Authors: Candia McWilliam
The morning came only slowly, and to occupy myself I went into my cupboards and lifted and tended and rebedded my shoes. I then went through scarves, folding them in layers of colour like soft sand. Touching the cloth, I thought of Penelope unmaking her weaving by night. The surprise of it was surely that she was not found out by a drop in standards, a slack weft, an unmatched tint, for why should you care if it is all to go? But one does, and as I thought of Lucas and Mordred and Alexander, I held and buffed in my cupboard, preparing it for the day of judgment, sorting and selecting, finding wanting, disposing. Unlike Penelope, I had no suitor and the only persistent gentleman caller appeared to be death, waiting to collect Lucas, having been satisfied in his appointment with the other two.
A tentative dawn was announcing itself not with birds but with the sibilant awakening of the house. Which part of the body is first attacked by grief? The heart breaks, we are told. But I felt that whatever was water in me was returning to itself. I heard voices in the conduits of the house. Pipes chuckled their malice. I heard the murmurous concern of the taps, requiring a single twist to bring them to copious weeping. I was all lymph. I wanted tears.
I awoke elastic and restored, with empty eyes. The house seemed to have been consoled. It was late. Cora was by my bed.
Cora was by my bed
; we were past the protracted courtship of women. It had been accelerated by emergencies of life and death. I was happy to see her.
I liked myself more when she was there. My having had a child was of use to her. It was not embarrassing, because inevitably recalling his death, as it was with other friends. She restored to me the more ordinary side of my past; without this ordinary past what was extraordinary would have been so much costume drama.
‘We are going to see him in an hour. I thought you might be someone who dressed for occasions,’ she said.
I do not habitually ask girls into my cupboards. They take it all too personally. They perceive it as an unfair advantage, of course. Then they look at me and realise that all this contemplation and cut gives me something which is not their careless appeal, which is not beauty, and they see that it has taken time, and they are impatient. Like active men who cannot see the pondering point of Plato or his lucid beauty, they want to deny it. I do not make such grand claims for clothes, naturally, but there is something so civilised in their necessariness, when it is made beautiful, that I am suspicious of those who dismiss them. They are generally people who cannot make time for whatever it is of which time is the point.
But I could hardly keep my new child out. She herself was dressed in what she had been wearing the night before. The garments were arguing less than they had been, and were buttoned to the neck. Her shoes, unsuitable but for once unvulgar, were the grey slippers which we had bought on the afternoon I had tried to get her to be tempted and clothe herself to hide her shame. She had won that skirmish, and I had no heart for more.
‘What did the hospital say? Is he that much better? Are we going to meet his secret wife?’ I asked.
I was allowing her very close to me.
‘I wonder who it was? Not Hal, with a conscience. God, his conscience must be more than pricking him, it must be cutting him up.’
I didn’t need to point out to her what she had said. Language is a case of knives.
‘Tell me. The only thing that matters is how is he? Last night there was hope, today we can see him. So what’s the difference?’
‘They never say, they can’t or they’d be priests, but what has happened is apparently that he has turned the corner. He is out of danger.’ Again the little boat, this time tacking, leaving the reef behind, waiting for the wind.
‘I think it’s more comforting that they talk like that. It draws the thorn. We would not understand the medical words and could not bear the emotional ones.’
‘It’s like a police state, only told what we should know.’ She stuck her chin out.
‘Nonsense, Cora, if pain isn’t an official secret what is? Privacy is a democratic privilege.’
But she was messing about in the cupboard.
‘I never thought anyone did it so carefully,’ she said. ‘You must be worried you’ll get run over by the State Coach, not just a bus. I have never seen such things. And they are clean as though for inspection.’
‘I like that,’ I said. ‘It makes me happy. It stops things going out of control. One for wash and one for wear, and then you can turn the other cheek knowing that there . . .’
‘Are three more cheeks,’ said Cora. I like cheap jokes when I am overwrought, but not many people see this part of me.
‘I was going to say knowing that there is another cheek.’ I put her down, but I was laughing.
‘I knew,’ she said. The I was long and indulgent. ‘But you have had to turn so many other cheeks you must either have several faces or be black and blue.’
‘I cover it up. Choose me some clothes.’ I did not even say it wanting to see her attempt to find something to her taste among my monotheistic vestments, and that a gloomy god. She put me into what she had chosen, zipping me up and hooking me in like a mother before a party. It was a piece of blue cloth which committed itself to the bones of the body only at the wrists and knees and in between flirted with the flesh. Until it was worn, it looked like a dead raven.
‘Lovely on,’ she said, making the ‘on’ as camp as a belted marquee.
‘Try this for size. We always say the nicest things come in the smallest parcels,’ she said, continuing the vendeuse game. I had not played like this since Alexander. She had handed me a really enormous coat. It was as heavy as a packed chandelier. It had been Mordred’s, and was far too big, black, with the shawl of beaver fur traditionally worn by capitalist oppressors. It was out of the question for me to wear it.
I am small.
‘You can wear that, Cora, if you don’t mind being taken for my girl.’ I meant it in the twilit sense, Oppie’s niece, and she took it in the maternal and gave me the uncoordinated type of embrace which must be reperformed neatly at once or be the cause of shyness for a long time to come.
‘I cannot think of anything rather, better, more, nicer. And you put this on. I wouldn’t like you to get a cold.’
Mordred would say that the English, inhibited inhabitants of a cold country, express family love with enquiries about weather-proofing – Are you warm enough? Will you be cold? Take a jersey. I was alarmed and pleased that Cora and I were expressing our love. I was afraid it might be rained off. Mordred and I had wanted a daughter. As a small boy, Alexander had asked if he might have Angelica Coney for a sister.
‘The devil you may,’ said Mordred. He was an old-fashioned man, who could invoke nothing worse than the devil. God and his adversary had not yet been moved on by the words in Angel’s little buckram pamphlet, blasphemy dethroned by pornography.
No one since Mordred had worn the coat. I did not want her to feel odd about this, but I self-indulgently wanted her to know the privilege she was enjoying.
‘It must be your husband’s,’ she said in the car on the way to the hospital. ‘I am very lucky.’
‘It doesn’t do to make a fetish out of things,’ I said.
‘I believe you, but not many people who have seen your cupboard would.’
‘And why do you?’ We were approaching the hospital. On the tiles under the original windows, green-gowned pre-Raphaelite sawbones stood about with their curly lips and lily-white hands. The modern part of the hospital, Lucas’s part, stood up like a tusk.
‘Because I know that you care for what you have lost and cannot bear to lose again, more than for all that treasure trove.’
‘Here we are. Watch out for the granite gorilla, or do you know her?’ I have never been good at declarations. I elicit them and then do not know where to put them down.
We were both, I think, as excited as children about to claim a reward. To get what we want, to retrieve a life, we will make awful bargains. But I had done no trading with the devil. I had sworn to my prompting power that I would use only will. And he was well enough to be seen, after only a day and a night, proving that either my will was indomitable – or that it was quite immaterial.
We went in past the granite mother and child, a small bobble hat by the stone apple. The hat had flaps, as small as a puppy’s ears.
He had a room to himself. Cora motioned to me to go in alone. Then I saw her thinking that what I saw might distress me, so that she had better come too. She stood at my back, in her long wool and sombre fur, the grey slippers making a Sienese courtier of her. Her big face had the smoothness of fresco. Its features had an absence of radiance to be seen on the faces of worthies attendant on a painted crucifixion. She was young, but then, in the fifteenth century, twenty was middle-age.
Lucas was pale and bandaged so his body in the bed made a long barrow. Bladders of liquid depended from tall metal trees at his head and feet, and to each side. There was no red, anywhere. I had prepared myself for it, and there was none. I had practised, thinking of all the most bloody things I had seen. I had even thought of the thing which I do not think about, Mordred’s dying.
‘Anne,’ he said, ‘don’t be scared. Or are you disappointed?’ He spoke slowly, as though he was thinking something out. His face, with its prominent bones, resembled the false heads placed in their beds by prisoners escaping, built of papier mâché and the will to live. I could think of no word to tell him how the sight of him affected me. What we had said to each other over the years was composed of the same twenty-six letters which I wanted now to be able to shape into a perfect sentence of love.
‘We didn’t bring you anything,’ I said.
‘Nothing would have been enough to thank you for what you have given us,’ said Cora.
‘You look as though you have got something for me,’ he said, looking at her. She had taken off Mordred’s coat, and had sat down beside him in a chair on his right, between his bedside and the thin silver tree with its serous fruit and hanging tubes. Seeing him alive, and with the resilience of her state, she had blossomed. Robed to the neck, and with her hands in her blue lap, Cora looked at him. Her hands were empty, her lap full.
‘I may not be God but I am a doctor,’ he said looking at her. ‘A life for a life is it? How long till this baby is born?’
I noticed then that Cora, now she had told me her secret, was blatantly pregnant. Because I had considered her as a bride to be and as a pretty but unedifying face at parties, I had not included pregnancy as one of the characteristics I allowed her. But now, I saw that it was not to be overlooked. She appeared to have grown since even that morning. She was sitting like a boat low in the water. She even rocked a little.
‘Do you get backache?’ asked Lucas. She nodded. I thought of him spatchcocked on the ground.
A profession can protect a man. There he was, every inch a doctor, while in fact a patient.
‘If only I could. Heal myself,’ he said. He had less voice than usual. Had they cut his lungs? When I cut up the lights for the dogs as a child, that breath leaving the pink sponges under my hand reminded me that this dogs’ food had been sheep’s life. The lungs had the airy mass of that jelly made with condensed milk which settles into layers, the top opaque and oxygenated, the middle translucent, and the bottom layer as clear as strawberry plasma. When cut, the lights were delectable but repulsive, sweetly pink, susurrating, airy. They smelt of blood and stale air.
Not many of my friends have yet fallen chronically ill. Those who have died have done so in a selection of more or less voluntary ways. Oppie tells me that I am reaching the age when, tired out by all the divorcing, they will begin to go. But I have not refined my hospital visiting (prison visiting is another matter) much beyond talking over the sick friend in the bed while drinking the champagne I have brought. I was uncertain of Lucas. This was unfair, as it placed social obligation upon him, but I could not see how to talk to him. My natural instinct was to embrace him, but I feared the drips entering his body under the sheets, which were too small for him, and clearly nametaped with the name of the hospital, as though he had been in that bed growing since he was a little boy. Though of course, he did not go away to school. I was shy of him. Even before this his inheritance of suffering had made me shy. My suffering, so different and so much more comprehensible, made me not more but less forbidding. Unable to touch him, I felt myself about to say something emotional to him. I knew that if I did it would be momentously tactless.
‘My visit to India put flesh on the bones of my concept of poverty,’ I had heard a bishop announce on the wireless once. (Unlike Lucas, I cannot bear music in a car, it makes me introspective and lunatic, because it is so demanding.) I knew that if I made a less than neutral remark to him it would curdle. ‘Fall-out,’ Lucas calls it, when I leave a particularly wrong sentence to settle. He speaks the language better than I do; he tells me this is the case with Poles, look at Conrad. All I
can
do, I say, is look at him, I can’t read him. All that hidden metal and the incessant sea.
Not that there was an awkward silence. I sat now at his other side and stared at him. He and Cora were discussing, no, he was giving her a consultation. With some slowness, and stopping occasionally to rest, Lucas was enquiring about the progress so far of the pregnancy. Was she anaemic?