Wait Till I Tell You

by Candia McWilliam

  ‘Mother, come down, I’m arrived. Or we are.’

  The voice came from under the window. Jean looked down through the scaffolding.

  ‘Do you want me to climb down to you?’ asked Jean, in an admonitory whisper that subtracted the intended irony. In the heat the creeping plants that embraced the house were reaching tendrils towards the scaffolding, pitting their minute continual subversion against the clumsy man-made optimism of its structure. Should it remain too long, the plants would wind it about and bring it down.

  ‘Shall I actually come in this way?’ said a male Scots voice, perhaps drunk. Jean looked along the house. Just to the side of her own bathroom window, over the workroom of Ludovina her employer, was a man over thirty standing rather crouched in the hot box of air between the first-floor scaffolding bars. His colour was bad. It was hard to believe that here was a romantic motive for Morag’s morning dash from Edinburgh, but it was Jean’s duty to ask.

  ‘Had you intended sharing a room? Ludo would not mind but I am not for haste in these things,’ she said to the starling-coloured head of her daughter below. Morag was standing thigh-deep among blue agapanthus and the long belts of their leaves.

  ‘Mother, I left my husband under twelve hours ago, and not because I don’t love him. I may.’ Morag began to look for a cigarette. She had taken up smoking in the last two hours. It had seemed impolite not to smoke in all the dejected rooms she and Findlay Meldrum had been put into after the finding of his father’s body. There had been so little all these strangers could offer, it would have been unkind not to take their cigarettes.

  ‘Have one of mine. You light the end that you don’t put in your mouth,’ said the man in the scaffolding, dropping a cigarette that fell some feet wide of Morag, and seeing the ineptitude of his throw, he burst into tears for the first time that afternoon, and fell limp out of the rungs down on to the deep lawn of moss where he lay on his back weeping at the English sky in gasps for his father as Jean and Morag looked down at him from their two heights, and, from her workroom in this house where she had been born, Ludovina heard what she had not for more than twenty years, the intractable grief of a man.

  The obvious thing, to gather him up in comfort, was evidently up to Morag; but she only knew more about him, she did not know him any more than did her mother or Ludovina. Shy of any first touch, she wanted him and his misery, and the way it might bind them for even these hours, to be gone.

  She had chosen this as her own day for drama, and events had eclipsed her. Things do not know when to happen, she thought, they are ruthless like children. Cheated of a weeping declamatory scene with her mother, she did not at that point choose to consider why she had not minded becoming involved with Findlay Meldrum’s long distressing afternoon with the railway authorities, the police, the hospital.

  Curiosity had made her listen to Findlay’s conversation with his father. But the sight of him had passed into her with a speed and heat she had forgotten through the years of discipline and some kind of peace with Edward. This made harder the thought of gathering him to her as he beat his head back on the ground – to put it out of its misery, it seemed – and poured tears for his loss of a man she did not know. If she had thought of holding him it was not to give ease, or not at once.

  In the end it was Ludovina who dealt with Findlay. Her presumption of competence always endowed her with it. She was good at the extreme states of others since they offended her sense of the stable, measured, discreet and sober way a rational life should be led. She was a satisfied atheist, a type that will take swift decisions without later compunction; her greatest impatience was against timewasters and ditherers. The rock of her unbelief had never once let her down.

  Letting herself out by the apple-house door, she moved over the lawn in her sandals and djellabah, her stout decisive form at once becoming the focus of the group; the other two women were distraught at the sight of a man unmanned. Ludovina took over. She was at her best in a crisis, her certainty and bossiness becoming buoyant and purposeful, not chilling.

  She thought aloud in the drawling unembarrassed tones that had served her perfectly well through eighty years of privileged activism and rash adventurous travels: ‘Jean, you make a bed and a drink for him, if you would. Somewhere he can shout and howl without disturbing us. What’s your name? Ah interesting, you are a Scot too then, at any rate at the start of your history. I live here because this is the house of the parents of my mother, and the house where I was born, but I owe myself to Scotland.’ Here she spoke of what she found best in herself, her toughness, her independence, her sentimental effective brusqueness.

  Ludovina remembered the urgency and stopped, delighted to be at the heart of things that were happening, not to have to kill time with talk. ‘Morag, this is sudden, but I am pleased to see you. Since he is not your lover, don’t be so foolish and hold his head to stop him doing that.’ Ludovina knew well that a mistress would hold a lover who wept. She had herself conducted passionate rational adulteries throughout her long successful marriage.

  Findlay had rolled on to his stomach and was beating his head down on the edge of the grass where it met the path of gravel and cinders. His shiny hair was dimmed by black dust. He began to like the distracting pain of smashing down his head among the sharp small stones. Morag squatted, sank and caught him under the arms so that his head was held in her lap where he lay tense and resisting until the reminder of life that came with being held for no reason but humanity entered him, and restored to him the superficial social emotions of a man watched by a short, composed octogenarian woman as he breathes in a stranger through her skirt wet with his own tears. Ludovina nodded as Findlay calmed down. She took her time. Her hard but inky hands were on her thick waist.

  She had the thread of a new story almost in her grip. She could not wait to return to her pen, with which she had a further three hours to spend that day, before she went out to dig the evening’s potatoes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Findlay said, apologising also to his father who, he thought, would have deplored every one of the actions taken by his son since his death. ‘I had not known it would be like this. You are kind.’ It was not easy to say these things lying down and into the lap of a woman he did not know, who smelt of lemon soap, ironing, cheese and pickle, blood and, on the fingers of her right hand that was now stroking, not holding rigid, his left shoulder, the beautiful autumnal domestic dirty smell of extinguished candle.

  SOUTH

  Strawberries

  ‘Church or chapel?’ would ask my nurse, and my parents would set their mouths. My nurse was asking if my high-church father or atheist mother would care for an arched piece of bread from the top of the loaf or a squared-off piece from the bottom. Whichever either chose, it would be buttered to the edge and smeared with fish paste. We were having tea in the white day-nursery, which always smelt slightly of singeing. My parents did not care for each other, and they detested Nurse, but could not agree as to her disposal. I loved her.

  As though massively exhausted, my father began, ‘Nan,’ (this was to convince himself that he had come from generations of people who had employed servants) ‘Nan, no more can you impute the Romanesque line of that particular crust solely to churches than you can suggest that our friends the Welsh worship in boxes; or, if, by “chapel”, you mean something more Romeish, while the Gesú in Rome could conceivably be considered squat, I cannot myself be sure that it might be seen as a square.’ Did he talk like this? If not in fact, certainly in flavour. He never stopped, never definitely asserted, incessantly and infinitesimally qualified. He was an architect but however did he draw his straight lines? How, once he had begun it, did he stop drawing a line? He might continue, ‘The fish paste, Nan dear, is, I must acknowledge, an apt touch for the believer when one brings to mind that ichthyic ideogram for the name of Our Lord scrawled on the lintels of Byzantium or in the sands of Palestine; this reduction, indeed, of fish, this distillate of the deep, this patum of piety.’


  Did he speak in his intolerable manner out of hatred for our unadventurous nursery world, the humiliating occasional necessity of spending time with the son he had somehow got on the stony woman sitting low in the nursing chair? I am certain he did not speak from love of words, for all his polylalia; he issued his words as though they strained the sphincter of his mouth, and sank, drained, whenever he at last completed a sentence. To ensure freedom from interruptions, he moaned at not quite regular intervals, as though his speaking mechanism were running down. He also breathed energetically and gobbled at his cheeks.

  My mother in contrast was so quiet as to suggest illness. When she spoke, the remark would be of the sort that made me pleased I had no brothers or sisters. The thought of anyone having to hear the things my mother said made me embarrassed. Today she said, ‘Did you know, my pigeon, the firescreen is worked in silk from worms which have eaten nothing but the white mulberry’s leaf?’ It was her overworked absence of banality which made me uncomfortable. I do not now think she was affected, rather, I think she may have escaped into willed eccentricity, which combined with an already eccentric nature. I have inherited her warmth towards esoterica; she had none for people, but she loved her dreadful facts.

  Unlike my mother, I have always felt inhibited by the idea of displaying curious information in daily converse. I find it hard to imagine dropping into a free, swiftly moving conversation, odd bits of factual knowledge; they seem to choke the progress and clarity of the thing. I loathe those men who just happen to know about monorchitism in dictators or the curative properties of the toxic members of the potato family. I like best knowledge which comes from comprehension. I do not care for ornamental knowledge, as worn by my mother. Expository or even revelatory knowledge are what I like. Since I became an adult, the mathematics of space and time have been my particular weakness.

  But then, on the rug of knotted grey and green cotton rag, concentrating on the knotting’s soft randomness to drive time off, I was years from my final resting place, the study of finite dimensional vector space. I have mentioned that I was an only child. I had no friends. If you have bundled and divided the genetic fibres I have offered you, you will not be surprised. But I did have, on my father’s side, some cousins, and I liked them.

  We were to see them the next day, for the funeral of a great-aunt of mine and of theirs. She had died alone in her flat by the river. On my last visit before her death, accompanied by my mother and by Nurse, my great-aunt had been alert in her freezing flat. She was as sane as a horse and my mother behaved normally for at least an hour. Nurse was scandalised by the cold, and told my mother so. My mother replied, ‘Cold is so very good for keeping the more highly-strung tropical blooms fresh.’ There was a very small posy of flowers at my great-aunt’s flat, and it was made out of wire and buttons. It lived in a vase with a blurry view of a castle painted on one side, strangely out of register, as though the transfer had been done by someone trembling badly. Beside this vase lived a photograph of my four cousins and me. This photograph pleased me in two ways, once warmly, for love, and once in a hot mean way. We were richer – in money – than they, and my coat, even in a photograph, was clearly better fitting, better cut, and of better cloth. I would be wearing this coat to the funeral.

  Tea over, Nurse bathed me and read a story to me, a story too young for my age in order to foil nightmares. We also conspired to keep me a baby, so my parents needed her and she could hold my own helplessness against her dismissal, when it came.

  My parents overcame their fraught lassitude for long enough to give me a good-night talk on the warping of furniture ferrules in comparative latitudes (my father) and the lost-wax art of a man (am I tidying the past unmercifully?) called Gloss O’Chrysostom (my mother). If he had listened, and she had momentarily emerged from her hypochondriacal trance, they might have found one another quite interesting. As it was, he worked at home, there was not yet a war to take and glorify him, and she simply had too little to do. I, as a child, was not sickened by all that rich leisure, since that is a child’s state, to judge its own circumstances the norm. And children have not learnt to measure time. Nevertheless, through observing my parents observe time and its passage (clocks, watches, timers, tolling, chiming, sounding, and the terrible mealtime gong), I was fast losing that innocence.

  I said prayers to Nurse, having rescinded to my mother the elaborate pieties she knew I had enunciated to my father. My private prayers were simple, ‘God bless me and God bless Nurse and God bless the Morton cousins.’ Their Christian names were easier than mine, John, Bobby, Mary and Josephine. Noel Coverley was my name. I have two middle names which I will tell no one. They attest the intimate spitefulness of my father, who has ensured that I recollect his coldness and his pretensions every time I fill in an official form. Thus he has slung my adult self about with the unhappy overdainty child I was. My grandfather had been the brother of their grandmother. It was the sister of these two who had died in the cold flat by the river. Another thing I love about mathematics of the sort I live among is the way that they blunt the points of time’s callipers, by stretching them so far apart, into other sorts of time. Families do the opposite, all the relationships marking time so clearly on that short wooden ruler.

  She lay in her coffin and the flowers held out in the steady cool for the whole service, which was long, and presided over by Anglican nuns. My parents and Nurse and I (in the coat) were driven in our grey Morris. The cemetery was beyond Chiswick. The cousins and their parents had come in a car they had hired for the day. Our driver sat in our car. Theirs went for a walk and bought a paper and a bag of pears. Nurse, who was a thorough Presbyterian and averse to what she called ‘smells and lace’, shared the pears with him. She was partial to a little fruit.

  It was my first funeral. Several things about it were unbearable yet intensely pleasurable. The only completely awful thing was the thought of a person in a box. The words of the service went to my head, so my tears were delicious. The 23rd psalm seemed to paint a nursery Arcady where a nurse and not a parent was in charge. We would all be good and fear would be cast out. For the duration of the funeral, I ceased fretting. I did not once look at my mother’s defiant white cerements, her alarmingly druidical hat.

  The mother of the cousins wore a woolly mulberry thing and she gave me a nice smile when the sermon was threatening to break the richly religious mood. Each of my cousins wore a navy blue felt hat. I had almost chewed through the elastic on my own hat. I could feel its petersham ribbons on the back of my neck. I was a skinny boy with blue knees and pale red nostrils. I had the strength of ten. I was always hungry, though I did not eat in front of my parents if I could help it.

  We crossed the road that divided the church from the graveyard where my great-aunt was to be buried. I was prepared for this burying to be the most shocking thing I had seen, worse than my father battering on my mother’s door, worse even than seeing a dog shot. So I was better off than Mary and Josephine whose faces crumpled as they saw the spadeful of earth land on that box containing a person. Perhaps they had suddenly realised that they might not live for ever. There was a wind, and while there were fewer motor cars in those days, the dirt from the Great West Road was worse. Our eyes filled with grit and our noses with the smell of cinders. John and Bobby did like men; they screwed up their faces so that no tear could possibly find its way out. I, being ‘delicate’, was expected to cry, and did so with unmixed pleasure.

  The only thing which shook me was the presence of another, unknown, child at the funeral. She was standing with two adult people. She made them look ridiculously large. She might have been my sister, she was so thin. She had a smirk behind her becoming tears. Her mother and father looked sleek and almost impolitely well-groomed. The small girl was dressed in a blue velvet cape with white fur like a frosty Eskimo doll. From the blue velvet bag she carried she extracted, still crying with her face, a peppermint disc the size of a florin. I smelt it amid the wool and naphtha. I looked reverent an
d stared hard at her from under my lowered lids.

  It was not only the mint of which I was jealous. Would this child come back to the cousins’ house? Would she offer them more highly flavoured snippets than I let them have from our different way of life? Was she related to me? Or to them, and not to me? I sent up a prayer which mentioned my great-aunt only incidentally. Its main petition was that my cousins did not, or would not, excessively care for this child.

  My mother took my hand in her gloved one. The kid felt like the lids of mushrooms. I knew what she was going to say and had a pretty good idea what she was going to do. Piously, for health reasons, against burial, she was about to break a glass capsule of eucalyptus beneath her nose, and blow it loudly. It was only since I had become seven that she had ceased doing the same for me in any exposed place. She then said, ‘While we have a moment of peace’ (what a moment, our family at prayer in a windswept graveyard) ‘my dove, just take heed of your mother when she reminds you simply to rise above the dirt and devastation at the house of your cousins, who are by no means as fortunate as you. Naturally, for reasons of politeness, we cannot fail to attend the proceedings, but I know I can trust you not to have any needs or to give in to any temptations you may encounter.’ She meant don’t go to the lavatory and don’t eat.

  One of the two lessons of that day was that death makes me hungry. It is as though food, the staff of life, were a spell against falling into dust.

  The burial done, my parents and I joined Nurse. She had the sweetly acid smell of pears on her. Her grouse-claw brooch had already that day achieved much in the way of irking my mother. We all got into the grey car. It slunk through the small streets near the Morton house. The driver could not park in their street; he would have blocked it. We had passed on the way a vehicle as long as a lifeboat and red as a fire engine. Its chauffeur was upholstered in cherry red, with cavalryman’s boots. A whip would have been unsurprising. My parents, who until now had exchanged no sentence, only my father’s accustomed latent speech and my mother’s dammed silence, looked at each other. That in itself was unusual. They spoke together, ‘Victor and Stella.’ My father continued, my mother no doubt wrung out by the effort of speech. ‘And the odious child, a vision in coneyfur. I wonder they did not drown it. Of what possible use is it to them?’ My father was in this way approaching one of his favourite topics, the childrearing customs of the Spartans. He did that turn especially for Nurse, who could not control her outrage, even when she knew she was being riled on purpose. My mother remained silent, thinking no doubt of the struggle awaiting her in the Mortons’ house.