Authors: Candia McWilliam
As I left Albany, it was completely dark, and cold.
‘You should have taken it, you know,’ said Tertius. ‘After all, you could never break it. No bad luck.’
I left, full of the superiority of one who has refused blandishment twice, spent a time scrubbing, and knows herself to be the repository of love for a good man.
The baby gave a kick, or was it my heart? Had they changed places?
By the Thursday of Lucas Salik’s dinner party, I was blown with thoughts of him. I had so little information, most of it from glancing reference or tabloid newspaper, the one too sketchy, the other too heavy-handed. But I could sit for hours turning my head like a sunflower to thoughts of him. He was a continent to me; I could have made charts of his eyes, maps of his hands. My perceptions were distorted by pregnancy and by obsession. I felt like Alice, so extremely did the scale of things swell, or shrink. In my dreams, I was walking over terrain which was Lucas, he was carrying me safe in his hand, he was wearing me in his buttonhole. In the day, I seemed suddenly to grow, to knock things over with my monstrous limbs, to have such heightened senses that the powder of another girl on the tube would nauseate me, the smell of flowers make me weak with maudlin grief. I could not read newspapers without crying. Every tale of gallantry or misery made me shake. The simpler the story, the deeper was my response. I was becoming the perfect tabloid reader. I left Tertius’s chambers drunk on the delicious raspberry smell of Windolene, arrived home weeping after seeing the headline ‘
plucky little Ahmed
–
mother’s vigil
’. Moreover, I could not stop myself.
I was possessed.
When Lucas answered the door, I felt momentarily appeased by the sight of him and then discontented that we were not to be alone.
‘Lucas might have a surprise for you,’ Tertius had said. Had Tertius guessed? Had Lucas actually confided in Tertius, who was after all his friend in spite of their different ways of life? Did he care for me, then? But make it soon, oh God, for then I must find the man I am to marry.
I could smell Lucas’s clean skin as I came in. I felt a completely pleasurable relaxation, a sense of subjugation, like a deer settling in a patch of shade so cool that it does not matter if the striped coolness is actually a tiger dormant. I delivered myself to him.
‘Have you met? I feel sure you must have, Cora Godfrey, Hal Darbo.’
Was I imagining the proprietary tone in his voice as he introduced me to this blond, slim man, perhaps twenty-five? I wondered briefly how he knew Lucas and then, I thought,
A blond
,
slim young man
,
perhaps twenty-five
, and I concentrated all my attention upon what fate had offered me as a potential husband. I arrested my floating, blissful, besotted, pregnant, diffused self, and clapped myself in the stocks of reality. The main obvious physical drawback was that this Hal was a creep. His meat-eating laugh and raucous accessories told me as much. He was like a boy who will become an old woman without seeing manhood. His looks were good, but not fine. He was made to be seen from far below, like a mannerist boy on a distant ceiling, all swagger and codpiece and painted eyes. He wore just a very little mascara. Had I not been pregnant, I probably would not have noticed, but I could smell the creosote in it. Lucas, very busy with plates and tureens and glasses, none the less watched us as much as he could, so I made an effort for him as well as for my child’s security. I am good at looking rapt and thinking about other things, and this evening I did better even than that. I looked rapt and thought about the same thing. This Hal could not be entirely awful or he would not have been here.
‘So,’ he said, ‘what brings you here?’
I did not reply, ‘I came for a chance to glare at a man whom I have fallen in love with but cannot have since his colouring is not congruent to that of the man who somehow fathered the foetus I am carrying – look no hands.’ Besides, he continued speaking.
‘Not from London, are you?’ Most people who live in London are not from London, they come from other islands, other continents or far-flung suburbs.
‘No, are you?’ I asked.
‘I know it very well, but no, my family are from Dorset.’
This is code for, ‘I and my ancestors know who we are, we have lived in the same place for generations, we are people of substance, we pick fruit from trees our forebears planted.’ If it is true, it is finer unsaid. He was like a man polishing his watch to show that it is gold. He proceeded to wag before my gaze, which he hoped would be hypnotised, the fat gold watch of his pride. We got on perfectly well. I kept my eyes open. I saw him notice my breasts which were bigger than they usually were because of the baby. He could not see my son. I could feel him pricing my clothes like a salesman. I wondered whether he was an actor.
‘No, estate agent for my sins.’
I love ‘for my sins’. It is a way of getting through a boring conversation. If you stick it on the end of the baldest statement it has a portentous ring which strikes a pompous gong. At least on the evenings together I would be able to identify, bring down and tag this boy’s flights of vocabulary. But now I would not tease, but lure.
‘You must see some lovely houses.’ I looked at him as though he held the key to heaven.
‘There are some fine homes,’ he responded, ‘but a lot of them are dogs. Still, you can do wonders with the particulars.’
Incredulous, I took part in the conversation which translates ‘leaky windowseat’ into ‘conservatory with view to water garden’. It is a game for dull car journeys to unanticipated destinations.
But how could I mind? I was in the house of the man I had fallen in love with, fallen like an apple. At dinner I was placed between Tertius, who was ribald and easy, and a delightful man called Daniel whose artificial hands were like silver crabs. As Lucas cleared away the soup plates, which had contained a dark red soup, I looked up to see Hal Darbo staring at me. He looked like a drag queen, with his soup-lipsticked mouth, but I knew he was a last chance and I sent over into his eyes the long beam like a searchlight which says, ‘I am really interested in you, you remarkable, rare, creature.’ His eyes returned a look which seemed to say, ‘Accustomed as I am to receiving that information, it is acceptable from you and we might yet come to some accommodation though it is always a dicy business until contracts are exchanged.’ I felt, which was mystifying, that he was approaching me with something of the same calculation with which I was attempting to acquire him. Even in these earliest exchanges it was clear that he was prompted by something more willed than desire.
Various remarks he made struck me, for my sins.
‘I never use Barbados,’ he said, and not during a course when we could have been taking sugar.
‘A couple of hundred ks, I tell them, or they think they’re in shantytown.’
‘Not a bad cook, Lucas, when he pulls his finger out.’ This was a bray.
And so on. By the time Lucas set upon the table a glass bowl of shimmering green jelly, I was sure that Hal Darbo would ask to see me again, and my plans were laid, though I could envisage no elevation of the edifice whose foundations I was laying. I felt cold when I considered what I was actually doing, taking steps towards a decision I could not but regret. If I married, I would have to stay married, but in the time available I would be unable to find the double of Johnny with all the qualities I admired in Lucas. I was using secret knowledge as an excuse for ruthlessness. I was committing, if not a sin, a dangerous manipulation which could not be without its own consequences, in the name of my child. I had seen women take small ruthless actions on their children’s behalf before. In the name of the little ones, atrocities are quite possible.
But in those days, I could have argued myself into committing almost any crime to see the dark head of Lucas Salik.
When I looked up at him, towards the end of the meal, taking my eyes briefly from those of Hal Darbo, I was so far advanced in the deliquescence of love that he appeared to have a halo. What I saw in his sunk eyes was wonderful to me. He was jealous. He looked as though he had stepped into an acid bath. He blazed, white and black, his halo the street light outside, blazing beyond the window, which, being of old glass, took and reinterpreted our solid lives like water. I looked into the black window where we all floated and settled, the colours drained of brightness, our faces white, the most real things the cold silver and green and transparent glass of knives and forks, bottles and glasses, paraphernalia more enduring than we who used it. When I said goodnight to Lucas, I wanted to cut a hole in his side and re-enter it, to be a rib of Adam.
I was driven home by a man with no hands, my heart belonging to a man who was a mender of hearts, and within me was growing another heart, not mine at all, but never quite not mine. These grotesque anatomical tmeses touched my dreams through a thin sleep.
Hal Darbo would be my artificial limb.
Hal had few other resources but he did have quite a lot of money. Our first engagement was in a restaurant. If he had been just a little more clever, he would have learnt that two hours spent in a theatre or a cinema save a certain amount of effort. I felt that he was putting himself through some necessary though hardly pleasant system, almost as if in preparation for an examination. I was not sure whether I was the matriculation he sought.
For he wanted me, or performed the manoeuvres of one who did, though he was not privately lustful, which saved me, since I was entering a period of my pregnancy when all contact, even with my clothes or with soap or a towel, seemed violent. I was also keeping myself like a bride for Lucas Salik. I let myself do this, and would continue to do so, until Hal became importunate. Of this he showed no sign. In public, he mauled me, but only when people were looking. When he said goodbye to me, we kissed as though reciprocal insertion of tongues into mouths was the general method of signalling departure for all people, whatever their relation. He did not draw me to him.
He seemed not to enjoy being with one other person. He spoke of his friends, not in a way which suggested that they had any distinguishing characteristics but as though they were his chorus, providing reaction to his performance. Not a thing he did was done without consideration for its effect. Not its consequence, its effect. You felt if he were especially jubilant he would not sing or dance or make love, but quaff some jazzy liquor, purchase a powerful speedster and open up full throttle into an impossible blonde on an alp. Because he was a reflection of others’ dreams, he was not so much insubstantial as so fashionable as to be very nearly dated all the time. ‘Not even wind surfers, dear, can always be
dans le vent
,’ Anto had once said to me.
Hal was the embodiment of modern cliché. He was not an eternal verity become a cliché, he was a nonentity with shrewdly mimicked characteristics. He was like reproduction furniture. I wondered if he had been born with no face and taken to a plastic surgeon. It would be a
plastic
surgeon. All these lofty conclusions about Hal excused me to myself. It is easier to forgive yourself for doing damage to a doll than to a person. As to who loved him, his friends and family, I did not yet know.
He was personable and he took me out a good deal. During this time, he asked me almost nothing of myself. This was a relief since I could not tell the truth, and also because it would be easier simply to use a person who had never shown himself interested, warm or vulnerable. I saw him at least once a day, and he telephoned me more often than that. I did not feel that he called to hear my voice but rather to check in, as one does before an aeroplane flight. I wondered if he realised that marriage was my destination. There was a comforting passivity for me in all this, which suited me as my body concentrated upon itself and its ward. While the word parasite is ugly, it is fine to be a host. In Greek, the word for host and guest is the same, and sometimes, after I had said goodnight to Hal or in the morning before dressing for work, I felt that I was the baby’s guest, that he was entertaining me.
Of course it was a boy. It must be.
Tertius seemed delighted at Hal’s pursuit of me. He frisked about his chambers, making sandwiches which he left among the highly coloured broken books. He asked me all the questions Hal did not ask me about myself. He began to show a side which it would be mistaken to call womanish. It was more tender and less competitive than that. He could ask the right question, again and again, like a kind torturer. I was starting to like him. I knew that he was a petty, easily bored and venal man, and a promiscuous homosexual. But he gave the impression, after you had observed him for some time, that these were the only sane things to be. He was spoilt, he had carved a waxy cell for himself among the drones, but he enjoyed what he did enjoy, properly. I was not able to imagine his most private enjoyments, but I had seen him crooning over his gesso, giggling over gossip, and spluttering his enjoyable anger all over a greasy but savoured feast. His vulgarity seemed like a tremendous headdress worn to keep marauders from something of very good quality borne inside his head. It might have been something as abstruse as perfect taste – that is, taste so good, rather than so exclusive, as to be almost a moral quality. Or it might have been that he was very kind and did not want to show that kindness to everyone, for not even that much kindness may help more than the very few intimates of a man.