Goya'S Dog by Damian Tarnopolsky Read Free Book Online

paused. There were noises in the office behind her, he imagined her standing at her desk, in her coat already, having picked her handbag up off the floor as the phone rang. She said she would make a note, she would speak to the gentleman who had made up the lists and would be sure to telephone him back. Horniman was standing much too close and Dacres tried to shoo him away. He didn’t like talking in front of other people, but he persisted, and she was tired, and she wanted to go home, and she became more frank and brusque. She said there was an alpha list and a beta list and it seemedthey had become intertwined. There was some difficulty in the disentangling, she said, staff were coming and going, they would do what they could to sort it all out … Looking back as he ascended the stairs he saw Horniman wiping the receiver on his sleeve.
    So in a spirit of resignation—if God wanted him to preach Art to the Colonies he had better preach Art to the Colonies—he’d gone down to the Strand for the meeting. He had nothing else on that week; literally nothing.
    In the Strand, he felt old and alien and excited amid cabs and bowler hats. Much time since he had seen so many bodies. He presented his cream invitation ( Edward Davis ) as you would at a ball. Up the white stairs, into a reception room with dark green walls, and then he was curiously timorous, feeling that there was more riding on the next hour than there ought to be. He stood alone in a youthful crowd of artists and poets and hangers-on. He waited to be offered a glass of something, but none came. There were sorry-looking biscuits on scratched plates and the room was too warm. He spoke to no one. He had in his head the notion of chatting with Miss Mills, the harried girl he’d spoken to about his invitation, but he didn’t make much effort to find her. He thought about animals: when you put a dog in a kennel with others of its kind, does it get its guard up, as men do in a new place? Assessing the threat and the expectations? Outside, the clouds waited, with all the time in the world.
    Lady Dunfield got up to speak: she talked about obligation and opportunity. (Her natural habitat, he would discover, was the low stage; her natural armament a flamethrower sincerity.) Afterwards she was asked if politics would affect their plans. She said that they would not allow themselves to be deflected by events on that plane. Someone behind Dacres muttered, “Well, that plane will bloody well affect you when it bombs you in the middle of the sea.” He wanted to go home and he wanted to stay put. Eventually he retrieved his hat and his threadbare coat and traipsed back to the underground, consciously avoiding looking at the National Gallery, feeling the pennies in his pocket. He had no other errands to run that afternoon. He thought about what to do.
    A fortnight later came another embossed envelope. It was as if an angelic bureaucrat were trying to rescue him from himself. It contained a signed letter of confirmation on the same sturdy material, and a carbon-copied sheet of instructions about itinerary, packing. “If you are a dancer … If you are bringing props … ” There was a train ticket to Southampton. Two weeks’ notice. They recommended a service for cabin trunk delivery.
    He was not the sort of man to check a nag’s teeth.
    â€œI love your foxes,” Lady Dunfield said to him in the liner’s smoking room, enthusiastically, her face like a soufflé gone wrong. Dacres didn’t know what the devil she was talking about. He ascribed the comment to her haphazard connection to the Real. And before he could think what to answer the gong sounded and she was being called away. “Sit with me at dinner,” she said, grasping his forearm—but she knew full well that he wasn’t in first class, that he had to sit in a different dining room altogether. Violet called to her and she eased away, happy