We progressed, each knowing perhaps that we were unlikely to return together without Cora for some time to the same places we always enjoyed, in the same order. Hal was not speaking much, but he looked about him all the time. We lifted up our heads to look at the grey webbed timbers of the great dock which had seen its last ship. I knew Hal’s family had ties with the navy and I wondered if he felt that British sense of insular romance when he watched the sea. I could see only one ship and it looked like a square rock, far out. As we turned back from the sea, I asked Hal if he would like to go in to some of the buildings. At first we just looked round corners into high stores. Carved at the back doors of what looked like warehouses were initials and drawings and some dates. The accomplishment of the lettering suggested that there had been a time when things were lovelier, more orderly and more careful. I thought of the sailors queuing for their guns and carving deep into the stone, standing with their seven-creased white legs, waiting to embark. I felt terrific sentimental lust. I wanted Hal because he was a boy setting out alone. I was sure other Hals must have carved that same name, digging with a marlinspike into the lee wall of the store, and I wanted to have their closeness with each other, with Hal. He made me feel landlocked by my Polishness. I was awash with self pity, an island in it. The feeling was not unpleasant. The cold wind, the seagulls, the dipping cranes and bare flagpole combined to make me feel pity for myself, no longer daring, young, combatant. The saltness of my face was for my youth, lost in effort, and Hal’s youth, to which we were saying farewell today.
I pushed against a door in a high building and it gave, into a hall of light, the size of a pasture. At first, I could see nothing but white, as though I were looking up on to snow. We were in a sail loft. All colour there was clear. The colours were the unobscured tints of heraldry, intensified by the white, as are the clothes of skiers. I could see no one, though I heard singing. I started to mount the ladder which led up to the highest rafter where the head of the vastest sail was made fast. These sails, though empty of wind, were hanging smoothly still; at their widest, they settled into glaciers of folds. I signed to Hal to come up, but he did not. I followed the singing, and turned a corner behind a swag of sail. I felt as though I were going backstage. A row of trestle tables receded from me, and the backstage impression grew. Six old women were bent over six sewing machines. A wireless played. The women were humming; the song was about love and rose gardens. I wondered whether they were the wives or widows of sailors. Over the table of each woman was spread her work. They were sewing flags, or rather pennants and ensigns, for these were rare work. One woman was fixing wings to a red dragon, another finishing the golden dots on the withers of a smiling pard. The hair of the old women and their spectacles were the only patches of half tone in the room. They might have been the imprisoned daughters of a king, stitching, stitching, stitching, in a fairy story. The black and gold machines purred. I was sorry Hal had not seen this.
‘Seen a ghost, dear?’ asked an old woman with pink hair. She had the voice of a parrot, among these parrot colours.
‘Good afternoon. No, I’m sorry, I am lost and I was enchanted with what I saw when I came in here.’
The old women set up that ribald cackle you will hear them exchange after confidences. They were refuting what they took as a compliment to themselves. I think they were suspicious of me with my posh accent and my long overcoat. I was not like an officer, but I spoke like one. My patronage was not naval, jocose. I was foreign. They did not know how foreign.
A woman, her puff of hair mauve, who was sewing a spiky red lion passant gardant on to a yellow flag, said, ‘Turn up the radio, June, dear.’
She had not seen me. It was time for me to go. We had no meeting ground. I wanted to give them all tea, to buy them all hats, to flatter them till they bridled. I wanted to rest their hands and legs and see them sitting in chairs with their feet out and their stockings down eating ices from tubs with little spades. I wanted to kiss them and cuddle them and show them a good time. I wanted them to be as sloppy as they liked, to leave the Christmas Club, to stop washing the front hall, to let their husbands go hang, to stop saving vouchers. I wanted to take off their glasses and give them back their eyes and deck them out, yellow and red and blue and green, and shower them with gold.
They wanted me to go away.
When I found Hal, he looked warmer and quite easy. His eyes were clear and he seemed in higher spirits. Darkness had come, and the cranes were lit, red and green, port and starboard. There were not many lights in the place, two in the Admiral’s House like calm eyes, and the high single light of the sail loft, not too big a window because sunshine would bleach colour from the flags, before the wind and sun might have them.
‘Did you find something nice?’ I asked Hal.
‘I found a place where they make ropes,’ he said. ‘I saw one being made. It was a mile long. It had a steel heart. It holds things together and can never break.’
‘Nothing cannot break,’ I said, and minded having said it all the way back to London.
Chapter 12
If anything, my having constrained Anne to be on my side had made us closer. It takes a good friend to lay down principles for your sake. I had, after all, blackmailed her. She was quite clever enough to agree under pressure and then to work in a subtle way to undermine Hal and Cora. I wondered how she would take the engagement, now it was a fact.
After the day at Chatham, I asked her to come and see me. The trees were almost empty and I had seen Hal and Cora together on several occasions. What impressed me in Cora was her meekness, her desire to please. She had begun to dress in a womanly way, as though she might have a unicorn on a lead outside. She listened charmingly to Hal when he spoke. I had told him after lunch one day that I would help financially with the wedding. He looked so surprised I was touched. Surely it must have crossed his mind, no matter how lapped in love he was? It made me diffident about confiding in him the main point of our meeting. I was again giving him lunch in Scott’s, to salute my own sense of symmetry. All that autumn I was making festivals of this nature, disengaging myself from the first phase of our love. I spoke quietly, to save Hal’s dignity, and said, ‘And, Hal, I’d like to get you a wedding present.’
‘Just not mats,’ he said.
‘I thought a house. Where would be up to you, but my one proviso is that it is not a poky bargain with views to a kill. And if you have children, that is, when you have children, there is a sum settled on them. Up to the limit of gift tax, I have done the same for you.’
I did not like couching it in these grey terms. Money is just a token of other things after all and they could buy for themselves with all this a ton of ortolans or one fine emerald or an education for ten sons. My money was the product of work and I wanted it to be spent in play. I had my father and mother’s shop money, I had magnified it with my diligence and I would have no children. I wanted to buy with it love for me and for the generations to come an insulated future.
‘That is good news,’ he said. ‘I’d been wondering about where we’d live. The thing is, I’ve come to see everything as a good investment. That is big of you Lucas,’ he said, looking straight at me like a man who is appreciative. ‘I am very appreciative. Let me give you lunch.’
I was touched. Did he remember our first time here? I saw his face. Only recently had it begun to age at all. The blossom colouring was settling down and his thin body was filling. I did not very much like his tie. It was narrow and black and shone like a fish.
‘D’you think he’ll be kind to her?’ asked Anne, later, in my upstairs room; a painted man in pantaloons played his lute close by.
‘For a time.’
‘That shows more knowledge of the beast than you’ve ever had, or do you mean if he is too kind for too long you’ll put a stop to it?’
We were pushing between us a tray of matzos and cheese. Hal had told me of an uncle of his who had so hated Jews he kept a tin of matzos in the front hall to discourag
e any Hassid who might be peering through his letterbox. I am fond of the testimonial on the packet. I like Anne to see that I am an aristocrat too, one of the chosen race, and, moreover, not careless as her lot are but careful, so careful we can tidy seas, half to one side, half to the other. Anne wore some leather with the grey glow of caviar. I do not like women dressed like this.
‘What a staggering ensemble, Anne, darling,’ I said in my Tertius voice, and as I said it I felt found out.
‘Revolting, I know, but I’m in a little fix, really,’ she said. She liked fixes. They filled her time and her erupted heart.
‘Tell on, dear,’ I said, hating Tertius as I used the phrase.
‘I’ve had rather a delivery recently, you see, because my poor fur man is ill, or not him at least, but someone must keep the wolf from the door.’ She looked shy and lit a cigarette.
‘His name is Mr Virtue, I don’t know what his parents’ name was, and he lives in a house about half the size of this room.
‘It is his child, you see. The papers have organised for the child to go and get done in hospital in America and they’ve forgotten travel and accommodation, never mind Mama and Papa and three sisters.’
He was, who would have doubted it, a Polish Jew. The child was ill. The story came out.
‘What do you mean, done?’ I asked.
‘Oh Lucas, you know how I am, I never know real things, but it’s not your sort of stuff or I’d simply have put the boy your way.’
‘I’m delighted you say that. What is up with him? I am surprised it can’t be dealt with in this country.’
‘He got burnt.’
‘Burnt?’
‘He came into the workroom and they were steaming a female coat.’ She could not eradicate details like this; she would have been a fine identifier of corpses, recollecting the colour of their eyeshadow. ‘The heat is to make the fibres lie, and he got burnt. The papers don’t want to say how he got burnt, but they got committed to him when they saw his little melted face, and so I’m doing a big order quick so Mrs Virtue can go with the boy. But we’ve got to keep it quiet or I would just hand over the money, without question. I have known Mr Virtue since Mordred introduced us and the child is a sweet boy. Now he is bald and his limbs are held akimbo by his shrunk skin. So that’s why I’m dressed as a Hitler Maiden.’
My best friend said that to me. I was pleased that she was quite free from fear as she said it. I let the sentence lie, and be buried, with many others. I wished to leave its grave unmarked.
‘The thing is, the papers started to make a fuss about him before they realised what his father did. A reporter saw him at his weekly physiotherapy place and took along a photographer on spec the next week. It was all perfect bleeding heart stuff and Mrs Virtue hardly speaks English so they didn’t gather why the child was in such an awful way. Once they found out, it was too late, but they are desperate at the paper to keep it dark about Mr Virtue being a furrier. They show those girls with their wobbly fronts in marabou scanties but they can’t come clean about the skin trade. Animals are big circulation, and so are tragic tinies. The paper didn’t mean for it to become such a big thing but when people saw the picture of the child with his lovely eyes looking out of a squashed bag of face, they kept on sending in money, as though they had to pay for their unburnt children, and the paper has discovered a man who mends faces and bodies. Not just a wrinkle smoother, but a man who repairs people after wars and spillages and secret fallout. What I can’t bear is the thought of people getting mended just to get broken again. At least with a child, there’s some hope of a real life to follow. But I can’t think where they will take the skin from. It’s so patchy, the notion that they will tidy his face and arms by plundering his legs and back; can’t things be made good without spoiling other things?’
‘There is some talk of artificial skin, but it could not grow with a child. Surgeons of the interior can be a little snobbish about this type of thing. But disfigurement is a wound as severe as any other.’ I said I was chilly on home ground.
‘Cora is scarred,’ said Anne.
‘Anne, what do you mean and how do you know?’ I did not like the idea of Hal touching a scarred person. Yet I was pleased, for any imperfection would at length divide them. Hal hates mess, as I said.
‘Oh, Lucas, it is nothing terrible. I should not mention it at the same time as the poor Virtue child. I only glimpsed it when I took her shopping with you. Her chest is scarred, as though a string of small pearls had slipped down between her breasts under the skin and stuck there. It is raised. It makes your fingers want to touch it, like scabs.’
‘Not appealing.’
‘Not unappealing.’ She broke a biscuit with one hand, flat, as though to do so were a skill. It was like watching a woman throw a ball like a man. ‘This room, Lucas, it’s not finished, is it?’
‘That’s the point, in a way. I don’t know that I ever want it to be so. I like it to change and shift. When they come and paint a new clown or a tub of bay or a far away tempietto I am refreshed. It’s a bit like a family, but without mess.’
‘There is no family without mess.’
‘You say that. The English upper class is infatuated with its own sense of cousinage which in the end ties down the individual like Gulliver. And I suppose because your own close family has been nothing but mess.’ It is because I am a stranger that I can speak the truth.
‘And thank you for those few kind words.’ I cannot bear the way they glove their grief in little jokes. Instead of being direct she was ‘guying’, a great conspiracy word of the inhibited British, the reaction of someone repressed and humble, a landlady perhaps or an undertaker. ‘Thank you, I’m sure,’ she said, on firm ground, being a housekeeper, settling her feathers, taking no more offence than was commensurate with her position.
‘Tell me about Mr Virtue,’ I said. ‘And why not have a plum?’ I pushed the bowl of blue fruit to her. They were quetsches, the kind which cleave neatly under the teeth, not those sweet English bolls of wetness, the colour of their faces.
‘The Virtue family live at the Elephant and Castle. Every day Mr Virtue goes to his shop in an alley off a mews behind Bond Street. Some of his ladies he visits at their houses. The reason why I’ve got this rather awful stuff from him is honour. The sort of thing he makes for me takes ages and he had these in stock for what he calls passing trade, the people who go and buy Rolls Royces for cash and sneak away to Spain one day just before the knock at the door. But he would not accept a loan because of any scandal. I like him because he loves what he does and he tells you about it in detail. I could listen to a mortician describe his trade as long as it was in sufficient detail.’
‘Some would say that is exactly what Mr Virtue is.’
‘I don’t think about that.’ The list of what Anne did not think about included it seemed to me almost everything which actually preoccupied her. This is another trait they have. I do not know whether I admire it. I envy it.
‘Did you have a good time with Oppie?’
‘Very. She thinks she has bred a new strain of yellow raspberry and wants to call it Winaretta. But she does not live in the past. She has plenty of young friends. What they like is her bossy ways. She seems to have all the experience without telling you about it or forcing it on you. It seems to share out infinitely like the loaves and the fishes. We went fishing too, out at sea. No herring came, because we women were on the boat. You can be sure if we had hit a shoal it would have been because we were on the boat too. One night we did plash-netting at the seashore and got very wet and caught a lot of flatties and weed.’
‘Flatties?’
‘Skate, plaice, those ones with their eyes in the back of their head and their mouths like a face against a window. The ones with bones down the edge. If you leave out a night-line for them you can come in the morning and find three one inside the other like Jiffy bags.’
‘Where should I get a house for Hal and Cora?’
She faced me,
blue eyes in her shocked plain face. ‘Do you really want it to fail immediately?’
‘I want them to have a decent start. A house will go some way towards providing that,’ I said.
‘If you have to, can’t you at any rate allow Cora to think that Hal has bought the house?’
‘I had intended that, yes.’
‘And then she can find out later?’
‘Or not.’
‘Short of buying the house next door, I can’t see what more killing thing you could do.’
‘Forget, Anne, that I am I. Think of me as a bank.’
‘Hal does,’ she said.
‘That is beneath you.’ I will not have these remarks tearing into my life. Anne suffers from prudishness about money, where Hal is refreshingly straightforward.
‘Lucas, get them a nice big house with lots of room for babies and a garden so Cora can land on something soft when she jumps.’ All promotion of Hal and Cora’s love affair to the outside world, Anne liked to show me what she imagined were her real feelings about it. I think she must have been suffering from jealousy of Cora, about to begin married life with beautiful, and not dead, Hal.
‘Are you at all pleased, Anne?’
‘I am pleased that you have what you want. I don’t love many people, but I do you and it is selfish I suppose. If you wanted human liver for breakfast, I think I would bodysnatch for you. Of course my conscience jabs me sometimes and I wonder where it can all end, but this is what you think you want now and I cannot, not being God, see what it is you really want. If I could see that, I would be very pleased to miss out this step. But as you are determined upon it I am now going to forget my reservations and hurl myself into wedding preparations as though Cora were my daughter.’
A Case of Knives Page 11