Authors: Candia McWilliam
I left out from my packing a sponge bag. My nightdress was drying round the tun of the immersion heater. A small suitcase packed for the unknown destination of my honeymoon – our honeymoon – stood like a hod of bricks at the side of my fort of boxes.
I went to the now mirrorless bathroom and pushed the bathplug into its socket. It was a universal plug, such as travellers to Russia use, and it would not fit snug. I tipped a mogul of blue salts into the tub and turned on the taps, which called a seabird’s cry from the heater, and a dim roar. There was a smell of matches as the boiler ignited. The water rose, blue and troubled, up the sides of the bath. I stepped in, thinking, if I was thinking at all, about making a cake for Dick and Gloria. Perhaps I could even bake something into it as the prison visitor bakes in the file, two bachelors’ buttons maybe. I rocked. The baby rose to the top of me as I lay. It rested like cream over milk.
I awoke, and heard Dick and Gloria themselves. The bath was not quite cold. The wind was getting up outside, flapping like a sail going up. The gusts were caught among the masses of the city, an inconsistent, interrupted wind.
Dick and Gloria sounded quiet, like nurses.
‘She’s not in the bedroom, only a lot of boxes,’ said Gloria.
‘Cora, are you about?’
I pulled myself out of the bath as out of a rocking chair in sand, my pregnant body off its centre, and put on a towel.
‘Hello Cora.’ They looked embarrassed.
‘I’m sorry I’ve not got any clothes on. My nightie’s wet and I’m afraid the bathroom mirror . . .’
‘Get a drink,’ said Dick to Gloria, and he pulled me into their room which was like the parlour of an out-of-season house in Chekhov, the furniture covered with the dustsheets of the tea-impregnated lace.
We had brandy from thick glasses. Had they not been thick, I would have cracked mine into my palm.
‘We raced with the telephone. We thought Hal might get you first. Something rather bad has happened to Lucas Salik.’ They were that good. They did not draw to themselves the glamour a bearer of bad news can claim, with suspense and banner headlines.
I felt three things. One was a sharp deep pain, as though I had been sliced. One was guilt, at not having loved him enough to provide a protection. The third, as involuntary as a smile at a funeral, was relief. There could be no wedding now.
I was not looking for it. I saw it first in the paper. The only reason Tertius did not get in with the news beforehand was my insomnia, which had held off till about four in the morning and then arrived and faced me out like a clock whose hands will not move. I opened my shutters and watched the London darkness change beyond the balcony. It changed from deep festive blue to cupreous green to rusty red. There was a wind which came from no fixed quarter. The leaves had been swept away by a giant with dust in his hair and a stiff besom. His coat was shouldered in reflecting plastic which was as proclamatory as a white stick; it said, I am very slow, do not run me over while I sweep up leaves before your car. His cart was made of some base metal like zinc, frosty with arcs of fanned shimmer. Metallic too, the moon showed sharp in the changing sky. I moved to the other, cold, side of my bed, and took up my book. I could as well have written letters or cooked a small feast, but there is a night-shift loneliness to these things, done alone; with the one other, of course, they are transformed.
I read my book by turning its pages. I had no presentiment, for I could not feel time passing. I jerked to complete alertness with rough eyeballs and a snapped neck when the papers came slapping through the letterbox like fish.
I receive all the newspapers in case there is one I feel like reading. There is no nonsense about ironing them, but at Stone the tabloids go into the low Aga for ten minutes and in London I wear white cotton gloves which get black on Sundays. If you read one of those tabloid papers without wearing gloves and then went out and killed a man, the police would have you by the evening edition.
Today there was no time for gloves. I am used to pictures of Lucas in the newspapers, but these pictures were cropped. I recognised the photograph; it had been taken at a party. His face, repeated in various sizes on the front page of each paper, looked facetious without the body, at ease, one hand no doubt holding a glass, from which it had been separated. I was used to seeing photographs of Lucas with children tented up in bed or parents looking like lottery winners. But these reproductions of this personal photograph suggested not the saintly surgeon the papers as a rule promoted. He looked vulnerable and exposed. I did not read the words till I was back up in bed, where I had dropped the papers from my bundled nightdress. If I don’t read the words, they will go away, I thought. I’ll phone him and he will be there.
He had been attacked, it seemed. He was not dead, though he had been left for dead. An attendant had found him; attendant of what, the papers did not say. Like the street sweeper, there must be people who sweep up corpses. I wondered if the attacker realised just whom he had been assailing, if he had read of his victim in the paper the morning before, if he connected the surgeon and the falling, bloody man. He had been robbed. He had been beaten and cut about in what the police were able to describe as ‘a brutal fashion’. Show me the kind cut.
None of it was at all unusual in these violent times. Sir Lucas was a well-dressed man, distinguished looking. The implication was that the streets are not safe for those of this description. Only the poor and already halt should go out; let the others stay in their well-appointed quarters. Some papers implied that he had simply conducted lightning, that fame has its black side. Some spoke of the ingratitude of a society served by these – immigrant was the word – healers; there was a declamatory piece of hysteria about blood for blood.
It was, like all news, a game of ambiguity. Read one way it meant one thing, read in the other way it meant another.
There was a fog of implication about the whole thing, which suggested that the papers were going to see which way things went. If he died, he would be honoured richly. If he was kept alive by heart surgery, all well and good, rather a coup for the biter bit school of thought. If he mended very quickly but there wasn’t much else in the way of news, well . . .
I supposed it must have been a boy. The newspapers would not be unaware of this but it was not yet of any use to them.
I could see him in my head. He was calling. He was very pale and he was bandaged. He lay on his side as though in a painted deposition. He looked stretched. The blood was very clear, not brown, and it kept coming and coming. It came in a regular seep and surge, seep and surge, as he grew whiter. This picture left me and I thought back to the actual time of the attack. What I could not bear to think of was the moment when, as I assumed it must have, desire had changed to fear. At some split, sectioned, second the fear which was part of the desire must have eclipsed it. It was the touch of the inorganic knife which must have done it. I did not know, but thought he must be used to cuffs and kicks, of a regulated kind, held within bounds. I do not understand his need but I do not fear it or dismiss it on his behalf and I knew that Lucas did need it.
I could not stop thinking about him, about his last moments. He must have passed out. I thought of his head, low in dirt. I knew, as I knew at Mordred’s death, that this was something which would not leave me. Not that it would haunt me, nothing so insubstantial. It was a positive constant, like love. I thought of him as I arose and washed and dressed. It was not a gentle folding of thoughts about Lucas, as though preparing him for the gradual washing-out we accord even the dead we have greatly loved; it was that nothing did not remind me of him, dirty and broken and bloody. The dawn was late. There was a magnesium brightness low under the fading wheel of moon. The sun came came up like revenge, red.
But, look, I had him dead already. He might not be.
Tertius’s telephone call was a relief. To talk about it was for a second to abscond from the fearful cinema of blood in my head. It was clear that he had not yet worked out a way of distancing himself from it; I was not sure of Tertius’s own tastes (do you know if your neighbour sucks oranges or cuts them up or just eats the smiling pieces as they come?), but he must have felt a guilty relief that it was not he who had been cut down. Later, if Lucas lived, Tertius would be the first to say, ‘Lucky old you, I’ve never managed to get them to go that far,’ and look around the room to see the effect, but now he was all officious spokesman and helpmeet. He was crying. I blessed him for it. He sounded like someone who is swallowing blades. My tears started to come; they were cold. They would not stop. I was disgusted at my own unbloody, clean state. I wished it could have been me. At least then I should not have to think about it, I could just die.
‘Can I come to you?’ I asked.
‘Are you all right on your own?’
It was as though murder was catching. I would be murdered if that would make him out of pain. I hated the slits in his body. Entrance into the body is private, not for strangers. I hate clean cuts, they make cheese of flesh. I hate the glimpse they afford of within, shiny and meticulously packed. A sharp knife to my finger, and I am holding it aloft like Liberty, to bring the blood back to my heart.
How would they hang this whole man aloft to retain his blood?
‘I’m not all right on my own. I’ll be better with you. I’m coming,’ I said.
‘I’ll ring the hospital.’
I could not drive myself, I was shaking too much, in irregular spasms, as though my body were trying to throw off a weight, which it could not. People jerk like that when they are exorcised. It seemed unfair to me as the taxi drove through the awakening streets that I was free to do as I wished with my body, but Lucas had had that taken from him. The taxi was surprising and beautiful to me, a barouche of leather, glass and steel. Its several blacks, of rubber, hide, paint, were too much for me to take in. A bunch of flowers would have slain me with colour and variety. I felt like someone whom a bullet has missed in war. I could see nothing but the futile beauty about me, for the bullet had hit my beloved friend, but its sharp trajectory had been enough to make me see how bright life was and how close death.
‘I feel like the shit who pushes his way into the last lifeboat,’ said Tertius at his chambers. ‘I doubt I’ll ever forget this day.’
‘December the third. Oh my God, worst of all, the wedding,’ I said.
‘What do you mean, worst of all? Can’t you ever let up? Please, Anne, have a care. He’s not a social problem, he’s our best friend.’ I saw that Tertius was pleased to carp at me. It was restorative. His last sentence was not convincing.
‘You know what I mean, “worst of all”. There’s nothing so dreadful as calling-in festivities. It’s bad enough when the bride decides she’s got to join a cult in Devon, but as for this . . .’
Tertius began to laugh. ‘How would you suggest the wording went?’ he asked. ‘“On account of the untimely demise of the groom’s – ahem – benefactor at the hand of a warrior unknown though to be honoured in a white wedding world where boys and girls live happy ever after, we are holding not nuptials but obsequies”? I’m certain in these enlightened days, Anne, you can get them ready printed.’
Bitterness is wanton, like showing the hangman the gauge of your neck, even wearing a pretty silky slip-knot around it in readiness. It also comes easily to lazy sentimentalists; it bestows an articulacy which sounds like thought and fires up the clay of sentiment till it resembles a vessel which will hold water. Mostly the bitter ones started with little sweetness, anyway. But Tertius’s sexual-guerrilla talk
was
caused by something, I was sure; he seemed very upset at the thought of the cancelled wedding, and the upset was coming from him in shocks of irritation quite apart from his grief about Lucas. I felt it from him as you might feel the irritation of a man who has missed a plane in an earthquake. The unheroic side of life continues. That is one of the hardest things to face, the banal form of life after death.
‘What did the hospital say?’ I asked. There was so much emotion in the room that I wanted to bring it to heel before we had a fight, just to stop it swallowing us. I sat in the window seat. A shute of sunshine ended in my lap, full of motes. I had no idea at all of what to wear; oh God, let him get better so I can tell him that he has discovered the occasion of my not having a thing to wear.
‘They said did he have any parents? I said that
they
were his employers, did they have no records? They said that I was clearly overwrought and that they advised two Disprin and a book but no, at the moment he was serious, not out of danger.’
‘It makes him sound like a little ship. Can we see him?’
‘Certainly not, unless he gets worse or better. To put the pennies on his eyes or in his mouth or wherever, or else to take him round adult games and deli food, I suppose.’
‘Have you spoken to Hal?’
‘I can’t find him. I have tried Lucas’s own flat, Hal’s parents, the
nid d’amour
in Fulham . . .’
Like his boisterous clothes and cubic cufflinks, his expression seemed tactless but gallant, as though his show must go on.
‘He’s not at his work?’
‘No one seems to be able to find him. And I don’t want to be the first to tell Cora.’ He pondered for a moment. ‘Do you really think the wedding should be called off?’ This seemed to worry him a good deal.