Authors: Candia McWilliam
I was touched. Did he remember our first time here? I saw his face. Only recently had it begun to age at all. The blossom colouring was settling down and his thin body was filling. I did not very much like his tie. It was narrow and black and shone like a fish.
‘D’you think he’ll be kind to her?’ asked Anne, later, in my upstairs room; a painted man in pantaloons played his lute close by.
‘For a time.’
‘That shows more knowledge of the beast than you’ve ever had, or do you mean if he is too kind for too long you’ll put a stop to it?’
We were pushing between us a tray of matzos and cheese. Hal had told me of an uncle of his who had so hated Jews he kept a tin of matzos in the front hall to discourage any Hassid who might be peering through his letterbox. I am fond of the testimonial on the packet. I like Anne to see that I am an aristocrat too, one of the chosen race, and, moreover, not careless as her lot are but careful, so careful we can tidy seas, half to one side, half to the other. Anne wore some leather with the grey glow of caviar. I do not like women dressed like this.
‘What a staggering ensemble, Anne, darling,’ I said in my Tertius voice, and as I said it I felt found out.
‘Revolting, I know, but I’m in a little fix, really,’ she said. She liked fixes. They filled her time and her erupted heart.
‘Tell on, dear,’ I said, hating Tertius as I used the phrase.
‘I’ve had rather a delivery recently, you see, because my poor fur man is ill, or not him at least, but someone must keep the wolf from the door.’ She looked shy and lit a cigarette.
‘His name is Mr Virtue, I don’t know what his parents’ name was, and he lives in a house about half the size of this room.
‘It is his child, you see. The papers have organised for the child to go and get done in hospital in America and they’ve forgotten travel and accommodation, never mind Mama and Papa and three sisters.’
He was, who would have doubted it, a Polish Jew. The child was ill. The story came out.
‘What do you mean, done?’ I asked.
‘Oh Lucas, you know how I am, I never know real things, but it’s not your sort of stuff or I’d simply have put the boy your way.’
‘I’m delighted you say that. What is up with him? I am surprised it can’t be dealt with in this country.’
‘He got burnt.’
‘Burnt?’
‘He came into the workroom and they were steaming a female coat.’ She could not eradicate details like this; she would have been a fine identifier of corpses, recollecting the colour of their eyeshadow. ‘The heat is to make the fibres lie, and he got burnt. The papers don’t want to say how he got burnt, but they got committed to him when they saw his little melted face, and so I’m doing a big order quick so Mrs Virtue can go with the boy. But we’ve got to keep it quiet or I would just hand over the money, without question. I have known Mr Virtue since Mordred introduced us and the child is a sweet boy. Now he is bald and his limbs are held akimbo by his shrunk skin. So that’s why I’m dressed as a Hitler Maiden.’
My best friend said that to me. I was pleased that she was quite free from fear as she said it. I let the sentence lie, and be buried, with many others. I wished to leave its grave unmarked.
‘The thing is, the papers started to make a fuss about him before they realised what his father did. A reporter saw him at his weekly physiotherapy place and took along a photographer on spec the next week. It was all perfect bleeding heart stuff and Mrs Virtue hardly speaks English so they didn’t gather why the child was in such an awful way. Once they found out, it was too late, but they are desperate at the paper to keep it dark about Mr Virtue being a furrier. They show those girls with their wobbly fronts in marabou scanties but they can’t come clean about the skin trade. Animals are big circulation, and so are tragic tinies. The paper didn’t mean for it to become such a big thing but when people saw the picture of the child with his lovely eyes looking out of a squashed bag of face, they kept on sending in money, as though they had to pay for their unburnt children, and the paper has discovered a man who mends faces and bodies. Not just a wrinkle smoother, but a man who repairs people after wars and spillages and secret fallout. What I can’t bear is the thought of people getting mended just to get broken again. At least with a child, there’s some hope of a real life to follow. But I can’t think where they will take the skin from. It’s so patchy, the notion that they will tidy his face and arms by plundering his legs and back; can’t things be made good without spoiling other things?’
‘There is some talk of artificial skin, but it could not grow with a child. Surgeons of the interior can be a little snobbish about this type of thing. But disfigurement is a wound as severe as any other.’ I said I was chilly on home ground.
‘Cora is scarred,’ said Anne.
‘Anne, what do you mean and how do you know?’ I did not like the idea of Hal touching a scarred person. Yet I was pleased, for any imperfection would at length divide them. Hal hates mess, as I said.
‘Oh, Lucas, it is nothing terrible. I should not mention it at the same time as the poor Virtue child. I only glimpsed it when I took her shopping with you. Her chest is scarred, as though a string of small pearls had slipped down between her breasts under the skin and stuck there. It is raised. It makes your fingers want to touch it, like scabs.’
‘Not appealing.’
‘Not unappealing.’ She broke a biscuit with one hand, flat, as though to do so were a skill. It was like watching a woman throw a ball like a man. ‘This room, Lucas, it’s not finished, is it?’
‘That’s the point, in a way. I don’t know that I ever want it to be so. I like it to change and shift. When they come and paint a new clown or a tub of bay or a far away tempietto I am refreshed. It’s a bit like a family, but without mess.’
‘There is no family without mess.’
‘You say that. The English upper class is infatuated with its own sense of cousinage which in the end ties down the individual like Gulliver. And I suppose because your own close family has been nothing but mess.’ It is because I am a stranger that I can speak the truth.
‘And thank you for those few kind words.’ I cannot bear the way they glove their grief in little jokes. Instead of being direct she was ‘guying’, a great conspiracy word of the inhibited British, the reaction of someone repressed and humble, a landlady perhaps or an undertaker. ‘Thank you, I’m sure,’ she said, on firm ground, being a housekeeper, settling her feathers, taking no more offence than was commensurate with her position.
‘Tell me about Mr Virtue,’ I said. ‘And why not have a plum?’ I pushed the bowl of blue fruit to her. They were quetsches, the kind which cleave neatly under the teeth, not those sweet English bolls of wetness, the colour of their faces.
‘The Virtue family live at the Elephant and Castle. Every day Mr Virtue goes to his shop in an alley off a mews behind Bond Street. Some of his ladies he visits at their houses. The reason why I’ve got this rather awful stuff from him is honour. The sort of thing he makes for me takes ages and he had these in stock for what he calls passing trade, the people who go and buy Rolls Royces for cash and sneak away to Spain one day just before the knock at the door. But he would not accept a loan because of any scandal. I like him because he loves what he does and he tells you about it in detail. I could listen to a mortician describe his trade as long as it was in sufficient detail.’
‘Some would say that is exactly what Mr Virtue is.’
‘I don’t think about that.’ The list of what Anne did not think about included it seemed to me almost everything which actually preoccupied her. This is another trait they have. I do not know whether I admire it. I envy it.
‘Did you have a good time with Oppie?’
‘Very. She thinks she has bred a new strain of yellow raspberry and wants to call it Winaretta. But she does not live in the past. She has plenty of young friends. What they like is her bossy ways. She seems to have all the experience without telling you about it or forcing it on you. It seems to share out infinitely like the loaves and the fishes. We went fishing too, out at sea. No herring came, because we women were on the boat. You can be sure if we had hit a shoal it would have been because we were on the boat too. One night we did plash-netting at the seashore and got very wet and caught a lot of flatties and weed.’
‘Flatties?’
‘Skate, plaice, those ones with their eyes in the back of their head and their mouths like a face against a window. The ones with bones down the edge. If you leave out a night-line for them you can come in the morning and find three one inside the other like Jiffy bags.’
‘Where should I get a house for Hal and Cora?’
She faced me, blue eyes in her shocked plain face. ‘Do you really want it to fail immediately?’
‘I want them to have a decent start. A house will go some way towards providing that,’ I said.
‘If you have to, can’t you at any rate allow Cora to think that Hal has bought the house?’
‘I had intended that, yes.’
‘And then she can find out later?’
‘Or not.’
‘Short of buying the house next door, I can’t see what more killing thing you could do.’
‘Forget, Anne, that I am I. Think of me as a bank.’
‘Hal does,’ she said.
‘That is beneath you.’ I will not have these remarks tearing into my life. Anne suffers from prudishness about money, where Hal is refreshingly straightforward.
‘Lucas, get them a nice big house with lots of room for babies and a garden so Cora can land on something soft when she jumps.’ All promotion of Hal and Cora’s love affair to the outside world, Anne liked to show me what she imagined were her real feelings about it. I think she must have been suffering from jealousy of Cora, about to begin married life with beautiful, and not dead, Hal.
‘Are you at
all
pleased, Anne?’
‘I am pleased that you have what you want. I don’t love many people, but I do you and it is selfish I suppose. If you wanted human liver for breakfast, I think I would bodysnatch for you. Of course my conscience jabs me sometimes and I wonder where it can all end, but this is what you think you want now and I cannot, not being God, see what it is you really want. If I could see that, I would be very pleased to miss out this step. But as you are determined upon it I am now going to forget my reservations and hurl myself into wedding preparations as though Cora were my daughter.’
‘Not Hal your son?’
‘You may award yourself that privilege. Have you met the Darbo parents? It is a funny name is it not? Sounds Hungarian or pretend, a sort of mistranscription of something grand. The kind of thing an actor might give himself once he’s mastered’ – she made appropriate gestures – ‘the plum in the mouth.’ She was sorting plumstones into pairs. She had two, and the lone stone which she pulled from her mouth, point first. Fine, for a rich man.
‘I’ve not met them. They have land.’
‘So does Mr Virtue, so do I. There’s land and land. I prefer the starry sky. I shall be very interested.’
‘Cora’s only real insistence about the wedding is that it be soon, and Hal wants that too. It is hardly as though gratification of desire were the motive for this, but I am of course of the same mind,’ I said.
‘Lovely,’ said Anne. ‘The sooner the better.’ She appeared enthusiastic for the first time that evening. ‘When shall it be?’
‘December the sixth, in just over a month.’
As we sat, the pale faces of the painted figures glowed in the deepening darkness. When Anne left, I felt as tired and as satisfied as a man who has taken hard exercise and eaten a dish of meats. I felt like a ringmaster who has induced the lions to form a circle and dance sedately bearing in their teeth a silk ribbon with no beginning and no end. I sat until the room was dark.
I was looking for a man. Until I saw Lucas Salik at Anne Cowdenbeath’s house in autumn, standing taller than anyone in the room and looking as clean as mint, I had been smug about love at first sight. Like burglary, though, it must be something which comes to you at last. Perhaps I had been too old too young and had this shock coming to me to teach me that all my monkey tricks were no good at a real tea party. I knew it was love because it was painful and the pain was about my heart. Even as I put my head in the noose and jumped and danced, I knew too that I was swinging not only for this man but for the chance of a father. Not just because of his age, but because of the purity about him and the air of difficultness, I became aware that I was going to lose time to this person. When he looked at me, I saw that he recognised something, too, as though a current of just stirring air were moving blue paper to orange flame. I was leaning against a mirror, my back to it, and a short man was printing out words from his mouth to my bosom. He chopped with his hands between sentences and even his eyelids had hair. I watched Lucas Salik, whom I recognised in fact as well as with my heart, since I had read articles about him and knew that he was a friend of Anne’s. I saw him leave the room and felt lustreless immediately. In the end the Greek left and I learnt that love in its early stages is self-reflexive and to do with vanity. Had Lucas Salik remained in the room, I would have been surrounded by men. His presence made me feel royal. His absence left me wretched. The only reason I stayed at the party was that Johnny returned to speak to me and I can never shake him off.