Mordred Cowdenbeath had been Anne’s husband; it was said that he had been found by Anne, his gun at his side. She had told me one evening that this was not so. By definition a crime, but a crime of passion, she had said, and slipped the oyster into her mouth as the tears slipped out of her eyes, trebly fluent salt.
Chapter 2
It is not that I believe in a good breakfast as you might believe in telling the truth, or in assisting the blind over roads. I believe in it as Anne believes in her cupboards. At least I have cut into the day and seen it unaddled. I like my life to be as pitched as a piano – with nothing lax and slippery to mar the tone, skew the hammers, slip between the snug keys. Before Hal, there was my curricular keyboard, the black notes of nocturnal jarrings struck only in timely order, when a sharp or a flat had been scored by lust. This plain upright opened into a grand piano with Hal; love opened up my ordered life.
It is not the case that a pianist must have long thin fingers, nor is it so of surgeons. What each requires is a broad palm, a wide stretch, and fingertips whose supply of neurones makes of each one the finder of exact destinations. I have hands like that. In other physical respects, I do resemble the surgeon of the nurse’s comicbook dreams. I am tall, dark, sad-eyed with a mien combining that of television intellectual and Dracula. I move quite naturally in a way conveyed only by the most swaggering and self-indulgent portraitists, Sargent or Boldini. I am etiolated but masculine. Until puberty, I looked like a tall, modest girl. At eighteen, I grew shoulders like coat hangers and rose to six foot four inches. Women fall in love with how I look. I frequently see women fall in love. It happens in hospitals; it is a form of gratitude. My looks are wasted there. The mothers with their repaired babies weep and embrace my fat and unpoetic-looking colleagues quite as much as they do me. The other women who fall in love with me are an inconvenience, sometimes worse. My looks feed fantasies which are not my own. The only real satisfaction I gain from how I look is the occasional mean one when an oily boy realises he is being crushed by expensive flesh, finer than that of any girl he can ever have. A solace is that Hal likes the way I look. He doesn’t love it; he doesn’t have the lover’s sponsorship of my beauty. He is content that I pass in most surroundings unrecognised for what I am.
My breakfast is unfaddy. I take porridge as a poultice if I am not operating in the morning. It keeps me warm. If I am operating it undesirably insulates my nerves. At the weekend, I have one (jugged) kipper (no smell) and during the week one egg.
I like a lot of mild coffee, brewed very strong; I dislike drinking it from thick china, or china with a raised pattern. I am fussy about what goes near my mouth and I don’t feel that embossed china can be very clean; I hate the knock of china on teeth. The teeth of spinsters on teacups in the consultants’ secretarial office is the most voracious noise I know, when I am jangled after a long performance. Naturally, I don’t have bacon.
My father sold it, though, in his last shop. ‘Cooked meats, speck, schink, rauchfleisch, tongue, back, belly, green, or there again nice cheeses . . .’ He would lift the bare-faced rind-stockinged hams and slice pink wafers from them, to fold in greaseproof, wrap in sugar paper and bag up only when all the purchases were assembled in soft white bags which were twopence the hundred and melted if anything leaked. Eggs came in bags, impossible to carry, even if there were no children, no other bags, no other shops to visit. At first the small shop in Clerkenwell sold little; it was just after the War and there was not to be for years the Esperanto of pimentos and the snobbery of refrigerators. Our first refrigerator ran on kerosene and had no name. Soon afterwards, with the last puff of Empire, came our Icecold Monarch. We bought our first car, a grey Consul, years after food rationing stopped; its name too smacked of victory, martial success and ascendancy, soon to fall away. We had sold the shop in Clerkenwell and even our most loyal customers could not make it to Bayswater to hear my father intone, ‘Nice olives, nice breads’ – that ‘s’! the profligacy, the delicious excess! – ‘nice butter salted or unsalted . . .’ Nice was a particle to my father; he never was quite at home in English, save with food, and then he used the language as his larder, cooking up sentences with happy gusto. His last shop was tall and thin, sausages hanging down six feet from the ceiling. Sugar balls in cellophane and strings of chillies hung in ribbons, and the shelves went right to the top of the shop. There was a smell of candy sugar and burnt coffee. My father, a small man but born tall, hooked items down with long tongs, tender as a gardener dead-heading a high rose. (That ‘items’ gives me away; ‘garment’ has on occasion unmasked some of the boys I grew up with, politicians or lawyers now.) Of course, they were ambitious for me, my father with his height taken from him and my mother impaling receipts in her kiosk at the back of the shop. I was well mannered. They had sacked a boy who had flirtatiously cut just two inches of the soft brown hair of the fat daughter of a regular customer with the knife he used to slice citron peel and angelica. I worked in the shop, and I worked at night. I think my bookishness then came from sex. It had that fanatical energy.
Not sex itself, perhaps, but things, for an adolescent boy, congruent. Sex is the brutal adultese for romance. I felt ennobled and powerful as I worked over books I could remember and forget swiftly, serially, as examinations required. My father and mother had diluted my Jewishness. Sometimes, now, eating or working with the haute juiverie of this country, I regret this; but I see that I could not be so polymorphous, so accepted, had my parents not to some extent diluted my flavour. I had no brothers or sisters; till they died my parents protected themselves from my unmarried state by saying I’d better wait till I was a qualified doctor, a GP, a consultant, a professor. He had owned a printer’s with a staff of a hundred and she played a piano with a raspberry-pink shawl and a vase like a silver cornet, the pinks for ice-cream, on top of it. I had seen the shawl and the vase, so I knew. They brought out little else. Polish is a difficult language; if it is your first tongue, you lament in all others; all sentences, said Polishly, sound sad. Mr Borzecki and Mr Sapietis would come monthly to make merry with my father. Mr Borzecki had a watchmending business with two dusty ostrich eggs in the window, each on a silver rest shaped like an eagle’s foot. Mr Sapietis was a Serb who made models of big cats in clay, fired turquoise; they were briefly popular in the 1950s and Mr Sapietis was miserable because he was bereft for that short time of being misunderstood. He had no fingernails for the clay to stick under. They had been taken from him. When they made merry, these three old gentlemen sounded sadder than ever. Their wives ate cakes, little tubs of short pastry filled with sour cream, a pistachio nut or a green glacé cherry on the top. Those green glacé cherries tasted differently, I swear, from the red ones.
The only line my father could not move was green cocktail onions, in the winter of 1959. For one vinegary week, we ate them with our potato and fish, little glass peas; the rest my father sold to a joke shop in Bloomsbury. My mother, who read in her kiosk women’s magazines illustrated in brush and pen with waspied ladies preparing for Ascot or for cocktails, made a remark about this which my father did not understand: ‘Those onions are eyeballs for highballs,’ she said. Even had my father possessed so advanced a grasp of English, he would not have used it to say such frivolous things.’
They appeared devoted, though I wonder whether that matters. It seems important to us, now. Running from a dark town in flames, hiding in haystacks from bayonets, knowing the list was shortening, that it could not but bear their names, concealing their child, swallowing an egg – raw indivisible luxury – did they enquire whether they liked, loved, desired each other?
My parents lived by mutual loyalty. That I recollect the green onion facétie shows it was a rare lapse from their blessed unalarming days of quiet retailing and lugubrious retelling; it was a rare hint of a small skittishness in my mother, a little willingness to participate in their new country. He did not get that far.
I saw her touch him once, after I qualified. She wore black lisle an
d black wool and worked with staining purple carbon paper and dusty cured meats all day, but she smelt of vanilla. She was, like many wives of thin men, fat. They were both crying. For that whole day I felt no guilt about my parents. They drank coffee with cream and pulled shiny red crusts from the plaited loaf to dunk; the bread was egg-yellow inside. A row of these loaves, some sprinkled with poppyseed, lay on the floury counter of the shop. In our back room some asters, brown themselves, were in a jug, with black seeds of pollen fallen on the table. We could go straight into the shop from that back room.
We celebrated my success, weeping and eating sops of bread, and serving when our customers came in; to some I was displayed, a prodigy. They had always known. At a quiet time, my father slopped a very little of his coffee on his serge trousers; my mother took a small knitted cloth, and, systematic as a mother cat, dabbed and rasped till he was tidy. The mark had been perhaps the size of a little coin. She hung up her cloth after rinsing it, washed her own hands and flicked his left ear with her left hand, he sitting, she over him. She flicked it in the same cat’s manner, as though she found the contiguity of their separateness an acceptable source of comfort. We were not demonstrative habitually, but for tears, lavements and festivals and beatitudes of tears. We cried together, not alone.
I slopped my coffee, too, more than twenty years later, the morning of Anne’s party, when Hal arrived in time for breakfast. He had not often done this. All signs of intimacy between us were kept to a minimum. I had trained myself to expect nothing, so that I could, when it came, be surprised by joy.
‘Lucas, I must speak.’
‘Sit down, I’ll make your tea.’
I am a coldish man, yet with Hal I am all uxorious attention. I lay trays with cloths for him. I know that he can endure neither socks with nylon nor deodorant with zinc, so I ensure he has neither, though all too rarely do I see or touch the places they are worn. He has his tea, orange pekoe, in a mug with honey. Is there no end to the refinements of profligate peacetime? My parents had the same bedspread all their lives. They would as soon have changed each other as the spoons they used. Hal sleeps half the night under only a sheet; the other half being spent, he assures me, beneath four blankets and a counterpane. He leaves me at the changing-over point. I lie and listen to the riderless horses led by one man return to the barracks at Knightsbridge. I doze. I hear the fishmonger’s lorry.
‘Lucas, I’m twenty-six, I’m starting to be successful at work, I’ve got a house, both my lodgers are leaving to be married, and what am I doing?’ I knew this tone, discontent disguised as responsibility.
‘My dear, you are the king in a cabbage-patch, go out and conquer nations.’ I was concentrating, wifelike, upon his reaction to his tea.
‘I’ve been feeling stale recently, negative.’ This phrase did not have Hal’s own unoriginality to it.
‘Who’ve we been listening to?’ I realised too late that I sounded shrill.
‘Don’t bother patronising me. Lucas, will you try for once to think of me, just for once?’
His tone was brattish; I must let him alone and resist my impulse to insulate him.
‘The thing is, Lucas, I want to settle down, to feel above board, clear, out in the open.’
I could not keep silent. ‘Live with me,’ I said.
‘Oh God, Lucas, I want to get married. Married to a girl. You know, one of those things with two of one and one of the other, one of those things with dressing tables.’
It was then that I slopped my coffee. It honestly was not so much marriage – that is a superstitious tic to which few are immune – but – dressing tables. How dare he? ‘Dressing tables’ was a code in our language; it stood between us for mess, screech, defilement, menses and powdery purses, habitual censorship and unnaked faces. Or so I had understood. Hal did not help me with the coffee spreading on my fine expensive suit.
‘Well, Hal, I see, how nice. Have you anyone in mind?’
‘No, since you ask.’
This sleek flaxen boy was bored with his toys. I would find a doll for him to break to save my own heart breaking first.
Chapter 3
I chose Cora because I wanted a wife for Hal quickly and she appeared to be the most available girl in the room, a room which I could fairly assume would contain people to some extent already vetted. I could as well have gone to the outpatients’ clinic of my hospital or to the supermarket, but my day had not brought me to these wife-nurseries. I was still acting with the decisiveness of a man taking the most direct means of saving his own life. I had not worked out how I would introduce them, how I would counter-suggest Hal into marrying this one (if, after a period of courtship, I did in fact want her for Hal), or how I would direct the denouement which would bring him, wounded and gentled, back to me. If there was another reason I selected her, some sympathy between us, whether I had some presentiment of intimacy, I simply do not know. My experience as a pimp is limited; as an undercover marriage broker non-existent. I sought the most direct way to make her trust me; I tried to make her like me. This is not my style. My patients revere and need me; to have boys who actually like you do you satisfactory violence is impossible, and I am sufficiently complacent to believe that friends will come to me without effort, when they know me; I am not sugar-coated. I do not know how to flirt, if that is the scarf-twitching sort of Noh play Tertius goes in for, and as for flirting with women, even the thought of it makes me feel the grave embarrassment I suffered when I first saw that Hogarth painting of a flushed couple in silks and ruffles and shame, his groin a flayed lapdog among the gay satin stripes. I decided to rely upon the manners which had been so useful in the shop; I am ashamed to say I did realise my height and appearance would help. Would she see the silver hook?
‘Good evening,’ I said. Leonidas had gone, I imagined, long before. She was talking to a man with a very small mouth and no pupils to his eyes. He made no response and left her side as I arrived, swiftly absent like a fish. She was still standing before the mirror. In it I saw the fish-man, just leaving. I saw a great deal of her back, and, unlike Dracula who cannot see himself in the mirror, I saw myself, standing over her. She had shoes – part of the ensemble which was so terrifying, according to Anne – which were raised on platforms. The toe of each was a snake’s head. The strap which kept each shoe attached was the snake itself, a green, glittering, padded spiral, clinging to her leg like greaves. Each snake had a rather straggly red tongue. I felt I must say something about these shoes. Did she wear them as a charm?
‘No,’ she said.
‘No?’ I said.
‘No, I do not know what snakes signify, no, I do not have an apple in my pocket, no, I am not a charmer.’
‘That’s clear,’ I said. ‘But who are you?’
‘Cora Godfrey,’ she replied. ‘And you are Lucas Salik.’
I enjoy, no, I thoroughly do not enjoy, a sort of folk hero’s part in the newspapers. Within their fifty-word gamut they find titles for me. No paper is innocent. The expensive newspapers say, ‘Heart Knight’s Vigil’, ‘Surgeon Through the Needle’s Eye’, ‘Aesculapius’ ‘Sword Hangs over Tracy, 4 days’. The papers which are read by people who fold them small to do so, thus ensuring they can read only four uppercase letters at a time, emphasise, reasonably enough, the parents’ pain. ‘agony of heart-mum Joan’, ‘death of heart mite beverley’, ‘big-hearted little Andy’ . . . Children, the smaller the better, and death baulked or death triumphant. Recently it had been ‘K for Drama Doc’, ‘Sir Lucky, say Heart Mums’. And still some of the babies live and some of the babies die, and I drive a quiet blue car as long as heart-mum Brenda’s garden.
I was going to begin one of those sentences which are puffed full with otiose words, when I noticed in detail, for the first time, the rest of her dress. I do not know more than what I have learnt from Anne of women’s clothes. Cora Godfrey was wearing a baby’s nappy, tied not as is usual at the waist, but at the bust. She wore a length of cloth tied in a knot over her bosom
. From either side her body was clearly visible. There was a knot at the back too. I wondered wildly for an instant if she wore a clamp on her umbilical cord. I was happy to see she was wearing plain white knickers. But I was not happy that they were visible. About her clothes, something must be done. The length of cloth was white, but sequined intermittently. She sparkled in her horrible chiton.
She was not uncomfortable, it seemed, in this conversational pause. She held a glass but did not drink from it. She looked at my face, then at my hands. She dropped her gaze to my shoes and waited for me to speak.
‘I gather that you are doing for Tertius, lucky man.’ I thought I might find out whether nights in strange men’s flats were her tone. I wanted flawed, not rotten, goods. ‘How did you meet him, actually?’
‘I think you know. I got picked up at Cam’s by a villain from the lilac Honours list. Completely revolting except for a Renoir in the loo. The worst thing was the endearments as he heaved away. What he wanted was love. Disgusting.’
I felt that she was either drunk or possessed. She did not know me and she was making her reputation hostage to me. I could not see why she spoke in this appalling way. She put her glass on the mantelpiece; on the piers of the fireplace were two deep-bosomed doves, in the bill of each a ribbon in bas-relief out of the pure marble. I wondered how this hussy could have struck me earlier in the evening as dovelike.
‘Ask men about themselves, so here goes. Did you always want to be a doctor?’
A Case of Knives Page 2