The White Body of Evening by A L McCann

drawn a kind of sick, sensual anarchy.
    Ondine put down the spindle and moved over to Paul looking at the picture as she took up a piece of paper and started on her own. She drew his face, concentrating on the pale freckles standing out against his white skin, giving the cheeks a greenish glow as she shaded them, and the eyes a deep blue, with a faint, yellowish outline. She drew calmly, changing colour quickly and pedantically, as if just the right amount of each were the essential secret of her portrait. Paul watched her, noticing that the skin tones looked better when they were tinted with blue or green, rather than red or brown, which was his instinct. He returned to his first picture, which he began to amend following his sister’s use of these colours, smudging them with his thumb into a mysterious, fleshy form, the promise of a garish vitality that, for a moment, pulsed with life on the page before him.
    Later, when the children were asleep, Albert paced the house scrutinising the drawings his children had left lying about on the floor. Anna sat on the couch reading Ada Cambridge by the light of an old oil lamp, trying to ignore Albert’s agitation, which was grating on her nerves. He was on the verge of saying something to her, but caught himself, realising that he didn’t have the words to express succinctly the sense of anxiety that mounted in him as he looked at the sketches. He had detected certain tendencies in himself, but detection and a degree of understanding did not render him capable of self–mastery. Accepting his own failure in a resigned and apathetic manner he was still, nevertheless, hopeful that Paul might be able to summon the powers of concentration and self-control, the absence of which had unhinged him. My son should be able to keep his head down, he thought to himself, and at that moment Albert glimpsed the vortex to which he had slowly sacrificed all the sounder principles of life and wondered at the folly of his own delusion.
    He wanted to say something about this to his wife, but the formulaic rhythms of their life together precluded confession as surely as it did intimacy. The sense of their partnership fulfilling itself according to the remote and automatic logic of hollow contractual agreement, in which man and wife were simply the masks they adopted for the sake of convenience, was now so apparent to him that he would have felt foolish and even a little bit insensitive reintroducing something of himself into their intercourse. There was no telling what it might have sparked in her. She seemed to sit there on the edge of hysterical self-revelation. Albert had no idea about Dr Winton, but in moments of clarity he hoped that Anna had been able to find something more than what the four walls of their cottage offered her, that she had been able to stumble after and perhaps lay hands on her own chimeras and draw life out of some secret source untouched by the poison that slowly seeped through the crevices of their marriage.
    So Albert said nothing much about the drawings. He just placed them gently on Anna’s lap, not wanting to disturb her reading. “Take a look at these,” he said.
    She looked them over, one after the other, until she came to the smooth, formless genitalia Paul had drawn. The drawing put her in mind of the afternoon she had gone to the stationer’s store in Flinders Lane. That afternoon she had resented Winton, more out of a thoughtless deference to convention than to anything she sincerely believed or felt. She imagined that his hands would be sweaty and that his gold-handled cane would be a tool for the exercise of cruelty. Why had she thought this, solely on the basis of the books assembled in the stationer’s shop? Because the body was such a filthy and compromising object? Because one couldn’t dare probe its workings in a disinterested manner? What a stupid prude she had been. She smiled inwardly at her former self, picturing a child with an utterly fantastic