Murr - Nude

The cashier in Tesco clutched Eugene's arm, fearing he might collapse again. She must have seen him many times, a willowy old man in his mackintosh and trilby hat. While scanning his Toblerone, sardines, and Ovaltine, she might have been struck by the Wedgwood blue of his eyes; eyes that somehow took her in without being so bold as to look at her.

Eugene, trying to steady himself, was just glad she'd not seen him steal the poster from the notice board. On it was an etching he'd recognized, a nude, but not for the life of him had he been able to remember who the artist was. He'd been furious, having lectured on this very etching as an art teacher at the Sacred Heart. As he'd slipped it into his pocket for later,the artist's name had tugged tantalizingly at one of the many lines he'd cast out into the fog. That's when he'd felt itlike a sudden blowand fainted.

Two left feet, he insisted, snatching up his shopping bag and hurrying out. What's wrong with me? He walked quickly. Last week, in line at the post office, he'd felt a sensation like two hands unfurling gently as smoke to take hold of the back of his head. Next thing he knew, he'd landed on a screaming toddler. Bad circulation. Maybe he should have stayed on at the Galerie des Beaux Arts, but it would have killed him to sell another insipid Thames-view watercolor to one of Richmond's nouveau riche. Not working made him anxious, though, which probably explained this low-level headache he couldn't seem to shake.

Soon he was at his tower block on the Roehampton Council Estate. He hated using the lift, which stank of urine and was littered with condoms and bags of glue, but he was on the seventeenth floor. It came to him the second he shut his front door. Rembrandt. He snatched the poster from his pocket. Of course! That lusty face, the imprint of a garter around her meaty thigh. To see it better, he took a seat at his kitchen table, which was in front of a window. Along the sill stood a half-dozen of the brightly colored antique bottles his wife used to collect, a tiny embryo of light in each. Below the picture it said, Open Figure Drawing, 5, no instructor, Wednesday at eight, Wharf Thirteen.

Once, imitating the ghostly naturalism of Ferrazzi's Idol of the Prism, he'd painted his wife, nude, right at this table.She was holding one of these bottlesredin front of her face. He'd sketched her face around and through it, and, as her arm had grown tired, had followed its lurid tracer down over her right breast and belly to where she brought it to rest between her legs. Catherine. He still longed for her, and thought now of the beauty marks on her back, her tiny, slightly spoon-shaped toes. That had been his last painting.

He'd not done many nudes. It struck him now how few naked bodies he'd ever seen. Amanda Collinger was the first, a blind spinster in her mid-thirties. As a boy, she gave him two bob every Saturday to polish her silver, letting him listen to the radio, her fat old guide dog, Dillinger, curled at his feet. (It wouldn't be long beforehe would help her bury Dillinger beneath her horse chestnut.) One time he realized he'd forgotten to bring down the carriage clock in her bedroom. He sprinted up the stairs, past the bathroom where she was having a bath, and into her room. As he took hold of the clock, Amanda entered in her robe, removing it before he could say anything, and closing the door. Taking a seat at her dresser, she rubbed lotion into her skin. Her body was perfectly pear-shaped, with small upturned breasts that put him in mind of thorns.

A body not at all like those in the dirty magazines his older brother, Simon, hid behind their wardrobe. Women with their eyes closed, mouths open, suckling on fantasies of men more impressive than those who looked at them. Men like hisdad, who brought women home from the pubs when his mum was on night shift at the Samaritans. One night Eugene had been shaken awake into the sight of his dad's hairy beer belly hanging over his Y-fronts. Eugene followed him into his parents' bedroom. Sprawled naked on her back on the bed lay his school friend Derek's widowed mum, vomit all over the pillow. Is she dead, tell me? His dad was terrified. Take a listen to her ticker. Can't hear a bloody thing with my tinnitus. Pale scars, like cirrocumulus, fanned out over her belly; her breasts had pooled flat into the pits of her arms. Eugene put his ear gently to her chest, which smelled of his dad's hands, a fishmonger's hands, scrubbed with halves of lemon. Nothing for a moment, and then, like the distant scuff of oars, her heart.

His mum was next. It upset him to bring this back to mind. His little sister died because the hand pump they used to drain her water-on-the-brain had malfunctioned. A week later, his mum, drunk, fell down the stairs, dislodging a disk. She begged his dad to get her sister in. What for? he said, adding as he jerked his head toward Eugene, This little girl will look after you. For weeks she lay on the living room floor, sometimes drugged so senseless with painkillers that she messed herself. Eugene cleaned her, brought her bedpans, and hooked up the machine that emptied her breasts, with those beautiful blue veins, of their milk. She would scream at him to keep his eyes shut. When he had no choice but to see what he was doing, she would close her own eyes.

After this, only three more: Queenie, Catherine, and Lisahis Galateathat poor girl.

Time for his shower. He got up from the table, but a little too quickly, and felt as if he'd hit a low ceiling. As he walked toward the bathroom, slipping off his coat, his head was like a boat's hold in which cargo had come unsecured. The old pipes clamored as he turned the squeaky tap for the shower. He pulled down the toilet lid and sat, waiting for the water to heat up. Wretched. A wretched daythough it would have been a good deal more so if Queenie had seen him collapse. She had tapped his shoulder just as he'd put his shopping down to examine the notice board this morning.

What you looking for, love? she said.

Youth.

Me? She smiled.

Youth, he repeated, louder.

Propping her reading glasses on her nose, she surveyed the board while he surveyed her. Though she was black Irish, most had taken her for Italian in her youth, a mass of dark curls (now iron gray) around a face of coarse features that had no business being so lovely. Her eyes, the green of weathered copper, seemed never to blink. She had lived two doors down; they were close friends as children, entering their teenage years during the war. One night an air raid shattered all the windows in his house as he and his family huddled beneath the kitchen table. The next morning Queenie fetched him out. She led him around roadblocks and up to the third floor of a half-collapsed building, motioning forhim to look out the window. On a pile of rubble lay a sapper beside an unexploded bomb, touching it so tenderly it might have been a lover. Bloody hell! Eugene flung himself into the room and tried to get out, but she jerked him back. Why are you always so scared? She released him, but he stayed. As the sapper breathlessly drew the fuse from that naked bomb, he glanced at Queenie: she looked as if she had found (and it horrified her) her vocation; found and lost it at once.

They fell back into the room. He began to cry, at which she couldn't stop herself laughing. She kissed him (out of pity, she would admit years later), keeping her eyes open so he had to close his. In that room he discovered himself in her body, slender and so sensitive. It was as if the souls of each were the bodies of the other,she a boy struggling to reclaim her own nakedness from him, he a girl struggling to reclaim his from her.

She was engaged to William even then. A childish promise, she told Eugene, given in the heat of his leaving, the nearest she could get, until her brother joined up a year later, to having some part of herself at the front. On the same day that William's mother told her he'd been sent to a mental hospital in Belgium, her family received a telegram informing them that her brother had been killed at Anzio. She buzz-cut her hair, put on her brother's overalls, and tried to enlist, causing a frightful scene. William returned a shell-shocked wreck; under pressure of her guilt and that English decency that seemed to be what everyone had suffered and died for, she married him.