Authors: Candia McWilliam
The only line my father could not move was green cocktail onions, in the winter of 1959. For one vinegary week, we ate them with our potato and fish, little glass peas; the rest my father sold to a joke shop in Bloomsbury. My mother, who read in her kiosk women’s magazines illustrated in brush and pen with waspied ladies preparing for Ascot or for cocktails, made a remark about this which my father did not understand: ‘Those onions are eyeballs for highballs,’ she said. Even had my father possessed so advanced a grasp of English, he would not have used it to say such frivolous things.’
They appeared devoted, though I wonder whether that matters. It seems important to us, now. Running from a dark town in flames, hiding in haystacks from bayonets, knowing the list was shortening, that it could not but bear their names, concealing their child, swallowing an egg – raw indivisible luxury – did they enquire whether they liked, loved, desired each other?
My parents lived by mutual loyalty. That I recollect the green onion
facétie
shows it was a rare lapse from their blessed unalarming days of quiet retailing and lugubrious retelling; it was a rare hint of a small skittishness in my mother, a little willingness to participate in their new country. He did not get that far.
I saw her touch him once, after I qualified. She wore black lisle and black wool and worked with staining purple carbon paper and dusty cured meats all day, but she smelt of vanilla. She was, like many wives of thin men, fat. They were both crying. For that whole day I felt no guilt about my parents. They drank coffee with cream and pulled shiny red crusts from the plaited loaf to dunk; the bread was egg-yellow inside. A row of these loaves, some sprinkled with poppyseed, lay on the floury counter of the shop. In our back room some asters, brown themselves, were in a jug, with black seeds of pollen fallen on the table. We could go straight into the shop from that back room.
We celebrated my success, weeping and eating sops of bread, and serving when our customers came in; to some I was displayed, a prodigy. They had always known. At a quiet time, my father slopped a very little of his coffee on his serge trousers; my mother took a small knitted cloth, and, systematic as a mother cat, dabbed and rasped till he was tidy. The mark had been perhaps the size of a little coin. She hung up her cloth after rinsing it, washed her own hands and flicked his left ear with her left hand, he sitting, she over him. She flicked it in the same cat’s manner, as though she found the contiguity of their separateness an acceptable source of comfort. We were not demonstrative habitually, but for tears, lavements and festivals and beatitudes of tears. We cried together, not alone.
I slopped my coffee, too, more than twenty years later, the morning of Anne’s party, when Hal arrived in time for breakfast. He had not often done this. All signs of intimacy between us were kept to a minimum. I had trained myself to expect nothing, so that I could, when it came, be surprised by joy.
‘Lucas, I must speak.’
‘Sit down, I’ll make your tea.’
I am a coldish man, yet with Hal I am all uxorious attention. I lay trays with cloths for him. I know that he can endure neither socks with nylon nor deodorant with zinc, so I ensure he has neither, though all too rarely do I see or touch the places they are worn. He has his tea, orange pekoe, in a mug with honey. Is there no end to the refinements of profligate peacetime? My parents had the same bedspread all their lives. They would as soon have changed each other as the spoons they used. Hal sleeps half the night under only a sheet; the other half being spent, he assures me, beneath four blankets and a counterpane. He leaves me at the changing-over point. I lie and listen to the riderless horses led by one man return to the barracks at Knightsbridge. I doze. I hear the fishmonger’s lorry.
‘Lucas, I’m twenty-six, I’m starting to be successful at work, I’ve got a house, both my lodgers are leaving to be married, and what am I doing?’ I knew this tone, discontent disguised as responsibility.
‘My dear, you are the king in a cabbage-patch, go out and conquer nations.’ I was concentrating, wifelike, upon his reaction to his tea.
‘I’ve been feeling stale recently, negative.’ This phrase did not have Hal’s own unoriginality to it.
‘Who’ve we been listening to?’ I realised too late that I sounded shrill.
‘Don’t bother patronising me. Lucas, will you try for once to think of me, just for once?’
His tone was brattish; I must let him alone and resist my impulse to insulate him.
‘The thing is, Lucas, I want to settle down, to feel above board, clear, out in the open.’
I could not keep silent. ‘Live with me,’ I said.
‘Oh God, Lucas, I want to get married. Married to a girl. You know, one of those things with two of one and one of the other, one of those things with dressing tables.’
It was then that I slopped my coffee. It honestly was not so much marriage – that is a superstitious tic to which few are immune – but –
dressing tables
. How dare he? ‘Dressing tables’ was a code in our language; it stood between us for mess, screech, defilement, menses and powdery purses, habitual censorship and unnaked faces. Or so I had understood. Hal did not help me with the coffee spreading on my fine expensive suit.
‘Well, Hal, I see, how nice. Have you anyone in mind?’
‘No, since you ask.’
This sleek flaxen boy was bored with his toys. I would find a doll for him to break to save my own heart breaking first.
I chose Cora because I wanted a wife for Hal quickly and she appeared to be the most available girl in the room, a room which I could fairly assume would contain people to some extent already vetted. I could as well have gone to the outpatients’ clinic of my hospital or to the supermarket, but my day had not brought me to these wife-nurseries. I was still acting with the decisiveness of a man taking the most direct means of saving his own life. I had not worked out how I would introduce them, how I would counter-suggest Hal into marrying this one (if, after a period of courtship, I did in fact want her for Hal), or how I would direct the denouement which would bring him, wounded and gentled, back to me. If there was another reason I selected her, some sympathy between us, whether I had some presentiment of intimacy, I simply do not know. My experience as a pimp is limited; as an undercover marriage broker non-existent. I sought the most direct way to make her trust me; I tried to make her like me. This is not my style. My patients revere and need me; to have boys who actually like you do you satisfactory violence is impossible, and I am sufficiently complacent to believe that friends will come to me without effort, when they know me; I am not sugar-coated. I do not know how to flirt, if that is the scarf-twitching sort of Noh play Tertius goes in for, and as for flirting with women, even the thought of it makes me feel the grave embarrassment I suffered when I first saw that Hogarth painting of a flushed couple in silks and ruffles and shame, his groin a flayed lapdog among the gay satin stripes. I decided to rely upon the manners which had been so useful in the shop; I am ashamed to say I did realise my height and appearance would help. Would she see the silver hook?
‘Good evening,’ I said. Leonidas had gone, I imagined, long before. She was talking to a man with a very small mouth and no pupils to his eyes. He made no response and left her side as I arrived, swiftly absent like a fish. She was still standing before the mirror. In it I saw the fish-man, just leaving. I saw a great deal of her back, and, unlike Dracula who cannot see himself in the mirror, I saw myself, standing over her. She had shoes – part of the ensemble which was so terrifying, according to Anne – which were raised on platforms. The toe of each was a snake’s head. The strap which kept each shoe attached was the snake itself, a green, glittering, padded spiral, clinging to her leg like greaves. Each snake had a rather straggly red tongue. I felt I must say something about these shoes. Did she wear them as a charm?
‘No,’ she said.
‘No?’ I said.
‘
No
, I do not know what snakes signify,
no
, I do not have an apple in my pocket,
no
, I am not a charmer.’
‘That’s clear,’ I said. ‘But who are you?’
‘Cora Godfrey,’ she replied. ‘And you are Lucas Salik.’
I enjoy, no, I thoroughly do not enjoy, a sort of folk hero’s part in the newspapers. Within their fifty-word gamut they find titles for me. No paper is innocent. The expensive newspapers say, ‘Heart Knight’s Vigil’, ‘Surgeon Through the Needle’s Eye’, ‘Aesculapius’ ‘Sword Hangs over Tracy, 4 days’. The papers which are read by people who fold them small to do so, thus ensuring they can read only four uppercase letters at a time, emphasise, reasonably enough, the parents’ pain. ‘
agony of heart-mum Joan
’, ‘
death of heart mite beverley
’, ‘
big-hearted little Andy
’ . . . Children, the smaller the better, and death baulked or death triumphant. Recently it had been ‘K for Drama Doc’, ‘Sir Lucky, say Heart Mums’. And still some of the babies live and some of the babies die, and I drive a quiet blue car as long as heart-mum Brenda’s garden.
I was going to begin one of those sentences which are puffed full with otiose words, when I noticed in detail, for the first time, the rest of her dress. I do not know more than what I have learnt from Anne of women’s clothes. Cora Godfrey was wearing a baby’s nappy, tied not as is usual at the waist, but at the bust. She wore a length of cloth tied in a knot over her bosom. From either side her body was clearly visible. There was a knot at the back too. I wondered wildly for an instant if she wore a clamp on her umbilical cord. I was happy to see she was wearing plain white knickers. But I was not happy that they were visible. About her clothes, something must be done. The length of cloth was white, but sequined intermittently. She sparkled in her horrible chiton.
She was not uncomfortable, it seemed, in this conversational pause. She held a glass but did not drink from it. She looked at my face, then at my hands. She dropped her gaze to my shoes and waited for me to speak.
‘I gather that you are doing for Tertius, lucky man.’ I thought I might find out whether nights in strange men’s flats were her tone. I wanted flawed, not rotten, goods. ‘How did you meet him, actually?’
‘I think you know. I got picked up at Cam’s by a villain from the lilac Honours list. Completely revolting except for a Renoir in the loo. The worst thing was the endearments as he heaved away. What he wanted was love. Disgusting.’
I felt that she was either drunk or possessed. She did not know me and she was making her reputation hostage to me. I could not see why she spoke in this appalling way. She put her glass on the mantelpiece; on the piers of the fireplace were two deep-bosomed doves, in the bill of each a ribbon in bas-relief out of the pure marble. I wondered how this hussy could have struck me earlier in the evening as dovelike.
‘Ask men about themselves, so here goes. Did you always want to be a doctor?’
‘I wanted to be something secure and remunerative and my family had left everything in Poland.’
‘I think doctoring comes in genes, doctors marry doctors, have little doctors. Doctors are respected as priests almost.’
I felt hocus-pocus on the way. Did she want to know something about holism or some dreary witchcraft for the dilettante sick? I began to speak.
‘I like the mechanical nature of medicine. It is why I have chosen not the magical zones of lymph and gland, but the engine, the pump, the heart.’ I had started to speak to her as though she might begin to understand what I said.
‘I imagine,’ she said, ‘that a doctor is not troubled with the feeling he does not exist. Other people tell him all day that he does because they need him.’
The only son of people who might very well have stopped existing, not merely have considered themselves not to do so, I thought her remark intense and trivial and indicative of a sort of shaman-respect which has corrupted many decent doctors and made them ponder uselessly on their ‘personal role’ in the families they treat, and such rubbish. But increasingly Hal made me feel, though I would not admit it, as if I did
not
exist. He even debased the doctoring part of me; he had said one horrible night that it was an excuse to get inside the bodies of people less fortunate than myself. The next child I operated on died eventually, not of heart failure, but of an infection I had not the pathological facilities at that time to have identified. In the end, the tiny refrigerated cadaver was flown to America.
I remembered that this girl was not a baby, as her clothes suggested, nor a grown-up woman, as they revealed, but that elvish thing a girl, a sort of social axolotl, equipped only with rudimentary gills for breathing the fiery air of adult life. She was managing fairly well with me considering that the glimpses I had of her were not, as they would be to most men who chose to converse with her, a welcome substitute for conversation.
‘Let me ask
you
about
yourself
,’ I said to her, not expecting the reaction I received. Her skin was thin, pale. Her colour came to its surface. Again I thought of some pale gasping reptile, its organs visible.
She looked for a moment desperate, as though she could not find her breath, and then, gracious and unconvincing as a child acting, she said, ‘And whereabouts in London do you live?’