Authors: Candia McWilliam
Why was I bothering with this gauche creature? Because of her gaucheness?
‘If you say that you will tell me a little about yourself, I shall show you “whereabouts in London I live’’. Are you hungry and have you a coat?’
It was eleven o’clock. A young woman who would do this, repair upon request to the house of a stranger, was surely a weakling at best, a tart at worst.
‘As long as you are not looking for someone to clean for your next-door neighbour,’ she said.
We left, observed, I think, by Anne, and, oddly enough, by the fish-man, who did not appear, after all, to have left. I had exerted no charm, no pressure. My one effort to bring the girl forward had been decisively rebuffed. Either she was perfect for my plan, egoless, pliant, or she was reckless to the point of stupidity. I could see no other reason for the docile way she allowed me to place her in my car and take her to my home. I could, after all, have been going to drink her blood.
She did have a coat. It, like the dress, was a piece of cloth without hook or eye, button or hole; it appeared to be a plaid, or simply a length of cloth before the tailor has begun to pin and chalk. It was, like its wearer, unbegun, but shot with a suggestive, shifting, metallic glimmer.
When we arrived at my flat near the canal, I got out of the car first and opened the door for her. We had not spoken much on the journey, because she had opened the glove compartment and taken out the Bentley maintenance book. It is a hardback manual; mine is as old as my car, that is twenty-three years old, three years older than Cora Godfrey, I had ascertained. She did not read the illustrated parts of the manual, or the log, but what could most nearly be read as continuous narrative. It was as though her eyes needed to absorb some print. The open pages on her lap were sometimes obscure, sometimes mauve-white with sodium street light, once (at Hyde Park Corner) a tabernacular red as we were halted, and then, as we slowed down along the canal, the less chemical glowing yellow of a light more like that of gas.
I let her into my flat with none of the feelings which must have attended almost every other such broaching in her life. The kitchen, where only that morning I had first understood the imperative necessity of a Cora, was to the right, the drawing-room at the end of the hall on the left. My bedroom was first on the left, a spare bedroom between it and the drawing-room. A large bathroom and a dressing-room abutted my own bedroom, a smaller bathroom the guest bedroom. My flat is on the first floor, second floor and attic. The attic I use mainly for books. The second floor is one enormous room which is always approaching perfection. It is ballroom, study, cave or retreat, as I will. There remains no trace of where the dividing walls once were, unless you lie looking at the ceiling in a high evening light. Then you see them; it is like terrain under snow. The walls were painted for me by a swart little flat-painter from the Opera, with a sort of cod Vuillard, which I love. It has no theme but happiness. Sometimes he comes and puts more in; the picture’s promiscuous domesticity can take any abundance of detail, like a good bourgeois French table food. The colours are the blue-greens, fuming lavenders, orange-yellows, viola colours (
not
pansy at all) and delicious pink-browns which blush and blanch depending upon where you stand. Against one wall is a bath on lion’s feet. It is not large and I have not permitted the
jeu d’esprit
which you might anticipate. No warm-hipped girl is stepping out for ever on the wall behind. But visitors to my room say they see her. One or two tricks I’ve allowed. There is a screen in the Chinese style which ‘disappears’ into the wall, and I like, in season, to have bowls of quinces and jars of japonica about the room, such as are seen in the painting. The smell of quinces, and their grey fluff, going in to that tight flower-end, are pleasurable to me. The bath is plumbed in. I use it often.
I took Cora, of course, into my drawing-room. It is a fine dark-green room whose white curtains are lined with heavy crimson blanketing – a secret unless I choose to draw the curtains close before sundown and then the room takes on a meaty, private, autumnal brown, and I can take the covers off my watercolours. These appear at first glance to be architectural elevations of naves, of domes, of proscenia; they are early dissections of the heart, painted with marvellous observation from the life – should I say the death? – by an unknown painter who was surely risking his own life by doing so. They have a diagrammatic quality which is not at all repulsive, rather satisfying and abstract. There is nothing of butchery to them.
‘Can I get you anything?’ I asked my nearly naked guest.
‘If you wouldn’t mind, I’d love something to put on, and a bite of something to eat.’
‘Most adults, when they go out in the evening, have provided themselves with those things, or have made arrangements to do so in the case of nourishment.’
‘Let me explain,’ she said, saucy hussy. ‘I dressed like this in order not to have to what you call make arrangements in the case of nourishment, and now I am here, it appears to be a house which must contain at least bread and cheese and I am certainly not properly dressed to eat
à deux
with a distinguished older man at home.’
‘But in a restaurant, or with a less distinguished man . . .?’
‘I could hardly have taken a change of clothes in a grip to the party.’
‘But why wear it at all?’
‘You mean, it’s as good as wearing nothing?’
‘I didn’t say that, no, but yes, I suppose that is what I could be said to mean.’
‘Money,’ she said. ‘I get bolts of cloth with flaws – seconds, you know – and tie them up in different ways. I daren’t cut them into shapes or make definite holes for my legs or head to go through because then I’m limiting my options. It’s very cheap.’
‘But, Cora, forgive me . . .’
‘You’re going to say it looks it, too. I am sorry. Now, have you some trousers and a jumper and some food?’
It was midnight and I had a – female – pirate aboard. I went into the shadowy grey of my room and through into my small dressing-room annexe. It is papered with faint and faintly lewd toile de Jouy of blue-grey; a girl plays the cello, a man the flute; a grinning dog in a ruffle watches this pastoral of
onanisme à deux
. It is pretty, womanish even. I found a grey jersey and some plus-fours and some long woollen stockings. On second thoughts, I took a pair of garters, too, the kind with wool flashes. Tertius had given them to me when he discovered I shot. He is a snob with the concomitant love of over-correct dressing.
‘Put these on, I’ll find a little supper and then you must please tell me all about yourself.’
I put her in the spare room to dress. It was where Hal slept. I longed for him to colonise it, but I was sure she would find no trace of my loved one. He could be tidy as a spy.
We re-met in the drawing-room. The big breasts were no less conspicuous for being wrapped in grey wool; my plus-fours were plus-sixes on her, in spite of her height; and the shooting stockings gave her the soft rusticity of a huntsman in the ballet. The garters the facetious child had used to hold up her hair which was abundant and of poor quality. She sat up straight, the book she had been reading snibbed between the cushion and the side of her striped chair. She had brought another chair and a walnut caddy-table into a mealtime group about her. On the table I placed my tray. It bore no traycloth, but a plate of charcoal biscuits, a pat of white butter, some salt, some radishes, a log of ashy cheese, a can of anchovies with their key and a head of celery in a vase which looked, plain clear glass in ornate golden stand, like a retort from a rococo laboratory. To drink, there was milk or water or pale tea. And she would have to
ask
for those – and then I caught myself. I was thinking churlishly of this girl I had invited to my home, who very possibly thought her frame would have to contain me later in the night, whom I in fact was contemplating kidnapping, and whom I was treating almost as offhandedly as I treat the passing boys. I offered her champagne, and of course she requested milk. I gave myself champagne. The bottles stood together on the tray as though for an art class to paint, thick white and thin green.
‘Do this, would you?’ I said, again as abrupt with her as with one of my sweet louts. I was behaving to her as men will to women, not as I do; I am courtly as a rule, what is called old-fashioned. I handed her the flat nugget of anchovy tin and the key for opening it. We ate them stuck into the runnels of the celery with unsalted butter and extra salt. I fetched two large cloth napkins and she tucked hers into my grey jersey.
But in order to hobble this kid for my panther, I must find out about her.
‘Are you English, Cora?’ I asked.
‘I am not from your social class,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit flashy to fit in, what with my size, and a proper tall girl from the shires wouldn’t do that. She’d wait around till someone came along who would give her a son so she could pass on her height like a parcel containing a bomb – don’t drop it, pass it on, only unwrap it if you’re a man. When I realised it was an asset I started learning how to use it, but I do get these lapses and that is when it is very nice to eat high food with a very tall man in his tall flat.’
I was delighted by her insecurity, so raw that she would be entirely tractable.
‘And your job, Cora, what do you do or do you only clean for Tertius?’
‘I do a number of small jobs, none of which is more important than any other. You could say I mark time but, lacking the cousin in Asprey’s or the father in the City, I’m an unsubsidised subsidiser of the subsiding upper crust.’ She was extremely nervous.
‘You talk a lot.’
‘I read a lot.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m gathering honey for the shining hours to come when I have earned my stripes.’
‘Stripes?’
‘Take it as you will. As a worker bee, or a beaten wife.’
‘Do you hear the terrible things you say? I could have gathered from your callow lineshooting this evening that you were a whore, a drudge or a masochist. I am sure you are none of these. I think you are just a young thing awaiting your vocation, and, just as your brothers have no war, you have no arranged marriage, no baby for your fifteenth birthday.’
‘There is something in that. No brothers, though. These radishes are good. The jobs I do are all part-time. It adds up to more than full-time. I came by them not through ambition but through a need for cash and an incapacity to say no. I work packing executive toys in a basement, I work laying out a magazine made of advertisements separated by prose which must not contain fewer than three references to teeth per article. I sew frogs filled with millet seed and pass them on for smaller frogs to be stitched into their arms and on Saturday mornings I serve at a restaurant where it is good to be seen. I also work in a charity shop. I like that, quite. I am of dependent means.’
‘I assume you are educated.’
‘I read a lot.’
‘What did you read?’ I asked this touchy girl.
Slick, out it came, before she thought, ‘Greats, but I fell out, fell not dropped. I just did not have the graft. But it’s given me all sorts of itches because I half understand such a lot. Medicine’s the worst in a way because you have a derivation pat like that and then it’s not the ligament which joins the foot and the ankle at all. So I’ve the illusion of comprehension and no understanding at all, like those awful clever children with swollen heads who understand fission energy and can’t get out of the burning snug when the telly explodes.’
‘What is your ambition?’
‘To be good. To be a good wife.’
I liked this, of course.
‘And what is goodness to you?’
‘My husband’s interpretation of goodness.’
However appallingly this equipped Cora Godfrey for life, it equipped her well to be Hal’s wife. Hal had a loose interpretation of goodness, if he thought about it at all.
‘Cora, have some champagne and then let me drive you home.’
She padded off to the kitchen – women always find the kitchen, it is like the rapacious hermit crab finding the soft flesh of the previous occupant of its new shell home – to get a clean glass. She required no exchange of confidences from me; now I had her in my house the quick-talking party girl with opinions was gone and I had a pliant geisha. She did not obviously react to what was a clear statement of intention not to ravish her that night.
She was evasive about her family. She was a town girl, a university town I guessed, or cathedral; I did not want to clutter myself with intimate knowledge of her provenance. I did not care to burden myself with what would be, in effect, should Hal have her, associations-in-law. She invariably neutralised too acidic a remark with an alkaline one. I wondered whether she had been brought up in some nonconformist creed, or one of those British sects. I hoped so. There would be more manipulable guilt and reflex torments with which to rein her in.
I drove her to the villa she shared in a far northern limb of the Crown Estates. It was one of those pretty houses where you may not hang out your clothes lest it distress the monarch. Indeed, these crescents have an unurban appearance, as though built as tiny farms. We agreed, Cora and I, that she should keep my clothes till we next met, which, I assured her, we would. I had put her two bolts of cloth and her stiff snake shoes in a bag, which I handed her.