Fly Away Home

by Marina Warner

  Another policeman, with a club stuck through his belt, swung down wide-legged from the jeep, lifted the bunch of greenish-yellow bearded fruits from the younger child, and hoisted them over his shoulder with a negligent finger.

  ‘Officer,’ began Diogenes, addressing the first policeman in his crisp uniform with his shiny leather straps and weapons. ‘We’re responsible. I have a visitor from Washington, DC, and we’ve been on a little sightseeing tour. We were thirsty. I merely wanted to treat him to one of our island’s delicacies. The children fetched the cocos for us – at my request. I undertake to make sure everything is fine with the … their auntie.’

  The second policeman was now pushing the bigger of the two youths towards the jeep.

  ‘He’s my younger brother …’ the boy began protesting, twisting his head to look back at the child standing forlorn now on the verge. ‘I can’t leave him here.’

  ‘So we’ll take him in, too.’

  Diogenes tried to look casual as he fished in his pocket, pulled out some ID and with it, some US greenbacks, folded underneath, which he slid out unconcernedly, moving closer to the first officer’s gaze.

  ‘You Dr Earle?’ the man said, with a smile that had no smiling in it.

  Diogenes nodded, fingering the money.

  ‘We’re proud of you.’

  The officer threw a glance at the American, at the car, at Mignonette, and calling out to them, said, ‘Dr Earle is an example of what this country can do.’

  Diogenes saw that he’d mistaken his man: this one wanted to put on a show, play the big man with the big men. Perhaps the man was frightened the money would prove a trap, perhaps he was filled with unusual rectitude. ‘Let me at least …’ Diogenes began. He wanted to say, ‘Come with you to the station,’ but the boys were already bundled into the back, their eyes staring through the panes in the doors that closed on them.

  ‘We’re not ashamed of this country,’ said the policeman, as he secured the rear doors, and swung himself into the driver’s seat.

  Diogenes Earle put his wallet away.

  In her flat later that evening, Mignonette was weeping for the boys; Diogenes had utterly failed to help, he’d let them fall into the hands of that vicious power freak … It was all his fault; with him around, they’d been conspicuous, and that jeep was manned with the only officers on the whole island who wanted to show how the law was the law because of his fucking fame and that journalist from the Post who would have gone back home and said, Those islanders’ll never change their spots. The boys were probably now lying battered and broken in some filthy cell, terrified out of their wits at what was still to come … She was sobbing, she was railing at him.

  ‘Aren’t you being a little melodramatic, my dear child?’ said Diogenes. He had been about to take off his trousers. ‘They’ll give them a warning, and then they’ll let them go.’

  ‘That’s what you say,’ she said, passionately, turning her face into the mattress.

  ‘Mignonette, my little one,’ he began. He tried to stroke her, but she flinched and pushed her face harder into the mattress.

  There was no staying with her longer that night, he could see.

  ‘I will do something, I promise,’ he said, letting himself out, with a glance back at the small, austere room.

  He walked down the hill from her street to the Hilton, where he picked up a taxi. He asked the driver to take him to the Institute. The man was surprised: ‘You work all hours, Dr Earle!’

  It was nearly midnight.

  He came in by the service entrance, reassuring the security guard with a squeeze on his shoulder.

  In the lab’s operating theatre, one monkey was lying on a bed, recuperating from surgery. Diogenes stroked the scant fur on the sleeping animal’s belly and checked the screens on which her life systems pulsed in streams of stars.

  ‘There, there, my beauty,’ he murmured. ‘You’re doing fine.’

  Then he put his face next to hers and smelled the mixture of antiseptic and animal heat in the residual warmth of her sleeping existence. Truly, she was all right, this creature with her slender black fingers crooked on her groin and her crinkled face with the lids beseechingly swollen over her eyes. There was another gurney lying empty alongside; Diogenes Earle climbed on to it and stretched out; the vervet being near, he was able to sleep.

  Mink

  ‘THE BEST MINK is blonde.’ This was a favourite subject of our mother’s. ‘Darker mink – tawny or taupe – can be chic, but never gives quite the full effect – oh, the utter luxury of mink with a gold bloom on it, like an albicocca. Like a baby’s bottom, like yours when you were babies!’

  Donna Byrd, maiden name Sarto, wasn’t like other mothers. Our mother! Even washing my father’s socks in greying suds, wearing the heavy-duty rubber gloves she’d always put on to protect her hands, she was an exotic blow-in, and she radiated the warm south through the wind-whipped fens where we lived then. As she rubbed and wrung, her words spooled out bright ribbons of hopes for us. She was an expert dream-weaver, and we – that’s me, Bea, for Beatrice, and my older sister, Ricky – short for Riccarda, because she was meant to be a boy – we jumped to catch them.

  She smoothed her new perm off her cheek with the inner, soft edge of her forearm above the wet gloves, and went on: ‘There are alternatives to mink: people swear by Canadian squirrel. But I don’t go along with that at all. Margarine to butter. And don’t you believe those advertisements. Margarine never tastes as good as butter.

  ‘Now there is fox. Fox can be marvellous.’ She closed her eyes and hummed to herself, nestling her head into an ­invisible corolla of fur around her shoulders, conjuring away the fenland drabness and carrying us off, far away. ‘Ah, sable. Sable is unbelievably luxurious.’ Her eyebrows were plucked into high arches and she flung back her head, to snuggle into the soft depths, with parted lips, like a film star on a poster. ‘Sable comes from Russia,’ she went on, ‘like astrakhan. Russians are the Christian Diors of fur!

  ‘And there’s always ermine.’

  Ermine! I saw queens and princes floating by, alighting on a mist-wreathed boat to sail, rudderless, across an enchanted lake towards a fairy palace on a spire-crowned island. They wore circlets round their brows, lined with ermine like the crown Elizabeth II wore at her coronation, the ceremony we bought our first family television set to watch.

  If the Sunday roast had been a leg of lamb, Donna’d set us up to mince any leftovers. We’d clamp the clunky steel mangle to the kitchen table, and she’d pare off juicy bits near the bone and pass them to Ricky and me and tell us to watch out for our fingers as we fed the chunks into the funnel, taking turns on the handle to spin them out into fine threads of creamy pinkness. Next, we’d mash stale bread with milk and chop onion into the bowl with the ground lamb, and she’d add nutmeg and pepper and allspice and thyme and garlic, and we’d beat an egg at her instructions and stir it all in. Then we’d roll out the mixture on a floured board to pat into polpette to add to the tomato sauce for supper.

  Fur came as trimmings, on cardigans and gloves, hats and collars and cuffs. She’d show us – in a copy of Vogue, which she always took – how a simple ruff or tippet or button or pompom lifted a nondescript outfit into a stratosphere of ­sophistication and allure. How a fur hat, especially one with a little voile scattered with moles like Marilyn’s, added mystery to eyes looking out from under the brim.

  This was power. I practised making eyes at myself in the mirror, dipping my head like a moorhen. When Ricky tried too, she just looked fierce. She has a temper and would knit her brows and hex you with her black eyes.

  Donna Sarto wasn’t going to settle for tassels or tippets. She scorned the way other women would be all smiles at a trifle – at a pair of mink earrings, for God’s sake. She wanted a fur coat, one that enfolded her head to toe, that swung along under its own supple density as she stepped out.<
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  She was saving up, and the laundry man helped, because she’d fill in the cheque each week for a little more than the bill, telling him she needed some cash.

  Ricky and I hadn’t really any direct experience of fur, not for real. My pink-eyed white mouse, known as Frosty, would slither through my fingers, warm and quivering; his coat was sparse over his rose-pale flesh and very soft and silky, and I pocketed him in my coat with the crumbs of biscuits there, and stroked him in secret.

  ‘You could only make an elf’s waistcoat from him,’ said my mother, laughing, as she stitched nametags on to my school uniform sports shirts.

  She handed over to me the latest Vogue. In the pictures inside there were fox furs that looked at you with liquorice eyes, and coats with paws hanging down.

  She began swabbing off her nail polish. I liked the smell of the remover and sniffed it in. Then we heard my father come in back from work, and she quickly tidied away the manicure set.

  ‘Don’t mention the mink,’ she said. ‘I need to find the right moment.’

  Our father wasn’t having any of it.

  ‘I’ve worn this suit for years!’ He twisted around the label in the pocket on the inside lining to read the tailor’s date … ‘Since 1946. That’s a decade and it’s as good as it ever was. You don’t need a new coat, and you certainly don’t need a stole. A stole is a silly bit of fluff, and it makes you look like one.’ He struck a pose, sneering. Donna’s lip trembled. I felt pricking in my eyes, not from shame at our mother wanting her mink but at my father for mocking her.

  ‘Come on, old girl, don’t get all worked up!’ His tone changed – now he was making light of it. ‘Think of it like this: minks are just rats, you know, but nastier.’ He turned to us, to me, to enlist my support. He’d given up on appealing to Ricky because she never backed him up. ‘Your mother doesn’t realise Mrs Cranston isn’t a patch on her. That woman can dress up to the nines all she wants in God knows what, mink or fish scales, for all I care, she’ll never be a stunner. Com’n, you’re a sensible little girl, tell your mother there’s no need for one-upmanship.’

  That was that, as far as he was concerned. The neighbour with the Jag, the swimming pool – and the mink – was flash, and flash was cheap.

  Our mother stumbled on, her thin shoulders tensed. ‘Mink is the warmest fur there is.’

  ‘I seem to remember I bought you only the other day a very fine winter coat, made from the best Scottish dyed-in-the-wool tweed.’ He was tapping his pocket, where he kept his wallet. ‘That coat’s got years in it still.’

  How we minded her timorousness in face of his authority. Ricky tried her best. Her eyes went all hexy, full and black, as she shouted at him, ‘Everybody knows that mink is the best fur in the world and fur is much warmer than wool.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ he said. ‘That’s my fiery little woman! But don’t believe what she tells you. Even if she is your mother, she’s prone to believing all kinds of stuff and nonsense. Mark you, she’s not as silly as some women. As that jumped-up Jennifer Cranston, for instance.’

  Years later, Ricky told me, that this was the decisive moment for her. ‘Bea, I understood then how we were going to have to have our own money. To do with it what we wanted. I was never going to be like our mother. I was never going to have to beg a man for anything I’d set my heart on.’

  But Donna Sarto, our lively exotic mother, wasn’t one to beg. She was like underground water, which is stronger than flames and molten magma; it grinds granite into fine sand and splits basalt, which is harder still.

  Once we were at boarding school, she started squirrelling away more from the housekeeping. It took years – and it’s another story, but also there was a friend, a friend who mended china, professionally, for antique dealers, and Donna learned from her how to spot a good piece at church sales.

  She was able to put money aside, week by week.

  I wasn’t there the night she first came downstairs wearing her mink and took his arm to go out. But she told Ricky and me later how our father reacted.

  ‘I say, old girl,’ he spluttered, ‘what’s this?’

  ‘He was awed, I’m telling you!’ Donna’d remembered, purring with satisfaction. ‘He couldn’t imagine how I’d done it, and it felt wonderful. I tilted my head and lifted an eyebrow at him. You see, the whole pelt was flowing like silk all around me. I was Venus rising from the sea, Venus in furs!

  ‘His glasses misted up so he drew out his arm from mine to take them off and wipe them.

  ‘I’m telling you,’ she added, laughing. ‘I have never felt more feminine.’

  The mink was in a plastic dress bag in the cupboard by the downstairs loo when I was at Donna’s last house, clearing it out, three months ago. My sister and I were taking it in turns to go and sift through another room. I didn’t know what was in the bag until I had unzipped it. It slumped through my hands, soft and supple, a bit chilled from its sojourn in the cupboard, and exuding naphthalene, which went up my nose. When I pulled it free and carried it into a stronger light I saw that in spite of the care Donna’d taken to keep it in the dark and the cold, it was rotting; the fur was falling off the skins like mange. I dared not look more closely; my hands felt itchy, as if some organisms were creeping from the fur on to my skin.

  Throwing it away seemed the only thing to do. But it also seemed a terrible betrayal of Donna’s carefully executed plot. Of the years involved. Of the triumphant conclusion.

  I googled ‘Recycling mink’, and several sites came up. There was a cottage industry somewhere in Vermont where we could send Donna’s fur coat and they would turn it into a luxury teddy bear or other soft toy.

  Or there were charities, which sent old furs to refugee camps in Afghanistan and places during the bitter winters. The donations were tax deductible.

  I emailed my sister about finding the coat, and she rang me, and we talked about it.

  ‘There are also Fur Clinics,’ she reported, ‘where old coats are shown in class to raise consciousness. To pass on to the young a horror of wearing dead animals. Lou has friends involved. She’ll send you the link.’ Lou is her daughter, and an active eco-warrior.

  ‘That seems a bit harsh,’ I emailed Lou. ‘It was a fashion, like ostrich feathers and crocodile handbags. Donna was a woman of her time. She couldn’t have known otherwise. Not sure I want her up before the next generation to confess her crimes, even if she’ll not be there in person.’

  Then a friend told me she’d been through the same dilemma, with a mink stole of her mother’s, and she’d found out that you could donate old furs to an animal welfare charity closer to home. It passed them on to farms for keeping orphaned nurslings warm, and it wouldn’t matter about fleas or moths or mange.

  Was this better?

  Ricky and Lou thought so. We began to laugh, the thin, sad laughter that greets time’s fell hand at work, because there’s no other way to respond if you are to carry on living. All that glamour, nonchalance, and allure – that feminine mystique – Donna had pursued, turned into the lining of a nest for a newborn calf? Why not?

  But in the end I did none of those things. I put the mink back in the bag and took it to the Recycling Centre and shunted it into a skip under the sign:

  Miscellaneous Household Goods (Penalty for ­Improper Use)

  A Rare Visit

  IN THE FLAT in Cairo where we were living after World War II, there was a narrow mirror in the hall in a gilded frame; it was hung too high for me to look into, but I could watch my mother’s face as she checked her reflection while the suffragi, Mohammed, went to open to the visitor who had pulled the little bell on its coil and made it dance and jingle. At the sound, Mohammed would glide across the cool polished floor in his soft babouches, his slight shadow cutting through the stripes of the shuttered twilight of our interior world. My mother, who by now had settled herself on the sofa in the drawing room
, would then rise to greet her guest as if surprised, springing forward in a shimmer of tulle, her light shawl left drifting on the chintz soft covers and cushions. When she came to a standstill – she alighted, it seemed to me, as airy and luminous as my fairy doll – I’d catch hold of a bunch of fabric from her dress and steady myself to look from behind her at the new arrival: a stream of visitors would drop in during her ‘hour’ for tea in the afternoon when my father would still be at work. As often as not, they’d be there when he came home.

  Calling out, ‘Melissa, I’m home, it’s a bloody dustbowl in town,’ he’d stride into the drawing room, rubbing his hands.

  ‘Had a good day, darling girl?’ he’d ask, as he kissed my mother on the cheek. Then to me, he’d add, ‘And what about you, little woman?’ and swing me up in the air once, twice, three times even, and then set me down again and make straight for the drinks tray, shouting to Mohammed to bring a bucket of ice. My mother never joined him, but the guests did. They smoked too, my father keeping between his lips the flattened oval of the Egyptian cigarettes from Constantinou’s (the Greek variety he favoured) as he bustled about, my mother’s friends often preferring the Virginia tobacco brands that were kept in wood-lined silver boxes and passed round by Mohammed after he’d offered them from a brass tray, tumblers of gin and tonic and bitters, or other mixes of choice, as well as whisky and soda, or whisky and water.

  My mother didn’t smoke either. She’d sit quietly, her dress fanning out around her slender legs, while the guests … well, the guests entertained her.

  When her friend from her hometown came, I never made a peep, because I knew that if she remembered I was still there, she would send me away. Zio Folco – he had a very fancy name, with a title from Italy as well as some high military rank – was a decorated veteran of both world wars, and in the partigiani, too, my mother would emphasise, and he arrived sometimes in riding gear, sometimes in civvies, sometimes even in Arab dress, which I loved to see – for he’d come riding in from the desert to the west of Cairo. He was living there with the local Bedouin, and he would only ever drink mint tea – ‘With five sugars, remember!’ he’d remind Mohammed in Arabic – and he’d sit beside my mother on the sofa. He would talk, and she would cry.