Authors: Candia McWilliam
I was pleased that these girls, who did not care about such things, indeed who despised them, would suspect, if only for a second, that the man I was besotted with was my lover. That they might think this made it a truth to me. I could understand why lies grow out of dreams.
‘Oh-ho, and has he cut you about yet?’ asked Angelica. ‘And has he sliced you open to see what it’s like inside?’
‘He’d never find out the usual way,’ said Dolores. This was a long sentence for her and seemed to bear some meaning which amused her, for she put her hand to her mouth, a human gesture for once. Dolores hummed when she was in her stride, a humming not from the throat so much as from her core. It was an almost soundless whirr like an idling machine or a cat too replete to purr. The noise may just have been the tension she conveyed, a tension not unpleasurable to its dispenser.
‘What’ve you got that he wants, Cora, contacts in the organ world?’ asked Angel, and she materialised at my side and pulled Dolores against her so they were like dancing partners, linked at the waist. They were as appealing as animals: that they were human gave them the vulgar but undeniable allure of creatures photographed for a newspaper, two frosty-whiskered leopard cubs. I even seemed to see them in a granular newsprint texture as though I were looking through a veil. This disintegration of what I see precedes tears for me. I hoped that they would not perceive this. I have never liked being teased.
They began to sing. Clues like this would sometimes encourage me to think that I had at last found out their age; but the only way to do that would be to hook them and tell over, as with sharks, their stomach contents, and that must wait till the Resurrection. As I would rise again with my son, so they would each produce the devoured souls of armies of fallen, rich, subjugated men.
They sang:
Last night I dreamed a dreadful dream
Beyond the isles of sky
I dreamed I saw a dead man fight
And that dead man was I.
Their voices were not thin like children’s, but swooped like cats’ cries.
‘He’s here, and we’ve got to split. We’re seeing a man about a dog. Take the afternoon off.’
I was grateful and surprised. Angel took the keys of the shop from her cinctured waist, and we all went out. Before I could introduce Angel, or Dolores could show her surgeon how well she remained, they were gone, tails in the air, starry behinds twinned, and I, heavy with assumed nuptial glee, was in the car of Lucas Salik.
‘Cora, it’s very good news, I know you are doing the best thing.’ Not, I know you will be very happy, I thought. Perhaps doctors are wary of such prognoses.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’ve known Hal for six years and can promise you will always be diverted.’ No sermons, no backbone of England references, then. ‘And that is a better promise than almost any. The cardinal virtues can be learnt later.’ I had a picture of Hal, red-hatted, buttoned into his covering gown, swiving, poisoning, machinating, as cardinals will. Mandrills and bishops have purple in common.
‘I’m happy with the ordinal ones,’ I said.
He turned to me as we drove. I do not like this, it makes me fear a slip, a skid; I prefer to speak to eyes in the mirror.
‘I prefer the cardinal ones. The big ones, if advertised, are absent, and, if present, are like mountains, so great that you can’t see them till you’re away from them. I mistrust anyway what is larger than life. Saviours, statesmen, generals, saints, they would all be dreary at dinner. I like sinners with besetting virtues. Great big men are like constellations, their faults made fiery by night’s blackness all right, but also rather humbling, and, on bad days, making you shake your fist at their splendid absentness.’ He spoke to me as though I understood what he said, which made me happy.
‘Do you love your patients?’ I asked.
‘Do you want to ask me that? I love them intensely when they begin to cease to depend on me. I feel as though I created them. Then they leave and they are as they were before, and I have been nothing but a cloud which fell over their life and moved off. It is like a mother, perhaps. I do all I can and I can’t do more. But my hands can do more than my brain reports back to me, and that instinct is like love, it is blind but sees clearly too. Shall we eat at home? Do you have to go back? Those girls look like twin Siameses.’
‘You know one of them.’
‘Do I?’
‘She was one of your patients. Dolores Steel.’ Did he know she had been in prison?
‘Your question is answered, then. I was as deep inside her as a person can be but I don’t recognise her. Still, some love is like that.’
‘What love? Surely not.’ I could not tell what he meant. I would know you in a shaven crowd of skeletons, I thought, and then thanked God I’d not said it. I have seen pictures. I threw away a book I found in the public library. Not to save me, to save them. I felt thrilled by it and was terrified. The book had been borrowed more than any other I’d seen, papered with borrowing slips. The man who wrote the book had been in one of these camps, and now he lived in Wigtown. ‘He was the last man in the Wigtown telephone directory,’ said my teacher. ‘It’s one of those names you deny thrice, all zeds. But I expect he counts himself lucky to be there, even the last man in Wigtown. And if you look at that sort of stuff again you’ll turn into a toad. It’s pornography.’ So I would just look at these books in the library, in between bodice-rippers and ballet books. Like most girls brought up in a town, I featured in a series of small violations, among them a sad dark man in a jumper and a duffel coat who felt my knees under the fabloned table in the library one smoky afternoon as I skipped through
The Rise of the Reich
,
The Diary of Anne Frank
and
The Scourge of the Swastika
, looking for pain. Then I took home
The Leopard
and was on the way to recovery.
‘I thought you would like to eat in my secret room now that you are one of the family, Cora. I’ve put it all up there.’
I had not realised that his tall flat had another floor. It was big enough already. He led me upstairs, cautiously, as though he were going to present me to someone whose behaviour could not be predicted.
I took a liberty. ‘Do you have a secret life in your secret room?’ I asked.
‘Don’t be arch. I thought you were over that. And don’t get hurt feelings. Women always have hurt feelings and it’s all show. Wait till you are really hurt. There you are.’
He opened the door into a large warm room between whose high windows was drawn a bath. That is, there was a bath, the old-fashioned sort with feet and smooth flanks, full of water, fuzzed with steam. It was a real bath, though almost everything else about the room was not real, but painted. On all four walls were depicted dancers, tumblers, musicians. The room was a clearing in the heart of a crowd of pastel celebrants, all shown in noisy joy, and all flat and silent. Harlequin, masked and with his nose erect, clasped coy Columbine in her wafered chiffons to his grape-groined body, chequered with kites of cinnamon and bosky mauve. Pierrot mooned over his tortoise-bodied lute. Ribbons of lettuce green hung from it. Among these figures of the
commedia
walked, danced, embraced and drank real people, if you could call them that, the damsels and queens for a day of rustic picnic. It was stylised, yet domestic, unreal in the uniformity of the faces of the revellers, which seemed, like the faces of ballet dancers, to have more in common than simply eyes, nose, mouth, even the actual cast of those features. It was as though the painter had codified the faces, for what was variable and distinctive was the colour, pattern and texture of the limbs, clothes, tents, instruments and bowers of the figures. Swagged, paisleyed, pied, piped, tasselled, pelmetted, stippled and dappled with a lemony sun which was gently overlaid and contradicted by the real pale sun from outside, as it washed in, checked by the windows’ astragals, the scene was as busy but orderly as an enormous textile. Appearance was everything. It was not a tidy room but everything in it appeared to be placed, not put. It was full of broken light. The shadows of the last leaves on the trees by the canal showed trembling over their still, painted counterparts. Painted clouds showed flocky underparts where the real sun fell. And the clouds of steam from the bath were not, as nothing was, what they seemed to be. The bath was foaming over, I saw as I came closer, moving past a shawled piano, with a deep head of baby’s breath.
‘It’s customary for brides,’ he said.
It was all too lovely.
I am an intellectual snob. In really lovely rooms, I have eaten canned ravioli and hairy toast, with great painters whose trousers are their painting rags. I mistrust loveliness unaccompanied by a little salutary privation. Battered beauties, ruins, were what I was used to. There was something too groomed, too purchased, about coexistent beauty and luxury.
‘Don’t be a prig,’ said Lucas Salik. ‘You are a young woman, and engaged to be married for the first time, so leave your high mind on the hatstand and have some of this.’
The feast was cold. It was like the meal which Beauty eats in the house of the Beast before he appears. This was clear delicious food unmixed, primary on the flat palette of the plate. There was red salmon, and red tomatoes dewy without skin; there were red plums and yellow plums and a bowl of green and purple leaves. These leaves were glossy, and there was a smell of oil and wine. Chinese white, four peeled eggs lay like decoys on a blue pond of dish. There was a loaf which was torn in pieces, of a white just warmer than milk but not as deep as cream; the top of this bread was shiny, its declivities and heights grape-shot with seeds. White butter, white cheese and red wine were wax and chalk and ruby in the sinking sun. The room smelt of one other thing, not smoke, or flowers, but something between, with the pervasive strength of the one and the sweetness of the other. On a glass dish flat like a lily-pad lay platelets of sugared carmine jelly.
It was a meal to be painted not eaten – but have you never wondered in what state still lives are by the time their beauty has been transposed into paint? The caterpillars on the plums must be chrysalids on prunes by then, and the game riced with grubs, its feathers long poached by the painter’s wife for her hat.
Lucas appeared to be preparing himself to say something. If it was a bargain like Pluto’s with Proserpine, I was already too late. I had eaten a plum, which must, in the barter of fruit with time, equal more than six pomegranate seeds.
‘You eat,’ he said, ‘and I’ll talk, for the moment. Not for the sake of it but because I’ve something important to say. Had you thought about the practical side of your life at all?’
I could not say that this wedding would not
be
were I not organising the practical side, a life for the baby, a father and a home.
‘I mean where you will live and on what?’ he continued. ‘I hope you won’t think me either interfering or underhand but I have discussed this with Hal and I managed to persuade him to accept a little help. I hope that you will be less reluctant than he. I wonder whether you would allow me to buy you a house. Nothing too demanding for you, but a little security for you both. As you know, Hal’s family have land but land is not, as the island race remind one, liquid, and you cannot start your married life in a rented flat. That is, of course you can, but I would not like it and I can afford to do this for you. It will give me pleasure. And, now . . .’ He did not let me interrupt, but like a parent with a picky child buttered me a curl of bread and put it into the hand which was not holding my glass. ‘Now you must let me talk about the baby.’
I was dressed much as most of the posed revellers about us; in cloth more patterned than shaped. The baby could not yet show, or could a doctor tell?
He went on. ‘If and when there is a baby, when, I hope, rather than if, will you allow me to make it my heir? I have no family left. I am not old but I have no plans. Please say yes.’
‘What did Hal say?’ I had the surrender of will which overtakes as the anaesthetic floods in. It was at once pleasant and compromising. My motives in marrying Hal were not pure, but they were not as impure as this could make them seem. But who would know?
Lucas sipped his wine. His mouth made that noise, sip, and he looked like someone who very nearly remembers something well forgotten. ‘I’ll tell you what he said when you’ve guessed what this is,’ he said, and passed me the flat plate of red sweets. I picked up a square. It had a pasty texture; it tasted of Turkish delight made not of summer’s roses but of the tastes of autumn, smoke and leaves and apples, a sweet mulch. The sugar made a noise like frost in my teeth. It tasted like the smell in the room. The smell was like musk, and breath, and ash.
‘It tastes like the smell in the room.’
‘What is it? See if you can track it down.’
I set off about the room, my glass, again full, in my hand. It could be the baby’s breath, but could you make a red jelly of the white flowers? Not unless the flowers bled. I pushed my face into the frothing tub, but it smelt only of green stalks and light powder.
‘Go to the piano,’ he said.
The shawl which covered the piano lid was the transparent red of the smoked salmon, paisley-eyed with almonds of green. It was held against slipping by a pile of sheet music, the pale blue of washed shirts, lettered in spindly Gothic black. At the tip of the fin of lid was a row of yellow apples. The scent came from them. When I picked one up, it was matt, like clean skin, and fluffy like a man’s cheek, in towards its stalk. At school they said that I put things in my mouth before I thought I bit it as you might an apple. The flesh held my teeth like the stone the sword. My mouth parched.