by Paul Bailey
‘Is she here?’
‘If you mean Muriel, the answer’s yes. She’s in bed at the moment. You’ll meet her as soon as she’s recovered from her migraine.’
‘What’s a migraine, Daddy?’
‘I was beginning to worry that you’d lost the power of speech, Kitty. A migraine, my dearest darling, is the worst headache you can imagine. Worse than worst. You feel sick and you can’t see straight, and the pain, Muriel tells me, is shocking. Poor Muriel. She’s lying in the dark, in peace and quiet, and praying for the migraine to stop, because she is longing to meet her stepdaughters. She has heard so much about the famous twins from their proud father that she feels she knows them already.’
‘Are we really her stepdaughters?’
‘Yes, Daisy. Muriel is my wife, my second wife, and since you are my children it follows that she must be your stepmother. And if your mother marries again you’ll have a stepfather.’
‘Nelly won’t marry again.’
‘You sound very certain, my darling. How do you know?’
‘Because she’s told us. She keeps her word. Nelly means what she says.’
(‘Nelly has been lying to us all these years,’ Daisy Hopkins would complain to her sister when she returned from India. ‘She could have told us the truth.’
‘Which truth is that?’
‘The truth that Grandfather McGregor shot himself. The coward blew his brains out. He absolutely did not die of malaria.’)
‘I’ll keep my word with you, Daisy. I’ll mean what I say.’
‘I decided not to write in code and that was my undoing, Kitty. I wrote in anger instead. And if I hadn’t written “Icon” I might never have had to find ways and means of leaving the country. It’s almost as simple as that.’
‘Why almost, Virgil?’
‘Because, because – as the man with the ring on his lip says. I must not confuse you. Let me tell you the simple story of the one truly bad poem I allowed to be published.’
She mashed the pulp of some aubergines she had baked earlier that day while he described the genesis of ‘Icon’.
It was on a spring morning that the idea first came to him. The long winter was just over and the streets of Bucharest were filled with people delighting in the unexpected warm weather. He and his close friend Radu Sava – one of those rare doctors who is actually concerned with the well-being of his patients – were walking along the Boulevard Magheru when Radu remarked that the kindly gaze of the nation’s benefactor seemed to be more prevalent suddenly, as if the photograph had both propagated and multiplied itself during the night. Then, a week later, another friend revealed that she had visited a kindergarten in Constanta where the dormitory beds, were so arranged that the children slept with the eyes of the benefactor looking down on them, as it were from heaven. ‘They are meant to feel protected, especially when they wake in the dark and see that his watchful eyes are still open,’ she had said. And as she was speaking, he thought of the icons of St Peter and the Virgin and Child his mother had treasured and prayed in front of year after difficult year, and the benign face of Romania’s saviour, coloured and shaped in the Byzantine mould was there before him – an icon, no less; a graven image, inviting prayer.
‘Have you ever heard angry laughter, Kitty? It’s short-lived. It dies quickly in the throat. I was laughing the moment I started writing “Icon”, but only for a line or two. The joke wasn’t fantastic enough, absurd enough, to be funny. It was hardly a joke at all.’
He had been pleased with the poem; pleased with its blasphemous allusions to the consummate blasphemer: the man who had neither doubts nor qualms about assuming the role of God. The editor of a student magazine in Tirgu Mure, a friend of the friend from Constana, had shared the deluded poet’s pleasure in ‘Icon’ and the complacent Virgil Florescu had granted him permission to publish it. The poem appeared in Magpie (‘That’s Coofanã, Kitty. Do you like the word?’) in the issue of May 1985, above the initials F. V.
‘I saw it in print and was horrified by its obviousness. It was no longer the poem I had believed I had written.’
(In Paris, after Virgil was gone from her, she would hear Dinu Psatta praise the poem that went underground in the dark times, passed from hand to hand on scraps of paper. ‘Virgil hated it because he hated having to write it. Even a poem that mocked Ceauescu was one poem too many on the subject. That was his opinion. But he was wrong, Kitty. The true subject of “Icon” is anyone who thinks he is God.’)
‘They were horrified, too – the authorities. But for a different reason.’
‘Blasphemy?’
‘Yes, of course, Kitty. Sacrilege. Heresy. I became known as the renegade poet. I became news. They, the authorities, sent a young man with intellectual pretensions to talk to me. They did not send an obvious brute. Oh no, not them. He claimed to have studied the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. He considered Frost lacking in moral fibre. I might have found him diverting had I met him anywhere else in the world.’
Virgil Florescu said nothing, that Sunday afternoon, of the young man’s appropriation of his mother’s Oltenian carpet. He watched Kitty, the undoubted love of his life, add a finely chopped onion, the juice of a lemon, salt, pepper, a sprinkling of paprika and a dribble of olive oil to the mashed aubergines. She whisked the mixture into a smooth paste with a fork and put the bowl into the refrigerator.
‘My very first stab at poor man’s caviare, Virgil. I hope it tastes as it ought to.’
‘It will.’
‘We’ll eat it this evening, sweetheart. I know how I wish to be occupied till then.’
Felix Crozier opened the door of the sitting-room, where a maid was waiting to serve them tea. ‘Allow me to introduce my lovely daughters, Beryl. My twin blessings. This is Daisy and this is Kitty.’
‘I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Daisy, Miss Kitty.’
‘Hullo,’ said Daisy.
‘Good afternoon,’ said Kitty.
‘Is that cake what I think it is, Beryl?’
‘If it’s a simnel you have in mind, it is, Mr Crozier, sir. It’s shop-bought, to be honest, but none the worse for that.’
‘Shall we sit down, my darlings, and tuck in?’
Daisy mouthed ‘My darlings’ to her sister, who whispered ‘Stop it’ in response.
‘I remember how you both like marzipan.’
‘I don’t like marzipan. I don’t like it at all.’
‘But, Daisy –’
‘I don’t like marzipan any more, Kitty.’
‘Daddy will eat it for you, in that case. Please be so kind, Beryl, as to give my daughter a slice without marzipan. What about you, Kitty? Do you still have a sweet tooth?’
‘Yes, Daddy. Thank you.’
‘That’s a relief. That’s my Kitty.’
‘Perhaps Miss Daisy would prefer orange or lemon squash rather than tea, Mr Crozier, sir.’
‘Why is she calling me Miss Daisy?’
‘Beryl is showing you respect, and Kitty too.’
‘Then why don’t you call her Miss Beryl? Don’t you respect her?’
‘No one respects Beryl more than I. It’s the Beryls of this world who keep the wheels going round. Beryl and her kind are the salt of the earth.’
‘Thank you, Mr Crozier, sir.’
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘Beryl calls you Miss Daisy for the same reason she calls me sir. Because she knows her place. We are fortunate in our family to be higher up the ladder than Beryl is.’
‘Which ladder? I can’t see any ladder.’
‘Squash or tea, Miss Daisy?’
‘Tea, please, Miss Beryl.’
‘And yourself, Miss Kitty?’
‘Tea, please, thank you.’
(Kitty would remember how Daisy picked at her slice of simnel cake; how she carefully dismantled it, crumb by crumb by crumb; how she popped each tiny morsel into her mouth and said ‘Munch, munch’; how she stared at their father during this
performance and how he maintained a tolerant smile, despite her provocation. The memory would surface in dreams, mostly, with Daisy and Kitty, in their red-and-white gingham dresses, poised on the edge of the chesterfield, under the huge, glittering chandelier, in the sitting-room of the house in Mayfair, in the ‘smartest stretch of London’.)
‘Muriel, my darling, there you are. Has the pain gone away?’
‘Only just, Felix. Only just. So these are your daughters. Why are they wearing table-cloths?’
* * *
His new no-home to go to was in a part of London with a beguiling name. ‘Gospel Oak, Kitty.’
‘But that’s miles away.’
‘There are trains and buses. It is not so far.’
‘Come and live here with me. Yes, Virgil?’
He smiled at her and took her hands in his across the kitchen table. ‘Not yet. Not quite yet. Put up with my temporary madness. It will pass. I promise you will see the sane Virgil Florescu one day.’
(In Scotland, the following summer, she would wake beside him in small hotels and boarding-houses. Mr and Mrs Florescu, as they styled themselves when propriety seemed particularly in order, would take breakfast together, morning after happy morning.)
He was in an attic now, he said; an eyrie. He could look out at the city, with the dome of St Paul’s always visible on the horizon. The servants of the house’s original owner had slept there, he’d learned from its present owner, an exuberant old woman who had once sung opera.
‘You must phone me, Kitty. It will be an experience for you. You will hear her sing “Mis-ter Flo-res-cu, telephone” up the stairs. Yes, yes, she sings. I shan’t respond instantly, so that you can hear her summon me twice – her second “Mis-ter Flo-res-cu, tel-e-phone” will be even more resonant than her first.’ He kissed the palms of her hands. ‘Your poor man’s caviare is the best – the very, very best – I have ever eaten, my beautiful Kitty Crozier.’
Because it was Good Friday, and all the shops were closed, they went to church dressed in what their stepmother kept on calling table-cloths. These were blue-and-white, and no more to her taste than the red-and-white ones they had worn the previous day.
After the service Daisy and Kitty sat between their father and Muriel Crozier in the back of the Rolls-Royce. The journey from Knightsbridge to Mayfair lasted five minutes.
‘We should have walked,’ Daisy grumbled. ‘We should have walked through the park. We didn’t need to go in the big silly car.’
‘I tested the weather earlier, Daisy, and decided it was too chilly for walking.’
‘We have jumpers. Nelly packed extra jumpers for us.’
‘If it’s fine on Sunday we’ll take a stroll in the park, I promise.’
‘Why not tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow? Muriel has plans for you tomorrow.’
‘I surely have. We’re going on a shopping spree – just you, and me, and Kitty.’
‘Aren’t you excited, my darlings?’
‘Yes, Daddy,’ Kitty lied, and spoke the words again to compensate for Daisy’s studied silence.
The door of the house was opened by Beryl, who curtseyed as they entered.
‘Hullo, Miss Beryl,’ said Daisy. ‘We’ve been to church. The vicar had a runny nose.’
‘Who’s going to race me to the top of the stairs? You, Daisy? You, Kitty?’
Daisy shook her head vigorously.
‘I will, Daddy.’
He let Kitty win, as she guessed he would. ‘Well done, Kitty. You’ve pipped me to the post again, as you always used to.’
‘Is this house yours, Daddy?’
‘No, my darling. It belongs to Muriel’s first husband. We hire it from him when we come to England. Jackson belongs to him, in a manner of speaking, and so does Beryl and so does the cook. The car’s his, too. He disappears to Switzerland with his valet – that’s his personal servant, Kitty – while we’re in London.’
‘Are you and Muriel happy, Daddy?’
‘Over the moon, my darling. Believe me. Over the moon.’
She did not believe him, because of the forced brightness in his voice.
‘Slowcoaches, that’s what you are,’ Felix Crozier joked when Muriel and Daisy joined them. ‘Absolute slouches.’
There was an hour to kill before lunch – or luncheon, as Beryl called it – and Daisy and Kitty occupied the time by playing I-spy in those parts of the house they felt it was safe to enter. They descended the stairs and commenced their game in the hallway.
‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with “n”.’
‘“N”, Daisy?’
‘Yes, “n”.’
‘I can’t see anything beginning with “n”.’
‘Yes, you can. Look, look. Actually, there’s two of them.’
‘Do you mean the statues? The black boys holding the candlesticks?’
‘Yes, silly. Say the word.’
‘Niggers.’
‘Your turn.’
‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with “u”.
‘Where?’
‘If I told you where that would be telling.’
‘Down here?’
‘Of course, Daisy.’
‘The only word I know beginning with “u” is umbrella and there’s no umbrellas.’
‘You’re warm. You’re very warm. What’s that thing against the wall as you come in?’
‘It’s an umbrella stand, Kitty. An umbrella stand with no umbrellas in it. Umbrella stand is two words and you only gave me one letter. That’s cheating. You should have said “I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘u’ and ‘s’” – then I’d have got it straight away.’
‘I’m sorry, Daisy. Let’s go upstairs again. There’s more bibs and bobs to choose in the sitting-room.’
They had already spied the chandelier, the sofa, the chest of drawers (‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with “c” and “o” and “d”,’ Kitty had been careful to emphasise), when their father entered and put a record on the radiogram. ‘Muriel and I adore this song, my darlings.’
(Thirty years later, in her modest, sparsely furnished, book-cluttered house, Kitty Crozier would hear
He is as simple as a swim in summer,
Not arty, not actory.
He’s like a plumber
When you need a plumber …
He’s satisfactory!
and remember the opulent mansion off Park Lane in which she and Daisy spent what Nelly was to refer to for ever as the ‘Easter of Easters’. She would picture the dapper Felix inviting his darlings to listen to the clever lyrics and ask herself if it was then that she felt her first slight stirrings of pity for him.)
‘We never tire of it. Shall I play it again before we eat?’
‘Yes, Daddy.’
‘Muriel knows it off by heart.’
‘Does she think it’s you the woman’s singing about?’
‘Me? No, Daisy. Certainly not. Me? Heaven forbid. Me, Daisy? Why should Muriel think it’s me?’
‘Because of the silly look on your face.’
‘I don’t understand, my darling.’
‘I do.’
‘I’m no plumber, Daisy. Definitely not. I’m hopeless at anything practical. When Muriel needs a plumber she very sensibly phones for one.’
There were extra-special Easter presents waiting for his darlings on the dining-room table, he told them when the song was over.
‘What’s extra-special?’
‘You’ll soon see. After you’ve closed your eyes, that is.’
‘I don’t want to close my eyes. It’s babyish.’
‘I still close my eyes, Daisy, whenever I’m lucky enough to be given a present.’
‘Who gives you presents?’
‘Lots of people. Friends. I have lots of friends.’
‘Friends like her?’
‘Please call my wife by her name, Daisy. Please be polite and call her Muriel.’
Attached to the boxes that contained what Felix Crozier described as ‘ostrich-sized Easter eggs’ – ‘It will take you at least a year to eat them’ – were cards which read ‘With love and kisses from Step Mummy and Daddy’.
In bed that night, Daisy ate and ate and ate all the broken pieces of her Easter egg until she was sick.
He wrote to Pamela Florescu in Bristol, informing her of his seventh London address. He hoped his kind token wife was well and happy, and he thanked her, as was his grateful custom, for making it possible for him to remain in England. He had completed two poems and was still wielding the fearsome spike with determination. He could say truthfully that, as a result of his efforts, the park was cleaner and tidier that it was usually. He sent his greetings to Tom. He had nothing else of any consequence to report.
He stared at the words ‘nothing else of any consequence’ and wondered at his reticence, his timidity, even. Kitty was of consequence, of deep and lasting consequence, so why was he loath to mention her? He smiled at the idea of Pamela, to whom he was married in name alone, becoming jealous. Pamela had lived with her doting Tom for many years. She would be overjoyed to learn that the husband she had never slept with (‘One chaste kiss to fool the registrar, and that’s your limit, Mr Virgil Florescu’) was in love with, and loved by, an exceptional woman. Although he was confident Pamela would welcome such news, his reluctance to disclose it persisted. He shivered, then, and the sudden blast of icy January air that seized him on that balmy September night persuaded him, when he was warm once more, to leave ‘nothing else of any consequence’ intact.
After posting the letter he went into a pub and ordered a beer. He sat down in a corner, next to three old men who were talking drunkenly of courage and guts. One of them, he learned, had been a conscientious objector and his companions were mocking him for his cowardice. ‘Cowardice? I was shoved in prison. I was forced to do the most terrible donkey-work for six long years.’
The other men cackled. ‘You didn’t risk life and limb, the way we did.’
The pacifist banged on the table, causing a metal ashtray to rise in the air and spill its contents into his lap. ‘You only ever bring up my pacifism when you’re thoroughly pissed. You can call me gutless as much as you want, but I know different. I’m not afraid of death. I wasn’t then and I’m not now, so keep your bloody tongues civil.’