Authors: Candia McWilliam
He sat, both small feet on the grey carpet, on the other half of the conversation seat. I had to twist round to address myself to him. He had used this intimacy before to induce women to order; it is hard, when seated like confidants together, to resist the atmosphere of intimacy and collusion attendant on the planning of extravagance. It is not hard to imagine the stealing of kisses on these little seats. To see the other’s eyes, you must move your body, and all that is between you is the miniature balustrade, its S a compromising knot. But Mr Virtue lifted a squared-off pile of paper, and turned it over like a chef turning out a terrine.
‘Look, I was correct about gloves. These people are the mad ones who think lettuces have pain and set tigers free from zoos. They would never wear leather, oh no, but they will break up the life of an old man.’ He looked much better now. Being able to identify whoever had caused this trouble made him quite chipper. Aggression and certainty were working their revision. He had been a scared old man, the fear of the star on the shop mocking his diligence and blowing out all his light-filled years. But now he had an enemy – and a mad one, he seemed to imply, at that – he looked better. ‘See, they would wear surgical gloves, rubber, while they were at their dirty work,’ he said. I thought of Lucas, operating, in his surgical gloves. Automatically, I looked at the block of coloured paper in Mr Virtue’s lap. He had no waist. He was all of a piece, like an egg. I could imagine his clownlike short braces, no more than loops over his stooped shoulders.
‘Christ,’ I said. Mr Virtue looked terribly shocked, though surely the blasphemy is worse for a Christian. ‘Oh God,’ I said.
Printed very crudely, the colours bright and unaligned, was a calf in a harness, braced into an apparatus which appeared to combine a rigid balaclava helmet and a set of stocks. Turquoise blots indicated approximately the eyes of the creature. Crude orange letters announced ‘
i die that you may have life
’. The last word was crossed out and the word ‘lipstick’ was written in an educated and ornamental hand.
Broadsheet across the next page (Mr Virtue was showing them to me with the grim commitment of one who shows off family photographs) was a pig. Wigwam-eared, with Scandinavian eyes and the pained regard of a fat boy, the animal was caught in some kind of tumble-drier, which contained, presumably, its body. The suggestion was of some monstrous rectal gavage. The effect of these pictures was to turn the animals into people. I was afraid to look at too many like this for fear I should become inured to torture. In atonement, or to comfort myself, I did not know which, I picked up one of the strings of fox-tails from my side and stroked it. It was the colour of apricots and it smelt of nothing meaty. It had been denatured. There were no masks or paws in the tumble of skins about me.
The pig picture also said ‘
i die that you may have life
’. Again the last word had been crossed out. The substitute word this time was, inaccurately in the case of Mr Virtue, ‘sausages’. The next picture was of a new-born child with a long, bony tail, on a rack. The commodity provided by this creature’s death was said to be ‘serums’. Green and cerise bracelets of an ethnic style were about its wrists and ankles and it had a complicated hollow crown, tied with colourful ribbons. The baby was a monkey and the jewellery well connected, I suspected, to an electric source. I hoped that none of these broadsheets would remind Mr Virtue of Tomas. I was unprepared for what came next. It was a big beagle.
I have had the same old dog since Mordred died. He is a beagle. I leave him alone for long periods because he does not like the town. He is well looked after at Stone. I like animals. I am inconsistent about them. I eat meat, wear fur, yet feel the day blest if I see a fox through the window. My dog has spent more time listening to me than any other being has. He was the repository of my mourning when Mordred died, because Alexander was too young, and when Alexander died the dog noticed and would not let me go anywhere alone. I was reared on Beatrix Potter, who makes her animals venal, so one accepts them as companions not toys. We share a cruel world, though I suppose our cruelty to them is even more systematic than our cruelty to each other.
The beagle was open. Its ribs were shown like a grate, with scarlet winged lungs, the heart overlaid in deep crimson. Hoses, ice-picks, a selection of explorer’s gear, staked out the beast, with its sorry face a replica of my dear stiff old dog at Stone. The words for this horror were ‘
i die that you may have a heart
’.
I thought of Lucas, who was very possibly dying. Had his research and operations on people depended upon this sort of thing? I did not care to know, for I could not think of anything but the horror of knowing too much; and the complete unoriginality of sin.
‘I’m here, Mr Vertle,’ called an effeminate policewoman, with blonde hair and mottled legs, coming in on a wave of cold air. ‘Virtue,’ said Mr Virtue, ‘or are you unfamiliar with it?’ He was much better now.
I set off once more for my house. A low early dusk was rising towards the sinking sun. I walked into it, staring until I could see two suns, one dull orange, and the other, misaligned and bloody, to the west.
I was pleased to arrive at my house and find everything in place. I did not consider it home as Stone is home, but after Tertius’s tip and Mr Virtue’s poor dishonoured shop, I was refreshed by its order. I tried to keep it as unidiosyncratic as a modern hotel. I do not pile up little still lives as clues to myself and the tables are not modestly petticoated. Widowhood has not drawn me to bandage my rooms with chintz. Ribbons and bows hold dust and I dislike their womanly bustle and billow. The most overt clue to my sex are the muslin curtains which hang flat over each window. They give a wavering tropical light. They are washed often and dry as they are wrung out, so must be ironed sopping. The smell is delicious, like spring flowers, or the better smells of a new baby in the house. Even the flowers I keep could be the choice of a man who has been brought up well by his mother. I like phlox, lilies, white hydrangeas, orchids and tall anemones. In London, I put one stem or head in a tall vase and let it react to the dry heating and bleak urban air. I do not have the heart to fill the room with bins and sinks of flowers as at Stone. In the wet Borders air they live and develop. In London I feed and tend my town flowers but they are unrobust blooms. Tubbed outside, only camellias thrive in the phthisic air. On this day, I had a staked tub of datura in the fireplace, some forced hyacinths and a fringed white orchid,
Habenaria radiata
, rooted in sharp sand. It appeared today to me to have the texture of a reptile’s neck, white hairbrushes and the face of a white bat. Had I been happy it would have resembled trumpets, bells and a butterfly. If I ever had suddenly to leave, it was only these plants which would require anything to be done. When I am not there, it is possible that the plants’ personalities expand and their whims develop in order to occupy the servants who are patently bored by my widowhood. Once, more drunk than usual, Mr Vang the butler told me that they all missed a man in the house. Such an absence is really more convenient than not for him, for it allows him to drink, as he believes, unobserved. I do not think he realises that I can count as well as Mordred could.
I have the paintings moved while I am away, not to surprise myself, but to amuse Lucas. He likes all evidence of riches. It makes him feel more secure. Only insofar as it bestows order does money comfort me. For every manifestation of this there are self-seeded shoots of disorder pushing through the heavy bland paving. The only proper grout is love and I lost that. But I am in the habit of my way of life, and Stone gives a purpose. As does the giving of pleasure, even if it is an illusion, to others, most particularly Lucas.
Four o’clock on the third of December; had I really spent all that time with Mr Virtue, with Lucas hanging, slung about with machines like one of the vivisected animals? Vivisected indeed was what he had been, cut while yet living. I must use the telephone before it dared bring me bad news. I spoke to a nurse who was amiable and helpful, not the monster matron of Tertius’s fable. Hospital, like prison, is always there. I crossed my fingers as she said that she would just go and find out what the position was on Sir Lucas.
‘No visitors yet, but he is out of danger.’ Fingers crossed, these simple words were all that mattered. ‘Is that his wife?’
‘He has no wife,’ I said.
‘Oh, that’s funny, I could’ve sworn I spoke to a woman who said she was his wife earlier today.’
‘She must have known she wasn’t,’ I said.
‘Sorry? Who shall I say called?’
‘Anne Cowdenbeath.’ I prepared to spell it.
‘A friend?’ What did she think?
‘A friend,’ I confirmed.
‘I’m sorry, but we’ve had a lot of press all day, and the phone hasn’t stopped. If only they’d give blood like they give grief on the phone we’d be getting somewhere.’
‘How would you say he was?’ I asked. Her jolly, brisk idiom was catching.
‘Well he won’t be out on the golf-course just yetawhile but he should mend if only he lets himself. It’s very largely’ – and I knew what she was about to say – ‘an attitude of mind.’
Of what else could there be an attitude? Surely he had a will to live? It was a delicate web. If he appeared to be about to die, the press might make much of the nature of the attack. Would he then be too humiliated to live? Did he mind people knowing? I had never thought so, but there is a difference between his narrow social world and his broad parish of patients, who might well be afraid if they knew, superstition about disease being strong if hysterical, theories about offended nature easy, comforting and currently ubiquitous, the sexual worm turning. Self-righteousness replacing righteousness, all the champing adulterers waving their tracts and flashing their QED at the poor offenders against public health. Health as a metaphor for virtue, is that the reason it is hard to meet the eye of the sick? Was Jesus ever ill? Surely the usual baby poxes, or was His Crucifixion His first illness? Then, He was not a queer, or do we make something of the soldier’s lance?
‘How is he?’ I asked the Irish nurse, but she was losing patience with me. I could not remember whether or not I had spoken aloud my thoughts. My attitude of mind needed a splint.
‘As well as may be expected. I’ll tell him then when he wakes up that Angela called.’
It was too late to put her right. The telephone was making its dry crick of disconnection.
Next I rang Tertius. He was quite drunk. I did not blame him. It was not as though he would be required to give the kiss of life to Lucas later in the evening. The telephone reveals drunkenness as sure as a tongue-twister. The added self-consciousness it induces pushes the carefully controlled drunk over into prissy burlesque, but you hear all the fouled juices close by, betrayed by the receiver. I could tell that he was not alone.
‘Annie, darling.’ I heard the hand come down over the receiver, and his boisterous voice call, ‘Won’t be long,’ to whomever was with him.
‘I’m sorry I’ve been so long in getting in touch, Tertius. Mr Virtue had a robbery.’ What was I making excuses for? For not having Lucas, healed, unpierced beside me here on the sofa, complaining a bit about the evening ahead, turning his drink and putting his feet on the white cloth? I repealed in my heart all the nagging laws I had laid down for him. He could walk over all the undinted snow of my cold house, if he could only walk.
‘Anne, you are hysterical. I can hear it.’ As drink is audible, magnified by the telephone, so is mood.
‘Not hysterical.
Not
hysterical,’ I said, and thought, I really am. It will not help.
‘You really are and it won’t help. Get old Mainstay to get you something for God’s sake. God doesn’t take bribes. He won’t make Lucas well just because you go hungry.’
‘Vang,’ I corrected, sucker, since Tertius finds new misnomers for the butler daily. It is one of the many small games whereby he staunches his boredom.
‘Vang. And who can Virtue be? Such names. Have you spoken to the hospital?’
‘He is much better. Mr Virtue is my furrier. Though the funny thing is, not funny a bit really since as you say they employ him, a person calling themself Lucas’s wife has been calling.’
‘Calling
herself
, presumably,’ said Tertius, a leer in the voice. I could imagine his anchovy-coloured face, to one side like that of a chewing cat. ‘Though in a sense Hal could be seen as the wife. Same awful inescapability.’ Someone laughed and Tertius made a noise as though he had been pinched.
‘Which reminds me, I’m now going to call Cora. She is certain to have heard, and she and Hal must have come to some sort of conclusion,’ I said.
‘There’s never one of those. I mean there’s only one sort of conclusion and that’s the sort friend Lucas has just missed by a whisker. What gives anyway with the furrier? Animals come back to fetch their coats? I wouldn’t like to see that, a rush of little raw rodents. Very Bosch.’
‘It was something like that,’ I began, and I told him. I did not have the energy to make a tale of it. I told him as simply as though I had a verbal quota, as though I were choosing the plainest possible words to fit into the stop-press section of a newspaper.
‘Cranks? Must be. The big-deal thieves come and go talking of . . .’
‘I know, I know,’ I said. He was showing off to another person in the room. ‘Who’s with you, Tertius? And will you be in if I call back after I’ve spoken to Cora? I just wanted to tell you exactly how Lucas is.’