Authors: Candia McWilliam
‘Angelica Coney is here. And I stand rebuked. Or lie, at this rate. I’m sorry. Drink and being noisy are my way of being subdued and introspective.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’m a prig. Give her my love. No not that. My regards. Is she talking to herself? I thought I heard more than one.’
Before telephoning Cora, I asked Mr Vang to bring tea and toast. He did not advance his condolences about Lucas. I was grateful.
Shunning autumnal whisky or brandy, I poured a tumbler half full, or half empty, with neat vodka. I swallowed it as a car takes in antifreeze. I merely felt prepared to take on the next frost or skid encountered. The spirit was surgical in its prophylaxis.
Cora was in. When I heard her voice, I was surprised not to feel jealousy. I did not have the energy, I suppose. I was aware of affection towards her.
I had liked her at first, when I met her at Kew. I had not been sure what her relations were with Anto Cranley, and I did not very much care for her to know that mine with him existed. I lied to Lucas when he asked me where I had met Cora. I did not want him to guess that I, as he did, required comfort enough to take it from someone I would rather not invite into my house. I liked Lucas to think me more virile than that, I suppose. Nor did I want him to be too interested in Cora for her connections. She too had been Anto’s mistress, I gathered. They took trains to meet each other and coupled in hotels, a romance for missing persons, though I supposed that, being young, she considered the rootlessness romantic, not perceiving that it was a painted desert, with a mirage for an oasis, and those colourful prickly times with Anto as bad to grasp as cactus.
It was safe for me to take Anto, which I did as I had just drunk the vodka, for I knew that I was thirsty sand, not slakable, but briefly held together by quick moisture. I had no further expectations. What to Cora was fleet glamour was to me the most practical means of meeting a requirement in the minimum of time. It suited me that Anto was a nomad, because I hate a trace of another now Mordred is dead. Except, perhaps, for Lucas.
Cora said, ‘Hello, Anne, I’ve been ringing the hospital all day. It’s wonderful that he is alive.’
It was sweet to pretend the main worry for her was Lucas. Surely she must be thinking of her wedding, the festival chores either to take place or be cancelled?
‘Isn’t it? Alive isn’t enough though. We want him living, do we not? And what of you, Cora? What have you decided, or have you thought at all, about the wedding? Are you able to discuss it on the phone? What does Hal say?’
‘Hal.’ She sounded as though she had come up with the answer to a dull crossword clue. ‘Oh Hal. He’s in a bad way,’ she said. It was a direct quote, I guessed. The strange thing about Hal’s inarticulacy was that it suggested no secret, no inexpressible. He expressed entirely the sum of what he felt; his language was adequate to the thing which occupied his brain. If he had a mystery, I had once observed to Lucas, it was where he kept his battery. One felt no interest in what he left unsaid.
Lucas had looked sad. I said, ‘Well, he doesn’t appear to plug in anywhere. Or you’ve never found the adapter.’ Lucas had left in a sulk.
Perhaps if I had been nicer; what if I had welcomed Hal, encouraged them to live together? Would Lucas then not have been stabbed under ground, perhaps by someone whose walk or hair had reminded him of Hal?
‘Hal,’ continued Cora, ‘wants to go ahead with the wedding. He seems very keen. Keener if anything. Oddly enough, I’m not. It’s not even the main thing, either, that puts me off. It’s really the grotesqueness of a whole occasion paid for by someone who might be having his funeral the next day. I kept thinking,’ she was rambling, ‘that the cress rolls would keep for the funeral and I did not like entertaining those thoughts. And it’s all become too serious to get married.’
‘I thought that was when people did marry,’ I said.
‘Oh if they love each other, yes. Then I dare say it would be like a fairy story. Getting married would fight off Lucas’s death. A good deed in a wicked world. But it’s not like that. It’s a bad deed in an indifferent world.’
‘Have you spoken like this to Hal?’
‘What do you think?’ She evidently found me less formidable on the telephone.
‘I think that he is pulling one way and you the other, and someone will slip, and by chance you will find this extraordinary decision taken just because of expedience and that won’t do. Besides, what do you mean by, “
If
they love each other”? Don’t you love Hal?’
‘I needed Hal. Or I thought that I did.’
‘Now what do you need?’ I had forgotten the puissant selfishness of the young. Only someone as young as Cora could ascribe this importance to her feelings. She had not yet learnt that event and plot are unaffected by them. She had not yet learnt to give in, and conserve strength.
‘I need to come to your house and confess,’ she said.
I did not question her meaning. ‘Take a taxi. I will pay. Spend the night. It’s easier to spend the night not alone when you are afraid.’
Since meeting Mordred and marrying him, which is to say ever since I have been familiar with Stone, I have trusted a presence in my life, which watches me, and as it were narrates my life to me. I am not in thrall to this presence, though it is like a system of discipline; neglected even for a day, it exerts pressure, asking to be respected. It is wiser and calmer than I am. It appears to have more time. It is more than the unexpected strength drawn from even the weakest person when death occurs. It is not in me, nor from myself, as such a thing could be. It has increased with the years. It has taught me things with which I was not born, like patience. It has taught me to be surprised by nothing. While its source may have been Mordred, its location is now Stone, but when I am not at the house it accompanies me. When I am exasperated with someone, the thing which is greater than I am will show me that person biting their hands with grief in a closed room. Of course I betray this balance frequently, feeling I owe myself a tot of malice. It is not a personal gift to me, but by accident it is mine. It has settled on me because I live in the house where it is living. In its gift are a rich impartiality and a stamina which grows as it is used up. This sense may be religion in the lives of believers; some dwellers in very old houses have it. It is a fit sense of one’s own unimportance and a dignity which is not of fabric or of history, but held up by the soothing knowledge of temporariness. It is like custodianship, or a vocation. Because everything at Stone surprises me still, surprise is my habit. I might walk out into a different century, but there the house would be, sheltering lives, indifferent to whose they were, human, arachnid, noble, ignoble, or the fragile life of a house martin’s egg. And while I am fond of the border country around Stone, it is not a landowning pride to which I refer. At night, I often feel that the house is a ship, that I do not know where it will be in the morning. The thing is grace I suppose, a magic worked by the household gods of this particular house; it is like an enlightened haunting.
I knew, as soon as I had her in my drawing-room, that I must take Cora to Stone. She looked deserted, half dressed, and knocked about, like a half-clothed mannequin from a shop window at night, elbows bending at the same angle as knees, blouse buttoned awry, dressed only for modesty, not for display. Even her hair looked like a wig whose rooted cap had slipped. She could not hold anything. I gave her a cup of tea – Mr Vang brought a fresh pot – and her hand, pretty and undextrous, held it for a coincidental moment only before it was spilt on the carpet; then there was the steamy smell of sheep and compost, of carpet and tea. This made me pause, and the saving grace which shields me stopped me, for another coincidental moment, from speaking. I obeyed its prompting to think before speaking, and then, having thought, I did speak.
‘It made me drop things too. When is the baby to be born?’
I am not a woman who invites confidences of this type, but as I asked I felt a reassertion of motive in my days stir like something hatching. I am not a maternal woman. I came to love Alexander like life, but did not instinctively do so, not at once. I do not think I loved him because he was a little Mordred, or because he was little. The physical youth he had, while it touched me and I found it attractive, was not one of his main charms to me. Perhaps this was because he had been my only companion during my widowhood, and this had made him, I thought, less of a child, completing him, making of him what Lucas once told me his mother called an old soul.
But I did feel towards this girl a desire to protect and shelter. It was selfish too. I wanted to concentrate on making something live, with hope on my side. I was like a woman who has been sewing mourning weeds all day and who rushes out to water her flowers, thinking of how they will be when spring comes. I was delighted with the sense Cora’s being pregnant – surely I was guessing correctly? – gave me of conforming and of being without will in some unorderly but fertile plan.
‘Early April. You and two others are the only people who know.’
‘Hal?’
‘No.’
‘But he wants children, I know, Lucas told me.’
‘I know, that’s why I’m, I was, marrying him,’ she said.
‘Which came first?’ I was listening again to my prompter, and letting it keep the pace very slow. In between her breathy sentences, I was feeding Cora tea. I put my hand under her hair, bracing the neck, to do this. I had to regulate the amount of tea she took, or she allowed it to run from her mouth. She was like an old woman or a baby, not a young girl.
‘The egg, if you follow. What I mean is, I decided to get married to someone because I was having him, the baby.’
I said, ‘We’ll leave gender for now. Aren’t you at the anything so long as it’s black stage?’
She looked worried. Perhaps my joke, was to the point. But then surely she would not have selected Hal as the father.
‘Why Hal?’ I rushed.
‘Time and his looks. Not how good they are, but how like they are to someone else’s, someone else tall and blond.’
‘Why cannot the father be the father? You have stolen a man’s child.’ I was outraged.
‘I do not think we could make what we had a basis for a baby’s life. The baby would be raised in a restaurant.’
‘There are a number of worse places. You are secretive and spoilt and wilful. And there is no time. Would you like two eggs and toast? Boiled, I mean.’ I was touched by this daft girl, who should not have owned a chemistry set let alone a reproductive system.
‘What about your parents? What do they say?’ I asked her later once she had been fed the eggs and ten fat toast soldiers. Mordred fed me this double treat throughout my pregnancy with Alexander. It is soothing to a body taken up with growing older to be reminded of its own extreme youth with baby food.
‘What about the wedding, hadn’t we better plan that? Or not plan it?’ she asked.
The controlling voice told me to be patient, about her parents. And had Hal felt the baby? Did he know that there was such a limit to the whiteness of their wedding? Had they really not slept together?
‘It is really up to you and Hal. Though I am sure you want me to take control and boss you about and take all the decisions, I cannot, because there is another person involved. Another two, counting Lucas, oh, and the baby. And how many hundred guests, for the day after the day after tomorrow?’
‘Hal, who seems astonishingly busy at the moment . . .’ she began.
‘He
is
getting married . . .’ I upbraided, though I would not be that particular devil’s devil, never mind advocate.
‘But his mother hasn’t seen him. Which is funny. And when I ring him he’s not at Fulham. Or the other numbers. Though he has called me. The funny thing is that he hasn’t suggested we meet to sort it all out. His mother seems to be carrying on regardless, an expression she has. It would be a real improvement if I didn’t appear for the wedding. They could have it anyway. I’ve felt like that all along, as though it was something like the change of life or moving house for Mrs Darbo, another challenge to her capabilities.’
‘Those women are very good with babies,’ I said. The prompter had nodded, just for the instant. ‘Anyway, Cora, never mind where he is, what does he say?’
‘It’s all on. He’s sorry about Lucas, but these things happen.’
‘Well. This thing happened. Rather dissimilar. Unless you believe everything you see in the hanging and sagging press they do not happen all that much, no. I think that Hal, by saying that he wants it to go on, is either showing terror of his mother or a fondness for you which he is having some difficulty showing in a normal way. I think we must go to great efforts to find him. But tell me your side of it first. What would you like to do? What do you think you should do?’
‘Until this happened to Lucas I would have got married if I’d had to wear thorns. All I’ve been able to think about is giving the baby a house and a father and fixing him somewhere in life. I dismissed all worries about not getting on with Hal and just thought of the baby and how safe he would be, with three of everything and his own toys and no sitting in libraries waiting for me to get home, and wearing his key under his cast-offs.’
‘You are not describing the childhood of your own baby,’ I said, and was moved to leave that, too, till later. ‘Did you consider what time spent with Hal would be like? What it is like? It cannot be changed. A baby, whose growing is drugging you with all these nesting dreams, will not make Hal more truthful or more kind or more funny or less like a . . .’