Mrs Caliban and other stories

by Rachel Ingalls

  They reached the top. Axel struggled with the key, threw open the door and fumbled his way across the room. ‘Heat and light,’ he said. ‘I want you to feel comfortable when you start to laugh.’

  Eino said nothing. He stood near the door until Axel had everything prepared, and then looked at the paintings as they were thrust forward.

  Axel did all the talking. He said, ‘Oh God, they’re so terrible, oh God. They’re awful. They’re just dreadful. You see?’ He came to the end of the canvases and threw himself into a chair.

  Eino walked silently around the room, looking at everything else, too. Finally he said, ‘You shouldn’t mind so much about it. What you can be good at doesn’t necessarily have to be in one particular vein.’

  ‘What could I do? I’m not good at anything.’

  ‘You’re a good friend.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Axel said thickly. ‘You hardly know me.’

  ‘I knew that the day we met. I always know who’s going to be a friend. It’s like knowing about women. Don’t you?’

  Axel belched and said that at the moment his luck with women was even more disastrous than his painting. ‘I spend most of my evenings staring at them through a pair of opera glasses. I can tell you the name of every girl in the corps de ballet just from her legs. But that’s the nearest I get. Anyway, even before I came to Paris, somehow I never seemed to end up with the ones I really wanted. Except once, that time – and then I threw it away.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Eino told him. ‘I’ll introduce you to some women.’

  Axel stood up. He reeled against the chair, fell back and tried to rest his elbow against the book case. He missed the first time. ‘That would be kind,’ he said.

  *

  He used to visit Karen’s studio on his way back from work. Sometimes they’d go out together and sometimes they’d arrange to meet Eino for a meal. They all knew, without saying anything about it, that Marissa wouldn’t want to join their party. And Axel had stopped wanting to see her.

  He found that he could talk to Karen about art more easily than to Eino. She liked wandering through the museums with him. One day he spoke of a Scandinavian Renaissance in the arts – painting, music, poetry: everything. And she said, ‘I suppose you got all that from Eino.’

  ‘No,’ he told her sharply, ‘I do have some ideas of my own.’

  She laughed, and said, ‘He’s always talking about it, though. Isn’t he?’

  ‘He talks about all kinds of things.’

  ‘But mostly about how the Scandinavian countries are going to be a single cultural nation and at the moment they’re like Italy before the unification.’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t thinking about all that political business.’

  ‘When we first met, he couldn’t praise city life enough – especially Paris. Paris and the arts of Europe. But recently he’s begun to change. I think it has something to do with his need to get away from Marissa. Now he says that we’ve got to go back to nature and back to the origins of Viking society. To study the trees and streams and mountains. Doesn’t he? He’s always talking about natural shapes and fundamental design.’

  ‘That’s right. Why not? He’s told me how to look for patterns everywhere. You wouldn’t believe how many different shapes wind and water –’

  ‘I detest nature,’ she said.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Crude, uncomfortable, formless, without a comprehensible style. Most women hate nature. I like civilized life, modern ideas. Eino wants to go backwards. It’s a kind of sentimentality. And the success of the venture would depend on a rebrutalizing of women – just as we’ve managed to bring things to the point where we’re sometimes thought of as rational beings. What can one say to a man like that?’

  ‘He reads a lot of Russian newspapers. They’re always talking about – God knows what: German philosophy, that kind of thing.’

  ‘I don’t take that seriously. I think he’s much more interested in those English notions – he wants to build a model farm and have a school for weaving and furniture-making, and do his own dyeing and make his own pots and vases and glassware. And silverware.’

  ‘He does talk about building a house.’

  ‘Precisely. My idea of a house is a little more like the governor’s mansion than some pathetic old log cabin out in the pinewoods.’

  ‘He says it’s got something to do with national identity.’

  ‘And what do you think?’ she said suddenly. Her blue eyes looked back as if a trap had been sprung on him and she was watching from the outside. ‘Do you think,’ she asked, ‘that it’s natural for a woman to live alone, without a husband or children?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t’

  ‘Most people don’t. But I love my life now. And I never used to be happy like this.’ She turned her head away and walked on, smiling. Axel wanted to know why she hadn’t been happy before, but it was as if he’d been told not to ask. If he tried to find out, he was sure, she’d smile again and steer the talk another way.

  *

  Occasionally when he’d call to see Karen, she’d be out and the students would brew him a cup of tea or coffee. His favourite pupil in the school became the young German girl, Minna. He liked her work, too; it was strong, simple and noble, the subjects usually full-length nudes, often of children. She was also good at sculpting animals in clay.

  He saw her sitting alone one day at a café table. He thought she might be waiting for a man, but he wanted to say hello anyway, so he stopped. She told him she wasn’t waiting for anyone; she often sat at that table by herself because she liked the building across the street and it pleased her to see how the light fell over it as evening approached.

  ‘But it’s freezing,’ he said. ‘Let’s go someplace warmer. You could catch pneumonia sitting here.’

  ‘Or something even more serious,’ she said. ‘Like what Karen’s got.’

  He thought at first that she was making some sort of joke. Karen always had a beautiful, healthy glow in her cheeks and a sparkle in her eyes. Sometimes she’d cough a little – that was just a kind of habit, like the repeated use of a gesture.

  ‘She’s consumptive,’ Minna said.

  ‘Impossible. She’s the picture of health.’

  ‘The picture, maybe. Not the reality. She’s very ill. It’s gone so far that she won’t see the doctors any more. It’s the reason why she left home. That’s where she caught it.’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said.

  She bowed her head sadly and looked back up. The building she liked had become part of the night while they’d been talking.

  He took her to dinner. They discussed sculpture and Eino and her family back in Germany, who had all sworn they’d never speak to her again. Her mother had thrown a coffee-pot after her the day she’d left.

  She spoke of the integrity of form and the meaning of line, shape and colour. ‘It’s all action,’ she said.

  A week later, he took her to bed. He told Eino, because Eino had introduced him to several women of easy ways and was constantly proposing to find him another. Now he didn’t want any others. He didn’t love Minna but he wanted to stay with her for a while. And he thought that she was in love with him; that made him happy.

  ‘She’s a nice girl,’ Eino said.

  ‘And a very fine sculptress.’

  ‘Perhaps. And headstrong.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Axel said. ‘She’s sweet and compliant. A loving, docile character.’

  ‘She walked right out on that family of hers, and they’re a bunch of fire-eaters. That must have taken something. For a girl to leave home –’

  ‘She had somewhere to go. She’d already written to Karen.’

  ‘Even so. If you leave home for good, these havens and shelters are always temporary. Staying with friends and studying at schools won’t make up for it. She isn’t the kind that should be on her own.’

  Axel suddenly had the feeling that Eino was trying to make
him feel guilty. He didn’t like it. He wasn’t responsible for the girl. And it wasn’t as if he’d been the first, although in fact that was something he hadn’t considered until afterwards.

  ‘I’d ask you back,’ Eino told him, ‘but Marissa isn’t very well.’

  ‘Because of the baby?’

  ‘I suppose so. What’s really doing it is that she whips herself into a frenzy of jealousy. Screaming and throwing things. I bang out of the house. Then I come back and she’s screaming about where I’ve been, and then she cries for hours.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ Eino said. ‘I wish I were out of it. I’d walk out on her this minute if it weren’t for Bruno. She’s sent him to her aunt’s.’

  ‘It’ll be better when the baby’s born,’ Axel said. ‘Give her something to think about.’

  ‘If it were anybody but Karen, it might make sense. I can’t very well say she’s the only one in town I haven’t had.’

  ‘Minna tells me Karen’s sick,’ Axel said. ‘Is it true?’

  ‘She’s got that cough.’

  ‘It isn’t serious?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Axel was relieved. He believed it because he had come to believe whatever Eino told him.

  *

  Just as the snows cleared and the rains started, Karen summoned them both to her tea table. The painting and sculpting ladies had gone. They were alone in the apartment except for the cook and maid in the back rooms beyond the curtain. Karen took out a bottle and glasses. She poured three drinks, lifted her glass and said, ‘Minna’s pregnant.’

  Axel drank a large gulp. He thought that Minna ought to have come to him first.

  Karen said, ‘You’ve both been sleeping with her. Which one of you is going to marry her? She isn’t a woman like Marissa, you know. That can’t be allowed to happen.’

  Axel looked at Eino, who remained head-down, staring at his drink.

  ‘Another glass?’ Karen asked.

  Eino murmured, ‘I can’t marry her. Not while Marissa is this way.’

  ‘Axel?’ Karen said.

  He took the second drink she was offering. He said that he’d have to talk to Minna herself before he could tell what he thought.

  *

  They were married in a rush. He wrote to his father and eventually received a letter back that expressed shock – which didn’t worry him – and sadness, which upset him profoundly. The rest of the family wrote short, constrained letters. He felt that he’d been cut off from them forever. The cold rain beat on the window-panes outside as he stood staring down into the street or across the way at the roof-tops.

  In the sixth month of her pregnancy, Marissa had a miscarriage. She nearly died. Eino stayed with her for a month afterwards, to see that she recovered her health and to try to make her tell him where Bruno was. Then he left her. By that time Karen had begun to cough up blood: the doctors said it wouldn’t be long.

  She received callers without rising to her feet. On some days she looked normal, on others all at once she was grey as a corpse and it was as if the colour had forsaken even her eyes. Axel came home one evening after seeing her and burst into tears. Minna put her hand on the back of his head. He was certain now, although she’d denied it, that the child she was carrying was Eino’s and that Eino had been the one she’d loved all along; yet she was kind to Axel, as he was to her. He was fond of her. It wasn’t what he wanted, but nothing ever was. Compared to the fact that Karen was dying, it didn’t seem to matter, especially since he and Eino were such close friends.

  Early in June Karen had a haemorrhage. She lived for four days after that. When Axel went to see her, she said, ‘Look at me now, Axel dear. This is nature.’ She smiled a terrible, delighted smile and whispered, ‘I’m not supposed to laugh. It starts me coughing again.’

  When her will was read, it turned out that she’d bequeathed a huge amount of money to found a combined school and artists’ colony. It was all left in trust to Eino, who was to have sole power of decision over the disbursement.

  ‘She must have loved you after all,’ Axel said.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Eino told him. ‘She knew I could spend it in a way that would do some good. I was always telling her what I’d do if I had the chance. You’ll help, won’t you? You and Minna?’

  ‘And Marissa?’ Axel asked.

  ‘Marissa sent me a letter as soon as she heard. Told me how glad she was that Karen had finally died; and said we could get married now, if I ever wanted to see my child again.’

  ‘Do you think she’s insane?’

  ‘No, only insufferable. She was always a bitch. It’s just that a long time ago she used to be good in bed, too.’

  ‘She can’t keep your child from you.’

  Eino answered that she’d already succeeded for months, but that he’d hired lawyers. That was as good as setting fire to your money, but there was no other solution. He’d get the boy and then go back to Finland. And as soon as Minna had the baby and was ready to move house, she and Axel ought to join them.

  Axel said he’d contribute in any way he could. But when he was alone, he thought carefully about the scheme. He didn’t believe it would be a good idea to ally himself so closely to a business enterprise that would depend on the friendship of a man who had no experience in business. He decided that after the birth of the child, he’d take Minna back to visit his family, and ask them for help.

  *

  During the long, light northern summers Axel used to work on the accounts early in the morning. At night he’d write poetry, which was even worse than his paintings had been back in Paris twenty years before. When the days grew shorter and colder and darker, he worked at night. He kept a bottle near his right hand. He’d pour out the drink systematically, so that there was always something in the glass. He sipped slowly and got through a couple of bottles a day. The alcohol never impaired his ability to count, though it had ruined his teeth, his circulation and his sleep. Nor had it inhibited the nimbleness of his mathematical juggling, the subtlety of his sense of proportion. When he falsified the figures in the books, it was all done in perfect ratio. That was why he was never going to get caught.

  While he drank and wrote down the numbers, he’d cough a little, as he always did in the months of snow, but he hardly noticed that any more. It seemed to be a part of the winter, or like a nervous tic that he’d lived with for half his life.

  At one time he’d worked over the books with his cat, Bonaparte, sitting on his lap. Bonaparte was a dark, skinny, animal, short-haired and soft. When Axel sat by the fire to read or just to daydream, Bonaparte would arrange himself with his arms around Axel’s neck or with his nose pushed up into Axel’s armpit. And Axel could think better: the cat’s warmth and its purring made him feel loved. But then, one summer, Bonaparte contracted the mange. Axel noticed that all at once his own hair was starting to fall out. And the children in the artists’ colony caught ringworm.

  The mothers in the community blamed the cat. That was nonsense, of course. It was much more likely that one of their odious brats had infected Bonaparte. After all, cats were very clean animals. Axel had probably said as much when he was drunk, although he didn’t remember. There had been some kind of quarrel as the Philistines turned against him – that he did remember: using the name Philistine. And it was true; the wives and children and other relatives had nothing to do with art. They were living in the colony the way camp followers lived with an army – irrelevant to the war and often getting in the way.

  A few days after the quarrel, he’d found Bonaparte outside on the doorstep, dead; he’d been torn to pieces. Maybe he’d been attacked by a wild animal, but it didn’t seem possible that he’d be able to reach home with such injuries. Axel thought it more likely that one of the people he’d insulted had killed the cat out of spite and put him there, where Axel would find him in the morning.

  And since then, he’d felt less guilty about the embezzlement. He should
have had half the money, anyway. Karen had left it all to Eino because she’d thought that whatever kind of artistic movement they created out in the forests should be under the control of one person. She knew that Eino wouldn’t be able to agree with anyone who had an opinion different from his own, whereas Axel could accommodate himself to other people’s interests. Of course, she couldn’t have known what was to happen to them.

  From time to time Axel thought about her: her voice, her laughter, the way she’d looked in her green dress with the black velvet facings. He also thought that if he could dream up some way of doing it, he’d like to get back at Eino for having everything, while he had nothing. He’d had nothing since Paris and the scandal that had almost precisely coincided with his family’s financial collapse – the landslide of bad luck that had swept them into bankruptcy, illness, emigration and death.

  *

  Eino’s wife, Maria, worked on a hooked rug while she talked to him. She said, ‘He’s always drunk. All the time, awake or asleep.’

  Eino made a small sound that didn’t mean yes or no, but simply that he was listening. He moved his fingers along the side of a glass one of his students had made; the balance, the shape, everything was right. The young man had even invented his own design – a swirl of blue lay at the heart of the inner cup and appeared to swim in its white casing as the glass was turned.

  ‘Isn’t he ever going to leave?’ she said. ‘I don’t know why you put up with the man.’

  ‘Because we were young in Paris together,’ Eino answered, without taking his eyes off the glass. ‘He knew me when I was becoming what I am. He didn’t become anything. He remained unfinished. Unexpressed.’ And when Karen’s will was read out, Axel had been put in the position of a dependant.

  ‘You aren’t the one that has to feed him and wait on him,’ she complained, hitching the rug towards her.

  ‘Is it such a hardship?’

  ‘You aren’t the one,’ she repeated.

  ‘Don’t be ungenerous.’ She wasn’t normally so mean-minded against people. In her housekeeping she was thrifty – a good quality for a wife to have – but in her dealings with people she usually gave them some margin before deciding against them.