The Jeweller's Skin (14 page)

1947

It was a long time since he’d driven any distance.  During the war, he supposed, going along the coast, talking to councillors about sea-defences.  And a stupid lot they had been, on the whole; middle-aged men afraid of their ignorance.  No, that was unfair: a good few had been thoughtful and straightforward; and one, Miss Wishart, a thin elderly woman with scraped grey hair, had a better understanding than many of his colleagues.

There was little traffic, so early on Saturday morning.  The sky was grey but with that faint shimmer, that might mean it would brighten up quite soon.  And the car handled nicely; he settled into his seat.  He’d looked pretty hard at the motor, before he’d bought it; had detailed discussions with the Morris salesman, an agreeable chap with a good grasp of mechanics.  He’d tried it, out along the Edgware Road, rounding Marble Arch with a light touch on the steering, on Bayswater Road a little sleet splashing the windscreen.  It was a luxury, after all, a big purchase.  But Mina had been surprisingly keen as well: We can go up and take the boys out more often.  He’d wondered for a moment if they’d be pleased, if seeing their parents during the term was difficult; but he’d said nothing.

At Swiss Cottage a milk-float was in front of him.  He slowed down, and began to notice people.  A waitress opened the door of a dark café, and a bulky, round-shouldered man went straight in past her, as if he’d been waiting outside on the pavement. 

Well, Mina could have whatever she wanted, he thought, overtaking the milk-float, accelerating towards St John’s Wood.  He saw her as she’d been sitting last night, in her high-backed chair, the firelight red-gold on the side of her face.  Those cheekbones he’d fallen in love with, and the grey eyes: she had kept her looks, the way fine-boned women did.  Less fiery, now, though, a lot more measured.

She hadn’t said, ‘You’re taking that woman, aren’t you?’  No, that wasn’t what she would have said; she would make sure she had the name correctly, a specific person.  You’re taking Narcisa.  That was what they had agreed, ten days ago, after a long night of talking, with no tears, ending with tender love-making: he would not tell her when he was seeing Narcisa, and Mina would not ask.  But she is amazing, he thought, as he passed Lords, the ground closed up behind its high fences.  This summer there should be a full season’s cricket.  He would go to the Lords test, take a few days off.  Mina is an exceptional woman, he thought again.  She could have insisted; after all, most women would.  She could have said: Give her up, or I divorce you
. 
He had taken a great risk, telling her, he realised.  Except that he’d never really believed she’d do that: give him an ultimatum.  A clever woman; no doubt she manages me.  The thought was surprisingly comforting.

On Baker Street there was a slight delay, a broken down bus, the bonnet open, the passengers standing listlessly on the pavement.  A ray of sun came through and lit up the scarlet hat of a small round woman.  A young man in a flat cap stood in the road, directing the few cars needlessly round the obstruction.

Through central London he drove without reflecting, enjoying the familiarity of the streets, Selfridges with its ornate window-frames, the bow-fronted Regency houses on Park Lane.  A tune came into his head and he started singing:
You saw me standing alone.
 

Vauxhall Bridge?  or Battersea perhaps.  There was plenty of time; he’d said he’d pick Narcisa up at ten.  Then through Pimlico and along the embankment.  Now there were people coming out on the street: a woman with an empty wicker basket; a group of young boys, evidently bored, throwing stones at a cat which whisked itself out of sight; two girls playing hopscotch.

It wasn’t till Esher that he started to think of the weekend.  How would she be, taken out of the hospital?  As if she were a patient, he thought, and shuddered.  It was what he had wanted, to get her out of there; it was sordid, after all, the afternoons - there had only been two - up in his hotel room.  Not what they had done; he was clear that that wasn’t sordid.  In some ways he was proud she had trusted him.  It had been unlike anything he had known, though he’d had adventures with prostitutes in his time.  But it wasn’t like that with someone you cared about.  It had made him realise he did care about her.  And the sense of everything she hadn’t told him; how small she’d looked in the tea-room beforehand.  Her name.

A Daimler overtook him and hooted twice.  ‘Fine, fine,’ he said aloud, ‘so your car’s bigger’.  He watched the road-signs.  It was different, coming down by car; he didn’t know it.

Then suddenly he was in the High Street, and Narcisa in her dark coat and that ridiculous hat was outside the George; and he was full of excitement, seeing her.

*

As they came over the crest of the North Downs she breathed out, as though she had been waiting for this plain with its brick houses and dark green hedges.  Anthony looked sideways at her and smiled.

‘Look,’ he said.  ‘It’s like a Bible painting.’  The cloud over to their right had split apart, and a widening shaft of sunlight was pointing down at a cluster of buildings and a few bare trees.

She said nothing.

‘Maybe you didn’t have them,’ he went on cheerfully.  ‘When I was a child there were these biblical scenes, and God was always making his will known, pointing out of the sky at you like that.  Or maybe it was the Holy Ghost.’

She studied the houses, their gable-ends lit up.  ‘You believe in God?’

‘Not since I learned about the first war,’ he said.  ‘The Great War, so they called it.  My older brother was in the trenches.  He survived, thank god’ - he laughed - ‘maybe I do - but once he told me what it was like, God didn’t have a chance.  I was called up myself, but it ended just in time.’

And I was in the asylum then, she thought.

‘What about you?’

It took a moment for her to grasp what he meant.  ‘I stopped believing at that time as well.  Though perhaps I did not believe so strongly anyway.  Even when I was a child, I mean.’

‘Your family?  Were your mother and father religious?  Mine were.’

He asks questions, she thought, and wasn’t sure she liked it.  Well, I am here in his car, I can hardly get out.  Anyway, this is not what’s difficult.  ‘We were Catholic.  But my mother was against the church, that’s why she gave me a name that is not a saint’s.  My father I think never went to church, or maybe once a year, because you are meant to.  After my mother died I think he was not interested any more.  My aunt took my sister and me to church.’ 

It felt strange, to be talking about her childhood; embarrassing.  Probably he would find it all trivial.

After a while he asked, ‘Your mother died?’

‘When I was four,’ she said, evenly.  ‘Now I think she must have had cancer.  They didn’t say.  - Ah, it was a long time ago,’ she added, with a rush of energy, sitting forward in her seat, as they passed through some town with neat squat houses.  She looked at him.  ‘I do not know if I am really the same human being.  Even the clothes we wore, I cannot imagine.’ 

He pulled in to the side of the road, by a row of shops.  She stopped speaking. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m interrupting.  But I thought we might buy ourselves some lunch, and picnic.  Unless you would rather have a meal in a pub?’

She considered, ‘No, no pub, I do not feel..’  She couldn’t say what it was that seemed too hard.  ‘But we need ration books, I don’t have one.’

‘We’ll manage,’ he said, and turned off the engine.  She got out and stood bewildered on the pavement.  ‘Of course,’ he said gaily.  ‘You don’t shop for yourself.  Well, come on, this can be a treat.  Anything you fancy, as long as they’ve got it.’  He opened the shop door and let his hand rest lightly on her shoulder as she went in.

They came out with a bottle of ginger beer, a thick slice of Caerphilly cheese, a small loaf and a pound of slightly wrinkled russet apples.  ‘What was wrong with the cold meat?’ he asked.

‘The tongue was going off, you didn’t see?  Very dark.  The ham, I don’t know.’  She looked across at him as he opened the car door.  ‘Did you want ham?  Probably it is all right - only..’

He got in.  ‘No, no, it’s fine, we’ve got a feast.  I forget that you are an expert on these things.  I thought we might eat up on the South Downs - on the hills - if you can wait that long?’

She began to relax in the car as they drove on.  He talked about the places they were passing, famous people she hadn’t heard of who had lived there, distant relatives he’d visited with his children.  He made no attempt to avoid talk of his family, and she liked that, his matter-of-factness saying his wife’s name.  It made her wonder for the first time about his life, whether he had had other women before her, if his marriage was happy.  He spoke about the two boys with amused pleasure.  ‘Ah, they’re terrific, we don’t see enough of them,’ he said laughing, at the end of a long story.

‘You don’t see.. ?’  She was puzzled.

‘They’re at boarding-school, in Norfolk.  In four weeks’ time they’ll be down for Easter.  Maybe we’ll collect them, in this’ - he tapped the dashboard - ‘One up on their friends, a father with a flash car.’

How can he love them and send them away?  she wondered.  ‘My husband was sent to boarding-school,’ she said. 

He will ask me if I have children.  Her stomach caved.  I will have to lie to him. 

The fields on either side were sodden, light glinting on narrow channels cut through the turf at regular intervals.  ‘Look,’ Anthony said.  ‘That’s Amberley.  Can you see the castle?’

She peered ahead.  Before them a there was a steep hillside, with reddish houses between trees, and a dark, jagged wall.  ‘There?’

‘That’s it.  It’s still lived in, I think: some minor nobility.’  He laughed.  ‘I don’t have much time for our ruling class.  With any luck the war will have shifted some.’

What does he mean?  she wondered.  The King of England?  It was so many years since she’d talked like this: not since Felix, the German music-teacher.  Perhaps she would get back into this world.   She was aware of his hands on the steering-wheel, capable hands that had also touched her skin. 

The road wove along the bank of a wide river.  The reeds were pale gold in the fitful light.  Two swans drifted close to the bank; one stepped out and opened its wings, raucous and ugly.  ‘This is a bit out of the way,’ he said.  ‘But it’s good for a picnic.  In the car, I mean.’

He reached into the glove compartment for a penknife, and cut the fresh white bread into thick slices, and broke a lump off the cheese to give to her.  It was sharp and pungent, crumbling onto her lap as she ate.  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll clear up later.’

He opened the ginger beer and she drank from the bottle, the glass stopper tapping against her chin.  As she passed it back, he said, ‘You know, I’m sorry but I’ve never known where you’re from.  Which country.’

She wiped her mouth, and smiled.  ‘It depends when you are asking.’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘When I was born it was part of the Ottoman empire.  Then it became the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.  Not that we were any of those, you understand.  Well, no, my mother was from Croatia.  Now it is Yugoslavia.  I suppose it is still Yugoslavia, since the war?’

He considered, making a thick sandwich with his cheese.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘it seems strange, when you live on an island.  And you have been the country conquering.’  She drank some more.  ‘But you see I have lived here much longer than there.  I am not English, but I am not Yugoslav either.’  I do not know what has happened to my family, she thought of saying, but couldn’t face the concern it would raise in him.

*

The village was on the far side of the Downs, across a flat plain with farmland.  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘the light, you can tell we’re near the sea.’  Had she known they were coming to the sea? Soon there was an inlet on one side, and on the other embankment trees, bushes.  She glimpsed an expanse of water hidden behind them.  A goose rose up calling and wheeled away.

They drove through the village, past a grey stone church; then Anthony stopped and called out to a woman passing.  She pointed them down a side road, nodding.  What does she think?  Narcisa wondered.  That we are married?  Two middle-aged people, what else would she imagine?  It made her feel not guilty but distant, as if her life were too strange to be understood. 

The road came to a pond with one duck, and a wide green.  He parked the car and they went up a grass slope.  Anthony strode before her to the top.  ‘Come here, look,’ he said, turning towards her, his hair blowing.  He reached down to help her up the slope, and held onto her hand once she stood beside him.

The tide was in; the sea was still, at the foot of a bank of shingle.  Fishing-boats bobbed up and down at anchor, a green-painted one very close to them, two or three more farther out.  The sky was pale grey, with a thin line of blue far out over the water.  The air smelled of salt; she could feel it sticky against her face, and tangling her hair as the wind caught it.

‘What are these?’  she asked.  There were round black baskets, domed, with a narrow opening, in a line in the lee of the sea-wall.