A Case of Knives

by Candia McWilliam

  ‘You’re beautiful, sweet, and you’d be a wonderful mother,’ he said, and I could have sworn he was addressing himself, ruddy now after two glasses of Quink and the meaty salmon, as he saw himself reflected in the towering glass behind my head.

  ‘Cora, will you marry me?’ asked Hal, speaking to himself in the mirror. He clearly accepted at once.

  I was so relieved that his question made me happy. After all, I would do my best.

  ‘Thank you, Hal, but are you sure?’ I could think of so many objections, it seemed strange that he could not. Perhaps he required to be married. But why would he then so touchingly, as though reading a script, have given me that conventional triple necklace of courtly compliments?

  ‘Are you ready for the second course?’ asked the older pederast. He addressed Hal. ‘Was it satisfactory, sir?’ He did not ask me. He knew the answer, but I was lucky to be there at all. I was not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs from under the table.

  We accompanied the tongue, and Hal’s game pie, with champagne, which showed a complete conformity to the routine of almost every lunch Hal ever had. It would almost have been more remarkable not to have it. He might recall a lunch without as ‘the lunch of the unhad champagne’, something like the unbarking dog.

  ‘Hair of the dog,’ said Hal. ‘I’ve been drunk most of the time since I last saw you.’

  I could not think of much to say. ‘I hope it wasn’t to do with me?’

  ‘Nope. Nothing.’ It must have been something pretty serious, for he had the clammy look of one who has not been sleeping easily for days. I would hate to have put him, or anyone, through that.

  He put his hands on the table as though to keep them under his eye.

  ‘Nothing at all. D’you get?’ and he looked at me with nasty eyes. He looked at himself in the glass again and modified his gaze to represent new love.

  As we left his club, I saw, leaving from the entrance reserved for members unaccompanied by ladies, Johnny. It was a grey afternoon. Ribbons of fog stirred low against buildings. A flower-seller pulled change from his long green apron, as he stood among his schooled shoals of flowers. Hal put his arm around me. The champagne, the optimism, the relief, conspired to make me feel tender towards him. I smiled at him as though I loved what I found in his face.

  I heard skidding feet at our backs. Soon we would be looking in the windows of a ring shop.

  Do the proprietors see and believe all that fresh love, or do they wait for the probate valuations to see if it has endured? I was prepared to face anything now, me, Cora, and Hal. And the baby.

  ‘Cora, Hal.’

  It was Johnny. In front of his chest he held, as a bossed shield, a bouquet of white chrysanthemums, each like a head of coral.

  ‘Let me be the first to congratulate you,’ he said. Then, like a fish, he was gone, among the fluctuating crowd, which was tenebrous, grey, dark blue and black, parting now and then for the passage of a sleek car.

  Chapter 18

  I had seen engaged couples before, and there can be a spooky air of conjunction about them, but I was surprised that Johnny had seen our state so quickly. Can it be that a proposal of marriage acts upon the processes as conception does, setting in train a sort of beacon-relay of festival synapses? I had thought that I was fairly undelighted, and Hal was not perceptibly enraptured. But some solitaire corpuscles must be pumping through my veins, telling my heart to tie a ribbon around itself and display its soft centre. Little chips of happiness were coalescing in me, it is true, but whether they would fuse as a champagne hangover or as a three-carat drop of pure joy, it was too early, on the very afternoon of my engagement to Hal, to say. I expressly did not covet the signs of engagement. As I am a greedy girl, not merely swayed but waltzed into orbit by appearances, this might have been surprising, but I explained it to myself. The baby was there, the soon-to-be visible sign of more than engagement, and I had not the brio to display at once a pregnant belly and a blushing absorption in the cut and colour of diamonds, aprons, lower-ground-floor apartments, and going-away costumes. I felt like a pig, who, having been slaughtered, is keen to be made into collops, loin, blood pudding, head cheese, trotters, and ells of nutritious, quotidian, sausages.

  I longed for the dailiness of life. Had I had a companion who knew about the baby, she might have told me that I would shortly be in receipt of the dailiness and the nightliness of life, but as it was the only sources of information were the magazines and baby books I read and threw away as a man might throw away pornography which can no longer work its magic. I threw away my baby books, though, in case they somehow contributed to, even enlarged, the crescent stranger within. I drugged myself with superstition, like a child knowing she will dodge the devil if she goes upstairs three at a time. I was certain that I was performing the correct actions to keep chaos at bay. I had been finding my unplotted life too shapeless to carry further and had taken steps to freeze its slippery form in order to bear it, in all three senses. Rather than attempt to carry alone a leaky vessel, overfilled, meniscus atremble, full of spilling, tricksy, watery, changeable life, I preferred to strike the water solid at a blow, like a hard frost, rendering it clear and portable as ice. I forgot for a time that ice burns are as savage as the burns of heat and steam. Ice also carries less weight than water, and displaces more.

  I wanted things solid and clear and marriage appeared to me then to be the only means of achieving this. I was astonished that it was so easily come by. I had been lucky in finding Hal, physically so suited to be the father of a child of Johnny’s and also, it appeared, keen to be married himself. The enormous gap, the certain absence of love between Hal and me, appeared an advantage. It made crystal clear the icy fact of our marriage. I liked, too, the way we did not discuss our love, or rather its absence. I felt modern, light. Where love for Hal should have been were the ether of my great true love for Lucas Salik and the fleshly love for my growing baby. Spirit and flesh, they joined to provide something equal to what another girl might have felt for the man she was to marry. In fact, very possibly superior to it. Hal and I, I thought smugly as we walked past the queue of people awaiting taxis outside Claridge’s, had a very tidy beginning, uncluttered by illusions and undusted with fragile spun hopes. He must realise this. We were embarking on a minimalist life. I had been to the flats of people who believed only in black and white and uncluttered space. Used to the gluey clutter of Dick and Gloria, and to my own dusty trophies and tableaux of soaps and flowers and pots, I had wondered what they did with all their things. Now I knew.

  They did not have them. No chest of drawers, no drawers, no wardrobes, no robes, no hooks, no hangings. A floor, a ceiling and walls are all that are required to contain light. This thought gave me a satisfying sense of weightlessness and purity. In a world silted up with choice and variety and brought to the edge of chaos by plurality, we would be starting our adult life uncluttered by emotions which would be certain to sag, to grow dusty, to be holed by moths of doubt and irritation. I felt light with the optimism of a person who has just completed a great job of cleaning. I felt a suffusion of almost renunciative brightness; I felt supernaturally tidy. That was that, I thought, as you might after taking the veil.

  The queue of people outside the lighted entrance to Claridge’s was marshalled by a tall doorman with the olive froggy face of a Spanish duke. His umbrella housed those nearer the front of the queue, sheltering them not so much from the light rain which was beginning to fall as from the vulgar gaze. ‘Look at them, weighed down with commitments and addled hopes and transmuted or tarnished love,’ I thought. ‘Look at the couples who not only hate each other but have paid to accompany each other, over an ocean perhaps, in order to pay to share a room and a series of hollow outings, costly, shared and disappointing. How terrible that they hate each other; how much worse that they once loved each other. How fortunate we are to be without that indignity. Look at that old pair, holding gloved hands like children crossing the road. How can they fa
ce the disintegration seen in the face of the other, the betrayed desires, the secrets unspoken and left to curdle? How can they look at each other, leathery over breakfast in their sleeping suits, and face that once they could not bear to separate, that they said into each other’s ears things which revealed they were afraid of the dark, or liked this or that.’ How shocking to realise that you have given your time to an old stick with ordnance survey cheeks, when once you thought him a king. I would never be disappointed and nor would Hal: we had no high hopes, no low hopes, no hopes. We had acquired each other as you acquire a refrigerator, to prolong cold storage. Our life would be clear and unmetaphorical.

  Hal was simply himself. It was reductive not metaphorical, his style. The only implications were the obvious ones of image. I was convinced he would straighten, by being only himself, my bent for complication, for fossicking out alternatives, for organising problems, for arranging difficulties. I felt as though he made me as he was. I would be his paper consort. When I was with Lucas Salik, it was true I was paper consumed in his fire, but now I had become engaged to Hal I must tame that feeling. Or at any rate when we married.

  Anto had teased me about the way, given the coloured board of my life, I had fretted it about till it was a jigsaw with pieces which would rearrange in too many different ways. He had laughed at the complication. He liked things simple, he often said, they were complicated enough even then.

  So he would be pleased about Hal. Who could tell, perhaps he would like him.

  My life appeared to me now as one unending television advertisement, all appearance and flawless fitting of intention to function, untroubling of conscience, unstirring of those ambitions which lead to error and tragedy. Nothing could go wrong in a world where things appeared so perfect. The baby would be fitted for our century by this life, would never be disappointed, having grown to expect only food for the eyes and body. He would be raised without ideas. He would not learn the discrepancies and shifts which are there for those who see them and absent for the amoral, the enviably blind. Unburdened by religion, by knowledge with its implications of more knowledge, the child would be as blessed as an animal, untroubled by interpretation, unvisited by nightmares. And Hal, the father, would see to this.

  ‘When do you think?’ asked Hal. We had just walked through Shepherd Market. Not a tart in sight in these days of outraged nature. I’d heard from Anto that this was where the golden-hearted ones still had their beat, and I had been shooed off once by a mansized tart who had thought me a rival, but it was quite empty now save a notice, ‘family butcher: brain’s, heart’s and galantine’, illuminated by a bluish light, raisined with dead flies. There was a dry-cleaner in whose window flashed a sign, ‘french pressing’. Hal and I emerged opposite a bookshop where I had spent afternoons. I said goodbye to its bow window. Inside were towers of books; there was a chocolate-house atmosphere to the place which gave to the passerby who entered the feeling that he belonged to a literary group. Hal would not understand, and why should he? But I saluted it as I went by, for its not having moved with the times, and for what it had lent me. Like Albany, it had shown me an older world, one which was richer than the world I knew of carefulness and re-impacted soap and the car used only in emergencies. Some of the patrons of the bookshop could not read, some bought books according to the colour of their spare rooms, but even these had given me pleasure. I said goodbye to all this and turned to my modern lover.

  ‘Very soon,’ I replied to his question.

  ‘I’d better tell Lucas.’ It was Hal who spoke, though he spoke my own thoughts.

  ‘Not your parents first?’ I asked.

  ‘Them too,’ he said.

  His voice was not that of a bearer of good news. I could tell he would fit in his telephone calls between those to clients in the morning. Thinking of the morning, I realised that we might, now bound to each other, have to spend the evening and the night together. I did hope not. I wanted to husband, if the word was the correct one, my resources, and now we had come to our conclusion I wanted time alone. I wanted to get it all done with as little fuss as possible.

  ‘I’ve got to see a person this evening, baby,’ said Hal. He moved his head like a pony, his palomino fringe momentarily covering his eyes. He pushed the hair back with his right hand and I saw the darker hair near the skull. I wondered what he would do when he was bald, then thought with some relief that he would probably not go bald but move with the aid of dyes from gilded youth to silver age with no bimetallic middle period.

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’d like to think a bit, too.’ As if thinking were something to be done alone. Soon I hoped to be able to stop thinking for good.

  ‘Leave the planning alone for a bit would you?’ he said. ‘I don’t go for the idea of you doing it for yourself, not having a mother and things.’

  Had I said I had no mother? Not as far as I was aware. People used to guess because of my domestic hopelessness, but I had rectified that. At school there had been a term of derision, then pity after I had sewn my nametapes on outside my clothes, like small civic awards. cora godfrey. cora godfrey. Cora, simply, even then.

  Hal’s face looked odd. He looked a little like a still from a film where someone is very slowly dying young. His eyes were filling with something moist which was gathering in their pink cills. He was a photogenic man, I was sure. A drop of Hal’s eye moisture hung from one of his blue-black eyelashes. Hal was exhibiting sympathy. It was of course counterfeit, could well have been used to sell black tulips or those brogues which stretch with the dead foot after death, but I was tired and pregnant and could not risk exposure to sentiment that evening, for fear of melting down.

  He faced me and leant his forehead till it touched mine, so our touching heads made a gable for our faces against the now heavier rain. Leaves lay yellow and flat on the shiny road, silent town leaves unlike the crisp country leaves of autumn. He made me thoroughly depressed about not having a mother, as though it were like ordering the wrong wine.

  ‘It will be good,’ said Hal, kissing me photogenically, and pushing me gently to meet a swiftly advancing taxi.

  Chapter 19

  I was grateful to whoever had put the severed tongue in Lucas’s car. The rawness of the shock had disarmed him and given him to me for that time he had spent in my house. Had we not passed that time together, I do not think that I would so quickly have decided to accept Hal’s proposal. But that I had this occasion to pore over (I had seen him asleep. Can you go further than that?) gave me a dowry of felt life (‘What other kind is there?’ asked Anto. ‘Underfelt life, I suppose.’) to take to my grave or my manger. Besides, there was no need to look at it that dramatically, for I gathered that Lucas would always be there. He was fond of Hal. Perhaps, after delving into open chests trying to trap the life within, he was soothed by Hal’s superficiality. I have noticed too that some men have a – completely unsexual – nostalgia which is frequently for a lost youth which they did not have. I imagined that Lucas had spent much of his youth isolated by books and by his work, and was nostalgic for a time of action and surface and success with girls which he had passed up. People feel such tenderness for themselves when young. Perhaps Lucas Salik had grown up in a town; Hal had grown up in the country, fed on bacon and Studland crabs and cream. Was Lucas perhaps envious of Hal? No one had told Hal’s parents no longer to inhabit their part of Dorset, nor burnt their parish church. Hal’s grandparents had not had to hide in the hills from Roman Catholics setting out on a pogrom from Wimborne. Yes, surely that must be a cause of envy.

  Sometimes I even thought that Hal, as it were, came with Lucas, and I could not believe my luck. It was not that I envisaged a ménage à trois, but it was good to think that Lucas’s life would be parallel to our own.

  ‘I am delighted for you, of course, but Hal is really the lucky one. And me,’ said Lucas on the telephone two days after I had become engaged. This confirmed my feeling that he would be there throughout Hal’s and my marriage.
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  ‘Thank you. I hope I shall please you.’ Whether plural or singular, he could never know.

  ‘You will please me.’ I felt my wrists grow cold as though they had been wiped with acetone. I rocked as I held the telephone to distract myself from the pleasure.

  I did not want to say ‘thank you’ again or we should be stuck like two characters from Molíre faced with a revolving door.

  ‘And, Cora, are you working today or are you able to join me for a late lunch at home? I have to finish some work here but there are some things . . .’

  ‘I am working, but can have lunch.’ I was in the charity shop more and more. Angel and Dolores seemed to need me.

  ‘I’ll collect you, shall I?’ he asked. ‘You won’t have time otherwise.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, you don’t know what a difference that would make.’ I had had to start taking buses because the underground made me so ill, and I was not good at it. When I am on the tube I wonder where all the pregnant women are, or have they mastered the buses? They do not walk, for I never see them on the street, and they cannot all be indoors. I have seen only three other pregnant women exposed to the public eye. One was a big blue brigantine of a woman running an easting down Knightsbridge. One was an Indian in a mauve sari with a little boy atop the coming baby; she was trailing a tartan golf-bag full of shopping. The other woman was myself advancing in a shop window. And only I as yet knew I was pregnant. So perhaps I had seen thousands more than I knew, but I just could not tell. I look at stomachs now, to see if they shelter citizens of the future, parenthetic people.