A Case of Knives

by Candia McWilliam

  But how could I mind? I was in the house of the man I had fallen in love with, fallen like an apple. At dinner I was placed between Tertius, who was ribald and easy, and a delightful man called Daniel whose artificial hands were like silver crabs. As Lucas cleared away the soup plates, which had contained a dark red soup, I looked up to see Hal Darbo staring at me. He looked like a drag queen, with his soup-lipsticked mouth, but I knew he was a last chance and I sent over into his eyes the long beam like a searchlight which says, ‘I am really interested in you, you remarkable, rare, creature.’ His eyes returned a look which seemed to say, ‘Accustomed as I am to receiving that information, it is acceptable from you and we might yet come to some accommodation though it is always a dicy business until contracts are exchanged.’ I felt, which was mystifying, that he was approaching me with something of the same calculation with which I was attempting to acquire him. Even in these earliest exchanges it was clear that he was prompted by something more willed than desire.

  Various remarks he made struck me, for my sins.

  ‘I never use Barbados,’ he said, and not during a course when we could have been taking sugar.

  ‘A couple of hundred ks, I tell them, or they think they’re in shantytown.’

  ‘Not a bad cook, Lucas, when he pulls his finger out.’ This was a bray.

  And so on. By the time Lucas set upon the table a glass bowl of shimmering green jelly, I was sure that Hal Darbo would ask to see me again, and my plans were laid, though I could envisage no elevation of the edifice whose foundations I was laying. I felt cold when I considered what I was actually doing, taking steps towards a decision I could not but regret. If I married, I would have to stay married, but in the time available I would be unable to find the double of Johnny with all the qualities I admired in Lucas. I was using secret knowledge as an excuse for ruthlessness. I was committing, if not a sin, a dangerous manipulation which could not be without its own consequences, in the name of my child. I had seen women take small ruthless actions on their children’s behalf before. In the name of the little ones, atrocities are quite possible.

  But in those days, I could have argued myself into committing almost any crime to see the dark head of Lucas Salik.

  When I looked up at him, towards the end of the meal, taking my eyes briefly from those of Hal Darbo, I was so far advanced in the deliquescence of love that he appeared to have a halo. What I saw in his sunk eyes was wonderful to me. He was jealous. He looked as though he had stepped into an acid bath. He blazed, white and black, his halo the street light outside, blazing beyond the window, which, being of old glass, took and reinterpreted our solid lives like water. I looked into the black window where we all floated and settled, the colours drained of brightness, our faces white, the most real things the cold silver and green and transparent glass of knives and forks, bottles and glasses, paraphernalia more enduring than we who used it. When I said goodnight to Lucas, I wanted to cut a hole in his side and re-enter it, to be a rib of Adam.

  I was driven home by a man with no hands, my heart belonging to a man who was a mender of hearts, and within me was growing another heart, not mine at all, but never quite not mine. These grotesque anatomical tmeses touched my dreams through a thin sleep.

  Hal Darbo would be my artificial limb.

  Chapter 16

  Hal had few other resources but he did have quite a lot of money. Our first engagement was in a restaurant. If he had been just a little more clever, he would have learnt that two hours spent in a theatre or a cinema save a certain amount of effort. I felt that he was putting himself through some necessary though hardly pleasant system, almost as if in preparation for an examination. I was not sure whether I was the matriculation he sought.

  For he wanted me, or performed the manoeuvres of one who did, though he was not privately lustful, which saved me, since I was entering a period of my pregnancy when all contact, even with my clothes or with soap or a towel, seemed violent. I was also keeping myself like a bride for Lucas Salik. I let myself do this, and would continue to do so, until Hal became importunate. Of this he showed no sign. In public, he mauled me, but only when people were looking. When he said goodbye to me, we kissed as though reciprocal insertion of tongues into mouths was the general method of signalling departure for all people, whatever their relation. He did not draw me to him.

  He seemed not to enjoy being with one other person. He spoke of his friends, not in a way which suggested that they had any distinguishing characteristics but as though they were his chorus, providing reaction to his performance. Not a thing he did was done without consideration for its effect. Not its consequence, its effect. You felt if he were especially jubilant he would not sing or dance or make love, but quaff some jazzy liquor, purchase a powerful speedster and open up full throttle into an impossible blonde on an alp. Because he was a reflection of others’ dreams, he was not so much insubstantial as so fashionable as to be very nearly dated all the time. ‘Not even wind surfers, dear, can always be dans le vent,’ Anto had once said to me.

  Hal was the embodiment of modern cliché. He was not an eternal verity become a cliché, he was a nonentity with shrewdly mimicked characteristics. He was like reproduction furniture. I wondered if he had been born with no face and taken to a plastic surgeon. It would be a plastic surgeon. All these lofty conclusions about Hal excused me to myself. It is easier to forgive yourself for doing damage to a doll than to a person. As to who loved him, his friends and family, I did not yet know.

  He was personable and he took me out a good deal. During this time, he asked me almost nothing of myself. This was a relief since I could not tell the truth, and also because it would be easier simply to use a person who had never shown himself interested, warm or vulnerable. I saw him at least once a day, and he telephoned me more often than that. I did not feel that he called to hear my voice but rather to check in, as one does before an aeroplane flight. I wondered if he realised that marriage was my destination. There was a comforting passivity for me in all this, which suited me as my body concentrated upon itself and its ward. While the word parasite is ugly, it is fine to be a host. In Greek, the word for host and guest is the same, and sometimes, after I had said goodnight to Hal or in the morning before dressing for work, I felt that I was the baby’s guest, that he was entertaining me.

  Of course it was a boy. It must be.

  Tertius seemed delighted at Hal’s pursuit of me. He frisked about his chambers, making sandwiches which he left among the highly coloured broken books. He asked me all the questions Hal did not ask me about myself. He began to show a side which it would be mistaken to call womanish. It was more tender and less competitive than that. He could ask the right question, again and again, like a kind torturer. I was starting to like him. I knew that he was a petty, easily bored and venal man, and a promiscuous homosexual. But he gave the impression, after you had observed him for some time, that these were the only sane things to be. He was spoilt, he had carved a waxy cell for himself among the drones, but he enjoyed what he did enjoy, properly. I was not able to imagine his most private enjoyments, but I had seen him crooning over his gesso, giggling over gossip, and spluttering his enjoyable anger all over a greasy but savoured feast. His vulgarity seemed like a tremendous headdress worn to keep marauders from something of very good quality borne inside his head. It might have been something as abstruse as perfect taste – that is, taste so good, rather than so exclusive, as to be almost a moral quality. Or it might have been that he was very kind and did not want to show that kindness to everyone, for not even that much kindness may help more than the very few intimates of a man.

  It was at about this time that I learnt that Tertius was a friend of Angel. He was rigid with snobbery, I’d realised that long before, but I could see that it was at once professionally necessary and also a cure for his boredom. I also cannot see that snobbery is more of a failing than it is a source of pleasure. ‘If that pleasure is not innocent, what is, now we are told that foo
d and sex are toxic? That leaves snobbery and sleep as the last simple pleasures,’ said Tertius.

  But snobbery could not explain why so lively a man as Tertius, and one so at heart conventional, should spare time for my colleague and tormentrix from the charity shop, Angelica Coney. Reared in a palace with different time zones for each wing, Angel was one of those sirens whose pull is all towards destruction. She was of any age between twenty and forty-five and she was a witch. I feared her and was dashed when she withdrew her lovely smile and pretty favours from me. She had black eyes and surprising blonde hair. Much of her power derived from her not speaking, or infancy. It was so alarming that you would resume worship to bring the sun out from behind her wrath. Her power was over all animals, especially men, but she used this power over them mostly to advance the boundaries of her princesspality, the animal kingdom. As a tiny child she had begun her career of animal-sympathy by releasing the hounds, the ark of her class’s covenant, the only animals invariably counted two by two.

  Angel had ignorance. It clothed her impermeably. She had no Achilles heel where comparison and reference might strike her. Her attitudes were unqualified and unclouded by awareness of anything but her own feelings, and these were few but strong; there was no danger that she might bore her opponents with fact to support her statements. What Angelica loved was animals, though it was more and less than love, for it was not a human feeling. They were her familiars. She felt their pain. Human pain compared with it, she said, was a luxury fathered by time on speech. When she did speak, it was to say such things. Brought up where the worst pains were invisible or trivial, she had decided that all human agony was so. The worst she had seen was adultery and mismatched shoes. I suppose she believed in original sin without knowing it, and felt the animals were innocent.

  She was dangerous because she had learnt disguise. She was considered human but the beast’s eyes stared out. She was the only child of parents whose name would die with her and whose great house, if she could achieve her dream, would be turned over to the animals.

  Her ambition was the restitution of animals to their proper place. I had laughed at her, imagining a sort of cheery reversal of roles, teddy bears conducting buses and giraffes delivering letters, or maybe just a wonderful party for creatures, elephants dropping their chains and cats letting themselves out for the last time. I said as much to Angelica, who blazed, no smile on her tiger’s face. She had needed to say nothing about my misplaced anthropomorphism, patronage, indeed she did not know these words. Instead, she turned on me, and said winningly, ‘They will eat you and all people like you and spew you out because you taste bad.’

  Angel was so cool and charming in her bearing that the fact that she was a lunatic was ignored. Her nobility would in any case have protected her from incarceration. I was not sure in what direction she organised her animal ambitions. I was sure the charity shop was some sort of front, and sometimes half expected to see a black panther in a fedora slink in, talking out of the side of its whiskers. Most of the time Angel was quiet, like a cat, and used her almost dumb vocabulary to hypnotise and stun men. She did, curiously, a lot of work for charities, all to do with animals. Her name, her passion for the beasts, and her beauty made her an adornment. I suspected that she licked men all over with a rough tongue before killing them, and when I saw her little hands, I would think of them laid, immovable leaden velvet, on the neck of some poor white hunter, before she inclined her little neck to begin the imperative neat destruction of her victim. Angel was as it were a vegan carnivore; cheese, eggs and milk she eschewed, but I imagined her coughing up hairballs of expensive shoe leather and silk ties after devouring a toothsome banker. She did not need it for herself, but she did need their money for her causes.

  Angelica lived near the charity shop, which was itself in Sloane Avenue, when she was not at her parents’ house. I had not been to her London house. I did not much want to. I feared there might be people, stuffed, under tall cloches, like the kudu and jewel-footed eagles she had not been able to persuade her gentle parents to destroy at Wyvern. After all, their life was destroyed already. But Dolores Steel was a frequent visitor to Angel’s London house. She was unable to describe things save in relation to prison, where she had spent two years. Things and places were thus better or worse than prison. Nothing was the same as prison, not even, she had said to me in the charity shop the day before she announced she was about to go in, ‘Not even hospital. And I should know.’

  Dolores Steel was Angel’s lieutenant. No, more secretive than that, I suppose. She was her crack division for desperate measures, for the extraction of money by means more forceful than charm and connections. I was not sure that Dolores ever did anything wrong, but her bearing was that of a man over and over polishing his gun, weighing it, spinning it, polishing again. But her gun was part of herself, you could not take it from her. Dolores looked like Angelica, though how her parents, a Spanish stevedore and a male impersonator from Hornsea, had combined to replicate the product of nine centuries of aristocratic jerrymandering and landlinked marriage was a mystery. Where Angel was fair, Dolores was black in all but skin. I thought her black-hearted, too, but I came when she called.

  Dolores’s crackshot sex appeal and crazy past, whatever it was, left her with few friends, and I felt sad for her. I thought of her in hospital as I had seen her before, diminished by the little bed and six flowers in a jar next to the Lucozade, and told myself to remember to go and see her this time. So embroiled was I with my own interior, which made me not ill but not well, that I almost did not ask her why she was going to hospital. We were sitting, she, I and Angel, on the floor of the shop, sorting old clothes into piles. The room was badly lit, the paint stained, but beige anyway, like many of the clothes having been tinted for serviceability, not appeal. The clothes were improbably stained, as though they had been lent to a troupe of incontinents for amateur dramatics. The necks of the women’s clothes were biscuit-thick in orange make-up. Before a laundry hamper of these clothes sat Angelica and Dolores, small, dark-eyed, high-cheekboned, and made up not with the rose colours of other women but with toffee and black, their four eyes doubled with black, their clavicles powdered with gold. I did not want to turn my back on them. Here, among the wool on the floor, they might be my kittenish friends, always curled together or definitely apart as is the case with cats, but they did scare me. Indeed, in spite of my comparative height, they called me Mouse, when they wanted to tease. Their natures were similar, not more than that. At some point in the future their relationship would end, I considered, though I could not say who would be the winner. For it would be a fight. At the moment their parity was almost perfect, though in the end Angelica’s atavistic confidence must give her the ascendant. But they were infatuated with their physical similarity to each other and increased it by dressing alike. Their straight backs and poised heads, with beautiful dangerous tight throats, prevented their resembling expensive paired whores. Their doubleness did not look like a gimmick, nor did they appear to be sisters; as for being twins, it was not possible to imagine such a pair surviving childhood without the one drowning the other. At the moment, though, they appeared to live on some secret, erotic cream. Theirs was not a friendship; they were mutually completely useful.

  ‘You love people for their weaknesses,’ gentle sages say; Dolores and Angel loved their mutual and respective strengths. What might have been seen as weaknesses by a human interpreter – absence of imagination, of feeling, of gentleness – were inoperative in their world. But, as we folded the old cat-smelling clothes in the stained shop, I was concerned when Dolores mentioned that she was to go into hospital. When she said that it was for her heart, I hoped, while blaming myself for the selfishness of the thought, and realising that to preserve myself I must not appear too keen for information, that Lucas Salik was to be the surgeon in charge of Dolores.

  ‘D’you know who you’re under?’ I asked, and let this awful idea literally twist my heart with jealousy.


  ‘The great Front Wheeler himself.’ Dolores was indiscriminately racist; she hated all humans. Can the word for it be humanist? I hoped further. There is, however, more than one Jewish surgeon of the heart.

  ‘The one with all the publicity on account of his pretty face,’ said Angel, and her face was like a bad child’s, sweet with hard eyes looking out. ‘That might even be handy, Dolly, see what you can do.’

  ‘The point of all institutions,’ said Dolores.

  ‘Is to find and destroy their immune systems,’ continued, in chorus, Angelica. They had a line in barmy but plausible-sounding maxims. I was not much interested. I mostly ignore ideological recipes.

  ‘And they transplant animals’ hearts. I would not care about the people. They live on to drink beer and go jogging, but look at the creature casualties.’

  I heard about creature casualties all day. I imagined them, rather quaint, a dachshund on crutches after driving heedlessly around a bend, a Louis Wain cat with toothache, far removed from the photographs Angel and Dolores purred over. These photographs were of split dogs and cats with their craniums neatly lifted off, replaced with glass and wire. I would sometimes see these photographs, blown up, fly-posted, lettered as though with a huge potato print, giving details of action to come.

  ‘Would you like a visit in hospital, Dolly?’ I asked, broaching the nickname as you might stroke a puma with a sick headache.

  ‘Why not,’ she said, with no inflection, as befits a royal person.

  So, I went. It was Lucas Salik. After speaking to him on the telephone, I wondered whether I had succeeded in my attempt to make him jealous. I had spoken of Hal, who was after all a friend of Lucas’s, as though he and I were a couple. I have never known whether this alarms or challenges men. But, with time running out, I had thought to goad Lucas into some committing gesture, just one, to leave me free to throw away and dedicate my life on and to Hal and the baby boy.