Authors: Candia McWilliam
Membership of the London Library is non-transferable. Hal’s is of no use to anyone. My hospital is linked with one in Westminster and sometimes it would have been convenient to dine at Hal’s flat, or even to sleep there. But what had not been spoken between us in now over two years made this impossible. I saw him sometimes in restaurants, but his timetable was very different from mine. He and his friends would take meals in the middle of the morning or at dead of night. ‘Property’ did not seem to get in the way. They read newspapers and ate breakfast in night clubs. I did these things at home. When I did glimpse his ‘pack’, I was jealous. He would not acknowledge me. He was a king among his courtiers and I not even the joker. I do not think his friends ever noticed me. The only places where there was a possibility of crossing were the very expensive Italian restaurants which are favoured by models, male and female, or the Connaught where some of these children, Hal’s ‘set’, were to be seen softening up a parent behind the screens. In one white-tiled basement, I saw a group of Hal’s friends order steak and red wine. They were all white in the face and their wrists showed. They spat out the meat once they had chewed it white; the wine they drank till they were sick. Anne was with me. ‘Very slimming,’ she said, and she ordered sweetbreads and three types of green vegetable and a jug of water with our wine. When it came she said an old Scots grace: ‘ “Some hae meat and canna eat, and some hae nane that want it, but we hae meat and we can eat and so the Lord be thankit.” Begging your pardon, dear,’ she added, ‘but thank God too that we don’t know those ghouls. Think, Alexander would have been one of them, maybe.’
So, how could I introduce Hal to Anne? In the third year of my love, I began to resume my visits to other shiny white-tiled places underground. There was even a regular boy, but in a way that is a danger and blunts the edge. I think he was drawn at that time to what must have been very evident in me. Deep in love with an indifferent Hal, I had advanced hyperaesthesia. He was a nice enough, lazy enough boy, and it took very little at that time to hurt me quite a lot, so he kept face with the wildest of his friends without upsetting himself by having to do anything very rough. I jangled with uncomfortable lust for Hal.
Anne’s clothes gave the opportunity, and it was easy and pleasant when we at last all met at her house. Hal was like a boat with the wind behind him among those bolts of silk; Anne had a high old time with him, dressing him up in her clothes. I would not allow her to paint his face. I could see her classifying him incorrectly. Of course, many of her acolytes were young men who worked in the service of clothes, men of the cloth of her particular church, but it made me hot to contemplate that she thought my sexless Hal just such a Cedric or Alun. So much of my own physical life has been to do with harshness that it astonished me, when I saw Hal’s neck coming from the neck of one of Anne’s gowns, a vatic grey purple, that neck almost without an Adam’s apple, to know I wanted only to protect it. ‘Such a little neck,’ I said to myself, and felt weak with paternal tenderness, as though I were sending him to war.
Anne was loyal. She did not see Hal alone, though he would have liked this. She did collect and drop the young and it was a conferral of prestige to be in her train for a time, a graduation in style.
Tertius and he seemed not to get on at all well and I left it at that, in a way a little relieved that Tertius’s worldly way would not spoil my Hal.
We had no routine, but there were things we did together which I am sure he did with no one else. We went to church, for instance. Each Saturday we chose a service from the newspaper, and, if I was not working, we went either to Sung Eucharist or to Evensong. My Jewishness is not offended by such excursions. I very much care for the music. Sometimes, I induced Hal to come to one of the City churches at lunch-time for some organ music. I love the swell, the sound so unlike that I produce from my grand piano. The music of the organ is like that of the sea; the church becomes a shell conveying the beating and soughing into the little shell of the ear. Hal seemed to like these outings.
We went to the sea itself in winter, and in autumn. Not many people would wish to take long pointless outings with someone with whom they were not in love, but Hal often initiated them. He loved docks, shipyards, piers. Chatham was the favourite. For the last four years before Cora, we went often. There is a figurehead with flaking rouge at the side of the Admiral’s House, and no flag on the flagstaff. Hal is patriotic in a highly coloured way and I am moved by this. It was not always easy for me to get away from the hospital for a whole day, but when I did, it was to the sea that we went.
I cooked for him, the sort of food he would not find in his restaurants. I cook with precision and invariable success; I do not talk about it during or afterwards and I always wash up. This is a rare combination which I have from my mother. I make very good bread, in batches, which I give away. I do observe Passover, and bake no bread for its duration.
I taught him about his own country, of which he was ignorant. I should have loved to teach him of Europe but he went abroad with his jetsam crew, usually to destinations involving no demands on his brain. ‘Not a holiday otherwise,’ he said, and he went off to another island with a beach or country with a coast.
I myself hardly believe that I have known him for so long and established so deep a bond with another person, for deep it is, despite its ostensibly thin substance. I have wondered whether this is what keeps me so preoccupied with Hal; he is in flight from me and might transform himself, if I grow too close, into something other, not a beast, not a tree, but a white indifferent flower.
What kept the power between us fairly balanced were my seniority and Hal’s need of me, which appealed to me at all times.
I understood him; I knew that when he was unkind, it was for a reason, and that when he was apparently cold it was because he felt too much.
Hal is shy. Over the past six years he has learnt from me many of the characteristics which should, in one of his breeding, be innate. Yet it took me to teach him to read, to dress, to walk in his capital city, to take his spoons and forks in order and not to hold them as pencils. I am puffed up with pride when I see him as he should be, at ease anywhere. It is odd that he needed to be taught, but I think that this must have to do with sending these boys away to school so young. So few of them have parents who share a name, let alone a bed, how can they learn a coherent manner and easeful grace? And the television, I suppose, saps the springs of action so that the poor brutes mistake the natural thirst for knowledge for a hypernatural thirst for experience. Those of these boys who go to university seem to use it rather to regress and to soak and to dip their flies in amber; perhaps I was more of a university to Hal than university would have been.
Hal was the one living person who needed me, I felt, on the morning he told me he needed a wife. I had not thought of it before; he was so much my angel that I had willingly allowed myself never to reflect upon tomorrow, lest he fly.
I had decided in the week before I telephoned Cora to introduce my love and my lure at a dinner party, which I would give at my flat. This would appear to Cora to be courtesy, maybe even interest on my part, and there could be no harm in that. Hal, no doubt already seeking his wife from among his jackals, would be smitten with her. I was almost certain I knew how to ensure that. I would whet his appetite by making it clear, after some encounters, each choreographed by myself, that I did not approve of Cora, meanwhile polishing her at my own leisure as I had polished him. But I would not be polishing her, as I had him, to be my adornment and stimulation, but to be so smooth as to be simply a convenience, Hal’s and my modest handmaiden and ultimate licence, the suave hoop which would at last bind us. I could not bear that someone else might have him. That someone must be chosen and created by me for Hal, and Cora had shown herself to be as suitable as anyone. Besides, I was in a hurry and I did not meet pretty biddable girls of a type attractive to Hal at the Hospital.
Hal himself was the most difficult guest to trap for dinner; I secured him by making sure that Anne was free. Anne would come to dinner with me in any circumstances, no matter how difficult it was for her; this was part of her loyalty. She would cancel a sword swallower, a Chancellor, a Maharajah and a performance artist to eat sandwiches in my big room. She would come if she was ill or if she was being fitted. She had come from several lands to hold my hand, even, when my parents died, to hold my head. On each occasion she was always perfectly accoutred. This will often pick me up from my sadness; it is a pleasure to see consummate tact at work. The black terrors recede when confronted with the consciousness of Anne’s decision to wear grey or beige, or mushroom, pleats, pads or peplum.
I telephoned Cora Godfrey.
She sounded very surprised and rather odd.
‘Oh, Sir Lucas,’ she said, ‘that is a relief. I thought it might be someone else.’ Which meant that she had also thought it might be me.
‘Please just call me by my name. Might you be free for dinner next Thursday, or is this at very short notice? I have a few friends for dinner on Thursday.’
‘I’d love to, it’s long notice and I’ll bring your clothes.’
She was nervous, gabbling.
Hal would not care for her haberdashery-department dressing habits, I knew, favouring tailored hoydens with shocked hair. I took a plunge taken as a rule only by royal patrons and worried mothers.
‘Cora, I know so few young women and I love to go shopping with Anne Cowdenbeath. Why don’t you come with us, this afternoon?’
‘This afternoon is the charity shop, but, no, I mean, it’s sweet of you, but I couldn’t possibly afford, and if you were suggesting . . . I couldn’t . . .’
‘No, I see that, but let me worry about that, and please cancel the charity shop. Isn’t there another girl behind the counter?’
‘There’s Angel.’
‘Angel?’
‘She’s the power behind the thrown-out. That’s what she says. I’ll ask her.’
‘You have given your answer, then?’
‘Provisionally for this afternoon and unprovisionally for Thursday.’
‘I shall telephone you again in half an hour. Until then.’
To persuade Anne to change her afternoon for me was simple. I had no duties at the Hospital that day. Cora settled Angel, whoever she was.
I collected Anne after lunch. She wore a mauve coat and skirt whose dull planes were smooth as metal. The geometry of her blouse gave her a breastplate, so she did not look soft and divided like a bird or a woman. She looked as though she might have a clock for a heart.
‘What is this, Lucas? I can perfectly well tell you are laying some plans.’
‘I just happen to like this girl. I think she is amusing and, as you say, that there is something there.’ If I showed merely a collector’s interest, Anne would not be able to perceive my motives. After all,
she
had collected Cora at first.
‘You like her so much that you want to deck her? Lucas, it must be for another reason.’
‘Deck her
out
,’ I said. It was pedantic, in character, and it obscured the scent.
The cream paint on Cora’s shared cottage was blistering; the capitals of the porch columns were starting to split. I could see down into a basement kitchen. It was dark but full of gilt. Gleams of copper, brass and dull gold reflected the afternoon sun. An enormous drinking vessel stood in the middle of a large table, whose cloth was blue velvet. Leaning in one corner was a pair of boots, very long. A sword with a jewelled hilt lay on the floor. Each of these things looked too big for the room. There were bars across the window and dark ivy grew there. I saw all this as we waited for someone to answer the bell. I was expecting some damsel in samite by the time Cora appeared.
She was looking perfect for Hal. I had proposed an afternoon which was not necessary, or would not have been, had I been able to tell her truly of what I was doing. But that truth would have dashed my plans and killed all magic, so I, rather sharply, indicated the car. I was angry with the poor girl for reasons she could not help; now Anne and I were going to have to waste our afternoon and our money just to make sure that Cora arrived at dinner in a week’s time looking just as she did now, and not as she had when I first saw her. Today the too large features of her face seemed glazed with some powdery layer which made them more controlled-looking. She wore a sort of sailor suit, but much too small, in navy blue. Her legs were skimmed navy blue, very sheer so that the colour showed only where the profile of her legs turned. Her hands were long and clean and her hair under some restraint. The shoes, thank God, were not snakes.
‘I hope you don’t mind, I’ve got my thrift-shop clothes on today. I wear them to show our customers what really great stuff there is if they look. This is mostly Girl Guide uniform with sailor’s buttons.’
‘It’s lovely,’ said Anne, turning round to smile at Cora. Cora had set herself along the back seat. She had put the bag, which must, I assumed, contain my clothes, on the floor. I had noticed Anne noticing this bag.
‘I’ve got to go shopping, anyway,’ said Anne, ‘so would you very sweetly both just come along?’
Women like Anne do not mean by shopping the exchange of money for some other commodity. They mean the placating of their hunger for another day. Money does not appear. Alterations of an invisible yet crucial nature are made.