Port Mungo Read Free Page 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