Free Port Mungo by Patrick McGrath Page B

he had a good place to work, and Peg was happy. And he had friends, yes, not gringos but locals. He liked the easygoing Creoles, their openness and generosity, which had sustained him and Vera in the early days. It seems it had been another of their impulsive decisions. When they saw the sleepy waterfront, the fishing boats, the painted wooden houses leaning out over the slow green Mungo—he flapped a hand dismissively at the river, and also, I thought, at the idiot romanticism of his youthful self—he said they just had a
feeling
about the place, so they got off the steamer and had their trunk unloaded onto the dock.
    —And the rest—sardonic bark here—is family history. Curse of the Rathbones.
    My brother was indeed cursed, I remember thinking, not by a family malediction but by the woman with whom he’d thrown in his lot. It became clear as he talked that Vera was a chronic alcoholic, as I had long suspected, and that her drinking had grown worse during the years in Port Mungo. Jack also gave me to understand that she was often unfaithful, and this I could see was more painful to him even than the drinking. The damage she’d done could be read in his eyes, in his body, in his gait and posture: he was a bowed and harrowed man, where once he had been straight and fierce. But he had his work, and he also—and again I heard the quiet pleasure in his voice—he also had his daughter. Peg was born a couple of years after they’d got to Port Mungo, and when he spoke of her it was with such tenderness that I knew his life was blessed at least in this regard, that the joy she’d given him had gone some way to compensate for all the pain Vera had caused.
    And his own sex life? In response to Vera’s infidelity, had he found . . . comfort, himself, elsewhere—?
    Here I discovered another change in my brother. Ten years before he would have launched at once, and with some gusto, into an account of his adventures. Now he was reticent. The question disturbed him, and I did not press him. But I continued to worry at it, for my brother had a powerful sex drive, and it was inconceivable to me that he now channelled all his libido into his work. I asked myself whether he had a mistress he was being discreet about, for I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised. The girls of Port Mungo were pretty creatures, what I had seen of them, slender, green-eyed young beauties with delicate brown skins, and possessed of an enchanting physical grace—wouldn’t any white man wish to claim one of these shy things for his own, set her up in a stilted shack on the other side of town, there to receive him whenever his loins were stirred—? I suggested as much but Jack said no. He shook his head. He was not interested in the local girls.
    I let this statement hang in the air for a few moments. One of the gringo women then? An explosive snort of laughter in response to this. Have you seen them, Gin? None of them under sixty. Hides like rhinos, pickled in spirits. I was pickled in spirits myself by this time, and so was he, but all the same I abandoned the topic, and what Jack did for sex remained a mystery. Perhaps, I later thought, he had indeed undergone some kind of Damascene conversion. Perhaps, in the face of Vera’s flagrant serial infidelity, he had resolved to act in direct contradiction of her ethos, almost as a rebuke—to be faithful to her, I mean, and celibate in her absence. Perhaps his own infidelity in Miami Beach, early in their travels, had sufficiently traumatized him that he no longer went after other women, being one of those rare men who make only one sexual mistake in their lives, and resolve never to stray again—?
    In fact I now believe that in spite of his wildly nonconformist life my brother did possess the moral fibre to control his appetites and sublimate them into his art; and I believe too that he never repeated the clumsy sexual error he made early in his relationship with Vera.
    She told me about it once.