. Our hair was the colour of damp sand and we spoke in strangled county accents, and despite our best intentions we gave off an air of supercilious arrogance which I suspect they found rather objectionable. Jack set about changing all that. He intended to conquer the metropolis, and by his dress and behaviour soon erased any impression of superiority. He formed opinions quickly, shouted them loudly, became frequently drunk on beer, and within a few months had gathered something of a coterie about himself. As for me, I had decided soon after our arrival in the capital that the best part I could play in this drama of conquest was that of the sage and silent sister. I accompanied him everywhere and, ever watchful, wasted no opportunity to murmur my counsel in his ear. I dressed plainly and affected an owl-like inscrutability, hoping in this way to mark out for myself a distinct and unassailable position in his retinue.