But she seemed to be busy in her kitchen, and not fussing. There is a type of English cooking which is loveless. It is a factual sequence of unattractive nourishment in which nothing is what it appears to be and everything causes atrabiliousness. It restores the dear dead days of rationing, I think. If Cora had prefaced her menu with tomato soup, she would have made a paradigm of this type of food. I am sure the Royal Family eat that food.
If I was not anticipating my supper with any pleasure, I was longing to see my darling. So it is odd that, when he arrived at nine o’clock, I felt edgy. That must be what women do, give you a cow’s warm company, then kick you just as you settle to milk them.
Hal was untouched by rain and he spun like a man in a spotlight, throwing out his arms from the elbow and talking as fast as a jackpot. It was clear he knew Cora’s house quite well.
‘Hi, Lucas, long time no see, and how is it at the hospital then? In Gloria and Dick’s room then, Cora? God, I’m hungry. I could eat an army.’
‘Gloria and Dick?’ I asked.
‘They are the couple who live in the basement,’ said Cora.
‘Hence the sets and props and all that. They work at the Royal Opera,’ said Hal.
‘That shelf up there is all hat steamers,’ said Cora, and she indicated a row of metal shapes, some like buckets, some like cones, and a small one like a pewter-coloured skull, about which I enquired.
‘It’s for smoothing out bald-pate wigs,’ said Cora, ‘so people’s heads don’t look worried from behind.’
‘Do you like opera, Cora?’ I do not usually listen to the answer to this question. Those who do are tedious and those who don’t are ignorant and opinionated and tell jokes about inflated tenors and bouncing Toscas.
‘More as I get older,’ said Cora, and I liked her for not wanting me to think anything in particular of her. ‘What,’ she continued, ‘would you like to drink?’
The three of us crossed to the room of Dick and Gloria. Cora had laid the table plainly. It was very white in that damascene room and the gypsophila hung above its vase as though it might at any point disappear, like gnats. She brought the crisp fritters and we dipped them into the horseradish. We dropped the eel into our throats.
‘Sold this fantastic property out of town today. Pool, sauna, paddocks, the works, and a heated cellar for turtles too. For soup, you know. I mean, would you believe?’ said Hal.
My parents had told me of pre-Revolutionary palaces with tanks below for turtles, but each generation is surprised again, and how touching he was in his discovery.
‘Doesn’t that come into The Grand Babylon Hotel?’ asked Cora, and Hal scowled, then reached across the table and wiped his hand on the upper part of her breast.
‘Best thing of all, fishy fingers,’ he said. He did not realise, in his artless compliment, that I had been responsible for this part of the meal. The cold wine set fair in my head and I felt smug that I was able to feel a tactician’s satisfaction when I saw him touch her in a way that suggested they were intimate. Cora left the table. Her face looked turned, as though she had tasted something bad. I imagined she was off to trail some watercress over the slabby chicken. It was fortunate I had brought so satisfying a first course.
‘Getting on?’ I could not resist asking Hal. I wanted to hurt myself before another could.
‘Getting off,’ he replied. I wondered how he liked this cosiness, which he had been at pains to avoid with me. It must be different with a woman.
I went to find Cora. She was wedging the now pale tongue into a tin. It was steaming and the room smelt of boiled socks, instead of herbs and butter as it had.
‘I just had to nip out to peel it, and I nearly forgot,’ she said. ‘I hope this doesn’t happen again.’
I was so soothed I had forgotten the early evening.
‘Sit down, Lucas, or, even better, take this.’ She gave me an oval pottery bowl. Upon it, its skin thin and brown as strudel, was the cold chicken. Half carved, in lines straight like harp strings, it sat in a pool of white and green. Between the flesh and the skin was a layer of this same marbling. Cora brought a bowl of green noodles and a dish of salad of those tomatoes shaped like the muzzle of a boxer dog. It smelt of fresh oranges and red wine and was drizzled with sugar.
She carved like a man, I could see that from what she had done already, but when it came to offering more, she asked Hal to carve. Not me, though I was senior, but Hal because he was her lover.
‘Have you been to see . . .’ began Cora.
‘Don’t let her start, Lucas,’ said Hal, and Cora, blushing, looked down. I, his not-lover, was often treated as the enemy, but where there was a girl we were linked against her. She was feeding us well; tonight was the sure fanfare to the overture of what I wanted. Why, when I should be feeling as though I were watching the champagne break on the prow of a ship of the line, did I feel equivocal? Was she not after all the right girl? It must be the tongue in the car. Who couldn’t talk?
Hal was pulling at the legs of the bird, and he dug his spoon into its cavity like a sexton.
‘Wake up, Lucas, she’s not that bad,’ said Hal, and he clicked his hand before my eyes, as shocking as a flashlight. ‘Been sleeping badly?’
‘I have, in point of fact,’ I said. ‘I think it must be the change of season.’ The season is always changing, but I did not want to admit to having been alarmed by a lipstick scrawl, and I could hardly tell him and the girl I wanted to mate with him that I was undergoing a painful gestation until at last they married. It felt like that. I was pregnant with Hal’s future.
Half of that future, or the nominal half, Cora, my zombie, took away our plates and returned with a fez of smoking, pale yellow sorbet. The smoke was the smoke of cold breath in the warm room. Inside this chilly cream were rimed cranberries. The wafers were of that sort which snap like unsafe ice.
I regarded my plate. Hal and Cora faced me through the flowers. I took a spoonful. Cranberries are celebrated in America, in malls and boulevards and marts. There are landscapes of them. Cranberry liquor in milk is a good head start for a life of hard drinking. They are a sour fruit, and sweet, and their colour heightens to the pink of monoxide-poisoned blood as they grow transparent in the pan. They jostle for closeness like snooker balls, but can never touch all over, as nothing spherical can, as our corpuscles even cannot. We are infinitely divisible. What can touch us, ever, all about? When I am host to this pointillist perception, I am nearing danger.
I was drunk. I kissed my future, he and she, goodbye, and drove home with the motor co-ordination of a medical man who is disobeying the law.
Chapter 11
‘Could we take a spin down to the docks?’ asked Hal. His voice was not clear. He must be telephoning from one of the sites he was selling.
‘Which ones, Hal, and when? I am committed every day after today for a week.’ This was not true, but I had not heard nor seen him since the lamplit evening in the opera-room half a month before and was starting to crave him. Autumn was here, and the hospital was preparing itself for Christmas. It was dark early enough for me to cinq à sept, a Tertiusism, at four o’clock, straight after a long morning operation. I was getting lazy, often went to the same place.
John Payne was watching me for symptoms; my own feeling of expectancy about Cora and Hal may have looked to him like the preoccupation of love. He was friendly to me now, as though I alarmed him less. Dolores Steel had become well; this meant that she had reached a steady plateau of malice and sulk. The nurses were pleased to lose her and did not enjoy the bag of rambutans she left for them, like torn-off tigers’ ears. I did not miss her, but I had dismissed any suspicion that she could have been in prison. Anne had been away, seeing her aunt Oppie in the Carse of Gowrie. The aunt soothed Anne. She farmed soft fruit and small potatoes and remembered the golden days of Sapphism with pleasure and sadness. She took her name from the rhyme which goes:
Artifex and Opifex,
Common are to either sex.
&
nbsp; I did not know her proper name and had met her only once, for tea at the Stafford Hotel, where she had asked the maid to pour into a teapot the milk and sugar, to save effort later, exhibiting hereby both practicality and imagination and their direct opposites. She dressed in fawn, tan, buff, and her clothes were the shape, too, of envelopes, with a little deckling of lace at the lifted chin, and perhaps a pale mica window of blouse underneath. She did not accommodate the opinions of others, she did not see the need for it, with the result that people agreed with her, all save Anne, who was treated as heiress to this infallibility.
Hal replied to my direct telephonic questioning, rare for him. ‘Today is great. Would the tank make it to Chatham?’
I was already planning, and replied, ‘That would be perfect, just before the winter. I shall collect you . . .’
‘Don’t bother with that, I’ll come to you right away.’
I had forgotten that I could not go inside his flat, and would have to wait outside in the car. I respected his containedness.
When he arrived, he looked pale to me, and there was no brightness in his face. I wanted this, but not until they were safely spliced, when he might have had demonstration of women’s strength-sapping. The pretty birthmark on his lip was clear honey on the white face. For the first time, I saw a growth of beard, like splinters, on his chin and cheek. Even the soft hair looked less bright. It must be the absence of the sun.
‘Car going all right?’ he asked. He sounded nervous and bored.
‘Job going all right?’ I asked. I would not give him a bouquet for a bunch of stalks.
‘As you see,’ he said.
‘Much of the car’s working is internal too.’ I could not stop myself.
‘About that . . .’ he said. Like many people who will not ruminate, he was trapped into introspection in the passenger seat of a car.
‘Yes, Hal.’ I kept from my voice the breaking hope that he was going to blurt out that after all it was not marriage he wanted, but love, and that with me.
We were leaving London, making for Kent. For this day it would be nice to be away.
‘I’m in love, Lucas,’ he said. He spoke as though he were testing the words in his mouth. He spoke as though he were reading the words of another man. I realised how much it must cost him to tell me this, and was moved. There was no music in the car, and outside were the heavy brown fields of Hal’s own country, the land of married men and regeneration of history less recently interrupted than my own. In some fields, spring corn was starting to show; it would be reaped, perhaps at the same time as Hal married, strong and straight. Englishman’s bones would make terrible bread. It would not rise. Polish ones would cause the bread to rise like Jacob’s ladder.
‘Tell me, darling.’
He did not react to the endearment, which I had fed myself as a cachou.
‘I love Cora.’
I was so relieved that I was almost pleased to hear him say he loved another, not myself. Now I would not even have to feign dislike to secure him on her hook. It was moving fast. I overtook a field of cars, my heart leaping. We were approaching the hop country, with its leaning staves like a struck camp.
‘Do you want to marry her?’
‘I’m not asking you. I’m telling you,’ he said. ‘And I’ve done the same to her.’
He made it sound like a single action, not the beginning of a changed life. But I did not care; they would be happy, then unhappy, and the weak world would give them their caging freedom, and there I would be, the keeper with the keys, waiting for Hal, at the door of his open marriage.
‘Are you happy?’
‘As a hatter,’ said Hal.
‘Why do you care for her?’ I was pleased with this soapy phrase.
‘She’s beautiful, she’s sweet, she’ll be a wonderful mother, and she loves me.’
The grey air was full of unfallen rain and the horizon was thickening as we drove seaward.
‘Children, Hal, so soon?’ I was still unsure what I felt about this. When they split, would any child stay with Cora? Could I bear Hal’s child not to live with me? I do not know many well children. Perhaps they are not so agreeable as sick ones. ‘My blessing goes with you always,’ I said. The inside of the car, its walnut and leather, were apposite for this conversation. I felt like a parent, a trustee.
My thoughts turned to money. Cora had none, according to Anne. Hal’s family were landed, I knew, but had they cash? I felt that it was immodest to speak of money so soon after we had disposed of the nature of Hal’s love for his Cora, so I said, ‘Would you like some music? Why not find something you care for? And take today as a holiday, Hal. It is the most important decision of your life and you deserve a quiet time.’
He was passive, seeming still a little tense, and he was cupping and uncupping his hands as though catching and releasing a stream of small birds.
He pushed into the machine what was already in it, not concentrating. The Commendatore was calling Don Giovanni to the feast. Through a fissure in the melody came the beat of unavoidable Hell. The voice was low and could not be refused. Giovanni tried his worldly charm, his excuses, circumstantial irrelevancies. But you cannot refuse a man of stone with a heart of stone. He just will not take no. I am afraid at this part of the opera.
The tape fell silent. There were two clicks. A voice, unsexed and didactically narrative, rather in my own manner, said, ‘Lay open the chest cavity, or, in the case of a pig, the thoracic cavity, taking care not to tear the skin, since, in the case of most laboratory animals, re-use is possible . . .’
It continued. I recognised the words because I had written them, in a paper, designed for a general audience, on vivisection, which is necessary, or so I feel, for my research. I think it is fatuous to deny this; one of my several quarrels with the idiots’ papers is their reporting of the question.
I pressed the button to eject this recording of my own words. I did not feel they were suited to this hymeneal day.
‘What happened there?’ asked Hal. He looked perkily interested, like a boy train-spotting.
‘I know you aren’t mad about opera so I added a little interest.’ I am not good at jokes. This one changed nothing. ‘I don’t know, Hal, to be honest, perhaps I recorded Don Giovanni over my broadcast on Righting Animal Wrongs.’ The voice was nothing like my own. My accent is very English.
‘Maybe you did. Do you get a lot of weirdos barracking you? I never asked, but there’s quite a bit in the papers at the moment about animals.’
This was untypically personal. Hal was asking me about my life. I wondered whether to tell him of the red words on the windscreen and the loose tongue on the seat. I did not want to spoil his day. But thinking of these things did alarm me. I had read of attacks on laboratories, on farms, even on graves. Beneath a grey photograph of two cutely mismatched animals, a pussy and a rhino perhaps, with its lightweight headline as full of double meaning as that below the uddered girl some pages before, would come an article, incoherent and sometimes directly contradictory of yesterday’s doctor-as-dragon-slayer article, describing the vile conditions and advanced tortures imposed upon animals. Inconsistent, but aphrodisiac to that sense of outrage which sells papers. I had seen facing-matter in those newspapers which came from two sets of premises. If people with those views met, they would not face each other save to fight. But the monster which buys and consumes these papers has not ideas but digestive juices, there to help it soften and digest neutral nutritious facts. I saved human lives, was ridiculously fêted for this, but I had also and indirectly been the cause of the death of many animals. Had someone made this link? If so, why were chops and steaks and sides not being burnt like books on street corners, huge barbecues of dissent? Why was I being singled out? As well put rattlesnakes in the boots of one single leather-wearer. That, of course, would be barbarous to the rattlesnakes.
It is abstraction which sets us over the animals. We live in the more than here and now, our memories hold more than modified and
relearnt reflexes. Or so I feel, and must feel so that I do not go mad in my work, at least not until God, our great abstraction, bends down into my cage in his white coat and clips to me wires to still me as he makes ready to investigate my heart.
It was Hal’s day and he must be treated as a bridegroom.
We parked the car outside the main gate of the dockyard, and set off first for lunch. I would have made an autumn picnic if I had had more notice, with some game perhaps, but now we had to go to a pub. I did not much feel like meat. The bar was full of seaside references. There were pictures made of stuck-down shells and net bags of glass floats. We ate two fishermen’s platters. ‘I wouldn’t mind a “Sailor’s Plate”,’ said Hal, and I liked him for noticing the roundabout genteel language, and mocking it. His face wore almost a leer; I thought that the interrupted Giovanni must have upset him more than he would admit. I hoped the lunch would not be the main part of our day wasted, inside instead of out in the last of the light. My temples felt as though they were nearing each other, as we sat in the gloomy bar. The dartboard was the right breast of an enormous mermaid, cut from polystyrene. What we ate was a drenched palette of pink shrimps and a squeeze of oily yellow. You could imagine these assemblages being made as therapy by old sailors, six crescent squeezes of pink, a puddle of red, a wormcast of yellow, the lettuce-green rag and that’s two more done. We drank Guinness and Hal looked about him with that touching undimmed boy’s interest.
As the day was growing cold, we walked back to the yard without lingering. What I loved best about Chatham after the Victory’s dock was the terrace of sailors’ houses behind the Admiral’s House which stood alone looking out to the estuary. This terrace was small and each house built for a midshipman, his wife and their family; even the stove-in greenhouses had finials. The squint washing-line poles were cast iron and handsome as weathercocks. The back gardens were ragged now, but they must once have given the homelocked sailors a taste of the earth, potatoes and leeks and neeps after all those captain’s biscuits and dried fish like stiff vests. Each of the little houses had its fanlight, small and pretty, the houses smiling behind them, each with its proper approach, a gate, a path, and a knocker. The modest fans gave a touch of grace. In the gardens of a few, Michaelmas daisies, tenacious as wire, were not yet subdued by weeds. Late butterflies took in the last sun on sparse buddleia.
A Case of Knives Page 10