‘No.’ Brodie glowered at the television.
‘Stop it, you two,’ Mayo called from the kitchen.
Hood threw the poster aside and put up the self-portrait, securing its top edge with a row of tacks. Its lower edge lifted and curled like a scroll. Hood stepped back. The man seemed to have moved slightly from the window and his gaze was no longer tense but mildly relieved, starting to smile. Hood had the impression that the wide-brimmed hat the man held in his hand had, earlier in the evening, been covering that fine hair. The peevishness, the anxiety, was gone from his face: Hood saw contentment in the dark eyes and light starting at the edges of the room where there had been shadow and old varnish.
He said, ‘What do you think?’
‘It’s poxy,’ said Brodie. ‘I like mine better’ — the poster was on her lap — ‘but I’ll put it in my room where you can’t touch it.’
‘I’ll do the same with this,’ he said.
Mayo drifted in saying, ‘I’ve done the dishes — thanks for the help.’ She looked at the self-portrait. ‘Incredible,’ she said. ‘It works beautifully in this room. Too bad we have to keep it upstairs.’
‘Look at her leer,’ said Hood.
Images jumped on the screen, a newsroom, an aged face: the late news. Brodie said, ‘Rubbish.’ There were shots of the seaside: ‘Record crowds —’ Hood sat between Brodie and Mayo on the sofa, his long legs extended, his hands clasped across his stomach. The drone of news made them remember — the unpaid electric bill, the broken door — and Hood listened, fascinated by how trivial their murmurs were, those low neutral voices on the old companionable sofa, in front of the crackling television. They stared at the television to ignore it, and it struck him as comic, their arrival at such simple topics, trading the bland family assumptions about the light bill, the missing bathplug, the burnt pan, the smashed bowl. ‘We’ll have to do some shopping.’ It related them; domesticity obliged them more than crime, and Hood almost laughed. The bomber went on murmuring to the thief: family matters — and he, the murderer, agreed to make cocoa.
‘Nothing about the picture,’ said Hood when the news ended. ‘Looks like you’re out of the running, Mother.’
‘We’ll send them another inch.’ said Mayo. She stretched, flattening her small breasts against her shirt. ‘I’m going to bed.’
Hood followed her to the top of the house, three flights. She paused on the last landing to kick off her shoes, and when she did Hood lifted her and kissed her. She stared at him with a wife’s detachment, considered his eyes, and moved past him. In bed Hood threw his arm around her and said, ‘Honey?’
‘I’m whacked,’ she said. ‘Not tonight.’
He spoke to the ceiling: ‘I had a ruck today.’
Mayo turned to him. ‘Who was it?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘You fool.’ She settled against her pillow, and he waited for her to say more. But she only sighed.
‘I snuffed him,’ he said. She said nothing: her sigh was sleep.
The house was purring an hour later when, wakeful, restless, Hood descended the stairs. He had not slept, but he knew how. He tore a pinch from his plug of opium and rolled a pill in his fingers: that was all the weight he needed to take him fathoms down through the world to Guatemala, to the Perfume River and beyond to the slowest rehearsal of damp sexual knots, the watery orbit of triumphant love. He swallowed the pill with a glass of water and the buzz in his ears changed to a new frequency, a low drawl that tugged and burred at the back of his eyes. The room was dark, but the painting had a light of its own, the white narrow face of that laughing man who stood, Hood saw for the first time, with one hand on the silver knob of a sheathed dagger. And the window he had seen as motionless with summer was alive with excited shapes, fat baffled men with buckets, bawling children, a rearing horse, a flock of fleeing chickens, riot. Rogier heard, but his back was to confusion, and on that face Hood saw his own alert eyes.
Part Two
6
Often, seeing a workman propped by a smoking ditch in the road, Hood dressed the man in ermine, envisioned a pronged crown where his tattered cap was and made that shovel a sceptre to lean his chin on. He gave them the benefit of his belief: the rag-and-bone man a stallion, the postman impressive robes. The regal face was puffed and florid; the labourer’s lank hair and heavy jaw only made the imagining more vivid. They might look broken, but they never lost that look of watchful cunning he had seen in powerful men — the pot-bellied general in his bird-bill cap supervising the shelling of empty hills. Hood convinced himself that the shouting hag in Deptford with her handcart of whelks and cockles and her sign Live Eels could be transformed into a braying baroness. It was a swift flight of the mind, and he rarely saw a pack of slender children that could not be possible inheritors: the urchins changed by the eye into princelings.
The slim woman he saw in velvet, a high-collared cape and buckled shoes, with pearls at her throat and a jewelled pistol crammed into her sash. She was agile, with blue eyes and a sly suggestion of toughness on her mouth. She had a boy’s bounce and black hair that was straight and bright and caught the sun like metal. She glided in the heat, always away from him. But that, like the oaf in ermine, was mostly fancifuclass="underline" he did not know her, he had only timed her movements, as she left the house in striped slacks and a yellow blouse and low slippers. She rarely smiled, but that was half her beauty; the rest was motion: the silver bracelets that rode on her arm and visibly jangled, and the sideways swish of her trouser cuffs and when she shook her hair the sight of her ear-rings; large hoops that jumped against her cheek, and all the light she brought forward on her skin that made him think she could not cast a shadow. She aroused him the moment he saw her, the housewife in Deptford with the large child, and he wondered if perhaps she was ordinarily pretty and he committed to enhancing her. He did pity her, and he felt saddest when her mood was bright and she chased the boy and made him laugh, because she was alone and did not yet know she was a widow.
She went out in the mornings with the boy, whose round head was screwed tight to his shoulders: he looked unrelated to her, his size was wrong, no feature matched. She stopped, carrying a string bag. If it was sunny after lunch she spent the afternoon in a corner of the park on Brookmill Road — the child flopped in the sandpit and she regarded him vaguely, keeping her distance, plucking at the pages of a book. Then, on the Thursday, the police arrived at her house, braking hard, and took her and the child away. An hour later she returned and her posture was so changed they might have taken her away to beat her. She seemed to crouch with grief, her black hair over her eyes, and she held tightly to the child as if, surprised by danger, she was performing a hopeless rescue and moving towards more danger. Her spirit had been arrested; she was weakened; and when she turned to speak to the policeman at the wheel her gaze saw nothing. She entered her house stooping.
Hood watched from a bench on the corner. He chucked the paper away. She knew.
On the following days, apart from one morning — the funeral, he guessed — she continued her routine, the morning shopping, the afternoon at the park, varying it once with a trip to the laundry. Her slimness had become angular, she had grown thin in a matter of days, with a stiff sorrow in her shoulders and a frailty that took the ease out of her walk and made her movements arthritic. Once she looked directly at him with hollow deep-set eyes, and Hood knew she was not sleeping. There was something stunned about her, not saddened but shocked. It was different from grief now; it was as if she had awakened in a foreign country and was listening for a familiar voice. He understood her displacement. Then she wore sunglasses, which emphasized the smallness of her head and gave her the hunched foreshortened look of an insect. She stayed close to the child, holding his hand, though he pulled hard on her arm. She was subdued, but the child was livelier than ever and bigger with infantile glee.