His cabin had a porthole that was sometimes a circle of blue waves and sometimes a circle of sky. Most times, though, it held the line of the horizon, and as this line moved up and down with the motion of the ship, the porthole appeared to fill and empty with water. As the season progressed, I came to think of that porthole as a kind of spirit level that measured my own equilibrium as I ebbed and flowed in Russell’s bunk.
In the lounge, in the dining room, on the deck, he was always older, wiser, worldlier, wordier than me. But I loved the fact that in his cabin, within the white wash of daily-laundered sheets, there were moments of silence in which I could pick up the scent of vulnerability on his naked skin. Or I thought that I could.
‘Rose,’ he said, one afternoon, as I slowly subsided in his arms.
‘Yes?’ I said, from where my head lay in the bony hollow of his bare shoulder.
‘I should probably tell you that on the last cruise of the season, my wife will be coming aboard.’
‘Your
wife
?’ I asked, propping myself up to look into his face.
It wore an expression that was quite unconcerned.
‘Yes, minikin. My wife,’ he said, quite definitely, at the same time as he tenderly fingered my cheek.
‘Your
wife
?’ I repeated.
He shrugged. ‘Oh, Rose, you remember the name of the game,’ he said.
‘Game?’
‘It isn’t called Pushing the Glass off the Table,’ he said.
Very clever, I thought. I could almost have applauded his immaculate groundwork. For now I knew that even if I were to fall to the ground and smash, right in front of him, he could easily excuse himself with the fact that it was most expressly not his intention to break me.
One final word from Rosie Little
O
n the day that I left school, my favourite English teacher took me aside to give me some parting words of advice. And I remembered her words clearly, even though I did not immediately understand their relevance. It’s important, she said, with not the faintest trace of irony in her voice, to know when to use the cake fork.
What was this that she was offering me? A dot point from her nanna’s etiquette manual? A titbit of snooty trivia, useful only in the context of high tea at a ladies’ service club, or the odd occasion on which one might dine with the governor? Or was it something else entirely?
Now that I have had a few years in which to think on it, I am almost certain that my teacher was speaking to me of words. For is not a precisely or cleverly used word just like a cake fork: a fine and delicately crafted thing, ideally adapted for one specific task? Is not the pleasure of attacking a passionfruit sponge with a dainty silver fork, quite similar to the pleasure one takes from having to hand just the right, exquisitely honed word?
But while it is a joy to have words like ‘accismus’ and ‘stridulate’ tucked away in your silver drawer, you would hardly want to use them every day of the week. You can eat cake perfectly politely without recourse to a cake fork, after all. There are times when a dinner fork will do just fine. And there are other times when, even if a cake fork is laid out for you, it is best to ignore it and use your fingers. And there are other times still, when nothing less than a pitchfork will do. The trick, of course, is to know which is which is which.
I think that my schoolteacher’s advice is worth passing on, but with an amendment that I made in the light of the filleting I suffered at the hands of the sesquipedalian Russell Short. For cake forks, like other small silvery things — mirrors, flying fish, the tips of some people’s tongues — can be deceptive. So to you, I would say it’s important to know when to use the cake fork, but it is equally important to know who is using the cake fork on you.
Horribly early on the day after Russell Short casually tossed his wife into our post-coital bliss, I sat knees-together on a small, rear-facing seat in a minibus full of cruise passengers. While the automated section of my brain supplied the cheery patter that I delivered into the overheated mouthpiece of a headset, I used the conscious part to wonder if there was one precise word for ‘I’ve taken a king hit from a direction that I did not expect, but even if I had, I could not have known that I would feel so profoundly winded’. If there was such a word, then I couldn’t think of it.
The scenery upon which I was commentating was barely visible, only just coming up into greyscale with the creeping dawn. Our passengers were on their way to take a hot-air balloon ride on the soft early-morning air currents, and it was still not fully light when the minibus pulled into a car park where four flaccid but colourful sheaths were slowly inflating upwards from the bitumen. By the side of one of these stood a woman in a white lacy dress, clutching a small white Bible and a posy of white flowers, and a man in a tuxedo, who was nervously clasping and unclasping his hands in front of his crotch.
‘Say,’ said an elderly gent with huge and stiffly cartilaginous ears, as I helped him down from the bus. ‘Are those two going to get married up in one of them hot-air balloons?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘They came to this car park a while back and thought, wow, what a place to tie the knot!’
I caught Natarsha’s disapproving look from the far side of the bus door, but it wasn’t until later, when I was back aboard the ship and cornered once again in the tiny empire of her office, that I realised how final a mistake I had made.
‘Number Ten, Rosie. Number Ten,’ she said, filling in the blanks of my third and final written reprimand. ‘I think of it as the cardinal rule. We
never
say no.’
I have to say that it was more of a relief than anything to be terminated before the arrival on board of the no-doubt lovely and erudite and uncreasable Mrs Short. And after so long aboard an American cruise ship, it was no small consolation that by the time my reprimands had been collated and the paperwork for my dismissal finalised, the ship had sailed into the sisterly waters of Canada.
‘Go on then,’ said Beth in our cabin on my last morning, handing me the last tissue from the box and wiping her nose with the back of her hand. ‘Get out of here.’
I handed in my uniform, smiled insincerely at Natarsha, and clodded down the ship’s gangway in my dear old Doc Martens, onto a wharf in a city half-rimmed by mountains. I felt heavy, and not only because of the weight of the two suitcases I carried. But I tried to buoy myself with the knowledge that this city was the one I would most probably have chosen, if I’d had to choose a city in which to be cast out. It was, after all, the city within whose credibly ramshackle arts precinct was my favourite tearoom in the world.
The Junction Tearoom was a converted house: the kind of grand old home that would once have had lawns and a tennis court and a commanding view of its surrounds, but was now squeezed tight into a corner block by the encroachment of urban clutter. Its wide and rickety verandas were glassed in and filled with rattan chairs and small, unsteady tables, each with a pile of assorted secondhand books, their topics alternately banal and arcane. But it was within the former bedrooms and sitting rooms and drawing rooms of the old house that the real magic of the Junction resided, since each of these rooms was lined with shelves, and all of these shelves were filled with teacups.
To wander through the house was to chart the modern history of the teacup. Represented were all the great potteries, and the lesser ones too, all the famous patterns, and many of the forgotten as well. There were ladies’ cups and children’s cups, Victorian cups and art deco cups, serious cups and silly cups. And not one of them was behind glass. They were there to be used. At the Junction, you see, you not only ordered tea, but a teacup too. Each was assigned a number, and had tucked into its saucer a small card detailing its provenance. Predictably, there were Junction devotees whose mission it was to have tea from each and every cup in the collection.
I arrived there late in the morning and chose a table whose pile of books was topped by a yellow-jacketed tome titled
British Poultry Standards
. And although I walked through all of the interior rooms and looked at the hundreds of cups I could choose from, and considered seriously a gold-lined Aynsley with burnished fruit, a Blue Paragon with roses and a Womble cup depicting four of the little scavengers paddling a bathtub, the cup I really wanted was one that I had drunk from before. I knew that I should try something different, but I was feeling low, and in need of comfort, and it was no time to be stern with myself. So I asked for the Red Domino (Midwinter Pottery, 1953, designer Jessie Tait), a good-sized white cup with a red rim that was trimmed with small white dots, and it was brought to my table, along with a plain white teapot and milk jug, by a waiter with a black apron strung tightly across his narrow hips.
Outside it was raining, and although I was not exactly cold, I could still have done with a quilt to pop over my knees, or a hot-water bottle to hold against my chest. I poured my tea and drifted into the clear circle of thinking space that seemed to open up around it. Well, I thought, I had excelled myself this time. Within a matter of days I had bruised my heart and lost my job, however unlovely the job. Was this how it was to be for me? Instead of learning to make fewer mistakes, I would simply rack them up more swiftly?
These were the questions I was asking of myself as I looked out through the drizzling window, and saw somebody that I did not expect to see. It was her. Surely. She was on the wrong continent, of course. And she did not appear to have aged a day in the ten years since I’d seen her last, on a train chuffing through the English countryside. But it had to be her. She was wearing the very same polka-dot dress with the flopping polka-dot bow at its throat, and the same neat little black shoes with their laces and high heels. She carried the same umbrella, but it was opened this time, and she held it steadily above her head as she stood on the corner across the street from the tearoom, looking directly at me.
Raindrops bounced on her polka-dot canopy and the traffic lights changed. And changed again. And then one more time. But she simply stood there, half-smiling at me, until — at last — I understood. That she had been there at every crucial junction, in one guise or another. She was there, that night in the Hyphen-Wilson’s boatshed, pinned to the wall as Miss August, wearing nothing more than the pants of a polka-dot bikini. She was at the hospital on the night I had six stitches between my eyes, her long blonde hair held back with a polka-dot bandana while she asked me questions and allowed me to tell myself the truth. She was the smut-cheeked child with the Christmas wreath, and the hand in the spotted glove that I had noticed hovering protectively at the edge of one of the photographs taken on the day of my christening. She was what I had been reaching for when I had chosen, on this very day, the dotrimmed cup that I now held in my hand.
I smiled at her across the shallow river of the wet road. And she smiled back, and lifted one hand to wave: the kind of wave in which the four fingers move as they would in a quick scale of as many piano keys. She stepped off the kerb then, and, without waiting for the lights to change, crossed the road. She entered the tearoom and the chime-bells of the door continued to tinkle while she shook the raindrops off her umbrella, collapsed and furled it. For just a moment, I doubted myself. Perhaps she would simply sit down at any one of the empty tables and order a cup of tea. But no. She took a seat at my table, and as she did so the waiter set down in front of her a cup that was black with white polkadots, resting in a saucer that was white with black. Of course.
‘I came to tell you something,’ she said, pouring milk, and then tea, from my jug and my teapot, into her cup.
‘Tell me something?’
‘Mmmmm,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it wonderful when the first sip of tea is precisely the right temperature? One of the great pleasures in life, in my book.’
‘You were saying? That you came to tell me something?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, her smile revealing some flecks of cerise lipstick on her front teeth. She sipped her tea again.
‘What did you come to tell me?’ I asked, trying to keep my impatience in check.
She took another sip and inclined her head towards me.
‘That your laces are undone, dear,’ she said softly.
My laces? I looked down at my boots.
‘And in here, too, dear,’ she said, tapping with skewed and wrinkled fingers at the centre of her polka-dot chest.
I looked inward at my heart. And indeed, there too, the criss-cross corsetry was slackened and gaping. I was all undone. Potentially, I could spill. Or tangle. And so I began to tug at my own heartstrings, pulling them up tight until there was just the right amount of tension at each criss and each cross. Then I bent down to my boots and laced them firmly too, first the left, then the right, finishing off on each side with a surgeon’s shoelace knot.
But when I looked up from my boots, eager to ask who, where, when, why …she was gone.
She was no longer in the tearoom, and she was not anywhere to be seen in the street. The waiter shrugged in answer to my searching face. She had simply vanished, leaving her polka-dot cup on the table, half full of milky tea. I put my hand on the side of her cup and felt both the warmth of it, and the warmth of the knowledge that she was out there. Somewhere. My heart swelled gently within the safe net of its lacing, and my toes flexed inside their casing of cherry-red leather. In a moment, I would take a bold and good-sized step, out into the woods again. But first, I would finish my tea.
The line from Christopher Hampton’s play
Les Liaisons
dangereuses
that appears on p. 4 is reproduced with permission from publisher Faber and Faber Ltd. Information contained in ‘A Word from Rosie Little on: Penises’, pp. 8–9, was drawn from a range of sources including
Ever Since
Adam and Eve: The Evolution of Human Sexuality
, by Roger Short and Malcolm Potts, and
The Penis Book
, by Joseph Cohen. The Elephant Information Repository referred to in ‘Elephantiasis’ can be found online at
elephant.elephost.com
. My thanks to Jessica Dietrich from the University of Tasmania and Judith Hallett from the University of Maryland for verifying the Latin translation of
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
on p. 198.