A Case of Knives

by Candia McWilliam

  ‘Not Hal your son?’

  ‘You may award yourself that privilege. Have you met the Darbo parents? It is a funny name is it not? Sounds Hungarian or pretend, a sort of mistranscription of something grand. The kind of thing an actor might give himself once he’s mastered’ – she made appropriate gestures – ‘the plum in the mouth.’ She was sorting plumstones into pairs. She had two, and the lone stone which she pulled from her mouth, point first. Fine, for a rich man.

  ‘I’ve not met them. They have land.’

  ‘So does Mr Virtue, so do I. There’s land and land. I prefer the starry sky. I shall be very interested.’

  ‘Cora’s only real insistence about the wedding is that it be soon, and Hal wants that too. It is hardly as though gratification of desire were the motive for this, but I am of course of the same mind,’ I said.

  ‘Lovely,’ said Anne. ‘The sooner the better.’ She appeared enthusiastic for the first time that evening. ‘When shall it be?’

  ‘December the sixth, in just over a month.’

  As we sat, the pale faces of the painted figures glowed in the deepening darkness. When Anne left, I felt as tired and as satisfied as a man who has taken hard exercise and eaten a dish of meats. I felt like a ringmaster who has induced the lions to form a circle and dance sedately bearing in their teeth a silk ribbon with no beginning and no end. I sat until the room was dark.

  CORA

  Chapter 13

  I was looking for a man. Until I saw Lucas Salik at Anne Cowdenbeath’s house in autumn, standing taller than anyone in the room and looking as clean as mint, I had been smug about love at first sight. Like burglary, though, it must be something which comes to you at last. Perhaps I had been too old too young and had this shock coming to me to teach me that all my monkey tricks were no good at a real tea party. I knew it was love because it was painful and the pain was about my heart. Even as I put my head in the noose and jumped and danced, I knew too that I was swinging not only for this man but for the chance of a father. Not just because of his age, but because of the purity about him and the air of difficultness, I became aware that I was going to lose time to this person. When he looked at me, I saw that he recognised something, too, as though a current of just stirring air were moving blue paper to orange flame. I was leaning against a mirror, my back to it, and a short man was printing out words from his mouth to my bosom. He chopped with his hands between sentences and even his eyelids had hair. I watched Lucas Salik, whom I recognised in fact as well as with my heart, since I had read articles about him and knew that he was a friend of Anne’s. I saw him leave the room and felt lustreless immediately. In the end the Greek left and I learnt that love in its early stages is self-reflexive and to do with vanity. Had Lucas Salik remained in the room, I would have been surrounded by men. His presence made me feel royal. His absence left me wretched. The only reason I stayed at the party was that Johnny returned to speak to me and I can never shake him off.

  If I could ever have shaken him off I would not be in this muddle, I suppose. What I minded about the whole thing was the time limit. I have always kept procrastination as a solution; if you conceal the worry, something will turn up. I was almost certain that it is justifiable and normal to treat time like this; it was only once you were old that time was measurable. As soon as I could, after my orderly childhood, I had concentrated on squandering time, spending it on anyone, purposely not acquiring a profession, absolutely not cultivating my own garden.

  Johnny was stupider than I, and for a time I idealised him for it. I felt it made him more moral, since he had only one view of things. I allied this in my imagination with his breeding, to compose a beau idéal, the kind of young man who has won wars. I ignored shortcomings in Johnny because I thought I could see that they were streamlinings. Who needed all these extra apprehensions and desires? They had done nothing for me but get me into terrible trouble. I had now managed to do exactly this. I had got into trouble and Johnny was the father of the growing gun-butter inside me. Another soul for England. Of course, I could not tell him, or he might do the decent thing and we would be imprisoned with each other on his acres with our child. I wondered, would it keep its fish’s tail? Johnny was like a fish or a half-human being specially adapted for underwater life, pale, pupil-less, gilled. He swam well and his rather beautiful voice uttered phrases as round and empty as bubbles. The words he used were round but empty, as though he read mostly the magazines you find in aeroplanes. He had mastered the stirring potential of cliché. This is not to say that his own feelings were not deep; they were, but beneath them lay things deeper into which it would be perilous to enquire, great invertebrate squids of gloom and voracious pessimism. But when I met him, I saw, romanced by his gold hair and his lineage, buried treasure; not the gold-digger’s ducats, as you might imagine, but unpolished jewels and fallow pearls. I thought I could free him into light and air, forgetting or, worse, ignoring that a sea creature cannot live outside its element. And now, through my own stubborn will, writing a fiction with my own days, I had managed to do the most undreamlike and incontrovertible thing imaginable. I must find a father for the child, and one who will never show up poor Johnny, who must not be touched by such things. Best of all would be a father who would not realise that the child was not his own, a blond and slim man, like Johnny himself.

  I did not tell Johnny. This particular deception is a form of theft, but I was saving myself. He would find the sea-woman he deserved and I would try to teach my child to walk on its feet without a pain like knives shooting up its legs. I do not remember what Johnny talked to me about that evening at Anne Cowdenbeath’s; in order not to rush at him with the truth, I was looking at small specific things about the room – a painting, a small square of serge green, glowing from it a single canary with legs like twigs. A girl stood before it lighting a cigarette, the sharp flame showing her profile which was as formal as though it had been bent from wire, and the profile inclined to it, that of her husband, the face of a man who has lived outside and among animals. Most of the people were older than I was and I could see girls in their thirties talking reluctantly to each other and smiling as though for a flash camera at men. They had begun to see into the fire. On an adjustable piano stool lay a white cat, small and long-haired. It appeared to have no bones but it flexed its claws as though admiring them from time to time. Both its upper and lower whiskers were abundant and they turned away from each other so that the cat, which in fact had no expression, was apparently frowning like a stylised Chinese warrior. On the piano beside it lay a can of chocolate sardines. Groups of three people would break and re-form regularly, as though that number only could sustain the preliminaries of conversation. A girl who looked like Tobias’s angel talked loudly without stopping. The man whose marriage she was remodelling looked tired and attractive and was smiling with snail eyes at a girl whose hair was the green and yellow formal shape of a large pineapple. The room smelt of white flowers. My height gave me to see why. Circlets of asbestos impregnated with scented oil rested upon each light bulb. I could also see the circles of baldness starting on men’s crowns. I felt slightly faint, whether from hunger or pregnancy I did not know. I imagined all the bow-ties in the room taking flight like a flock of butterflies. On whom would they really alight? Would they flit from husband straight to wife? I suspect people not of more fidelity than they practise, but of more contentment than they profess. Of course, there were in the room people who were not married and people who would never marry, and those male couples who were most married of all.

  I knew that Tertius was a homosexual. He did not have to tell me so. Perhaps if I had stayed at university, I would have known more about this.

  Tertius made sure that I knew about him – not, I think, because he was wary of my falling for him, but because he liked to talk about it. I suspected he was miffed by the legality bestowed upon his special taste since his younger days, the thrill of alluding to them being tempered by it. He touched upon his habits f
requently in speech like a blown old beauty revealing her share certificates. Though I guessed that Tertius had not ever been pretty, he was forceful, and still many of his visitors were handsome. He had a visitor once a week who must have been in the army with him, I think. They shouted a lot when they were together. I liked cleaning Tertius’s chambers. Albany was a surprise to me; I had dreamed of London like this. It was orderly and safe and something interesting was always happening; in streets this may pass unnoticed. In Albany it is shared, collegiate. Albany felt like a university attended by a very superior selection of ghosts, just such clubbable, entertaining and personable intellectuals as I should distrust because they are the jujubes in the shop window, and I outside, staring in, like poor Keats. But I prefer association to participation, it favours quick changes.

  As the taller and darker figure of Lucas Salik returned to me, so the slighter, fairer figure departed, with the balanced and opposing movement of funicular cars. What had Johnny been saying? I would have liked to think his departure linked to some fight over me, which Lucas had won, but I suspected it was to do more with his recognising Lucas and fearing that he would be shown up by him. I had no idea what Lucas Salik’s personal life was; it was ridiculous to think I could pertain to it in any lasting way. Anyway he was not blond and I had, very soon, to be married to a father for my fair and growing baby.

  I would not allow myself to have a fatherless child. I would not do it; I am not independent in that way. As to any other future for the child, adoption or death, I could not do it for the ghosts I would let into my life.

  I knew that I had a very short time in which to seduce Lucas Salik. I would then be able to contemplate what had happened for the rest of my life. It would be my last freedom. The only way I knew to do this was by making it clear that I could easily be had. The sad thing was, I wished to be for him a nun, a virgin, a daughter, but the only way I could be sure to make him swiftly mine, and then almost certainly lose him, was to speak to him like none of these, but like a slut. At Stone, there had been talk about him, but none of it personal, as though everyone there knew him too well to ask questions.

  When he said to me, ‘Good evening,’ I was delighted by the restraint of his manner. It suggested the discipline of works and days which I admire and cannot reproduce. I wished I were not dressed in trash, but quiet as a nun, so he could see me as no one has, calm and not trying. Instead, I behaved like a tramp, showing all the cards at once, drawing attention to my snaky shoes, accosting him with sex.

  We introduced ourselves. He seemed, which pleased me, to have asked about me already, since he reacted not at all when told my name. Most people remark upon a name, any name; not to is to acknowledge an uninterest so complete as to be rude. In my life, I have thought up charming reactions for a dishonourable roll of silly names. When I called him by his name, I liked its taste. All the time, I was just liking him more and more and not very much liking behaving like Salome. He seemed at least to be scrutinising my body. I stared at him and what I saw made me want to drown. I felt as though I were growing younger, cleaner, further from my husk which was saying ugly and provocative things. I must stop myself before I did in fact insult this tall gentle man from whom I wanted only love. I turned the talk to him with an audible shift of clumsiness, and there passed one of those conversations which always cause regret later. It was pretentious and consequential. Most often, I have these conversations with men or women on whose abstruse and well-tilled field I have been trespassing; they gracefully conceal their surprise that I should need to inform them about what they know best. I flounder, my tongue thickens, and I feel the disuse of my brain like a cloth turban worn inside the head. If only someone would take it out, wash it, iron it, and embroider order and variety upon it.

  At last, it seemed to work, and, stultified by my conversation perhaps, he suggested that we go to his house. He would think I was trash, but perhaps in the anonymous night I would be able to smuggle into his ear the contraband emotion I was carrying, growing at the same time as the – unrelated – child. What I felt was not what I had felt for anyone else, but then, I was very young. Two things, I think, made it so monstrous in scale. I had given myself so little time, by conceiving this child, to be simply myself with one other. And then there was his age, and, allied to that, his publicness and profession. I wanted the touch and understanding of this doctor-saint. I did not know of any other coin but the ready one with which to buy his touch. He was also beautiful; from my childhood, I had admired height and darkness and the look of suffering. There had been adults, even when I was four or five, whom I would wheedle into pushing me on the swing, or taking me to catch minnows; what had been between us was frail, flirtatious, unbegun, diffuse, without dirt. This man was the conclusion of those handsome decent men pushing me in the rust-scented swing park or carrying my net and jamjar by the water.

  He drove me to his flat. A sentence with little promise but of seediness. But I had to read something in the car not to shake, and the streetlights seemed like banners put on just for us. The traffic lights scribbled at the car windows. I felt we were touching, because we were in the same enclosed space. Air which touched his hair was touching me also. As we drove by the side of the canal the turning trees, under the street, were in gold leaf.

  Once inside the house-sized flat, it was easy to behave like a hussy. I felt as though I had come off stage. He, in his own rooms, grew. Each piece of furniture and painting seemed placed to frame his beauty. There was no trace of a woman. I knew he had no wife. I must see his bedroom. I wanted to lick his mirror, to crawl over his sheets, to eat his clothes.

  I was hungry.

  He sent me into his spare bedroom to put on the clothes he gave me. The room was tall and striped with white on white, the pelmet hung with grey tassels, and the curtains looped over grey hooks. It was like a tent before Agincourt, not that of Prince Hal but of the Dauphin. There was a sterility to the room, no signs of recreation, not so much as a tennis ball. I opened a drawer but it made a noise and I did not want him to know I picked and pried. Men do not do this prurient investigating, or, if they do, not where you wish them to. If you put all your ribbon and gauze underpinnings in a drawer and scent it with boxes of creamy soap and a scatter of photographs, they will not look. What they will find is the blistered pan and the grey-footed stockings, the things their mothers have taught them to fear. In the drawer of Lucas Salik’s spare bedroom, I found a square of unshiny grey paper cut to fit the drawer and, at the back of that drawer, beneath the paper, a box of razorblades, which I left. To carry that as a memento of my great love would be not only uncomfortable but misleading. Most of my friends would buy those razorblades in boxes only for chopping up lines of drugs. I wanted to watch him shave, but I knew nothing so intimate would pass between us. I was here for the least close intimacy convention permits, loveless sex, the lovelessness not unilateral. I undressed, regretting my scar as I do perhaps more often than I do anything else, and then in the same phrase of thought telling myself I am lucky it is just that, and put on the clothes he had given me. I smelt them before I put them on, lavender and mothballs, and went out to find him. Tears waited behind my face.

  He was not in the drawing-room, so I looked for a book, remembering not to choose it simply to match my clothes like a woman in Firbank. The danger then is to look for a book which you think will impress. In the end, I took a book to hold, that being really all that I needed. I held it and I regarded it and I do not know anything about it, now, years later.

  Our conversation, when he arrived back with the sort of food it is easier to eat outside, I attempted to keep reasonable, unprecocious and also completely open to the fact that we were about to do something without consequences. I was sorry that he extracted my near university career from me; men prefer to have flings with girls who won’t think, and Greats are incontrovertibly thoughtful.

  ‘Cora, let me give you some champagne and I’ll drive you home.’

  Thank goodness h
e was beginning to behave like the wolf at the door. The shadows around his eyes were the colour of mushrooms. He did not sit up, but along, making of his whole length a lap. His mouth was pink, red blood seen through white skin. I was familiar with the business about driving back. Would we engage in the inevitable combat at his elegant house or at my harem, with washing over the bath and Dick and Gloria shrieking? I hoped it would be here; then I would be able to remember the entire occasion, without having to relocate it afterwards in my memory.

  In his kitchen I opened the fridge. I do it automatically, like reading letters. I was too excited really to concentrate. I wanted to keep all my observation for later. The cold air from the refrigerator and its hum restored to me some calm. I took a glass the shape of a sconce and returned to him. He put his own glass and mine upon the floor and poured lackadaisically and incidentally, a bronze man in a fountain. He did not look either at the tilted bottle foaming into the deep narrow glass or at my face. Could he be nervous?

  I spoke gently to him. Perhaps he liked the illusion of chastity in his girls and I had gone too far beforehand. I sipped and slipped out sweet words.

  We were obviously to do it at my house. I could understand that. Why should he sully his own? It was a long drive, but fast, and I felt pleased with the certainty I had that his trap was closing round me, that soon I should be nothing but a thing in his clutches. I felt like the fox, who, we are told, having enjoyed the chase, gives in to the teeth and the rending. I had not believed that the fox feels like this before, had even been to meetings with Angel and Dolores, but now I was keen to have my mask and my brush cut from me.