by Polly Samson
I hung my keys on the hook beside Vincent’s still there like an ornament: a souvenir with a rabbit’s foot fob. He left one morning while I watched a squirrel stealing nuts from the bird table. I had my Paul close, snug between my breasts as any joey in his mother’s pocket. “It’s twenty weeks today,” I called out to Vincent who was pulling on his socks. “Our baby is viable.” “Oh for God’s sake, you’re never going to stop this nonsense,” he said as he flung down his keys and slammed the door.
I wondered, because I couldn’t help it, whether any of my books had ever found their way across Vincent’s desk at the Daily Mail where he wrote mainly about boob jobs and cellulite, his magnum opus as dead to him as his soul. I stepped into the kitchen shaking rain from my hair and Paul came shimmering towards me, pale and beautiful. He lifted his hands to my face. As we embraced I vowed I would spend more time in town come the summer: I would visit Vincent’s grave and cut a rose for Paul. It was quite a cheery thought. I had a perfectly lovely pair of secateurs at home.
The Morning After
They were all there, the plump men in their dickie-bows, the women glinting with sequins and spite, rattling their jewels at one another and casting acquisitive eyes over the list of auction items for later. The usual things were up for grabs: the golf weekends and wing-walking opportunities that would be re-donated to another charity as soon as the winning bidder sobered up, the dinners at expensive restaurants hungry for promotion, the handbags donated by designers fashionably doing their bit for the environment, for the fluffier of God’s soon-to-be extinct creatures, for children, for Africans, for whatever.
Olivia felt at home on the usual spindly gold chair, her breasts nestling in her dress, displayed for all the world like a couple of Easter eggs in novelty egg cups. She milked her friend Sabrina for the grislier details of a recent weekend in Gloucestershire to which Olivia had not been invited.
“…and the children! The girl - who is not a looker, by the way - wouldn’t let Julia finish a single sentence and the boy had to be sent to his room for slipping worms onto the barbeque.”
“Oh yuck…” Ever since she’d been widowed Olivia had found herself left off the guest lists of all the jolly occasions. She took it as affirmation of her own attractiveness in the eyes of the other wives.
The croustade of quails eggs came and went, the man on her left sloshed Pouilly Fume into her glass. “Not such a bad vintage,” he said with yolk yellowing the cracks at the corners of his mouth and Olivia rather hoped he wasn’t so well brought up that he’d feel impelled to turn away from his companion to make conversation with her for the duration of the next course, which was, quite predictably, to be salmon.
“They only discovered what he’d been doing with the worms after everyone had eaten their lamb burgers,” Sabrina was saying. “Revolting, I was nearly sick.” She waved a hand at the floral arrangement in the centre of the table: “Why do you suppose they always put things like vegetables in there? Artichokes? Are they trying to surprise us?” she said dismissing the flowers while Olivia watched the diamonds flare at her wrist. “Mistress present,” said Sabrina catching her eye. “So much better than anything he ever bought me after we were married.”
The pudding, a concoction of white chocolate mousse and crushed raspberries in a gilded cage of spun sugar, was left untouched by both women. The man who had been so enthusiastically refilling her wine glass claimed to have once been a drummer in a rock band. She and Sabrina found him just a little bit interesting after that. As the coffee and petit fours arrived a woman whose Minnie Mouse voice rendered her unsuitable for public speaking took to the podium to introduce the guest speaker. “It is because of people like Daniel Flint that the trade in Indian Tiger products has been brought to light,” she squeaked. A juddery video was being shown of tiger skins being shaken out on dusty streets. The swerving camera picked out a shelf of bottles. Chinese characters in gold, a translation in bold type, and no, it wasn’t a mistake: “Tiger wine” printed on the labels.
“Oh, how awful,” Sabrina said, reaching for a tiny square of fudge and then thinking better of it, as a tall man with shoulder length dark curls bounded on to the stage.
“Who’s that? Lord Byron?” said the drummer but the women were not listening to him any more.
Daniel Flint spoke in a voice that was rich and dark. His surveillance team had taken many risks concealing cameras in brief cases, posing as businessmen, meeting the illegal traders late at night and bringing back footage that more than hinted at corruption and links to government agencies.
“I know that you’re here to have a good time and straight after the auction the band will be on but I ask you please not to ignore the envelopes that have been placed on the tables before you,” he said, and before he had finished speaking Olivia was unsnapping her bag, which was too small to hold a chequebook, hoping her credit card would do. “Your donations will make a difference.” Daniel Flint seemed to look straight at her and she felt herself grow hot. “Your donations will fund our work to expose this illegal trade.” And then, still looking at her he thumped the lectern: “If we don’t act now the Indian Tiger will be wiped off our planet within the next decade.”
Oh it was shameful! By the following evening, the artichokes that Daniel Flint had salvaged from the floral arrangements were bobbing about in a pan of salted water in Olivia’s Holland Park kitchen, and they were both still laughing as she opened the second bottle of wine.
He had noticed her almost immediately: she was hard to miss with that hair and those legs. He had picked out the drummer whose band had provided the soundtrack to his youth, and there she was staring up at him with huge doe eyes, twisted around in her chair, blonde hair lustrous around her naked shoulders and falling in thick waves against the emerald sheen of her dress.
She’s wearing a loose silk blouse this evening, no bra, making his penis twitch every time she leans forward to dip the fleshy part of an artichoke leaf into the dish of melted butter between them. Her amber eyes glisten, he sees tears wobble and spill as he tells her about the things he’s seen. The carcasses: so many of them. The bones with bits of tiger skin still attached that are suspended in the bottles of rice wine. “Like the worms in tequila,” she says, twisting her hair. “Much worse,” “Oh yes, I didn’t mean that…”
He reaches over and touches the sweet tip of her nose where a little butter has made it shine. “And the tiger’s nose leather is used to treat wounds,” he says. His fingers move to the top of her head. “The brain is ground into a paste for pimples.” He kneels at her feet, takes her hands in his. “The claws are used to cure insomnia…” Her nails are lacquered bright red and he kisses them one by one. She smells deliciously of aniseed.
She woke shivering from the strangest dream. Daniel Flint lay stretched out beside her, one arm thrown across the pillow, palm upwards as though waiting for something to be placed into it, the other lost beneath the sheets. He was smiling slightly in his sleep in a way that made her envy whatever was going on in there. Her own dream hadn’t been so bad, just odd: she had been tiptoe-ing through the snow on a high silvery plateau, wrapped in soft furs, a tiny fawn-like creature on wobbly legs beside her, nibbling and nuzzling her, looking up at her with liquid brown eyes, and in the dream she knew that this was her baby, and that just out of sight Daniel was standing, sniffing the air for danger, guarding them. She steals another look at him across her pillow: his nostrils flare slightly, his eyelashes and brows are so dark they appear to have been sketched and smudged on to his face with charcoal. It seems impossible that such a beautiful specimen is lying in her bed. It’s like finding a Fabergé egg in a junk shop.
She tiptoes from the bed. Moonlight floods the room as she slides back the curtains and she can smell the night-scented jasmine that winds its way from the garden to her window, but still she can’t shake her chill. Daniel stirs slightly in his sleep, mutters something that sounds like “beloved,” and turns his face into the pillow. Olivia can
’t stop smiling as she wraps herself in her Shahtoosh shawl and wonders at her strange dream. How can it be that a mere vision of a snowy wasteland can make her feel so cold on a summer’s night? Her body tingles beneath the shahtoosh and she hugs herself through its soft embrace: not a part of her has been untouched by Daniel’s lips, his hands, his breath in her ear as he whispered the things she didn’t dare to wish. “A coup de foudre,” they both agreed, they laughed, they fucked, she cried, they fucked again, and before they slept, he wiped away her tears.
She is still shivering despite the shawl, her beloved “toosh” given to her on her wedding night, and the envy of all her friends. The fine faun-coloured cloth so wondrously warm it was said that a pigeon egg would hatch if it were to be wrapped in it. “There,” her husband ran the miraculous bolt right through the centre of her wedding ring. “The real thing. I won’t tell you how much it cost.”
Daniel wakes with a dry mouth and Olivia’s sheets tangled around his legs. He reaches for her across the bed and his fingers snag against something soft. He slides his eyes sideways and even in the pinkish dawn he fears that he knows only too well what it is she has wrapped around herself. He turns onto his elbow and gingerly rubs a piece of the cloth between his finger and thumb: it is unmistakably a shahtoosh, made from hairs so fine that whoever wove it had probably gone blind. A small snore escapes from Olivia’s mouth, and with it a sour smell. Stupid woman! He doesn’t know if he wants to shout at her or run away. Both probably. He wonders if she’s one of the brainless ones who believe these things were fashioned from the shed breast feathers of the fictitious Tooshi bird, but doubts it. The newspapers have been full of this fashion scandal: the massacre of four young Chiru antelopes for every shawl. He stands from the bed and bends down over her, just to be sure. He should wake her up and tell her how the chirus died for her: caught in the headlights and gunned down, or with their legs bitten through by the teeth of a barbarous trap. He should tell her how soon these beautiful creatures will become extinct and how it will be a double tragedy since the chiru’s fleeces are carried over the mountains to the Indian border and bartered for Tiger parts: India trading with China so that every Shahtoosh has the blood of a tiger upon it. But the nausea he feels is rising from his stomach and burning his throat and she doesn’t smell so good to him now. A breeze sucks at the curtain and shadows fall across her face. She had seemed almost radiant to him the night before, with her trembling tears and righteous indignation; he would have been happy to die in her arms; but now he can see that it was all artifice. If he tugged hard enough the blonde tresses would probably come off in his hands and there is something un-natural about the curve of her cheek, in the tightness of her jaw and in the way her brow remains mysteriously untroubled as he grabs his things, leaving her lying beneath her shroud, and finds his way out and into the morning.
The Itch
He has his back to me while I tell him about my day: the fresh Cornish crab I bought at the fish shop for our supper, lunch with my mother at Peter Jones. “It’s got worse,” I say. “Her hands shake so badly she spilt soup in her lap.” The hem of his jacket is down, the light catches a spidery thread hanging there and I wonder, has he always looked out of the window when I talk? There’s nothing much to see outside. Just the lawn, still striped from his weekend mowing, and next door’s cat asleep on the wall.
“Lucky for you the crab’s already dead,” I point out as I chop purple shallots on a board. His hand strays across the table to last Saturday’s Telegraph Sport.
“I hate the thought of them screaming,” I say.
“It’s only air escaping,” he says glancing at a racing page that I feel sure he must already have committed to heart.
I slice cleanly through tomatoes and wonder if it’s possible that he no longer thinks about other times; that for all he cares to remember we might never have cooked together or bought live crabs from a Cornish fisherman. It’s unfair really, isn’t it? There are things that I would like to forget but I can’t and then there are happy memories that I cling to, with a real effort, like squinting at a Picasso to see the face behind the abstraction.
The tomatoes then were from the little shop in the Cornish village and were more knobbly than the slippery supermarket ones I’ve just cut. The knives in the cottage were blunter too: seeds splurged from the gashes I made in the tomato skins and spilt on to the breadboard like spawn. We cobbled together our supper to the sound of a tinny transistor radio, Johnny Walker’s hits from the Seventies: “Play that Funky Music”, and Bony M, and songs about summer and love from Grease. We danced around each other in that unknown kitchen, lost in the moment, as though fate were our choreographer and Venus a puppeteer pulling our strings. Alan rubbed garlic onto toast, heaped the tomatoes on top and added swirls of olive oil. I swung washed green salad in a tea towel above my head, allowing drops to splatter violently in wet stripes against the window and walls and to fall onto us like rain; he pulled the cork from the wine and wiped debris from inside the neck with his finger. “Mama Mia, Here I go again…” We mimed the songs into stainless steel salt and pepper shakers: “My,my how can I resist you…” We leant towards each other until our shoulders touched, really, we did...
“Do you remember?” I say, but he’s already dialling a number. He’s standing with his back to me, the telephone cradled between his shoulder and ear, a file from the office scattering papers onto the dresser before him. “Hello, so sorry I wasn’t able to get back to you earlier today. Now, about those prices…”
I hum to myself. I remember.
How bright we were. Not just younger. Everything around us was more brilliantly coloured and we moved through life on lighter feet. Dancing indeed! Funny that I can remember more about our time in Portreath than I can about, say, last weekend. Was it roast beef or roast chicken? I have no idea. But I can picture us in that cottage right down to the jam jar of sea pinks on the table and if I stand here now and lick my hand it reminds me of Al’s skin and him lying on the sand.
It was supposed to have been crab supper then too: a pair of them, the size of ornamental fans scuttered across the cottage floor on stiletto claws when the fisherman tipped them from his sack and I screamed at their lollypop eyes.
“Well, of course they’re looking at you,” laughed Al, my boyfriend, as my husband Alan then was. “How can you possibly expect them not to?”
Petroc the fisherman licked his cold-sores with a fat tongue, nodded his agreement. Up and down went his head while his eyes popped at me until I was more afraid of him than the crabs.
“Thank you, very much,” said my husband-to-be, noticing my panic and ushering him away from where I stood. He held open the door: “Tell me, what do we owe you?”
One of the crabs lay half-heartedly inspecting its claw under the table, the other was manoeuvring itself along the skirting board, scraping and rattling like a clockwork toy. I tried to stop my hands shaking as I set water to boil in the large tin pan. The letting agent had pointed to it in the scullery, said it was what all the visitors used when they bought from the crabman who would surely come calling. He never missed a sale when the cottage was rented, apparently. “Likes to grab an eyeful of the lady visitors, does old Petroc,” the agent had told Alan, jerking his thumb to where I stood looking out at the sea through the kitchen window.
I left Al to watch over the water while I walked down to the shop by the beach huts for salad. I took much longer than necessary; stopping to talk to a dog, reading the labels on bottles of sauce, choosing new shoe laces. The impending death of the crabs hung over me, pressing down on me like a lid; I wanted to be neither executioner nor accomplice. By the time I forced myself back into the kitchen, the pan was trembling as steam made a cymbal of the lid, clanging away and starting the crabs up again in clipping tangos across the stone flags. Al looked at me, his brows high, a question. “No way,” I said dumping the paper bags onto the work surface. “I’m not doing it.” I had my hand on the door through to the ot
her room, I could smell the blood and guts of the fishing boat, probably from the sack that Petroc had left on the floor, and I thought how strange it was that I’d always known that smell as fear.
Al looked from the crabs on the floor to the boiling pan of water, back to the crabs, and then to me, still standing by the door. I couldn’t tell if the brightness in his eyes was laughter or anger. I hadn’t known him long enough, though he’d been fantasising about eating fresh crab all the way down in the car. It wasn’t until he spoke that I realised I had been holding my breath. “I’m not really all that hungry,” he said, and I let out a sigh.
“There’s tomatoes and stuff,” I said, “and we can have some toast.” Then he tuned the radio to Johnny Walker and that’s when we danced, elated because our merciful hearts beat as one and our eyes were bright with the power of absolution.
There was the occasional click of shell on shell to remind us about the crabs which were safely back in the sack, coaxed there by Al and the fire shovel while I hid in the back room. We ate the tomatoes on toast and salad by candlelight, sitting huddled together at a little blue painted table by the back door with the beach stretching into the shadows beyond the sandy patch of rough grass and the sea wall.
We mopped our plates clean of juice and oil with bread torn straight from the loaf and drank cold white wine from heavy tumblers because we couldn’t find stem glasses. It was one of those meals that you know will be memorable even before the moment has passed. I sat back and tried to stop my mind from wandering while Al cleared away the plates.
“Right, I think it’s time,” he said coming back from the kitchen with the sack. Together we clambered onto the wall and jumped down onto the beach where the seaweed was strewn across the sand like rags. There was half a moon that night and I watched as Al became a silhouette, a shadow-dancer, halfway down the beach, tipping open the sack, holding it by its corners at arms length, to release the crabs. He had to shake it quite hard in the end as the crabs clung to the hessian, their pincers clipping and snapping like surgical instruments. The sack had become their comfort blanket. I stayed where I was as he finally managed to untangle them and I heard them fall onto the sand with two little thumps, like shoes onto a carpet, before they scuttled towards the glittering darkness that was the sea.