Cast of a Dog Killed by the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii, c 1874, by Nigel Jarrett

The Dog from Pompeii- Cast of the Dog in Chains, from Pompeii, Italy. Archeological cast, c. 1874. Photo by Jebulon, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Cast of a Dog Killed by the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii, c 1874

Ellie had drawn that dog from a photograph many times. She'd drawn a lot from photos: a ceramic bowl -  a receptacle - titled Vessel, caked in river mud before firing and thus also alluding to "vessel" as in "ship"; Marlon Brando in The Godfather; a Weimar matchseller with the matchboxes in a tray around his neck – a haunted waif.

Old photos mainly, like the one of that dog, taken in Victorian times; old photos with subjects aching to reach forward as if in mute  appeal to the present. All flawed subjects, she'd realized: a ship foundered (or primitive bowl); a mobster soiled by iniquity; a ragged-arse to whom society would never offer prospects.

After favourable first impressions, she realised that her drawings from photos looked just like the photos themselves. They had not moved the image on. So, apart from the self-congratulation at having created a passable likeness, it had been frustrating.

Drawing from life, even when it was inanimate, she found difficult. It were as if the subject could get up and walk away or, if a person, grow impatient with her endless markings and revisions or berate her for spying on them. Humans and animals, anyway, never kept still; not still enough for her to complete her drawings. Most times she crumpled the results into balls and tossed them in the bin.

But, in a photograph, her subject was a prisoner, completely under her control. It would never abscond out of anger, fear, or impatience; its "gloating'" over any frustration she felt would be imaginary.

In such cases, a photographed object, human and animal or not, would personify the inviolable, albeit defenceless against her exasperation. It watched her fail, withdraw, and return for another attempt. That Pompeiian hound, petrified in its anguish, was doubly imprisoned: first by lava flow, then by the photographer's lens. The lava had made a sculpture of it; the photographer had photographed the sculpture; and she had tried to draw the photographed sculpture. That lapidary dog, so lifeless yet so alive in its torment, was a work of art. After trying to draw it for the nth time she began to feel sorry for it, for the way it had waited so often and so long for her to capture its essence.

On the day she was ruminating on all this, her husband agreed to pose for her naked – or "in the nude," as he put it. She hadn't wanted to ask. But she had. He was watching the TV.

"Why not?" Harry said, without looking at her.

Anyone who knew how much and for how long her marriage had been idling might have thought her suggestion a desperate attempt at revival or acceleration. She thought that concealing behind his nonchalant reply the sense of something sparking repeatedly in the air was Harry picturing a Zippo with a worn plug of flint or too low on gas or both.

She couldn't recall when she last saw him without clothes on. She didn't mean the nightly and early morning view in passing when they undressed or got ready for breakfast and work. But not even that of late: for a while – well, a couple of years – he'd been turning in an hour or so before her.

He was asleep when she entered the bedroom that night. Not wishing to disturb him, she didn't switch on the light, but relied on what light seeped in when she left the bathroom door ajar. It was enough for her to look at herself, a spectre in the tall mirror, and wonder if her changed shape had placed her former one beyond recall. Did he agree to "sit" for her knowing there was little prospect of his nudity or nakedness leading to anything? She realised her body had been overtaken or taken over and left changed, probably for ever, though not in an instant and not with her obviously contorted with fright and trepidation. No – feelings like that were stored below the surface and kept to herself, not shared with Harry or anyone else and, she guessed, put down by him to moodiness.

She was indeed moody and seemed successful in dealing with it. She did deal with it. He'd ask her if she was OK and she'd always say Yes, which he probably accepted as a token of what was needed from him to guarantee her independence.

Harry posed for her one Saturday morning. Neither of them had work and they'd both slept on.

"Let's do it," he said. "The nude thing."

He swung out of bed and adopted the pose of Rodin's The Thinker as a joke.

"The Thinker doesn't wear boxer shorts," she said. 

They could hear next door's kids playing outside. The sound always sounded like a reproach, someone else's progeny as emissaries, their voices disembodied and carried on the wind; but she never shared that with Harry.

They went into the sitting-room and he sat, relaxed and not thinking, in an upright chair away from the window, the  shorts discarded.

"How do you want me?" he asked.

She told him to sit forward, as if alert, with hands on knees.

After a few seconds, she began drawing half-way between frontal and side-on. She saw how much he, too, had changed; or, rather, she saw something she knew but had never pondered. It were as if he'd agreed to produce incontrovertible evidence of irrevocable change. In the evening art classes she attended, students were told to look intently at an object and draw as they looked, as if looking would reveal something to them.

Well, it had been fun. Her drawings of him naked, nude, could have been anyone. She'd captured his soapsud hairstyle but obliterated his facial features with firm diagonal strokes in parallel, relegating them to shadow. 

"You haven't flattered me," he said, referring to those unwanted migrations of the flesh.

It wasn't meant to be a criticism; in fact; it sounded like an admission that revealed a truth hitherto unspoken.
​
He turned in early that night, as usual. She retrieved the wedding photos from the second album, the photographer having convinced them that retro black-and-white portraits were the coming thing and provided two sets. She homed in on a picture of them both – it wasn't a "white" wedding anyway – and touched Harry's face. She began drawing it, revelling in its complex lack of gradations, the fissures that opened up, in pure light and dark, such expectant happiness.

Nigel Jarrett

Nigel Jarrett is a leading Welsh writer, a former newspaperman and a double prizewinner: the Rhys Davies award and the inaugural Templar Shorts award, both for short fiction. He's had eight books published, including in 2023 his fourth story collection, Five Go to Switzerland. In March 2024 his second poetry collection, Gwyriad, was published by Cockatrice Books. His story, Our Man in Beauvais, based on the work of Rodin, appeared in The Ekphrastic Review. He writes and reviews for Jazz Journal and Acumen poetry magazine, among several others, and was formerly chief music critic of the South Wales Argus. He lives in Monmouthshire.