Read Online Goya'S Dog by Damian Tarnopolsky - Free Book Online Page B

before now.) Bridging funds is all I need to tide me over—it is always this way in a new place as I know you know. Send it c/o the King Edward Hotel, King Street East, etc. Various currency restrictions are being talked about, so act now.
    Good God, I hope you’re still here. I’ve heard nothing of the troupe. Nothing in the awful papers at least. Half expected to be tracked down by the Dunfield art Gestapo but no such pleasure. My love to the Lady. And do send the cash/PO instanter.
    Dacres
    He spoke to Stanley Burner’s secretary several times over the next week and even went back to the foundry again but he had no luck seeing the man. On the telephone one of the secretaries had started calling him Davis, and Dacres wondered if he did in fact have a doppelgänger stalking him across the city, walking in his steps, and no doubt making a success of himself by painting Canadian hunt scenes. Moira asked him did he intend to keep calling back every day and Dacres said he fully intended to, trying and failing to make her feel she was in the wrong. Finally he received two copies of a letter of recommendation from Burner— hope you will forgive, distinguished figure, excellent opportunity —and a list of names. He went to see a banker two blocks from his hotel. They told him to return the following week but he knew what that meant so he took up residence in the waiting room. The point was to land a commission. Once he did that, once he hadestablished himself, he would be able to ignore it, and concentrate on his Real Work. But first he needed to land a commission.
    He was on the tenth floor of a crenellated office building and he watched fog dip into the shallows between squat grey stone towers. Dacres smoothed his tie down his shirt to cover a mustard stain, crossed his legs, and stared at the receptionist, a girl half his age with red hair and healthy jowls and a face like one of Brueghel’s dancing peasants. He made her twitch. She sat beneath a stiff portrait, poorly executed, of a man with a military bearing. The subject was posed sitting on the corner of his desk in an attempt to make him seem approachable. It was passable, but the planes were all wrong, all on one level, and the furniture in the background was no more than sketched out. He had to ask if it was worth abasing himself for the opportunity to produce such rubbish—he had to ask himself what in hell he was doing—and then he thought of the cheque. He could charge $350 and not have to worry for months. He asked himself if he had the resources, right now, to work on a portrait; the internal resources. Given that he had not raised a brush in so long. He swept the thought aside.
    â€œAll I need is a push,” he said aloud.
    The receptionist, moon-faced and squinty eyed, looked up at him and quickly down again.
    Waiting is erotic, he’d read somewhere. He’d been sitting here an hour already, but had decided not to lose. Solid men carrying briefcases—hail-fellow-well-met—looked down at him as they came and went. He smiled enigmatically, showing his poorly arranged fangs. He refused to move, he refused to get up and stretch his legs, he would wait here like the cat at the kitchen door. Like the man in the fable he would grow a beard and eventually it would reach to his knees and the receptionist’s daughter would become the receptionist but he wasn’t going to let himself be fobbed off.
    Dacres daydreamed. He leaned his head back. At twenty-two he’d gone to Paris; everyone did. The war, the previous war, had just ended. The world was beginning again. Full of hope, pride, and fatambition, he’d rented a room above a restaurant, planning to apprentice himself to an unknown master, planning to paint and learn and mostly live. There was a drawer in his washstand where he kept food: coffee, bread, potatoes wrapped in a crimson handkerchief. Soon he ran out of money and washed dishes in the bistro