by Patrick Gale
‘It’s wonderful,’ she said, but had always found it sinister; like enjoying a picnic in a poppy-waving meadow, then discovering that you’ve been eating beside a dead cow. ‘It’s so big. You can see everything.’
‘Exactly. I thought it could go up there, on that wall opposite the window. It’s ten times larger than the real thing, I’m sure. Just look at the detail. It’s funny, in the first week of knowing Brother Jerome, we discovered that we both liked it for the same reason.’
‘What?’
‘The perfect martyrdom. Quiet, like Saint Joseph’s. The workers in the fields, the sailors in the sea, even the birds and the animals – they’re all carrying on as though nothing was happening. Icarus has given his life to a dream, to trying to reach the sun, and he’s falling so beautifully. I know it’s morbid and sounds stupid but the picture feels frozen. Of course all pictures are frozen, but, oh I’m not explaining this properly.’ She watched his eyes flicker across the paper. ‘It’s as if he’d wanted to paint the silence, to hold that moment when Icarus starts to plummet down and just before anyone has noticed. It’s the instant, just there, when his death has a meaning, when he’s altered the whole landscape.’
Domina struggled to think of something to say, but she’d been concentrating on his eyes and lips and could only sigh, smile. She broke the moment by straightening up. It was as if she had checked his laughter. At once he was adolescent again, awkward, self-effacing. He stooped and started to roll up the poster.
‘You shouldn’t let me ramble on like this. You must go to bed.’
14
‘Cum veni Sancti Spiritu.’ The children’s voices were as bright as the glass in the cupola whence the sunlight fell to the black and white checks of the marble floor. The light gave substance to the rich fragrance that spilled from the swinging censers. There was a congregation of souls but they were behind. Sister Charity (games) was as lovely as she had remembered her. The oval face. The almond eyes. The long, long body and the voice, ‘Veni mecum, sanctissima ancilla Domina Sofia Feraldi. Dominus tecum est. Veni mecum Domina Feraldi ad magistrum amoris.’ Sister Charity spoke through a smile, and extended a perfect hand. Domina took it, still hugging her Debrett’s to her naked chest. Together they waded through the arum lilies, down the avenue of altar boys. The boys were swinging censers and tossing handfuls of sugared almonds, exquisite, pink, blue and pearly white, from that little shop outside Saint Sulpice.
‘And lighten with celestial fire, da deedle dumti da deedle dum,’ les enfants chantent. The almonds tapped her lightly all over, on her breasts, her thighs, her back. Some caught in her ankle-length hair, and stayed there, eggs in a nest.
They reached the high altar and Sister Charity was taking away Debrett’s, oh so softly, her fingernails barely touching Domina’s skin as she did so. And now she was holding out a goose. It was a Canada goose, and it was dead. She lifted its head back and presented Domina with the lifeless breast. ‘Osculi avem amoris,’ she commanded.
‘Pavarotti Crush Bar and give her back a scrub down, like,’ Ginny called from behind her ‘cello.
Domino bent forward and sank her lips into the down. The angelus bells jangled and the bird shook out its wings and was gone.
‘Oh Christ, Dad, she’s not dead, Dad, she’s not dead!’
Sister Charity turned back from the altar once more holding up a gnarled wooden staff, only now she was Mamma.
‘Kiss it, cara. Go on. Kiss God’s rod.’ Domina bent and kissed. The angelus sounded again and she looked up to see green shoots sprout forth from the tip of the rod, shoots that opened out into lilies, freesia, montana, a cluster of white waxy blooms. She knew she had to walk on now, past the fluttering lace of the altar boys, past the high altar, which by now was the size of a Chippendale writing desk. Mamma Carita (games) was instructing a small Japanese maid. ‘E dica al ragazzo di lasciare il conto sul tavolo della cucina,’ she said. ‘Vado prima al salone di belleza. Diamine! Ancora il telefono.’
Watched by the congregation of souls, Domina came out into the sunny field where the bi-plane was waiting. She knew that the sweets had melted all over her skin into circles of damp confetti.
He was standing inside, in white kid. He waved a gloved hand and threw her a penetrating smile. She felt herself grow hot in the face. A vast black woman was scrubbing the wheels. As Domina approached, she presented her glossy back as a stool. ‘You’re the Boss, missy,’ she laughed, ‘remember, you’s the Boss.’
Poised with one naked leg on the seat and one on the cleaner’s back, with his smile on her breasts and the air piping with the squabbling of sparrows, Domina told herself, ‘This is very Ecstasy.’
15
The propeller was a roaring blur, a hail of sugared almonds was pelting over her skin, her legs were about his neck and truly this is the meaning of bliss, she thought.
But the bi-plane couldn’t move away. It would start forward, then be tugged back, start forward, then be tugged back. The lurching sickened Domina and she turned to see the black woman clinging to the tail-end, her face contorted with glistening rage.
‘What? What time?’ Domina murmured.
‘Phone. Mrs Tey? Here, there’s a phone call for you!’
Eight o’clock. Domina threw back the sheets and ran, half-awake, out to the landing.
‘Here. Phone call,’ gargled Mrs Moorhouse and launched into a very wet cough.
Bridget Croak, remembered Domina. Bridget Croak, the fat frog housekeeper in that Racey Helps book.
‘Hello?’
‘Domina. Hello there. It’s Jo.’
‘Oh. Hi.’ Who was Jo?
‘You said you’d be free today, yes?’
‘Oh. Yes.’
‘Great. We’ve got a job for you. Copy typist stroke clerk, bank in Holborn, nine to five-thirty, three-fifty an hour, starting today and carrying on until at least next Friday. Sound OK?’
‘Perfect.’
‘Fantastic. Have you got a pencil there?’
‘Yup,’ she lied.
‘Well, it’s the Hagushiri Banking Corporation, Shanghai House, Holborn. Just report at Reception and they’ll send someone down to find you. Can’t miss it. It’s a big tower up in the two hundreds on the left. How are you on tubes?’
‘Fine.’
‘Great. Look forward to hearing how you get on. Call in here on your way home and we’ll give you a time sheet. Pay’s a week in arrears.’
‘’Bye.’
‘Ciao.’
‘Hagushiri, Shanghai House, Holborn. Hagushiri, Shanghai House, Holborn. Hagushiri, shit shit shit, Shanghai House,’ Domina muttered under her breath as she raced back into her room and scrabbled for a pencil and paper.
Mr Punjabi was in the bath singing selections from the Andrews Sisters’ repertoire, so by the time she descended the basement steps, fragrant, impeccably turned out, in need of strong black coffee to still a churning stomach, it was five to nine.
‘Comment, Domina? Est-ce que tu dois te confesser déjà?’
‘Hello, Thierry. No, I’ve got to go to work and I’m late and it’s my first day and I don’t want to go.’
‘Have my coffee. I haven’t touched it and it’ll be cooler.’
‘Bless you.’ She accepted the mug and took a deep gulp. Thierry spooned some more grounds into the percolator and let out a heavy sigh. ‘Mais qu’est-ce que tu as?’ she asked.
‘Mon ange est parti.’
‘Billy? Oh dear.’
‘His name was Dwight.’
‘Yes. Dwight. He had such a sweet smile.’
‘That’s the way. I think you English call it “Sod’s Law”; ça veut dire, perfection, if and when you find it, is always accounted for or about to board a plane for Newark, New Jersey.’
‘Which was he?’
‘Tons les deux. You’re late for work. You must go.’
She took the Central Line. The carriage was full. A baby was yelling close by. She wanted to slap it. She had to stand wit
h one arm in the air. The man with the greasy forehead, who shared her metal pole, seemed to have chewed a head of garlic for breakfast.
At Tottenham Court Road almost all the girls left the carriage. Domina took an itchy seat. The garlic man, who had sat down opposite her in the seat for disabilities and heavy shopping, fumbled in a pocket of his brown suit and produced a half-eaten Mars bar. He peeled the black paper away to reveal the point where he had left off, and took a large bite. Nougat crumbs spilled onto his tie and a washing-line of caramel dangled, snapped, then clung to the contour of his chin. Domina looked away. Smile when you introduce yourself, and remember to shake hands. The importance of first appearances cannot be overstressed. Every temporary is an ambassador for Westminster Bureau.
She emerged, flushed, on to the sunny pavement. Her eyes felt as tight as a pig’s. She wavered, obstructing the purpose of passers-by, while trying to relate what she saw to the square of the A to Z she remembered. She struck out along Holborn. Once she succeeded in finding a building with a number, she realized that she was at quite the wrong end of the street. She quickened her pace. Her scalp began to itch with the salt of surfacing sweat. She glanced at her watch. It was nearly half-past nine. Saint Paul’s appeared in view. She stepped off the pavement and had to leap backwards into the crowd as a van bore honking down on her. One of her heels wobbled threateningly.
‘Don’t worry,’ said a man with kipper tie and scarlet face, ‘it may never happen.’
She brayed almost wildly in the teeth of his perky smile and set off once more. How could people do this for a living?
One hundred and three. One hundred and five. One hundred and seven. The numbers stopped. She passed the base of a glass and chrome office block. A stitch began to wrench at her ribs. Another door. Another number. The number was three. It should have been one hundred and eleven but the number was three. The stitch brought Domina to a standstill.
‘Oh, bloody hell!’ she exclaimed, and leant against the nearest wall to regain her breath. A bus crawling up from Saint Paul’s made up her mind. Dumping the Total Temping Package in a bin, she wove her way between the cars to the next stop and raised a hand.
A thrill of nostalgia hummed through her as she tapped across the polished floor of the loggia. Sister Annunciata had obtained permission for her to work in Senate House library in the summer before her Oxbridge term. The place lent a cinematic glamour to dogged hard work; an effect of the Mussolini-meets-Caligula look. Trooping in with the ashen-faced finalists each morning, she had imagined herself an extra in Metropolis. Standing again in a great steel lift, clutching a virgin notebook and the dog-eared envelope she had suddenly started to scribble on in the top of the bus, Domina felt the sweet familiar buzz. Whenever this sensation came upon her, she perceived afresh that her work was a serious addiction.
‘Hello, I’d like a day ticket, please, so I could use the Periodicals Room.’
‘Are you a student?’ The attendant gave her a quizzical once-over.
‘Yes. At Bristol,’ Domina lied, and handed over an English Faculty Library ticket one of Randy’s students had left behind once.
‘Fine,’ said the uniformed woman, copying out a slip. ‘One day ticket, for the twentieth, for Miss Cary McNichol. There we are. The Periodicals Room’s through there, where they’re stamping out books, through the doors at the end, past the display cases then turn sharp right.’
Domina shied away from any attempt to make her discuss her modes of composition. She found the concept of inspiration embarrassing because it was so near the truth and yet so high-flown and irrational. Her imagination had always been a vivid one but she had been blessed with a childhood in which grown-ups smiled and dubbed her an incorrigible story-teller, rather than slapping her wrist and telling her not to lie. She held that the spicing of conversation with undetected untruths was a priceless social art form. The spinning out of exchanges between characters was thus no more taxing than entertaining her cleaning-woman, and therefore only mildly entertaining for herself. The thrill lay in plotting. The ideas tended to come during conjunctions of manual occupation with mental vacancy. She would be clipping roses, scraping her feet with a pumice stick, once she had been making jam, when the seeds of a plot arrived. There was never any preliminary concentration on the matter, they simply ‘arrived’; hence the embarrassment concerning inspiration. Had she been a poetess, or even poor Rick, had she been a writer of sub-Strindberg, the awkwardness would have been less. The difficulty was that her medium was Middle-Class Domestic, and Thalia tended to do her stuff during bouts of middle-class domesticity; one could never own to the agency of pumice sticks and sugar thermometers. Her advocates believed each play to be a feat of cerebral engineering from conception onwards and she would not deceive them.
Once the ideas had come there was no danger of losing them altogether, but from the moment of their arrival there were offshoots and fleetingly suggested developments that had to be recorded as they came to her. By twelve-thirty she had the bare bones before her. A librarian aged thirty-nine, called Fay Harker, has been living all her life with her draconian mother who acts as secretary to the bishop of an important northern diocese. Driven by the demand that she mind the bring-and-buy stall at yet another Uganda Mission coffee morning and by the realization that should she accept the choir-master’s proposal it will be out of sheer bloody-mindedness, she grabs her savings and runs away. She moves into a bedsit in an extravagantly seedy building in West London where she pretends to be the widow of a canon. Against the background of street fighting and general social unrest, she becomes involved with a young priest who has moved into the house in a spirit of charitable Evangelism, and proceeds to summon up the considerable worldly passion which neither party knew they could muster.
As morning mellowed into afternoon, Domina began to lose concentration and to brood. The hairdresser had said she looked only thirty. Sitting in this roomful of students brought home to her just how easy it was to feel twenty-five. Or was it that she felt like a twenty-five-year-old? Increasingly, she let her stare drift up from her pad to her neighbours. At the table opposite, a girl was poring over her Browning Quarterly, a wholly inappropriate smirk playing about her lips. The boy across the table from her was sitting back in his chair, hands in pockets. He was smirking too, his eyes on the girl’s face as though willing her to giggle. Domina took off her reading glasses to get a better look.
He was well-built – she could see that through his rugger shirt. There was a fleck of mud on his temple. He had taken a copy of Sound and Vision off the shelves and propped it open on a stand before him. She wasn’t fooled. ‘Meet you after my match,’ he had written, ‘four o’clock, Periodicals Room, table eight.’ Then Domina saw why they were smirking. Only one of his feet was on the floor. An empty shoe lay beside it. He shifted his thighs slightly and the girl let out a gasp that was turned into a cough.
Domina flipped her pad shut, threw it with her pen into her bag, and made for the lifts. She would go out with a young man. She had to go out with a young man.
16
A hot, oily bath, some hours and several fortifying gins later, she was led out of the front door by Thierry.
‘I thought this was a men-only sauna,’ she said, as he swept her past the neon sign, up the steps and into the red-lit hall. A large woman whose quantities of gold glistered behind the reception desk chuckled aloud as she saw them.
‘Evening, Terry, love,’ he said. ‘One and a guest; that’s two-fifty. Hello, dearie. Haven’t seen you before.’
‘No,’ said Domina, twitching. ‘Hello. Thierry, let me, please.’
‘My responsibility, my treat,’ said Thierry. ‘Come on.’
She followed him into the thickening crimson gloom. What she could see of the walls was hung with thick flock paper. The hellish glow overthrew all colour distinction.
‘I suppose the red is to hide the bloodstains on the staircarpet,’ she joked.
‘Comment?’
‘Nothing.’
As they descended the basement stairs, the temperature rose sharply. There was a smell of gin and cigarettes, laced with sweat and stale Eau Sauvage. A disco beat was thudding steadily nearer. They reached another reception desk. By the light of a piece of reproduction Art Deco, a moustachioed lavatory brush smiled in welcome. He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray shaped like an outstretched hand. In her hasty glance, Domina noticed a magenta stain around the stub.
‘Hello, you old slag. Welcome back to the Herpes. Who’s your lady friend, then?’
‘That’s my secret.’ Thierry turned to her, ‘C’est vraiment dégueulasse.’
‘Where’s your tickets, then?’
‘There you are, Percy.’
‘You know that’s not my name,’ said the brush and swung round to Domina, lifting his eyes to heaven. ‘Thinks she’s that sharp, does our Tel.’ Domina grinned sheepishly, and glanced behind her. A small queue was forming. All men. She wondered how often Gerald came here. Their host continued, ‘There’s your towels. Pink for a prissy little girl.’ He handed Thierry a towel. It had 47 embroidered on one corner. ‘And blue for Madam.’
‘Thank you so much.’ Domina took hers and hurried after Thierry who was disappearing down a corridor to their right. After the glare of the lamp, the darkness was blinding. There were occasional puddles on the floor. She heard the waver in her voice as she called after him. ‘Thierry? Thierry, I thought you said it wasn’t really a sauna. I can’t very well … Why did he give us … ?’ She almost fell over his slight frame in the dark. Where he had stopped, a thin rectangle of red light defined a closed door.
‘This is the only hard part,’ he assured her. ‘You must simply keep walking. It’s usually very crowded, so hold onto my belt.’