I had so little time in which to reach him. It was a desire to have known him, rather than to know him, which drove me, as though a glimpse would give me that for which to strive through the rest of my life. Sometimes, dreaming of him, I would remark his similarity to our idea of death – tall, pale, dark – and wonder if that was what I wanted. But, if so, I did not think I would be lucky enough to die in childbirth. I have never been that well organised, or how should I have arrived where I was?
So, it was curious to propose something as ordinary as dinner at my house, with Hal, to Lucas Salik. After I had spoken to him on the telephone, I thought of several ways I could have improved upon the telephone call. By praying to him, perhaps, petitioning him, throwing flowers in his way.
Where he worked, where he performed his miracles, a hospital, seemed to me scented with clean sanctity. To my queasy pregnant nose, the disinfectant was a delicious uncomplicated smell, and I connected it with medical infallibility in the service of life. Dolores was burning bright with rage in her bed, but she ate the fruit I had brought quickly, cracking the lychees like little birds’ skulls.
To see him was not disappointing, but it showed me how unrealisable was my dream. He was a real, a busy, man. In a way, it was his colleague, a cheery doctor whom you could see mowing a lawn or washing a car, who made me feel that Lucas had a life which was ordered in a book, with a ballpoint pen, on lined paper. I had seen him only socially, at ease, where he was independent and unbeholden. Here, it appeared, that as much as his patients needed him, he needed them, to practise his skill. I felt that there was a system of ill health, which he required. I did not want to look at him in front of Dolores, for I knew she would see and use my naked self against me. Men’s attention turns to Dolores as though she were hanging by her teeth from a trapeze, naked, but Lucas appeared to want to leave.
Dolores’s glare may have unsettled him, for she looked at him not as though he had repaired her heart but as though he stank. I could not tell if this concerned him. I wondered if he noticed. Perhaps she was just a collection of faulty valves to him, as women are said to be to their gynaecologists. Or at any rate, by the wives of gynaecologists. But what of the gynaecologists of gynaecologists’ wives?
I liked the big blue car by now, it was an emblem of his distantness and competence and power, but I was not sure how to speak to this presence by my side. How can you address an idea? I wished for a secular collect with which to address him. I was terrified of embarrassing him. Things had become not more easy, but more difficult, with time. My affair, if that was what it was, with Hal, seemed trivial. So enormous yet simple were the things I felt for this man that I did not want to be too close to him. I required a new, formal language in which to address him, not the vulgate.
And then I felt a soggy mass at my side, lifted and observed it. It had escaped from its wrapping. I was surprised that he could face the further treating with organs, having presumably been dealing with them all day, but it was a tongue, uncooked. He had said he would buy something for supper. I have heard of ways of cooking it which make it edible, but I would as soon eat a bull’s eye. When I asked him, he seemed surprised. I wrapped the tongue in a newspaper which announced on its front page, yet again, Lucas’s operation on the little Afghan boy, the tones of the article waiting for the child either to take up his bed and walk or to die. Such papers were everywhere. There was also a scrap of paper within the newspaper. It must be the butcher’s receipt.
He said, ‘Please don’t tell Hal. He hates mess.’
Bloody, bloody Hal, I thought, and I thought the word in full, gory and sticky. Hal hates mess, does he, Hal who is not pregnant, not covered in tongue blood, not sitting here inextricably tied to a man who will have nothing to do with him? To hell with Hal, I thought. I wanted to spit.
But it was he who did that, on my doorstep. In the same second as I saw Dick and Gloria on the floor, making love in their basement, Lucas Salik was very sick. It did not affect my infatuation. Partly there is the divine degradation of serving the fallen idol, and then there is the simple pleasure of seeing that a person needs you, in the most direct way. I had wondered how mothers deal with their babies’ disgusting milky sick and curdy bottoms, but I saw now it would be easy. All I wanted was to make him new so he could do it again. He was mine. Moreover, he fainted, only just inside the house, and only mad strength enabled me to haul this skeleton tree of man to a sofa, where I mopped and swabbed. It was like those dreams where you save your idol’s life. It was all I longed for.
While he was unconscious, Dick and Gloria went off to their work at the opera. Like Angel and Dolores, but how unlike, they were entangled, but like contiguous root vegetables, not tangled animals. They were both pale and thin, but their tameness and their indifference to the darkness of the basement made them desirable subtenants. They thrived, indeed, in the dark.
When Lucas was recovered, I gave him a stiff shot of rum and felt like a seducer. Its scent of cane and molasses made me dizzy.
‘There was a note,’ I said. ‘It said, “they can’t talk”.’
Certainly, those who could not talk must be the creature casualties, and some mercenary of Angel’s must have done this. I was too vain to let him know my thoughts, and decided to make light of it. It was after all an isolated incident. Anyway, how did they get this great lolling tongue from an animal without cruelty, or was it from some beast not inconvenienced by the absence of its tongue?
Since he seemed unwilling to talk, I left him to cook his part of supper, which is how I should like to have been treated in the same circumstances. I had prepared everything I intended to cook beforehand anyway.
I love the feeling of well deployed time that having things done in advance gives. I suspect that it is really an elegant way of wasting time, but the dishes of cubed, diced, peeled, waiting components make me feel like a mosaic maker, placing colour on the table, which, seen from the critical distance of the diner’s chair, seems to have form and shape.
I had not been prepared for his being able to cook. Had he learnt it from his mother, as men usually do not? All I really knew about him was that he was Jewish and Polish. I knew that this made him rare – a survivor, or, rather, the child of survivors.
When I returned to the kitchen, I felt like Mary and Martha: there he was, in my house, doing something quite ordinary, which he seemed naturally to endow with grace. I hoped that Hal would be eaten by sharks on the Bakerloo line. The occasion was separate and delightful, like going swimming at night or a first dance. As it occurred it entered my memory, not, for once, adorned, but clear and simple. The baby was apt in the domestic scene. The tall man in blue in my plain kitchen made the room replete. He lifted and poured batter from its blue jug, and he poured again. The noise of fat fizzing and settling, the blue fat smoke, the fritters as light and hard as sugar glass, though they were salt, but sweet to me, did not make me nauseated. It was as though my nerves themselves were being sealed. Time hung light. I seemed to take part in and to see the scene, two big people in a small room, a round and full scene shown in a round mirror, hanging still. He handed me the yellow C-shaped fritter he had made for me. I was happy.
After Hal arrived, the evening became ordinary again. I insulated myself more successfully than I would weeks ago have thought possible against Hal’s digs, his resentment, his innuendo. I wondered how Lucas would feel when Hal and I married, as I was quite certain we would.
I wanted Lucas to go, so I could think about him. He was tired when he left. He seemed drunk, but I thought it must be the shock. The source of that shock, the tongue, I set to cool and jellify under weights overnight.
That night was the first night Hal stayed with me, and I found that I could remain courteous, even conversational, by thinking, as he moved, of Lucas Salik, pouring down from the blue jug a pale fluid stream.
Chapter 17
After our first night together, Hal appeared to calm down, as though he had made the first connection on his jo
urney, wherever it was taking him, but the checking-in telephone calls became more frequent. I had to leave the job where I packed jokes into matchboxes because he telephoned so often that the nuisance was no longer offset by the cheapness of my labour. So I was working more at Angel’s shop, and, of course, I was still going to Tertius’s chambers. Sometimes Angel appeared when I was cleaning there. Tertius would then look at me as though he could no longer recollect who I was, and I would know that it was time to go. He did not like to share Angel, at whom he poked no fun, whom he always called Angelica, ‘So oddly vegetable a name, Cora, no?’ I felt that, while he liked my cleverness, it did not to him, a clever man and a self-made one, have the integrity of what is born, the pure abstract contemplable beauty of immemorial money. I felt no bitterness about this. As long as you are yourself eating something fairly nutritious, the feudal food chain is quite ornamental and not desperately restrictive. ‘Class,’ Tertius would say, cutting off a section of Arctic Roll and eating it over the Burlington Magazine. ‘Class, does it start in school or does school start in class? Or does class start,’ here he would purse his lips like a monkey de-pipping a grape, ‘does class start, as you might say, in class?’ He needed class and was entertained by it; he was like a banana grower with the keys to the monkey house.
I began to hear an accent in Tertius’s voice. He had always spoken in tones, astoundingly, unashamedly, camp-posh, which suggested he was entertaining after dinner, to the accompaniment of a desultory piano, a home-service audience. But, just occasionally, when he eased up, as he put it, in my presence, there was a fruitiness in his vowels, and he seemed about to swing quite the other way, to speak in a Northern accent unheard but in pantomime. The gusto of his pretentiousness was endearing; it was like his gung-ho queerness, so caricatured that it protected itself. Tertius was offended by the naturalist school of homosexuality, he liked it colourful and mannered and full of sickly tints and hectic colour. I think he was offended, aesthetically, by its current, fashionable ubiquity and barefacedness. Not that he objected to coveys of boys dressed to kill. ‘Ooh look at those private partridges,’ he would say when we went to deliver frames. He loved to see a kept boy. ‘Real poule de luxe,’ he would say, without jealousy of either keeper or kept. But I think that he liked the beauty of the cat in the bag, and now it was out of the bag he felt a certain thrill was lost. This may have been his age, a lament in him equivalent to a more conventional man of his age having regrets about the second post or proper cake at railway stations. It was entirely suitable for a pregnant person, I felt, to be around a queer.
Anne was away. I did sometimes want to speak to a woman, and a woman who had had a baby at that, but she was not approachable and I had not seen her since the night I had met Hal, when I had felt her eyes on me too coolly not to be coming to some conclusions. Was pregnancy visible even in its earliest stages to women who had known it?
And now, the baby could be felt. It was November, and he was to be born early in April. I could carry off the extra bulk, but I must marry Hal soon. Sometimes it seemed to matter a great deal, and then I would pull away as it were from my own life and perceive that it did not really matter, that the seas would wash us away anyway, that we were all protected from duty, responsibility and the future by what is called mutually assured destruction, which is the capsule the world keeps under its tongue for when the prison walls start to grow together. From these thoughts, which were I suppose the sin of despair, I would come into mad fits of gaiety when I could set my eyes on fire with looking at something quite ordinary. Stupid, optimistic, pushed towards light by the baby, I would sleep, and wake up, reality appearing dim when I awoke, hung-over from adrenalin.
For when hope was there, it was not small and personal but enormous, ambitious, redeeming. It was an unreflective, biological, hope. I suppose it was the hope of hormonal change, sufficient to keep a mother blind to any rough truth till the baby is born.
I was feeling, for quite different reasons, something of the emotion and energy which were the medium of Angelica and Dolores. In me it came from the baby. Their ideology (it was as totalitarian as that) must come from something too. I could not think what drove them.
‘Of course, it’s sex,’ said Tertius. I was folding shirts for the laundry, bending them really, they were so stiff with dirt. He had this trick of starting a conversation at its most salacious point, in order to reel you in to it.
‘What’s sex?’ I asked. I thought for a moment he had been speaking of some new painter, Sachs.
‘The secret of Angelica’s amazing energy. She’s like a really well run machine. Not something whimsical by Tinguely though, Cora, but a really big, cold one, going day and night, no frills. A crematorium, something like that. Pure, consuming sex. I mean,’ he said, and he looked a bit sad as though his usually convenient proclivities had let him down, socially, by causing him not to desire her, ‘even I feel it.’ He made a long, square, face.
‘Talking of which, darling,’ he said, ‘how’s it going with the golden boy? Or is he a Golden Ass?’ He pronounced it with a long ‘a’. Tertius liked simple, two-ply jokes.
‘We speak a lot.’
‘You must do something more than that. He’s made for you, my loss of course.’
‘Oh Tertius, I’d always do for you.’
He gave me a purple-veined look. He was like Silenus, but in a mosaic, all composed of squares and violent colour, requiring distance to be apprehensible. His suit was brown from across the room, but as you approached it, it flowered into its constituent colours, a fearful orange, a winking turquoise, a gleeful purple. His tie was as solid as a block of chocolate, his cufflinks tablets of the Law. His teeth were the demerara brown of Kendal mintcake. I saw that Tertius could be a bad enemy.
He left the room, and returned, bringing a bottle, which he appeared to have lifted out of a Braque. It was square. It did not look like other bottles. He poured me a glass of white stuff.
‘Sit down, love, I’ll be back in a mo, I’ve got a surprise.’ The drink was like icy supercharged marmalade. The baby began to dart like a goldfish but I was pleased with myself and liked my new burning heart and floaty head.
I heard the front door open, voices, and then in came Tertius, with, behind him, Hal. He seemed to have been neglecting the highlights in his hair. I thought, ‘This is the first personal detail which has intrigued me about this boy I plot to marry. He dyes his hair.’
‘Cora, baby,’ he said. He was addressing only me, not itemising me and my contents. His face looked still handsome but neglected. It is not customary for a man’s looks, unless he is much older than he says, so speedily to disintegrate.
‘God I’ve been miserable,’ he said. Not, ‘without you’, but I feared he might mean this, and it was lent regrettable credence by the pouched face. I did not want him to care for me, so much as to want to marry me.
‘Come to lunch, won’t you, Co, there’s a doll.’ No one calls me Co. No one ever has. Affronted, touched, sensing a crisis I could desire, I poured the orange fuel down my throat and said to Tertius, ‘Can I go early?’
‘Can she come, Thrice? Say yes, do.’ Hal sounded like a woman asking for a geegaw. He had his name for everyone. It was a weary piece of his constructed charm. His charm was prosthetic.
‘Go, children, go,’ said Tertius. He saw what I could have told him was wrong, a young man and a young woman in love, arm in arm, going out into the autumn.
We ate at Hal’s club off Clifford Street. It was unsuitable in every way. He had for some time been holding a meal there out to me as a treat to come but I had not realised quite what a treat it would be. I re-found him after a journey to the ladies (‘Which if you need to attend you are not,’ said the face of the breeched pederast at the desk) which took me under London and approximately to below the bandstand in the Park. Of course, we were eating in the ‘ladies permitted’ section. He was sitting at a small table with a dirty cloth and a menu so comprehensively coated in plastic that
it looked as though it were adapted for benthic use.
‘I’ve ordered wine,’ said Hal. An older pederast appeared with a carafe of untranslucent wine, the size of the vinegar bottle at a chip shop. At its neck was a tassel, like a very small jousting favour. The bottle was set down. Hal seemed to be recovering. He was rather impressed with himself and his club. Under the floor were men drinking wine and eating meat which would satisfy Lucullus.
I didn’t look at the menu, but I had a shot at guessing. ‘I’ll have egg mayonnaise and tongue salad,’ I said. And in the kitchen, I thought, it will be like those intelligence tests with matches, how few need you move to change DEAD into LOSS? My guess was that, if I did not eat the one lettuce leaf, half tomato and monocle of cucumber garnish on the egg mayonnaise, they’d simply need to swab the plate down and plonk on the rubber mat of pressed tongue to convert EGG MAYONNAISE into TONGUE SALAD.
I had given my pressed tongue to Dick and Gloria for what they described as a ‘bit of a do’ backstage. ‘At least you can’t skid on tongue, or there’d be the hell to pay with cueing – “Oh, so sorry, I just tripped over my tongue,”’ they said.
My mind was wandering. This was, I was certain, to be the luncheon during which I became engaged to the young man of my contemplations.
Hal ordered smoked salmon, which unaccountably was not the rectangular brown sort found in sandwich bars, but ragged rosy slices of it with a big pithy half of lemon and proper untriangulated bread and butter. ‘They’re partialish to me here in point of fact,’ said Hal.
Anything which followed would serve me right. But the baby must have a father.
The prongs of my egg mayonnaise fork were connected with a sticky web, as though the person before me had eaten shredded wheat. I ate my egg (it was an egg) with my pudding spoon, one, two, half ellipses. Hal did not notice. Would I be able to carry on regardless in our marriage too? I started to develop the idea. But my heart was not in it. That heartless stylish hypocrisy was gone, killed by good intentions, romance, and the horrible consequences of promiscuity. I ceased thinking of ‘adultness’, or ‘going my own way’, and looked at Hal. If I concentrated on feeling drunk, he looked handsome enough.
A Case of Knives Page 15