Wait Till I Tell You

by Candia McWilliam

  The sandwiches had been meat. Mr Gordon had whittled some driftwood into a dragon shape and shown the children how to extract the bitterness from a cucumber by cutting off the tip and turning it round and round on the cut end till all the white gall had been milked out. He then scooped out the seeds, halved it along its length and handed around sweet chunks of the cold cucumber, improved beyond its vegetable self, transformed into fruit.

  When the boys were building follies with their composition bricks or sitting up in the copper beech tree’s maroon chambers, Mr Gordon would sometimes join them. The longer he stayed with his sons the more like them he seemed, although to Mollie the boys did not have the charm of their father, being easy to understand. An indirection in him held him in her thoughts more than she knew, although he looked her in the eyes when he spoke to her, encouraging her to flourish in his difficult gaze.

  Rhona Gordon nagged her father, who could not do enough for her. When he made little loaf pans for her and crimped dishes for tartlets out of metal he had pressed and cut himself, she told him, as her mother might have, ‘These are sharp for a child, do you not see that?’

  The night in the small house was a warm one in late summer. Rhona and Mollie had been awaiting the occasion with a pleasure that had sufficient alarm to it to be interesting. Darkness came at night and who knew what it might contain? Not Germans, after all this time (it was the middle thirties and the two girls were brought up ostrich fashion), but Englishmen perhaps, over the border for a rieving night? Aged fourteen, the girls were children enough to confuse fear and interest.

  No one had told them anything more helpful about these sensations than that the male pigeon is moved, when the mood comes upon him, to ‘tread’ his mate. A picture of this obscure conjunction did not help. The she pigeon looked compliant, the he pigeon smug. A pointless attention had been paid to the particularities of their plumage, their iridescence, and so on. It was like being shown how to roll an umbrella when what you wanted, if only you knew it, was a voyage in a hot air balloon.

  Rhona and Mollie had done their teeth in the farmhouse. They brought out with them a candle and a drum of matches that were not to be used save in an emergency. Through the garden under the waxy trailing leaves of the copper beech, over the rabbit-netting into the fruit cage and out into the orchard’s long grass they walked as though they had not been there before ever. Each girl wore a camel dressing gown and carried a stone hot-water bottle wrapped in a piece of blanket. They had provisioned the playhouse earlier with apples, bread, butter and splintery-pink rhubarb jam.

  Small and burdened the plum trees seemed to gnarl as Mollie walked in the dark between them; they were seemingly changing in shape as though being cooked from beneath, or twisted at the roots. So damp was the grass it was like paddling through wet ribbons as the two approached the playhouse. Mr Gordon had hung a Tilley lamp and shown them earlier in the day how to turn off its light by rolling away the flame.

  It was like a cabin inside, warm and close and appointed with no superfluities. The two beds were made up, white as open envelopes.

  In bed, the lamp extinguished, the windows opened at a distance nicely judged to take into account both health and marauders, Rhona and Mollie said their prayers and then began to go through the girls in their class, judging who had been kissed. There were seven Fionas in the class so attention had to be paid.

  Rhona had not been kissed, in her own opinion, she said. You did not count the Lorimer boy because he did it to everybody. Mollie had not been kissed, although she moaned at her mother’s handmirror sometimes and offered her cheek to it, sometimes even her lips. The girls fell asleep after a satisfactory bout of giggling that came to them as a mercy just as they began to talk about ghosts.

  In the aware early sleep that leads to dreams, Mollie instructed herself not to talk in her sleep. She did not know what secret she contained, only that one was there. Although Rhona was the talker when they were awake, Mollie spoke out at night and woke herself often at the height of these dreams of puerile adventure and high colour that did not sit naturally with her quiet waking style.

  When she awoke later, it was neatly, as if she were about to arrive at a station. She moved out of the cosy bed in two cool movements, casting a glance she realised was duplicitous at her sleeping friend; walked backwards like a sailor down the steps that led to the childish dining set, unlatched the door with the discretion of luck, and went out among the plum trees in her nightdress. Her feet were bare. The trees no longer appeared distorted but ordered in an abundant pattern full of blue, starry all the way down to the shining grass. She took a plum. In the day they were yellow fleshed inside the glowing red skin. By night under combining stars this plum was blue skinned, white fleshed. Although it was not quite ripe and still clung to its stone, she bit it and chewed. A shiny knot of resin had seeped and settled where a wasp had been before her. She wiped the stiff globule off with her thumb and looked up into the face that was higher up than most of the burdensome fruit.

  ‘I woke you with my lamp, did I? Are you cold?’ asked Rhona’s father, and her absence of fear completed itself.

  Sixty years on, after church, Mollie listened to Rhona and watched her as she nagged at the world and set it to rights.

  ‘Would you have done that, though would you, Mollie, I’m asking you, would you ever have been so foolish? Would you not have had the presence of mind to run? Or even to try to do the man some reasonable harm? The good men have gone, the men of honour, the men you could trust, the men like, did you know him, Mollie, my poor father who was wounded in that First War and never the same, so Mother and I, it was hard for us, hard, we had to protect him from his own peculiarities. Of course, I recall now you did meet him. And one night when we slept the night through in my garden house, it was blossom time and the trees were white with the blossom, it made its own light like surf, I’m remembering it now, you said his name in your sleep. You said, “Mr Gordon.” It was blossom time, I’ll never forget, and we made jeely pieces before it was light. With plum jam. It was a rare night.’

  Mollie contrived to maintain the air of uninterest that was the response most familiar to her old, betrayed, dear friend; there was no need at this late stage to look into the roots of the friendship’s heartwood, a tired man on a night of nights kissing a young girl next to a deep tank of tar, some days before it came to the time of gathering plums.

  For After the Trains Have Stopped, a Woman Owes it to the Outside World to Take a Proper Pride in Herself

  ‘I owed it to myself,’ said the first client of the morning, ‘and to the outside world.’

  ‘Do you see much of that, the outside world, then?’ asked Diane, who was adjusting the bands and pads and clips that led to the machine.

  ‘Not in so many words. But there’s my husband. And the family.’

  ‘Oh nice,’ said Diane and Josephine Cochrane knew that the beauty operative (for so said the words embroidered across the breast of the overall Diane wore) had stopped listening. She braced herself for the torture that would begin when Diane began to activate the machine. The convulsing twinges of electricity that were intended to brace and tone Jo Cochrane’s body till it would bounce if thrown any distance, the unpleasant tingling-hot, trickling-cold feeling of the soggy pads against her skin, the crabtip clips leading from them, bringing the increasingly strong electrical impulse, the live wires trailing over her deadish winter flesh, all these were bearable. Diane’s talk, though, was harder to endure.

  Jo put her book very close to her face and tried to look as though she was reading, to convey that she was reading. Reading carried out in the usual way wouldn’t look like enough of an activity to transmit itself to Diane. Jo tried to look as though she was thinking, too. She was doing neither. Perhaps because she was actually willing Diane to keep silent, the other woman sensed this and began to talk; Jo had brought about the event by thinking about it, like a person eaten out by a secret until that secret is legible on the skin of it
s bearer.

  ‘With me it’s the little things. Nothing’s too much trouble. If I give my heart, it’s given, and there it is. The first one is the only one. If he asked me back, I’d be there over broken glass before you said knife. My mother’s the same. Been like it all her life. You can ice a cake in only so many ways, but the trim’s different each time. And the message on the top. And that’s what keeps me at it. When I seen him dancing on the floor with Andrina I says do I let him walk all over me in public or do I walk? The kids was all behind me and they’re attached like pins, all in a burr, close as ’edgehogs. Nothing’s too much trouble for them. I won’t let them lift a finger. That’s how I am. Can’t have other people do things for me if I could do them myself. Every little last thing.’ She paused. Her speech did not break naturally, being excitingly unplotted, but whenever she intended to do something, she stopped, as though she were not geared for simultaneity.

  Diane twiddled the knobs on the machine that delivered the convulsions that were meant to make Jo’s body fit to be seen by lengthening and shortening her muscles like so many slugs with salt dropped on them. The central panel of her trunk lifted, tightened, sank. Her sides sucked at her rib cage. The currents that were to deal with her knees attacked with cramps that pulsed at her with the impartial venomousness of jellyfish. Diane spoke unblemished English save for its content and the irregular, almost genteelly specific, loss of an H at the start of a word. The drift of her speech, its lowness of muscle tone, soothed Jo but worried her too, since she was left never knowing when, or how, to respond. She became as jumpy as a deaf actor waiting for a cue. All her senses compensated for her confusion, rallying to try to divine the sense of what Diane wanted to hear.

  The cubicle was built of Scandinavian-type wood, with big knots and the odd hole, that Diane had filled with plugs of cotton wool. She’d had the idea of fragrancing these one week in winter when things were slow. The walls were not secure, nor was the bench on which the seeker of beauty must lie to get her shocks. Each seeker got a fresh length of recycled-quality kitchen towel (turkey width) to go under her. This gave a good impression, Diane said. She saved the lain-upon paper towel for her kitchen, where it was meant to go in the first place if you thought about it. Diane’s life was full of such logical considerations. She let her kids stay off school some days because if she had not they would be anyway. That way, she could be sure they went when they went, so she said.

  Diane had a vision that was not Josephine’s. The fragrant cotton-wool balls kept off stray glances, from the numerous men who passed through, Diane said also. Jo had never seen a man at The Beauty Spot, except for the postie who flung and fled, and it was not easy to see how a stray glance might angle and fix itself so as to penetrate the knot holes in the light wood. Poor man who did achieve this. What he would see might scare him into joining the Church. The Beauty Spot was a walk up the road from the other focus of the village, the disused station, where crafts were sold in the season and home baking all year.

  Lochanbeg was an abrupt wee border village pressing close to the sides of an old road that it refused to allow to grow wider. Women came to the village in great numbers, having done so from the first day Diane arrived with her electric exerciser. There was reputed to be a larger machine over near Dumbarton, it was said, but it was situated in a great open place with mirrors and other individuals in need of improvement, according to one customer of Diane’s, who came right the way over from her guest house by Peebles and swore by Diane’s machine. Other ladies, too, agreed, that the charm of The Beauty Spot was its smallness.

  ‘It’s homey,’ they would say, a word always used when a place is not a home, or not a home of choice. The chief charm of The Beauty Spot was its near invisibility. The social word might have been discretion; the fairer word was incongruity. Yet women drove in their cars rather solider than those locally reared from all over the lowlands to be subjected to the electricity that was directed by Diane through their unloved fat and into their disused muscles. Diane herself was a curiosity. She had arrived from England with her machine, with a clutch of English children by her first husband. She was to be the second wife of Gibson Renfrew, who owned the big local garage where they did a steady trade in 4-wheel-drive vehicles about five months of the year, and made up the shortfall in sandwiches and souvenirs come the season. It had been a thinning living till Diane appeared with her slimming machine, after which many profitable contacts had been made.

  When you stepped on to the forecourt of Gibson Renfrew’s showroom, the asphalt gave. Beneath it, the heather was waiting, as it always did unless you gave it no hope at the root, to come back. Gibson was a big man with a small mother; he was easily led astray by women, but his mother saw to the sorting-out. Diane had come from the south to the house of her mother-in-law and the children of her husband’s first wife, and she had them all subdued and happy right away. A baffled happiness had furred up the usually sharp relations of the Renfrews. No one could say why, but the effect was noted. Mrs Renfrew senior had said, and to be heard, that ‘Diane was a woman of her word’. It was thus become a known fact.

  Jo Cochrane said, ‘I’m reading.’

  ‘Why did you ever not say? I can’t be expected to read your thoughts, can I now?’ Diane spoke kindly. She never took offence. She was chewing lo-cal gum and eating a nice Rice Krispie and syrup flapjack to her elevenses. Rice Krispies fell with stunned sweetness to stick to the wide rubber bands that bound Josephine round her least taut parts.

  Josephine Cochrane thought of the confusion undergone by the modern body. She considered the state of Diane’s gum as it must be when she had reached the end of the day and its snacks. Diane turned up the power of the currents leading to Jo’s legs.

  ‘You’re not reading now, are you?’ Jo waited. It came when she had hoped it had passed. ‘Aren’t you having yourself too good a time?’ The current at the top of her legs was as high as it could be. At least the girl-talk was over. No worse to come but this rather bracing self-inflicted – and costly – pain. But Diane continued, ‘Too good a time to waste it reading?’

  ‘She only says it because it’s what she thinks I want to hear,’ Jo said to herself. She was reading ferociously now by dint of counting the number of ‘fors’ on the page. It being a book by a Scotswoman, there were twice the usual number for the word has more than just the single use.

  ‘Flapjack?’ said Diane.

  ‘No, thankyou just the same.’ Jo thought she might try a joke. ‘I’m here because of too many flapjacks. In principle.’ There she went. Why could she not rest without being strict for the truth? Who cared if she didn’t precisely eat flapjacks?

  ‘They’re high in fibre. I’m surprised you got that way,’ Diane indicated the many surfaces of Jo, ‘by just eating flapjacks. After forty isn’t it, you’ve the face or the figure, not both. They say. That’s what they do say.’

  Jo wanted to ask her why, if this was so, she continued to sell the notion that you could have both with the collaboration of an electric current and some almost Victorian-seeming paraphernalia to harness and apply to the vexed face and/or figure.

  With a laxness shocking and pleasant, the current sank and was gone. Already Josephine heard the voice of the next seeker.

  She was speaking to Karen, who did electrolysis and waxing and was off on a course to Wick, to learn thalassotherapy and the physiology of the nose.

  ‘I do it for myself alone, and not the outside world,’ said the voice of an older woman. Emerging from the insecure wooden booth without her tights, Josephine stopped for a moment, dazzled by the freedom her limbs had forgotten in their fifty minutes of constriction. She looked for the speaker in the low front room of The Beauty Spot. Mrs Renfrew senior was speaking. ‘My daughter-in-law,’ she was saying, ‘gives people what they want. She’s a girl in a thousand.’

  If she had lived in a city, Mrs Renfrew senior would have said, ‘She’s a girl in a million.’ As it was, a thousand was a million to her. Locha
nbeg was never busy, and since the railway line had gone it was less so. Tourists came like bright ghosts of day in cars and buses but vehicles that had brought them took them away. There was not the old pleasure of holding people strange in the village till they had buried at least a generation. Mrs Gibson Renfrew senior set down the box of frosted butterscotch furls she’d made for the home bakery up the road. Her life was fuller now she’d Diane in her family; there was more in the way of things to do.

  ‘Of course, I’d to test the icing for it was sweet enough,’ she said to Diane, ‘and fresh sponge out the oven on a cold morning fills the inner man like a cladding. Anyroad, it was good right enough I knew I was coming in to you, dear, so’s I knew it would do no harm if I’d a wee taste.’

  Diane was ushering her mother-in-law into the booth where old copies of The People’s Friend lay stacked on top of one another, the pages stuck together – as the pages of recipe books sometimes are with grease and sugar – with massage cream, patent slimming gel (drawn, so it declared, from the wasps of the Yucatán), baby powder and the crumbs of home baking.

  Josephine muttered to Karen that she wasn’t going just yet, went into the leanto outside lavatory, put her tights over her tingling and insulted hind quarters and wrote out a cheque. She preferred to do this where Diane wouldn’t see her and feel a touch insulted, somehow less artistic, for being paid.

  For that was Diane’s secret. She was an artist of what people wanted to believe. She kept life on the move. Well might one ask what was the point of coming many miles to be attached to a machine of unproven efficacy in the diminution of the expanded flesh and then passing down the grassy street to purchase fresh home baking, but Josephine understood it now, in the shining tussocked meadow behind The Beauty Spot, looking along the steely row of stone village houses with the telly aerials too big for their chimneys.