Port Mungo by Patrick McGrath Page B

same wilful disregard to which Peg had been subjected, but this time he made no argument and simply took over. He employed the same wet nurse who had breastfed Peg, a large, calm woman called Dolores, and for the first fifteen months Anna lived in her house, along with Dolores’s seven children. During those months it was Peg who spent hours every day with Anna, and could often be seen wheeling her little sister down to the waterfront in a barrow to show her off to the fishermen. Jack told me all this without any rancour. He said it was not Vera’s fault she had no interest in mothering. Fortunate thing, he said, that he could cope. And Dolores was a treasure.
    A curious figure he cuts, then, my brother, this fiercely driven artist, this latter-day Gauguin, stimulated by the wealth of form and colour in the natural world down there, also by its fecundity, its exuberance, its violence—yet at the same time displaying a maternal solicitude towards his two daughters while their mother was off doing whatever she liked, mostly, it appeared, drinking and chasing men. And it occurred to me that it was perhaps because of this sustained immersion in nature and mothering that he was losing the civilized reflexes. And he
was
losing them, of this I had no doubt at all, and I can remember various occasions when the fact was vividly brought home to me. Once, towards the end of my stay, we were sitting out on the deck at sunset, having the first drink of the day, when we heard from inside the house a series of groans and a slow, uneven tread on the stairs. We turned towards the door. It was Peg, and she was in pain: always barefoot, she had trod on a thorn of some kind and could put no weight on her left foot. In she hopped, and Jack briskly told her to sit on the deck in front of his chair, and had her lift her leg. He leaned forward to examine the sole.
    —This it? he said, prodding the ball of her foot, and Peg let out a scream.
    —Oh don’t be such a baby.
    He then seized her slim brown ankle and, with his other hand gripping the foot tight, applied his mouth to the sore place, and began to suck. That foot was filthy! She’d been all over town, god alone knows what she’d stepped in. I offered to go fetch the disinfectant but he said it wasn’t necessary. He sucked lustily at the dirty foot, sucked and spat, and every few seconds he lifted his eyes and grinned at her. Peg grinned back as she wriggled about on the deck on her bottom. After a minute or two he sat back, picked at her foot with a fingernail, then extracted the thorn with his teeth. He held it up for us to see, tossed it over the railing and wiped his hands on his paint-smeared trousers.
    —All right now?
    —Thank you, Jack, said Peg.
    But before she limped off, he had her stand with her back to the railing—and urinated on her foot! To disinfect it, he said. Then he sat down again, grinning at me, as he pushed himself back into his trousers.
    He enjoyed my snort of disapproval, and I was on the point of telling him what a primitive he was becoming when we heard a scream from the staircase.
    —What is it now? he shouted, turning towards the house.
    —Mummy’s home!
    Port Mungo boasted one grand establishment, a sagging relic of the town’s former glory which despite its flaking paintwork and spreading mildew—its cellars were flooded on a yearly basis—did maintain certain of the old amenities, in particular the large rooms on the upper floor which got the breezes off the sea. For this reason the Hotel Macaw was favoured by those of the townspeople who at midmorning or twilight liked to take their rum in the relative comfort of large rattan chairs, beneath ancient ceiling fans, in the spectral presence of dead banana moguls who drifted along the verandahs with the proud ghosts of exotic Creole women on their arms.
    Jack and Vera took me there the evening she turned up at Pelican Road after an absence of several months. When Jack heard Peg’s shout he was