Wait Till I Tell You

by Candia McWilliam

  Their father I called Uncle Galway. He taught history, cricket and Latin at a nearby school. Aunt Fan taught part time at the school, when she was not busy with her children. Her subjects were botany and maths. She occasionally taught dressmaking, though even the pancloths she knitted were out of shape.

  Their house was attached to its neighbour. It gave the impression of being a big cupboard, perhaps because nothing inside it was put away. In the sitting room, the temperament and pastimes of the Mortons were apparent. The room was stuffed with books, rags, wools, jigsaws, a tricycle, a tank of tarnishing but sprightly goldfish, a cat on a heap of mending, jars of poster paint, a shrimping net and some wooden laundry tongs lying on top of a crystal garden in its square battery-jar of waterglass.

  Upstairs, I knew, there would be clothes everywhere, in optimistic ironing baskets, over bedheads, stuffed into ottomans. Everywhere were clothbound books, yellow, maroon, tired blue. In the bedrooms there was a good chance of hearing mice; the Mortons were allowed food wherever and whenever they wanted it. They kept apples and sweets in their chests of drawers, where socks might have been in another house. They were a family which shared its secrets.

  The sitting room went straight into the kitchen. Today both rooms were occupied by those who had come on after the funeral. Why were my family, with so much larger a house, not entertaining the party? Their sallow social tone might have been suitable to the decorous gloom conventionally required by a funeral. But they had not offered. It seemed better, at the end of a long life, that there should be not my parents’ mean, ordered luxury, but what I saw spread out almost indecently in the kitchen, soft cheeses, deep pies, steaming fruit tarts, jugs of custard and of cream. Aunt Fan was dispensing the food with a battery of unsuitable implements, pie with an eggslice, trifle with a silver masonry tool, cheese with a palette knife, cream from an Argyll. It was a bright mess of colour and juice, squashiness and superfluity. Nurse and my mother stiffened, the one as she saw good food in quantity, the other as she perceived the prowling spectre of uncontrol with its attendant bacteria, spillage and decay.

  My cousins fell on me, wagging like pups. Each of them held a thick slice of well-buttered black cake, so by the time they had greeted me I was an object of horror to my mother. She took a long look at me, winced, drew herself up, ruffled and settled her shoulders, and bent, in movement like a river-bird, to unbutton and remove my now Mortonfied coat.

  Nurse fetched a plate for herself. My unspoken arrangement with the cousins was, as usual, to get myself upstairs unobserved. I think now that their parents colluded in this against my mother. The house’s muddle was a considerable help. I now, too, surmise that my mother’s desire to be free of me was even stronger than her dedication to germ warfare. And on this occasion it was clear that she could hardly remove her glare from the pair of grown-ups who must be Victor and Stella. They were tall and, separated from their curiously superior child, clothed in blatancy and confidence. My itch for vulgarity responded to those glittering froggings and facings.

  But what concerned me was their daughter, now free of her velvet cape and revealed in a white cotton dress smocked in unfunereal red. The collar was embroidered with very small red strawberries, natty fraises du bois. The buttonholes down her back were sutured in the same bright red. Her hair was long, thin and white. She had no front teeth, just two gum spaces. This gave her a lisp. Bobby introduced us. She was Coverley too, her grandfather my grandfather’s brother. How had my father overlooked, in his passion for overinformation, especially where it touched upon himself, a whole knot of family? My cousins obviously liked this girl. So I hated her.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Is that woman your nurse?’ I saw Nurse, for an instant, without love. She was piling a large plate high with food, all mixed up. Her skirt was wide as a fender.

  ‘Yes, she is. And where’s yours?’

  ‘Left, they always have; can’t bear it.’ So she was one of those bad children who rushed through nurses and showed off about it.

  ‘What do you do to them?’ I asked, not in admiration as she might have hoped, but prissily.

  ‘It’s not me, it’s my father, and I can’t possibly say. I don’t know exactly but shall soon enough, my mother says. The last one broke his ivory hair brushes and tore up some of his clothes. My mama says it is something I shall learn all too soon. Men have a rolling eye, she says.’ All this with the toothless lisp. In spite of her chilling self-command, something gave me a hint of fellow feeling.

  ‘Is your mother mad?’ I asked. From observing Aunt Fan, I knew that my own mother was not typical.

  ‘Is yours?’ asked the child. ‘She looks it.’

  ‘Come on, you two.’ It was Mary. She stood between me and the other cousin, whose name was apparently Lucy, taking her left hand and my right. Mary was shorter and sturdier than we were. Nurse came over and blocked our way to the stairs. She did not mean to; she was just that fat. I looked up and saw she had two plates, spilling with good things, leaking over the edge. I read the names of the china in her shiny hands, ‘Spod’ and ‘Crown Derb’. Her fingers covered any remaining letters. Each of the plates had been broken, at least once. Now they were riveted, and should not have been used for food. Where the cracks were, a deep purple was beginning to appear, the juice of black fruits.

  Nurse was a small eater, but she heaped her plate at the Mortons’ house.

  ‘Just go and fetch a cup of black tea, dear,’ she told me. She was not smiling.

  ‘And would you,’ she spoke to Lucy, ‘get a slice of lightly buttered bread?’

  Equipped with this thin meal, we returned to Nurse. She wore her bowler-style hat indoors. She peered out from under it. The coast was clear.

  She filled the narrow stairway as she led us up its druggeted steepness to the bedroom where our cousins had made a table of Josephine’s bed.

  ‘Pass me the tea, dear,’ she said. ‘And before either of you’ – she spoke to me and to Lucy – ‘starts on your meal, it’s bread and butter. Sit down.’

  We sat at opposite sides of the child’s bed and she placed in front of each of us a gleaming incoherent feast on broken china. She looked at Lucy, who appeared less menacing up here. She smiled at her and the little girl smiled back, showing side teeth like buds.

  Taking a white cloth from the holdall whose cane hoops lived at her elbow, Nurse said to Lucy, ‘Lift up your hair, love, and Nurse will tie this round your neck. You don’t want fruit juice on those smart strawberries. Eat the bread and butter, the both of you, then you can say you had bread and butter when you’re asked. Church, Lucy. Chapel, Noel.’

  I explained to Lucy what it was that Nurse meant. All those nurses, and she didn’t know a single thing. Eating opposite me and bibbed up in the white cloth, Lucy became at once an ordinary little girl, hungry, skinny, released for an afternoon from the obligation to be odd. By the time we had finished our tea on the bed her untoothed gums were purple and I loved her.

  Already equipped with the deviousness and instinct to flirt of a grown woman, she had been dissembling ignorance, she told me years later, when she pretended not to know what Nurse meant by ‘Church and Chapel’. ‘I was putting you at your ease,’ she said. By then we were smokers, and, as I held up a light for her, we looked through the pale flame to the bright red burning tip of the cigarette, bright in the dark like a wild strawberry on dark moss.

  You Can’t Be Too Clean

  I’m the woman lives on the step of the bank and eats soap. That’s my name and how they speak of me when they fold away their eyes and move a wee bitaways off their track even though it’s the bank they’ve come to see and they’ll have to pass me. Often I see them holding their noses without even lifting their hands, which is odd, because I think you can’t be too clean.

  I’ve other names but they’re put away and I can’t see when they’ll come out again for they’re locked up in the other bodies I was. For the moment I live on the step of the bank, unless it’s winter when
I get a bit closer and move in between the portals. Dog’s’ll not pee there, it’s too skeetery. It’s mosaic on the floor between the portals, very smooth till you lie on it and then it’s all small corners and you lose the picture in close-up like that. If you stand away from it you can see that there’s a picture of a woman all made of squares pocketing her wages with the help of a lion and an owl also made from these small hard tiles, each with the four corners when you lie on it. I settle down after the bank’s stopped getting visits. Then God’s in his small corner and I in mine. I can take the mosaic if I put my blanket down on it. This blanket is the main thing. The blanket and the soap.

  This blanket I brought with me out of the first life and right through the other ones up till now. It has covered the many forms of nakedness I have lived inside as the time and the place changed. The blanket had its moment of glory in the shop, where it was part of the list of things I thought came with being married and the one I was about to marry agreed and marked the box next to ‘Pure wool Witney blanket, 72” x 84”, cream, satin bound’ with a 6. We’d a house with three double beds that soon. Maybe it was then I should have heard a red light. All the beds got used, so the wastage didn’t seem like it might to me now I’ve been poured through the many lives. We’d people in to lie under those blankets several times a year, and we kept the beds ready to be made up, covered with white counterpanes over the mattress protectors, the folded blankets and the sleeping naked pillows.

  The quantities of unused linen, clean and folded, that lay ready for my use then makes me feel weak like remembering kisses used to. It all comes up into my chest and heart and I raise up my head and smile right deep into the eyes of what’s in my mind – and it’s clean sheets in there, clean sheets radiating whiteness and the smell of soap you’d so much of you kept it folded in its paper between the heavy cold sheets, the scented soap just lying there ready among the sheets that were ready too, waiting to be extracted, flung and soothed over beds that were aired three times a week and mattresses that were turned each month.

  I think of the stuff I’ve used up without thinking as I’ve gone through and I wonder how the world can take it, the weight of materials needed for a person to live a modern life.

  The other moments of glory belonging to the blanket are various and include some happiness. Its label is soft now and it’s only got threads going across the way. The sheeny blue and yellow words about Made in England have all unwound from the sturdy threads. It’s a blanket from the time of market towns and church attendance.

  For sleeping in the threshold of a bank, though, a city like this is by some way superior to a market town, where there’s not enough to do so then they turn to those of us who repose outdoors in most weather conditions.

  The blanket came in a lorry from a shop to the first house, boxed up with five others and paid for by a guest at the wedding who had hopes of some business arrangement with my intended loosely to do with an implement for crushing used cans. Later he went away for a while and while he was away doing that his wife took the first quite big overdose but he got out with a discreet companion from the right side of the law for a couple of days of compassion during which she achieved a more efficient job of counting and succeeded in her ambition so then he received a little more leave during which arrangements were made for the children who became swiftly used to the habits of their grandparents and learned how to turn off lights and keep their voices down.

  So in the end they got a good education though I was worried lately when I saw in one of those catalogues that people don’t notice falling out of their magazines as they walk along looking at the shiny pages for what to buy next that someone else has brought out a contraption for crushing used cans, not the man who introduced the blankets into my life, or I should say, the blanket. Empty used cans, these machines can compress, though few householders understand empty in its full form, meaning containing nothing, not a scrape, not a lick, not a wipe or a dribble of food.

  I cut out food practically when I achieved my present way of life, though I keep up my fat intake with the soap and have managed to rectify my dreams at one and the same time, the soap giving a safe taste to dreaming. It’s probably not an indigestible food and of course you sleep all clean inside. I’ll take you through that when I’ve set it all straight about the blanket. Soap leaves nothing lying around inside you, that much I’ll say. Inside me it’s calm and empty as a basin.

  At the time of receiving my blanket I did not pay it sufficient attention. I slept under it, certainly, or under what may have been only one of its fellow blankets, that were so like it, but at that time I slept under my blanket, or even, in winter, blankets, with the intervention of a sheet. On top of it all, like cream over a sweet and rich pudding, lay a sack of feathers sewn into furrows and trapped in there with flowers printed on to cloth.

  The depicted flowers that were so plentiful in that first married house didn’t do more than give it pattern and colour at first. There was no scent of course. A shocking absence of decay soon gave a hint of the truth about these blooms. They turned their heads at me, the roses, the lilies, the auriculas and gillyflowers, and watched and turned again to each other to pass remarks on the state of my appearance and see how I compared with them in being pressed into flatness and colour and odourlessness.

  They talked at first only when I was out of the room. The harebells on the cushions confided in the curtain hydrangeas, the ivy on the trellis silk-screened on the paper throughout the hall began to close over the areas of white, so I grew short of light and air while the leaves approached one another to exchange the words the flowers and leaves all spoke from the walls and windows and beds of the house where I had been taken to live. The flowers despised my changeability, my moods, my unreliable way of being alive. They were unchanging, open always even in the absence of sun, firmly forward-looking.

  I had worked out the way out of the bower by then. I lit it up to shut it up. The fire was stubby and noisy and I was right – it did talk louder than the flowers. Soon after it had started to win, though, he arrived home from where he went in the day and duffed it up with a blanket. But it left a good gasp of smoke choking each flower in the room where I was meant to sleep, so at least that kept them quiet overnight while I pruned all the chintz curtains downstairs and took the throats out of the floral cushions, which got me peace of a kind when he drove me in the car at night against all these lights coming at you with the promise of colour over your face coming in stripes till you felt it must lie over you in ribbons and I parted the ribbons of light I’d collected in the back of the car and walked out into the place where they sorted the first body I’d had and ushered in the next one which began after the doctor laid me down and helped me to sleep without talking or behaving at all like a flower and even replaced the blanket after. My own blanket.

  The place had a room for sitting and a chair for sitting too in that room for sitting, also a television and a notebook for writing what you wanted to watch in. There were people staying there wanted to watch things I can’t stop seeing now right inside my head even if it’s so cold in the portals of the bank you’d cut your side open just to get your hands on the warmth inside. Not all of the people at the place wanted to watch things you’d get on actual television I didn’t think but he said, the doctor said, that we keep these ideas inside us at our peril. So that is how I got some of the ideas someone had put outside of themself inside me and it is why I wail from time to time in the doorway of the bank, not able to sleep the idea out of my head or wash it out no matter how much soap I use in and out.

  They were logical things and all very practical and written in the slow helpful way a recipe is made out: Take a woman and bend her double till you see right up through her so you’re looking out of her mouth at the stars and then you take the one and then the other and fold her up small and put her in the pan and boil her up three times bearing in mind that the cheeks and forearms yield up the best and finest fats. To keep the next one young
-skinned use this rich substance made from the previous one’s smoother parts.

  Leaving the place was sad enough though because of the doctor and the way he listened to the flowers too when I had explained, coming close on the pillow to hear when the embroidered buds chattered among themselves on the hem of the linen sent from home to this place where they provided me with a bare room that was the least talkative as to the walls I’ve slept in ever. I have more faculties than those who do not hear the flowers speak and the leaves spread their rumours, but others can’t take the news I have for them – that we should ward off decay by sitting motionless and keeping clean and remaining in the proximity of money.

  The last luxury, my blanket. And the other that is an essential, the soap. I eat it without water, in the slice, but for washing I do use some water from the Ladies round the way. I never wash with the eating brand, or vice versa.

  From the bank in the morning come noises like the sounds in a deserted zoo. The sleeping money is unbarred, its movements and territory marked for the day. It breathes and its breath is not warm, though that of its suitors may be.

  After that time at the place with the doctor the old body got lost and the new body grew big at home and unloosed its little prisoner. I felt the blanket cover him and me and the new one and wished the world away. The walls and windows no longer commented. In my absence they had been frozen white and iced cream. Only in the room of the new one were there flowers, metal, in a bunch, and they blared pleasure out of all their bulbs of light over the bed where new small blankets covered the third one of us.