Authors: Candia McWilliam
‘I’ve got to see a person this evening, baby,’ said Hal. He moved his head like a pony, his palomino fringe momentarily covering his eyes. He pushed the hair back with his right hand and I saw the darker hair near the skull. I wondered what he would do when he was bald, then thought with some relief that he would probably not go bald but move with the aid of dyes from gilded youth to silver age with no bimetallic middle period.
‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’d like to think a bit, too.’ As if thinking were something to be done alone. Soon I hoped to be able to stop thinking for good.
‘Leave the planning alone for a bit would you?’ he said. ‘I don’t go for the idea of you doing it for yourself, not having a mother and things.’
Had I said I had no mother? Not as far as I was aware. People used to guess because of my domestic hopelessness, but I had rectified that. At school there had been a term of derision, then pity after I had sewn my nametapes on outside my clothes, like small civic awards.
cora godfrey. cora godfrey
. Cora, simply, even then.
Hal’s face looked odd. He looked a little like a still from a film where someone is very slowly dying young. His eyes were filling with something moist which was gathering in their pink cills. He was a photogenic man, I was sure. A drop of Hal’s eye moisture hung from one of his blue-black eyelashes. Hal was exhibiting sympathy. It was of course counterfeit, could well have been used to sell black tulips or those brogues which stretch with the dead foot after death, but I was tired and pregnant and could not risk exposure to sentiment that evening, for fear of melting down.
He faced me and leant his forehead till it touched mine, so our touching heads made a gable for our faces against the now heavier rain. Leaves lay yellow and flat on the shiny road, silent town leaves unlike the crisp country leaves of autumn. He made me thoroughly depressed about not having a mother, as though it were like ordering the wrong wine.
‘It will be good,’ said Hal, kissing me photogenically, and pushing me gently to meet a swiftly advancing taxi.
I was grateful to whoever had put the severed tongue in Lucas’s car. The rawness of the shock had disarmed him and given him to me for that time he had spent in my house. Had we not passed that time together, I do not think that I would so quickly have decided to accept Hal’s proposal. But that I had this occasion to pore over (I had seen him asleep. Can you go further than that?) gave me a dowry of felt life (‘What other kind is there?’ asked Anto. ‘Underfelt life, I suppose.’) to take to my grave or my manger. Besides, there was no need to look at it that dramatically, for I gathered that Lucas would always be there. He was fond of Hal. Perhaps, after delving into open chests trying to trap the life within, he was soothed by Hal’s superficiality. I have noticed too that some men have a – completely unsexual – nostalgia which is frequently for a lost youth which they did not have. I imagined that Lucas had spent much of his youth isolated by books and by his work, and was nostalgic for a time of action and surface and success with girls which he had passed up. People feel such tenderness for themselves when young. Perhaps Lucas Salik had grown up in a town; Hal had grown up in the country, fed on bacon and Studland crabs and cream. Was Lucas perhaps envious of Hal? No one had told Hal’s parents no longer to inhabit their part of Dorset, nor burnt their parish church. Hal’s grandparents had not had to hide in the hills from Roman Catholics setting out on a pogrom from Wimborne. Yes, surely that must be a cause of envy.
Sometimes I even thought that Hal, as it were, came with Lucas, and I could not believe my luck. It was not that I envisaged a ménage à trois, but it was good to think that Lucas’s life would be parallel to our own.
‘I am delighted for you, of course, but Hal is really the lucky one. And me,’ said Lucas on the telephone two days after I had become engaged. This confirmed my feeling that he would be there throughout Hal’s and my marriage.
‘Thank you. I hope I shall please you.’ Whether plural or singular, he could never know.
‘You will please me.’ I felt my wrists grow cold as though they had been wiped with acetone. I rocked as I held the telephone to distract myself from the pleasure.
I did not want to say ‘thank you’ again or we should be stuck like two characters from Molíre faced with a revolving door.
‘And, Cora, are you working today or are you able to join me for a late lunch at home? I have to finish some work here but there are some things . . .’
‘I am working, but can have lunch.’ I was in the charity shop more and more. Angel and Dolores seemed to need me.
‘I’ll collect you, shall I?’ he asked. ‘You won’t have time otherwise.’
‘Oh, thank you, you don’t know what a difference that would make.’ I had had to start taking buses because the underground made me so ill, and I was not good at it. When I am on the tube I wonder where all the pregnant women are, or have they mastered the buses? They do not walk, for I never see them on the street, and they cannot all be indoors. I have seen only three other pregnant women exposed to the public eye. One was a big blue brigantine of a woman running an easting down Knightsbridge. One was an Indian in a mauve sari with a little boy atop the coming baby; she was trailing a tartan golf-bag full of shopping. The other woman was myself advancing in a shop window. And only I as yet knew I
was
pregnant. So perhaps I had seen thousands more than I knew, but I just could not tell. I look at stomachs now, to see if they shelter citizens of the future, parenthetic people.
‘I shall collect you at half-past one. You do not know how I look forward to it,’ he said.
At the shop, Angel was as still as a cat. She was stiff with electricity. She hissed down the telephone. She was in places without perceptibly moving towards them. She was dressed as an astral plumber, in dungarees and tennis shoes. In her ears were gold spanners and she wore a belt of gold, which showed that her waist was as narrow as a hand. Furs and feathers and leathers were taboo, but she felt no shyness of treasure and wore metal and gems like a savage queen. With her ‘boring’ real baubles, she wore false gems. Dolores shared Angel’s ropes and manacles and shackles and cleats of minerals. Each of them invariably wore a gold handcuff, a split pair, Angelica explained, used by her great-uncle to civilise jealous mistresses. He would leave them cuffed together for the night, right hands linked. In the morning they would be brought tea – ‘And the co-operation of the two thirsty ladies in their mutual desire for refreshment was remarkable to see,’ Angel would say, mimicking the old man. Two ladies had stimulatingly displeased him by ignoring the tea. ‘Pretty as a picture,’ the great-uncle said, Angel told me. The chambermaid saw it too. And how did Angel know? ‘Oh, Harding was with us for ever and she had a grey parrot with which she taught me to kiss.’ I thought of the dark blue spatula of a parrot’s tongue and Angel’s pink triangle. ‘The parrot had a dark pink crest which stood up when it was excited,’ she said, and she looked through me to Dolores who was also rigged as a navvy. The studs at the front of Dolores’s suit were haphazardly done up. The chains seemed to weigh her down. She looked trammelled with languor as she sat, little red cotton sandals on the bar of her chair, and legs tense and spread as a frog’s, except that her right hand was busy, scratch, rub, writing in what looked like a diary. I assumed it was accounts for the shop. Her hair was caught up in pins to the top of her head so that her eyes blazed unobscured. Both she and Angel had eyes which were long, made to be seen, like those of a pharaonic slave, in sly profile, with a sweep of lid as long, like the undisplaying tail of a peacock. These four eyes looked like the hieroglyphs for fish.
As I grew more pregnant, I became more scared of these two. I had let the side down. I was sure that they had insides which would not be so inefficient as to be hostess to the issue of a man. As for getting married, I dared not tell them. When I did, they would simply replace me, and until then I wanted an income and somewhere to go in the daytime. It had become my only job beside cleaning for Tertius.
For there was money. I had none. When people I had come to know said they had no money, they did not mean what I mean. They meant that the extravagant step they contemplated might not at that moment be prudent. I meant that it was a question of looking to see if that Isle of Man fifty-pence piece I had found in my raincoat lining was legal tender or if it would be best to try it on a chocolate machine before handing it to the greengrocer. This moneylessness was starting to bite. In their middle twenties people start requiring all sorts of hardware; the game of being a student starts to pall. I was good at the appearance of money and hopeless about its principles. If I could make a day go by with the sustained appearance of solvency, I let the next day go hang. I had somehow not learnt the virtues of thrift and providence. More than that, I desired their opposites, though I had never gambled with anything but my life. For every day I just about got through on money from redeemed fizzy-drinks bottles, the lie (that I had money) dictated by my vanity was protected and sustained. The reason many of my contemporaries could play for so long so late and with such dangerous toys was that they could go and recuperate in houses whence nothing could be seen but green. Before their dinner parties they rang Nanny, nodding in her little room in Rye or Brighton, to find out the recipe for thick gravy. And, no matter how wild they were, they would have narrow feet and know how to tip and whom to address as Mr and whom as Esquire. They knew never ever to touch capital. The boys were the same. They changed their shirts twice a day and were neither familiar with inferiors nor keen with their seniors. They had few superiors. They passed out like gentlemen, having aimed the sick inconspicuously, and were impassive, even derisive, in the face of female nakedness. If at a party other women than the stripper were present – real girls, girls whom you married – they knew how to carry on. Treat it as dressage, and make cool and detailed comment indicative of expertise. Just in time, I was getting out. Lucas would take me and Hal under his wing.
‘Address these, Cora, would you,’ stated Angel. She was folding leaflets. Periodically we sent these out, appealing for funds. Why did Angelica not just auction a selection of golden tools?
No sport in that, I supposed.
So I spent the morning addressing glueless envelopes, glueless because the gum is made from the feet of cows, as anyone who has worked for a newspaper or lived near a knacker will tell you, and is therefore ideologically unsound. There was at my school a girl with such a seraphic face that she was unable to convince people that she had ever done anything wrong. She was poised and lovely. Her rosy cheeks seemed scented with sweetness. She was cruel and loved to tease ugly people. Her tribute was obedience without question and a constant flow of dirty information; if you kept her in these, she left you alone. I bought a term’s peace from her with a corked test-tube full of cow gum. I told her I had obtained it not without difficulty from a boy I knew. The terrible smell of sealing that lie I cannot forget. She was in ways a perfect beauty, ethereal to look at and with a real enthusiasm for her subject. Perhaps she was my first Angel. I fall for these tyrannical beauties who are preposterous but a pleasure to please, like monstrous children. Once in possession of your abject devotion, they excise you. You cannot keep them happy for very long. They are, for girls educated only with other girls, not a lesson in one’s own sex so much as an instruction in the ways of heartbreakers. From them, you may painfully learn what to beauties of each sex comes naturally, encouragement, evasion, desertion. The smell of cow gum always recalls that summer of meretriciously purchased peace. The licking of envelopes evokes its price.
Angel provided me with a list and a pile of envelopes. The names were the usual ones, the back two pages of most exhibition catalogues and all opera programmes, but this time with their addresses. Magnificent storekeepers, famous scientists, and a procession of older beauties, if you could categorise them at all, seemed to be the catchment area today. But I did not ask Angel how she had made her choice of ‘victims’. I have thought before now that she can hardly differentiate between people. She does not see them as more than a herd.
Just before one o’clock, Dolores sighed, put down her pen and stood up. Then, like a cat washing itself, piecemeal, she admired herself, section by section. She walked over to the glass and strained on tiptoe until she could see her face. She smoothed her brows with licked little fingers. She smoothed the pearly brown long lids of her eyes with the middle finger of each hand. She tilted her chin at herself, this way then that, and caressed her own neck till it seemed to grow longer. Then, she tucked her right hand and her left into her dungarees and, as though she was touching icing sugar or talc, she remoulded her breasts. They stood out soft and hard-tipped, on either side of the range of press studs down her front. She held her hands away from her, of necessity at arm’s length, and then flattened them slowly down her swerved back, African buttocks and small round thighs. To watch her do this was to watch a sculptress. She had re-made herself, in her own image.
‘Wait a bit, Dolly,’ said Angelica. ‘We’ve got to wait till the Mouse’s trap appears. Who is it Mouse, today?’
Should I feel guilty about allowing Lucas near these girls whose associates, I was fairly certain, had put that disgusting tongue in his car? It was not brave to have hidden that I suspected I knew where the thing had come from. Vanity again, I thought.
‘It’s Lucas Salik,’ I said, and I was delighted to be able to say it.