In the kitchen a knife scraped. His wife had finished. Carefully be laid the glove over the books, where it posed lightly, coquettishly. He closed the door softly, as if apologetic, and returned to the easel. In a moment the girl in the photograph might move as desired and stare from the window. But the sun’s last shards were blunted; at a crossroads in the centre of the landscape, traffic-lights tripped up and down their scale. Two glasses chimed. He cursed his wife; jealous, she’d driven away his model. He strode out of the bedroom. ‘Are you going out?’ he demanded.
She arranged the first ring of glasses, encircling the table-leg. ‘I want to do as much as I can tonight,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I thought you might like me to stay in.’
‘When I’m painting?’ She turned to him: surely he could have left that unsaid. ‘Watch what you’re doing!’ he shouted, but too late; kneeling, she overbalanced and her hand, flinching away from the glasses, caught the table-leg. The table reared. The glass top came down on the arm of a chair, and a star flew out between them.
‘Oh, I am sorry,’ she cried, on the edge of tears. ‘I didn’t mean to.’ But he’d rushed to the table and grasped a carved leg. The ruined top ground and splintered and he whirled, brandishing the leg, topped with a head of jagged glass like an axe.
‘I didn’t do it on purpose. I wouldn’t have done that.’ She tried to catch hold of his hand as it drooped. ‘We’d better get rid of it before someone gets hurt,’ she said.
‘Throw away the glass but leave the legs. I may be able to use them sometime. In a carving,’ he added bitterly.
In the night he sat up. His wife’s face lay upward on the pillow, helpless. The black sun was hot beneath the horizon, like a coal about to set fire to the air. He plodded through the flat and turned on the kitchen light. The carved legs were piled in a corner; above them an edge of the curtain swayed. He thought he heard his wife call out. He would fight her; he would complete a painting to express the flat. If only he could see the girl, find the photograph. Behind him the door banged and sprang back. Someone moved silently to stand behind him, her hands almost touching his shoulders. She didn’t tint the white tiles of the kitchen. He swung about. Only the restless door moved. ‘I wouldn’t have left you,’ he said almost to himself.
His wife was propped up by the pillows, waiting. ‘What were you doing?’ she asked.
‘There was something I wanted from the kitchen. I didn’t expect to find you awake.’
‘There’s a rat in your cupboard,’ she said.
‘Nonsense. What would a rat want in there?’
‘I heard something scratching at the door. If you’re not going to look, I will.’
She slid out and was round the bed before he could move. Aghast, he slapped the light-switch. Electric light thrust out the moonbeams. She pulled open the door and craning on tiptoe, leaned her head inside. At last she decided: ‘It must be in the wall.’
As she returned to bed he extinguished the light. ‘You haven’t closed the cupboard properly,’ he said. He opened the door as if to shut it with a slam. A moonbeam partitioned him off from the bed. He laid his hand on the rim of the cupboard, waiting, and the glove fell on his fingers like a caress.
Dear Sir, I am in receipt of your letter—On the back he sketched the glove. At once his pencil traced her poised arm and ranged over her curves, the lead point sensitive as his fingertips. It smoothed her hair and formed the framed oval. But her face eluded him. The shutter of his mind had jammed. Was she facing him or smiling secretly in profile? He drove the point into the paper close to her hair, and the pencil snapped.
‘We’ll have to eat in here tonight,’ said his wife from the kitchen. ‘I know it’s crowded.’
He threw his overcoat on the bed; he should have an overall to welcome him, a vortex of colour like petrol after rain.
She was wearing a grey sweater; she looked young as a rediscovered photograph. Opened, the oven door exhaled the heavy heat of steak. She encircled the meat with potatoes and smiled. ‘When I was dusting your books—’
His knife froze in the meat. ‘You were dusting my books?’
‘I thought it was the least I could do. I found a glove. I thought at first it was the rat.’
And he’d torn up the sketched hand. ‘What have you done with it?’ The knife gouged; the meat tore.
‘I threw it away, of course. It would have ruined your books. It was covered with — I don’t know, it was all wet.’
‘With tears, perhaps. No, no, it doesn’t matter.’
The pillow gasped as his fist drove in. The bedroom was void. He left his easel in the corner. Already the girl’s presence had attenuated; she’d begun to fray, to be absorbed into the flat like mist. Or to drift out of the window; his wife was systematically driving her out, destroying the expressions of her personality, his tokens of her. Clouds bulged from the lacklustre sky like wet wallpaper. He stared at the unlined sheets, willing even the curve of her leg to form. One sight of her face and he would possess her. But he felt sure the photograph was ashes. Suddenly he caught up his easel and bore it toward the window. There would be a suspended silent moment before the easel smashed and scattered on the concrete. He thrust the window high. A breeze breathed into his eyes, and for a second a cloud smiled beneath hair. At once he knew. With gestures sure as sketched lines he set up the easel. Then patiently he lay back on the bed to wait.
He leapt up. His wife was sorting plates and cutlery on the kitchen table. ‘I won’t be in your way,’ she said. ‘I won’t be, will I?’
Without a word he clutched the carved legs and returned to the bedroom. Each leg was wood. Unprepared for the end of a curve, his fingers constantly fell into space. He laid one leg against his; when he moved the edge cut into his flesh. The wood was lifeless. The cupboard was empty. One side of the canvas had slipped low; a corner encroached on the wide dull landscape. The girl was elsewhere. Even the touch of the glove had been too light to suggest so much as the ghost of a hand. Abandoned once, she would never return again if re-buffed. And yet, he thought — and yet his painting might provide her with a hold. She might become the painting.
Light resonated in the glasses like a soundless chime. He stood before the kitchen door; his throat was dry. The kitchen was her last refuge. Surely it contained nothing that his wife might shatter. The girl knew this as surely as he did. Yet he was afraid to enter; it would be their first meeting. And his wife would be alert.
The door swung in his wake. She came to meet him. Yet not quite; her presence was lent a harsh immediacy by the white tiles, compressed by the pendulous sky, but not formed. She was still preparing for him. He must wait. As he whirled, impatient, he glimpsed his wife’s face, flat as a painting against the wall.
He paced the bedroom. The sky was close as the walls, encasing his eyes. He found that he could hear himself breathing, almost suffocated. He wrenched open the cupboard door and dragged out a sketch-pad. A title for his painting. Anything. But the edges of the pencil were insufferable as the angles of a rusty threepence. A book to calm him. The art-paper scraped beneath his nails, agonizing as tin. He dropped the book and rushed into the kitchen.
‘Oh, what is it?’ his wife cried. ‘Don’t keep going away from me!’
At the sound of her voice the girl fled. The kitchen rejected her. He stared slowly at his wife, the neat ranks of cutlery, the handkerchief bulging the arm of her sweater like a muscle. ‘God. God. God,’ he said.
And then he fell silent.
Behind her head, like an embryo born of the breeze, the curtain swelled. A thrust of air created cheekbones from its folds. Above them hollows might harbour whatever expression he called forth. The line which linked the hollows fell away into an arch. As the curtain swayed a wrinkle smiled, but shyly.