There were three of them. They approached Assia, slowly, deliberately. Their reflected silhouettes were elongated by the veneer of the glacier that they walked upon without apparent difficulty. They came closer. She saw that they were only girls. They had puffy, disdainful faces like sleepers roughly awakened. Their fur coats were much less expensive than hers. The hides had the cockled look of wet goose plumage.
“Hello,” Assia said.
The one in the middle swayed her pelvis in a slack arc. Coming closer, Assia could see that she was really terribly young. A child. “This is our corner,” the child said. Her accent had the spring of island buoyancy. Assia looked out onto the Thames. It made sense, she guessed. Crossing the ocean in order to claim one corner of the riverbank. Even if it did not make sense, these girls could be no less crazy than the mariners who would crawl out from their warm kips this evening to have perfunctory relations with them out here in the raw of British Siberia. The sea was entrancing and so was the shore. All parties were drawn together by the force of gravitation. They would be separated by the same. The sailors went back to their berths. The girls went back to the bridge. Everyone went their way with cold and clean hands. The thought of it made Assia feel better about finding herself back in the same old mess again. She would find her way out.
“Do any of you know of someone who could help a girl in trouble?” Assia asked them.
“What sort of trouble?”
“You know, the sort that multiplies.”
“What sort don’t?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t.”
“Would you help me out?”
“What about the one who helped you in the first place?” The little girl put a sardonic spin on helped.
“I think he has helped enough,” Assia said.
“Do you reckon?”
“What is your name?”
“What’s yours?”
“I’m Assia.”
Then the little girl did the strangest thing. She reached out and touched Assia on the arm. To make sure that she was real.
She stepped into the birdcage lift that would take her up to the bridge above. She lacked the nerve to address her baby on level land. She wanted her child to view the uninterrupted space above. This was how she would speak to her baby, mother-to-daughter, but not eye-to-eye. The more that one has experience with immensity—she would not say and not have to say to her baby—the more one achieves a sense of the moment. Timing. Entrances and exits. The little one would understand when it was older. And thank God that wouldn’t be for a while yet. Look at all that space and breadth, Assia would not have to say once they were standing atop the bridge. However would I protect you without the counter-reflex of timing? Neither of them was ready yet. She had never held the baby in her arms because there was always such a world between her and the child. The child did not even know what it was like to be born. Now which of them, her or the baby, was truly going to die tonight?
A quarter of the way up, the lattice girder shadows caught her in their web. She saw the lights of other bridges beyond and the head- and taillights of skating ships, weightless upon the Thames. The phantom organ that she had been trying to avoid all day and night began to play just above her head. She bent down so that it would pass over her. She lowered herself to her knees. She lay down flat on the flats of the lift. The world went white. The organ was playing the Wedding March.
The next morning she knocked at the apartment door that bore the numbers that she had been looking for. A servant opened it. One of her eyes kept referencing, hen-like, first the floor and then Assia. She was smiling slightly, her head nodding up and down, letting Assia know that she knew that her presence, her very existence, was an imposition to this well-dressed stranger standing in her doorway.
“I am here for my dancing lesson,” Assia said, defensively. It was what the voice on the telephone had told her to say. The servant kept nodding and trying to hide her smile. The sentence had sounded all right in the realm of the hypothetical. The servant hung her arm in the air and pointed obliquely down the hall. Assia held her ground so that she would not have to brush by, coming too close for her own comfort. The servant waited as well. Assia made a point of catching her eye as she went by. The servant didn’t look away this time. She thought the familiarity repugnant. She wondered who it was she should report the impertinence to in a place such as this.
“Thank you,” she said.
There was a circular black, flat-woven carpet in the parlor, like a malignant spill. A girl in a green towel was sunken into a pillowed chair, eating a plum. A nibble of red meat turned to nectar between the towel girl’s teeth. She entered the first bedroom that she came upon. It was dark and smelled of perfume. She stood in the doorway. She looked back out into the hall. The servant was not following her. The perfume smelled like passionflowers. She remembered that scent, but nothing else of the flower’s charisma. Well, she did recall that the corollas looked a little like the bores of artillery. They were delicate. They were bellicose. The passionflower, she remembered, was a climbing plant. Tended correctly, its growth was almost unprecedented. She saw herself dimly in the mirror on the opposite wall. She checked for evidence of maternity, once again, in her figure. She made out a light string dangling like a fissure in a sepia print. She reached and caught it in the air. The room came alight. In the mirror, she saw a grossly overweight woman lying dead in a caisson behind her. The dead woman had the complexion of a cake of lavender. Despite her age and size, she held in her dead hands the vivisected and mended stuffed maquette of a baby bear.
Assia crossed the hall. She entered the adjacent bedroom. The same servant stood with her back to the door, lighting a tray of votives with a longer tallow.
“Excuse me,” Assia said.
The servant turned with the taper burning in her hand. In this light, she was easier to see and somewhat harder to look at. She had a puttied nose and deep, excavated eye sockets with merry little blue pinheads set deep in the cavities. Behind her there was a steamer trunk full of taffeta and lace costumes. Fiery plumes. Dress-up finery.
The servant caught her looking. “We have our carnival on Saturdays,” she said.
“My dancing lesson?” Assia repeated, trying to keep things on the proper level of nonfamiliarity.
“Are you a working girl, dear?”
“Never.”
“Are you married?”
She didn’t like the servant’s presumption. “Do you ask everyone that?” “Sometimes I can tell.”
“I’ve made up my mind, if that’s what you’re getting at? I’m uncomfortable enough. You told me to go into that other room—”
“That’s Maria Alice, our midwife.”
“Midwife?”
“Her secrets have not died with her,” the servant said. “Would you care for a drink?”
She didn’t answer. She wanted to leave. It was a wearying feeling. She had been so many places that she had wished that she could leave immediately and pull the memory, like a pliant rug, into the hole behind her. She had had such difficulty in choosing men, hemispheres, careers, and unfeigned narratives of her past life. Men were made punchy over how quickly she would give herself to them and how quickly she could withdraw. “Do you have a heart or a parking meter in your chest?” David, the analyst among her husbands, had asked.
“I asked, dear, if you would care for a drink?”
“I’m going to be married,” Assia said, answering an earlier question and throwing the other woman off.
“Congratulations,” the servant beamed, after a moment. What was there between them? There wasn’t even the safety net of a Hippocratic oath. But this person, or one much like her lurking behind another door in this apartment, was the one whom she would be trusting to put her life back into balance. To aid her in convincing Ted that all scorned, spurned women do not play by the axioms of the nineteenth-century novels, ridding themselves from the scene when their pres
ence proves inconvenient. This wretch standing before her, whom she hoped to take her leave of and never to see again in a matter of forty-five minutes to an hour, was one of the singular entities of her entire life. Best to try to treat her like a man.
“I will take that drink.”
The servant crossed the room. She opened a cabinet drawer. She removed a bottle and two glasses. Assia felt her stomach clench.
“Is it the child of the man you will marry?”
Okay, they were rapidly working their way around to the necessary intimacy. Best to go with it. But not to go too far. She didn’t want the servant doing what she was charged to do while intoxicated.
“Yes, it is his child. But I don’t want him to feel that I’m pressuring him.” Her lie sounded moronic.
“So you did not tell him?”
“He would never allow it.”
“The child or the marriage?”
“Both. Maybe both. I don’t know.” She had been trying to sound light and flirtatious, but it came off as bad acting; an actress so aware of her shortcomings that she was about to burst into tears at her audition. “He wouldn’t allow what I’m asking you to do.”
The servant handed her a tall one. Straight whiskey. “Why don’t you tell me more?” she said.
“I don’t want to, you know, take a chance. There’s plenty of time for children.”
“Have you been married before?”
She took a wee belt and smiled widely. “Not at heart,” she said. “How many times without your heart?” the servant asked.
Assia wagged her finger. “Don’t make me, please.”
“Have you ever had a dancing lesson before?”
The question chilled her. The servant was going too far, forgetting her place. She remembered the story of the concentration camp guard, fattened through five years of war, who wedged himself into a striped inmate’s uniform and ordered the Jews to call him Moishe once the Allies arrived. Assia looked at her hard. “I guess that I didn’t learn the lesson, right?” she said. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”
The servant took her first sip of the whiskey. “If you are telling me the truth, go home.”
“What do I tell my fiancé?”
“You can tell him that his wedding day will be the luckiest day of his life. He is getting two for the price of one.”
“What do I tell him if I am lying?”
The servant turned and walked to the cabinet. She set her glass down and walked back. She said, “If you are lying then show me your hand.”
“My hand?”
“Show me.”
Assia extended her hand. The servant held it, palm up, between the leather parchment of her own two hands, squinting to read the topography.
“I wouldn’t have thought it,” she said, “but you seem to be a very good candidate.”
“Does that mean you’re not going to make me come up with another good excuse?”
“According to this,” the servant said, “you do not have an excuse.
Good or bad. What is your name, dear?”
Assia said, “My name is Sylvia. What’s yours?”
The servant went and drew the shade on the window.
She took her clothes off. The servant removed the blanket from the rubber-upholstered gurney in the corner of the room. It was much like the ones that Assia wheeled around in the war. To the cold room loaded. The return trip empty. She lay down.
“Why was that dead woman holding a doll?” she asked.
“It wasn’t a doll.”
“A stuffed toy, then.”
“It was her last daughter’s.”
“Her last?”
“She outlived all her children.”
“Sad.”
“She never said so.”
“What did she say?”
“She said that she wished that she had had more of them.”
“I wouldn’t want one of mine to see me in my coffin. There’s nothing in the world that could prepare them for that.”
“Is that why you are doing this?”
“I thought you said that we were past excuses.”
“So I did.”
The servant took a pocket watch from the pouch of her dress. She calibrated Assia’s pulse. She went back once again to the cabinet. She drew out a leather satchel. It was much like the blistered, yellowing field bag that Assia’s father used, prior to and during the war. She grew up with a fear of seeing it unclasped.
“Do you love the man who made you pregnant, Sylvia?” the servant asked.
“You read my palm. You can tell me.”
“Your hand did not say.”
“Then I guess that I don’t know.”
“Do you ever want to have children?”
“Why all these questions?”
“I’ve never had any children.”
“Two of us.”
She remembered going to the train station with her Canadian flier. They were setting off for the port. Marriage. Canada. Once again putting the ocean between what was present and what had been the past. Her mother showed up at the station. She stood there, holding up her father’s military coat. She turned her back when Assia called out to her. She lifted the coat in the air and gave her daughter her father’s shadow.
“I’d like to have a child that I didn’t love,” Assia said.
“What for?” the servant said flatly.
“To survive me.”
“What for?” she said again.
“I would like the child who survives me not to wear my scars.”
“And you think that a mother not loving her child leaves no scars?”
Assia said, “I am afraid of how coldly I can love. I can love without leaving any marks.”
“That’s funny.”
“I don’t think that it’s funny.”
“I mean it’s funny because of something Maria Alice used to say.”
“What did she say?”
“She would say that it was the cold heart that made the best kindling.”
Assia, peeking, saw a flash of argent tools. On reflex, she turned her head to the wall. She felt a cold swab and the servant’s chill fingers. Then the nip of the hypo.
“I need you to count for me now,” the servant said.
“One—”
“No, begin with ten.”
Oh, yes. Had she really been away from the operating table for this long? “Ten . . . eleven—”
“The other way, please.”
Remarkable what you are able to forget, no? “Ten . . . nine . . . eight.”
The servant said, “Sylvia, I need you to count more slowly and breathe more deeply.”
17.
Ted
“Let me know if there is anything I can do for you,” neighbors would say quite cautiously, the ambiguity of his estranged wife’s death escaping no one.
“Well, I guess I need a nanny now,” he muttered several times.
Sure enough one showed up at his door. She introduced herself as Mrs. Hillard and put a letter of recommendation into his hand when he extended it for a shake. She’d had a husband who had suffered dismemberment during the Second World War. He had lingered on for a decade thereafter with IVs in his arms and a reproachful look in his eye. Also, she said, she had had a favorite uncle who had died at sea. “I guess that I’ve been around death all of my life,” she said, ending her brief interview with Ted on the correct note. He wondered where the money was going to come from and considered whether or not it would be unseemly to phone up the BBC and admit to tearing through their sympathy money like he had decimated Monte Carlo and had not lost a wife.
He attempted to tide over one evening in the flat, upstairs in the bedroom while Mrs. Hillard slept with the children in the nursery, but in the middle of the night he realized that the crushing sadness that had been impending for the last few days was actually never going to arrive, but would forever send him night telegrams of its imminence. Sleep would no longer be the release that i
t always had been, and staying awake in defiance would be the only training possible in learning how to sleep upon a bed of nails. He phoned for a taxicab, having already warned Mrs. Hillard that he would be keeping irregular hours.
The lorry let him off at Greek Street, which was still more or less alive at the hour of three in the morning. He looked through the window of the American-style eatery. He went in and apologized profusely to a waiter who looked at him skeptically. He had left without paying the last time when he suddenly remembered that he had a luncheon date at an alternate restaurant.
“Did you pay over there?” the waiter asked.
Ted made amends for that previous meal and ordered another while promising a double gratuity. He ate and then he sat for hours, watching the street and enjoying in spite of himself the sight of the soft rain, the steady diminishment of the traffic, and at last the drunken night crier who arrived at dawn to fill the lone waiter in on the goings-on over at the Central Criminal Night Court of the Old Bailey.
At dawn, the waiter approached his table. “Want breakfast as well?” he said. “You could tip me triple.”
He waited for the chemist’s across the street to open for the day. Once inside, he realized that he did not know the names of the pills that he had been taking the last few days. He only knew what they had been called when he was in college, “uppers,” “downers,” “poppers,” “particulars,” or “prellies.” The aged pharmacist didn’t look like the sort who would be helpful. He bought a notebook, the second one he had purchased in the last few days, and left. He was thinking of Saint Sebastian as an alter ego. Sebastian was a Praetorian martyr. He was the patron saint of plague. He checked into the same hotel and asked for the very same room. He sat at the little wooden desk with the notepad open. Nothing came to him. Sebastian would not speak. Ted sketched arrows. The phone rang. The clerk downstairs told him that there was a party on the other line wishing to speak with him. He had not spoken to Assia since that night, standing there naked in the upstairs bedroom at Court Green trying his best to downplay his erection. “It’s all a mistake,” he thought that he might have said. He asked the clerk if the party was a female. The clerk told him no. Ted said that he didn’t wish to be disturbed and he didn’t want it confirmed that he was staying at this hotel. Unless a female called.
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