A Case of Knives
Authors: Candia McWilliam
A CASE OF KNIVES
CANDIA McWILLIAM
TO MY FATHER AND MY STEPMOTHER,
AND FOR MY MOTHER
My thoughts are all a case of knives,
Wounding my heart
With scattered smart,
As wat’ring pots give flowers their lives.
Nothing their fury can control,
While they do wound and pink my soul.
George Herbert, ‘Affliction (IV)’
Contents
I needed a woman. Or, better, a girl. A woman would be too set in her mould. I required for my purposes something unrefined and eventually ductile. I would perform the smelting and hallmarking myself. I wanted the pure substance I obtained to be worth my effort. I was thinking in terms of ingots, not of pigs.
I have found out recently of women, that, although they are less than pigs to me, since I do not have to eschew the devouring of them, as I do of pigs, to some these fleshy creatures are precious and worthy of the assay.
Occasionally I see in the street a man whose bearing tells me he has endured many of the same privileges and ostracisms as I, and read many of the same books; we have what is called a lot in common, yet we care to remain separate, poised, attentive and distant above our secret parishes, like birds of prey. Our quarry is shared, and our romantic hunger common. We require, like policemen or vicars, a beat. What we hunt is monsters who will turn on us, victims who will show themselves panthers and Calibans; they may be meter-readers, good husbands, fine fathers, but briefly, in the dark or the excoriating snowy brightness of under ground, they are to me, and to these other well read, civilised, gentle men, everything we have wanted. I have never woken up in the bed of someone I have made love to; nor has someone who has made love to me woken up in my bed. The people I have seen in that touching, crumpled state of waking up have all been my patients. One cannot feel violence towards a person one has seen asleep.
But then there was Hal, and he changed the regular, discrete, unadmitted quarterly satisfaction of this essential service in my life. It was clear at once that I could not forbid this boy my home, nor deal him banknotes just out of the lamp-posts’ sight.
When I first saw him, I was thirty-nine and he twenty. He was entering a chemist’s shop in St James’s Street. The Palace looked on, a toy fort full of courtiers. I saw at once that he was not to be picked up. Even in St James’s, there is provision for that sort of thing. I fell in love with him as I looked; the sensation was of sinking, without end. As I sank into the sight of him, I caught on nothing. I saw he had no archaeology. He was simply what he appeared to be. My past is full of bones and ghostly shapes traced in salt and acid. I saw he was an untroubled English boy, his past a simple matter of roots and earth.
My appearance is elegant. I wear conventional clothes. I have been told I look like a man who has had at least one child. Whether this is on account of my profession, I do not know. At any rate, it has been useful to me.
In the chemist’s, this young man and I each purchased a wooden bowl of shaving soap. I said, to the assistant, but of course to the young man, ‘I find the floral soaps leave you with the blue cheeks of a baboon.’ He smiled – did he even shave? The respectable shop fronts were dark but festive as we walked up the street, as though khaki cigars and chestnut hats and dusty-shouldered green bottles were emblems of love.
But that had been six years ago and now I needed a girl.
Here, I thought, she was, smiling, her back to a tall looking-glass, her arms athwart the marble mantelpiece. A woman with her back to a mirror is a rare enough thing, one who will keep her hands still almost unique.
I even felt something of the twinge of recognition which is a presentiment of intimacy. Housemaid’s memory, Tertius calls this, meaning the realignment of recollection so its nap lies smooth with the velvet of sentiment and comfortable untruth. His snobbish name for this emotional editing has its source in the frequent employment of the device in detective novels. When his Lordship is found dead on the library bearskin, the housemaid remembers that his Lordship always was funny about bears, never could abide them really. When you come to like someone, you recall the first meeting dignified by time’s paragraphing; they were not drunk, they were recently bereaved, their orange sombrero was a welcome note of colour at the funeral. It is far easier to reorder memories than to admit to repeated errors.
I was struck by this girl. She appeared to meet all my superficial requirements. Classical beauties draw to themselves light, their faces pearly in any room. This girl drew to her face and arms not light but colour. A painter will tell you these are the same thing, but at first glance they are different. Light is all take and colour is all give, at least until you look again. She flashed colour like a witchball, bright not pale. There were some pearly girls in the room, and they would surely wear better, if kept in padded cases and held close always to scrupulously soaped flesh, but they were not to my purpose.
Had she held, balanced on her lifted face, a disproportionate sphere, glowing like ectoplasm, she would have resembled one of those Art Deco lamps which have twice been fashionable this century. She had the uselessly sportive length of limb, and the base-metallic glow. She appeared covetable without being unattainable; had auction houses dealt in young women, she might have been picked up quite reasonably at a fairly popular specialist sale in Geneva, with invited bids. She was listening far too attentively to an old Greek three-quarters her height. She looked down her face to his, and moved her features in response to his. The thick brows of the Greek beetled; her thinner eyebrows flinched. His eyes, the red-brown of prune flesh, gave a warm leer; her blue eyes hid behind mauve lids. His grey jaw jutted; she tucked in her chin like a dove. Unless she really was horribly shy, this submission was unconvincing, and gauche in one so big.
Her clothes were not those of a shy girl. She appeared not to realise her size. Unless she learnt soon that her little ways would sour and leave her, like a pale old cheese, on the shelf, she would be wasted. But if she grew into herself, well, then, she would be the perfect picture for the frame I had in mind. In her appearance there was something unEnglish which appealed to me. I was pleased to see this combination of confidence and unease; it is a suggestible compound.
The girl seemed also to have big breasts. I wanted that, too. It was, perforce, to be a full-length picture.
I sought our hostess. Anne was upstairs in her fur cupboard, shivering. There was no sign that anyone had been with her.
If it is possible to admire a person intellectually for their storage system, I did Anne. Her clothes cupboards were tall lozenges of space, obscure and cool. So all cupboards might be described, but hers were a cathedral of sartorial labour, its craftsmen Siamese mulberry tenders, French button piercers, Amazonian crocodile skinners, small men pulling shards off beetles in jungles below warring helicopters, men in palazzi weaving fields of cloth from dreams of past power. The guildsmen of bonded beauty all contributed to her cupboards’ satisfaction, and, unlike Nana, the end of all this endeavour was not the pleasure Anne might give men, or the money and power she might gain from this pleasure. She was like the bibliophile of pornographic books. She had all these lovely things created solely for adornment, yet her pleasure was in their contemplation more than in their employment. She told her clothes like a miser, but dressed almost invariably in immaculate constructs of no definite colour.
From the east of her cupboards came the glow of sequined dresses beneath stoles of chiffon; there was a lady chapel of underwear sewn by nuns. Anne’s own faith, as far as I could tell, was the limiting of chaos by external control, the absolute control of passion by ritual. Anne kept her clothes in an order logical and convenient, ready, like a soldier, for any contingency. Her cupboards were a thesaurus of social possibilities. I would tease her by inventing absurd putative events and making her select clothes to wear to attend them. She could always do it. We played in her cupboards like children.
Both Anne’s houses contained their air-conditioned armoury of skins, muslins, wools, and the braced infantries of shoes. Each item bore a card which was inscribed with the date and place of its last wearing. I once asked her whether she notched the satin heels of her evening shoes for each conquest. She replied that she had her conquests made into coats. I was not sure whether she had lovers.
This evening, I sat with her in the gloom among the furs, the coldest part of the clothes-cathedral, giving a faint winter smell of naphtha and gauze-bagged dry flowers, downy buttons of immortelles, with their petals like small fallen pointed fingernails.
The furs were shouldered with shawls of chiffon to prevent chafing. These capes looked, on the congregation of sleek or brindled shoulders, pitifully domestic.
Anne was not vain. She had short light hair which lay where it was placed, a creased face with prominent cheekbones, very pale blue eyes, and an expression without guile. She was thin, not slim, and never wrinkled her nose, swivelled her hips or licked her mouth before or after telling a lie. So far as I knew, she had never told me one. Her posture was that of a sailor; she was always braced against some greater force, hooked to a chair, set against a wall. Her skin and hair were of a similar light brown, which grew more differentiated in sunlight. After prolonged exposure, her skin would darken to the colour of soft brown sugar, and her hair lighten to the colour of caramel. She was always neat, but she pushed her sleeves up from her wrists. She had thin feet and hands and the eyebrows and gaze of a boy. She had no greed but I sometimes worried that she was easily bored. I despised this, but she never seemed to be bored by me, so I was mollified. She was never bored, she said, at Stone. Stone was home, the house of her dead husband.
‘Lucas, come in at once, take a pew.’ Anne would adopt phrases, use them or a time in a voice different from her own to show she was joking, then forget to highlight them in this way, so that they became assimilated into her speech.