by Simon Mawer
“She’s a friend, a colleague. Is she hurt?”
“The doctor’s seen her,” she said. “There’s nothing too bad.”
I followed the policewoman’s large blue backside down a corridor. I was at just about the same level. Blue serge and black lisle stockings. Legs like Indian clubs. For a moment I wondered how the woman would appear, shorn of the uniform of officialdom, stark naked and wobbling as she moved. Little more alluring than me, I guessed. Then she, opened the door onto an interview room and I forgot all about that, because there was Jean sitting at a table, clutching a mug of tea in her hands. She had a cut and swollen lip and a black eye. One cheek was puffed up, and there was a plaster over her left eyebrow.
“I didn’t know if you’d come,” she said quietly. And she apologized, actually apologized as though she were to blame—as though she had been brought in for drunken driving or something. “I’m sorry, Benedict. I’m awfully sorry. They wanted me to go into hospital for observation, but I said no. I just gave them your name. I know it was silly, but that’s what I did. The thing is, when you’ve been married for a few years you don’t have many people to turn to, do you?”
The policewoman looked at me doubtfully. “Mrs. Miller’s had a nasty experience. She’ll need a bit of peace and quiet.”
“What happened?” I asked. I wanted to put my arm around her, of course, to bring her that fragile thing that we call comfort. But of course I couldn’t reach.
“We were called by the neighbors,” the policewoman said, but I hadn’t really asked her.
“And Hugo? What about Hugo?”
Again it was the policewoman who answered. “Mr. Miller is in custody at the moment. But unless Mrs. Miller brings charges, there’s nothing much we can do.”
Jean looked at me with those absurd eyes. “I don’t want that. That’d be awful, wouldn’t it?”
“Not as awful as what happened.”
She sipped her tea and shook her head. “Awful,” she repeated.
And that was how she came to stay. An angel of mercy, I was. Cherub. A cherub of mercy. An ugly, aged cherub of mercy, bereft of wings. She still had some of her things at my place, and we bought others, going round the shops almost like a husband and wife, laughing at the looks we got. We were, in a way, happy. In my shadowy basement flat I think she felt free for the first time in years, because of course I imposed no restraint on her. I couldn’t dare to. She settled into the flat and she seemed quite unconcerned about the incongruity of things. “Snow White and her single dwarf,” I said once, and she grew really angry. A delightful sight, Miss Piercey angry, as angry as when I remember her catching someone sneaking out of the library back home with a stolen book tucked away in a carrier bag. “Benedict Lambert, don’t you dare say things like that! We are what we are inside, not what we look like.”
She sounded like my mother. She had a childlike sense of optimism, and the mere fact of my existence couldn’t cure her of it. She was convinced that “things would work out.” We were therefore a ménage of opposites: hopeful against hopeless, cheerful against acerbic, tall against dwarf.
She didn’t bring charges of assault or battery or any of the other things the police suggested against her husband, but the courts did put some kind of restraining order on him anyway. “Restraining order” sounds like a muzzle, but it didn’t stop his phoning her at work and abusing her. “Got a man, have you?” he would ask her. “Nothing but a fucking tart.”
She tried to reason with him, but it was pointless. Hugo Miller appeared to be partway round the bend and straining to discover what was beyond the corner. “You’re not supposed to be telephoning me, Hugo. And apart from everything else, it’s bloody inconvenient interrupting me at work.” I don’t know whether she got the expletive from me. It wasn’t the kind of word she used normally, but then times weren’t normal, were they? Times were bloody abnormal, in fact.
“I’ll have to get somewhere of my own,” Jean told me. “I’ll have to get out of your hair.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort.”
“You want me here? You’re always snapping at me, always telling me what’s wrong and what’s right.”
I explained that that was just my manner, that when you’ve been in my business for long enough, the didactic manner becomes normal, that I was nothing more than a bore and should be told to shut up if necessary.
“You mean you want me?” She laughed. “Want me here, I mean?”
“Of course I do.”
“But I’ve kicked you out of your bed and everything. You can’t forever go sleeping on the sofa. It’s not right.”
“It’s all right by me for the moment.”
“Until?”
“Until you invite me in with you.”
A pregnant silence, if you’ll forgive the expression.
“Is it true what they say, then?” Eric asked one lunchtime.
“What do they say, Eric?”
He drew a pint of bitter and sniffed, as though considering the matter. “That you two are shacked up together.”
“It’s not what you think at all,” Jean said indignantly.
“Who says that?” I demanded. Among other things I felt a stir of pride. Quite unjustified pride of course, but then all too often pride operates without justification.
“People,” Eric replied carelessly.
“People should mind their own business.”
He nodded, as though at one of the eternal verities. “They never do, though, do they? Anyway, good luck to you, I say.”
Jean eyed me curiously over the steak-and-kidney pie. “Cheeky devil.”
“Me or him?”
She pursed her lips in that way she had. Her two eyes, the green and the blue, considered me in their own, asymmetric manner. “Both of you,” she said.
I’m looking for a moment, of course. The moment. Was it then in the pub, when Eric brought the subject up, thrust it, so to speak, into her consciousness? Or was it the morning when she suddenly and without apparent reason smiled and reached across and touched my cheek as we sat at the breakfast table? Or when we ate at that French restaurant and talked of trout? Or later, when we went to a piano recital and heard some unknown Czech pianist play On an Overgrown Path with such intensity that Jean actually wept, there in the recital room among the suppressed coughs and the faint air of tedium? Or was it one Saturday afternoon when there was a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition at the Tate Gallery and a party of schoolgirls stared after us as we moved from The Moulin Rouge to Jane Avril and one of the girls whispered in a voice that echoed from the ceiling, “Look, Miss, it’s ’im.” Jean laughed. It was a bitter, ironic laugh. She was learning. As the wretched schoolteacher hurried her children into the next room, Jean looked at me and laughed. Was that the moment? Materially, no. Materially it required other things, a concatenation of events. But, beneath the plain material cause of things, was it then, as she looked at me and laughed?
After the exhibition we walked out into the afternoon and strolled along the embankment. The tide was out. Gulls cried in the wind. The heavy slick of the river slid past like bile. A small steamer was battering its way downstream toward Chelsea while on the mud flats a pair of herons picked fastidiously over the debris. Across the river, the bulk of Battersea Power Station lay like a vast, inverted dining table. Jean glanced down at me. “Can I tell you something, Benedict?” she asked, and her tone was portentous, the sound I dreaded, the sound of doctors about to deliver judgment. I’m afraid there’s nothing whatever we can do…
“Please don’t.”
“You’re so brave,” she told me. “I mean, I’ve got problems, but compared with yours they’re nothing. And you never mention things. Never. You can even laugh.”
Things.
“It’s not being brave,” I assured her with the famous Benedict carelessness. “To be brave you’ve got to have a choice. You’ve got to have the option to be a coward. When you’re like me there’s no choice.”
S
he looked at me with those eyes, and I read a muddle of pain and pity there. “If you weren’t like you are …”
“It’d be another world.”
She stared into the wind. Those eyes, those matchless eyes, were glistening with tears. But the wind might well have done that. It was cold and raw, coming from the Essex marshes. “It’d be easier,” she said. “That’s all. Easier.”
We got back that afternoon in a shared mood. Sentimentality, perhaps. Sentiment, certainly. The two float dangerously near each other, like related bacteria in a culture, infecting each other with plasmids, passing the genes for mawkishness and insincerity, love and lust, back and forth. And laughter helped. And alcohol. All these things.
“What do you want to do?” she asked as she cleared away the supper dishes. We had drunk more of a very ordinary vin ordinaire than was good for us, and had laughed immoderately over el cheapo and chateau plonc.
“That’s up to you.”
Miss Piercey was a different woman. No longer a mouse. A rat, a laboratory rat, white and sleek and with a mind of her own. We looked at each other through some kind of haze of alcohol and pity, and, in tones clouded with embarrassment, she told me that she wouldn’t mind. It was just … It wasn’t easy … It’d be difficult … if I saw what she meant … “There, I’ve said it,” she ended up, having said nothing. She began to wash the dishes brusquely, as though angry about something.
“You’ll break the plates,” I warned her, but she took no notice. We drank coffee without talking, and then she put the cups in the sink and announced that she was going to bed.
I’m looking for the moment; but perhaps it doesn’t exist. Perhaps that is just the way our minds work, thinking that a significant event must have a cause. Perhaps it is no more than chance, the terrifying machinations of chaos. I sat there and listened to her moving about the flat, going to the bathroom, flushing the lavatory, splashing around in the basin or the bidet. Doors banged shut. A kind of silence fell. What had been said? What, if anything, had been agreed? The arrangement with Eve had been so much simpler.
I tiptoed along the corridor to her door and tapped softly, in case she might hear.
“Who is it?” she called, in case it might be someone else.
“Can I come in?”
“Wait amo’ …”
I could hear sounds beyond the wooden panel. Then: “Turn off the light.”
I did as I was asked, and opened the door into a blanket of darkness. The air was scented with her perfume, the smell vivid in the dark—slightly florid, slightly overstated, entirely dangerous. “Over here,” she said softly, as though I might not know the layout of my own room. I closed the door behind me and crossed the room to the bed, putting out my hand and finding the cool touch of the sheet; and then hot, soft flesh. She stirred in the shadows. I touched silken skin, an edge of bone, a declivity that ended in a deft thicket of hair. She made a sound that was difficult to interpret, a small, voiced exhalation that might have been distress.
“Are you all right?” I asked. My eyes had begun to accommodate to the dark. The exiguous light that seeped through the curtains from the light shaft now gave vague substance to the room, to the bedside table and the chair and the ghostly body laid out like a corpse in front of me. The ghost’s voice came back to me after what seemed like a long pause. “We shouldn’t,” she whispered.
My fingers moved. “Why not?”
She sighed, having no particular answer. “What do you want to do?”
I was shaking. With fear, with excitement, with impure joy, I don’t know. I have no wish to classify and delimit my feelings. All I know is, I was shaking as I knelt before her like a supplicant at an altar (because it was the easiest way, in fact) while she presented herself like one of my mice, making small, mouselike sounds, a faint whimpering, a mewing, a desperate cri du chat. My once-trembling fingers had found sudden and surprising dexterity.
“Oh God,” she whispered, although surely God had nothing to do with it. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
I leaned forward and tasted her, and she had a strange and bittersweet flavor that I had never imagined nor could ever describe: taste mingled with touch, a mysterious combination. Unsteadily I got to my feet and poised behind her, the mattress wobbling beneath me, her buttocks clutched for capricious support. “Be careful,” she whispered in the darkness, rather absurdly. “Oh God, be careful.” I leaned forward against her. “You’re so big,” she said. “So big.”
That night my semen coursed in glutinous coils into the core of Miss Jean Piercey: tiny bullets of potency, as potent as any other man’s, wriggling and shivering their way out of the acid world of the vagina, hoovered up by the nuzzling trunk of her cervix, sucked, pulled, wafted up through the darkness of her womb toward the distant tubes.
We slept apart. I didn’t want her to wake and find me beside her.
She looked drawn in the dawn, as though she hadn’t slept properly. “What do we do now?” she asked, fiddling disconsolately with a teapot and kettle. A scene of domestic bliss. Giant Honey Pops for breakfast.
“Continue as before, more or less,” I suggested.
“And what if I get pregnant?”
The sound of water pouring. An exhalation of steam. Otherwise, silence. In the midst of that silence did she, I wonder, compute the odds? Was she even aware that they existed?
“If what?”
She stirred the brew. “Pregnant,” she repeated.
“How in God’s name …?”
“What’s it got to do with God? You always say you don’t believe in him.”
But God had much to do with it. The Egyptian god Bes was an achondroplastic dwarf. He was the god of entertainment, the god who frightens away the demons; but he was also the god who protects pregnant women. “But aren’t you on the pill or something?”
“I told you to be careful. But I didn’t want to stop you. In case you misunderstood.” Speaking thus to the sink and the pot of steaming tea and the frosted window beyond whose panes was a decorative light shaft full of drainpipes and electrical conduits. “I thought you’d think I didn’t want you,” she said softly. “There can’t be much chance, can there?”
“You sound like a schoolgirl.”
“Do I? Do you know how schoolgirls are?”
I ignored the taunt. “The chance of me, my dear, the chance of me happening was one in fifteen thousand. And here I am. Chances are things that have a habit of happening. So when was your last period? And why the hell aren’t you on the pill, anyway?”
She looked up suddenly, her mismatched eyes bright with anger. “I didn’t need to be, did I? I didn’t need to be on the pill, because Hugo Miller couldn’t make babies, could he? I thought I’d told you that. All his sperm is …” She searched for the word, and found it sure enough. “Deformed. Two tails, three heads, I don’t know what.” She sniffed. “Anyway, my last period was about a fortnight ago.”
I buttered my toast with care.
1. Kalmus and Fry, Annals of Human Genetics 43, 1980; Profita and Bidder, American Journal of Medical Genetics 29, 1988.
God.
You were wondering when I was going to get around to him, weren’t you? After all, Mendel was a priest, a friar who had dedicated his life to the service of the Almighty. He must have celebrated mass every day, either alone in one of the side chapels of the convent church, or before a congregation up at the ornate high altar, the fanciful, florid, and fantastic Silver Altar, with a thirteenth-century icon of the Madonna and Child buried in its center. He was ordained in 1847 and was thirty-six years a priest. That makes thirteen thousand masses, more or less. Thirteen thousand recitations of Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem coeli et terrae—I believe in one God, Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. It has a quaint, old-world ring. The question is, did he?
Jean went to church. This startled me, I’ll admit. It was the very first Sunday after I had picked her off the streets, so to speak, before we had any kind
of real intimacy (although Benedict the diminutive goat was speculating, of course, speculating all the time on the possible and the impossible). “I’m just going out for a bit,” she told me while clearing away the breakfast things. She seemed almost furtive, as though she had a secret to hide.
“Going where? It’s Sunday.”
“Precisely.”
The church she had found (she had spied out the land in advance) was a redbrick confection designed during the last century by William Butterfield. Saint Mary Magdalen. In its neo-Gothic extravagance it might have been a branch of the Royal Institute for Genetics; but of course it also looked the twin (dizygotic, not identical) of the convent church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary at the Augustinian Monastery in Brno. In fact you could put those two buildings side by side and an untrained eye would be hard put to distinguish between them for style and date: both slate-roofed; both dark brick (the one red and black, the other dusty mauve); both grimed by traffic fumes; both pinnacled and buttressed; both witnesses to arcane rites and superstitions and redolent of incense. There is a difference in date, of course. The Augustinians’ church in Brno was consecrated in the fourteenth century, whereas a plaque beside the main door of Saint Mary Magdalen is
to commemorate the laying of the Foundation Stone on
28th May 1856
by Doctor Edward Bouverie Pusey
On behalf of the Ecclesiological Society
You’ll notice the date: the height of the Tractarian movement in England, when Pusey was expounding the doctrine of the Real Presence, and Newsman was going over to Rome; exactly the same time that Father Gregor, Roman by birth and upbringing, was watering his first-generation peas and about to discover a real presence deep inside them, the factors for tall and dwarf, for pure white and dark, corrupt purple.
“Do you believe, then?” I asked her.
“Of course I do.” There was a note of defiance about her reply, as though she expected an argument. It transpired that she also used to sing in the church choir in Ruislip. “They’ll miss me. I used to take the soprano solos, me and another girl.”