‘I shall collect you at half-past one. You do not know how I look forward to it,’ he said.
At the shop, Angel was as still as a cat. She was stiff with electricity. She hissed down the telephone. She was in places without perceptibly moving towards them. She was dressed as an astral plumber, in dungarees and tennis shoes. In her ears were gold spanners and she wore a belt of gold, which showed that her waist was as narrow as a hand. Furs and feathers and leathers were taboo, but she felt no shyness of treasure and wore metal and gems like a savage queen. With her ‘boring’ real baubles, she wore false gems. Dolores shared Angel’s ropes and manacles and shackles and cleats of minerals. Each of them invariably wore a gold handcuff, a split pair, Angelica explained, used by her great-uncle to civilise jealous mistresses. He would leave them cuffed together for the night, right hands linked. In the morning they would be brought tea – ‘And the co-operation of the two thirsty ladies in their mutual desire for refreshment was remarkable to see,’ Angel would say, mimicking the old man. Two ladies had stimulatingly displeased him by ignoring the tea. ‘Pretty as a picture,’ the great-uncle said, Angel told me. The chambermaid saw it too. And how did Angel know? ‘Oh, Harding was with us for ever and she had a grey parrot with which she taught me to kiss.’ I thought of the dark blue spatula of a parrot’s tongue and Angel’s pink triangle. ‘The parrot had a dark pink crest which stood up when it was excited,’ she said, and she looked through me to Dolores who was also rigged as a navvy. The studs at the front of Dolores’s suit were haphazardly done up. The chains seemed to weigh her down. She looked trammelled with languor as she sat, little red cotton sandals on the bar of her chair, and legs tense and spread as a frog’s, except that her right hand was busy, scratch, rub, writing in what looked like a diary. I assumed it was accounts for the shop. Her hair was caught up in pins to the top of her head so that her eyes blazed unobscured. Both she and Angel had eyes which were long, made to be seen, like those of a pharaonic slave, in sly profile, with a sweep of lid as long, like the undisplaying tail of a peacock. These four eyes looked like the hieroglyphs for fish.
As I grew more pregnant, I became more scared of these two. I had let the side down. I was sure that they had insides which would not be so inefficient as to be hostess to the issue of a man. As for getting married, I dared not tell them. When I did, they would simply replace me, and until then I wanted an income and somewhere to go in the daytime. It had become my only job beside cleaning for Tertius.
For there was money. I had none. When people I had come to know said they had no money, they did not mean what I mean. They meant that the extravagant step they contemplated might not at that moment be prudent. I meant that it was a question of looking to see if that Isle of Man fifty-pence piece I had found in my raincoat lining was legal tender or if it would be best to try it on a chocolate machine before handing it to the greengrocer. This moneylessness was starting to bite. In their middle twenties people start requiring all sorts of hardware; the game of being a student starts to pall. I was good at the appearance of money and hopeless about its principles. If I could make a day go by with the sustained appearance of solvency, I let the next day go hang. I had somehow not learnt the virtues of thrift and providence. More than that, I desired their opposites, though I had never gambled with anything but my life. For every day I just about got through on money from redeemed fizzy-drinks bottles, the lie (that I had money) dictated by my vanity was protected and sustained. The reason many of my contemporaries could play for so long so late and with such dangerous toys was that they could go and recuperate in houses whence nothing could be seen but green. Before their dinner parties they rang Nanny, nodding in her little room in Rye or Brighton, to find out the recipe for thick gravy. And, no matter how wild they were, they would have narrow feet and know how to tip and whom to address as Mr and whom as Esquire. They knew never ever to touch capital. The boys were the same. They changed their shirts twice a day and were neither familiar with inferiors nor keen with their seniors. They had few superiors. They passed out like gentlemen, having aimed the sick inconspicuously, and were impassive, even derisive, in the face of female nakedness. If at a party other women than the stripper were present – real girls, girls whom you married – they knew how to carry on. Treat it as dressage, and make cool and detailed comment indicative of expertise. Just in time, I was getting out. Lucas would take me and Hal under his wing.
‘Address these, Cora, would you,’ stated Angel. She was folding leaflets. Periodically we sent these out, appealing for funds. Why did Angelica not just auction a selection of golden tools?
No sport in that, I supposed.
So I spent the morning addressing glueless envelopes, glueless because the gum is made from the feet of cows, as anyone who has worked for a newspaper or lived near a knacker will tell you, and is therefore ideologically unsound. There was at my school a girl with such a seraphic face that she was unable to convince people that she had ever done anything wrong. She was poised and lovely. Her rosy cheeks seemed scented with sweetness. She was cruel and loved to tease ugly people. Her tribute was obedience without question and a constant flow of dirty information; if you kept her in these, she left you alone. I bought a term’s peace from her with a corked test-tube full of cow gum. I told her I had obtained it not without difficulty from a boy I knew. The terrible smell of sealing that lie I cannot forget. She was in ways a perfect beauty, ethereal to look at and with a real enthusiasm for her subject. Perhaps she was my first Angel. I fall for these tyrannical beauties who are preposterous but a pleasure to please, like monstrous children. Once in possession of your abject devotion, they excise you. You cannot keep them happy for very long. They are, for girls educated only with other girls, not a lesson in one’s own sex so much as an instruction in the ways of heartbreakers. From them, you may painfully learn what to beauties of each sex comes naturally, encouragement, evasion, desertion. The smell of cow gum always recalls that summer of meretriciously purchased peace. The licking of envelopes evokes its price.
Angel provided me with a list and a pile of envelopes. The names were the usual ones, the back two pages of most exhibition catalogues and all opera programmes, but this time with their addresses. Magnificent storekeepers, famous scientists, and a procession of older beauties, if you could categorise them at all, seemed to be the catchment area today. But I did not ask Angel how she had made her choice of ‘victims’. I have thought before now that she can hardly differentiate between people. She does not see them as more than a herd.
Just before one o’clock, Dolores sighed, put down her pen and stood up. Then, like a cat washing itself, piecemeal, she admired herself, section by section. She walked over to the glass and strained on tiptoe until she could see her face. She smoothed her brows with licked little fingers. She smoothed the pearly brown long lids of her eyes with the middle finger of each hand. She tilted her chin at herself, this way then that, and caressed her own neck till it seemed to grow longer. Then, she tucked her right hand and her left into her dungarees and, as though she was touching icing sugar or talc, she remoulded her breasts. They stood out soft and hard-tipped, on either side of the range of press studs down her front. She held her hands away from her, of necessity at arm’s length, and then flattened them slowly down her swerved back, African buttocks and small round thighs. To watch her do this was to watch a sculptress. She had re-made herself, in her own image.
‘Wait a bit, Dolly,’ said Angelica. ‘We’ve got to wait till the Mouse’s trap appears. Who is it Mouse, today?’
Should I feel guilty about allowing Lucas near these girls whose associates, I was fairly certain, had put that disgusting tongue in his car? It was not brave to have hidden that I suspected I knew where the thing had come from. Vanity again, I thought.
‘It’s Lucas Salik,’ I said, and I was delighted to be able to say it.
I was pleased that these girls, who did not care about such things, indeed who despised them, would suspect, if o
nly for a second, that the man I was besotted with was my lover. That they might think this made it a truth to me. I could understand why lies grow out of dreams.
‘Oh-ho, and has he cut you about yet?’ asked Angelica. ‘And has he sliced you open to see what it’s like inside?’
‘He’d never find out the usual way,’ said Dolores. This was a long sentence for her and seemed to bear some meaning which amused her, for she put her hand to her mouth, a human gesture for once. Dolores hummed when she was in her stride, a humming not from the throat so much as from her core. It was an almost soundless whirr like an idling machine or a cat too replete to purr. The noise may just have been the tension she conveyed, a tension not unpleasurable to its dispenser.
‘What’ve you got that he wants, Cora, contacts in the organ world?’ asked Angel, and she materialised at my side and pulled Dolores against her so they were like dancing partners, linked at the waist. They were as appealing as animals: that they were human gave them the vulgar but undeniable allure of creatures photographed for a newspaper, two frosty-whiskered leopard cubs. I even seemed to see them in a granular newsprint texture as though I were looking through a veil. This disintegration of what I see precedes tears for me. I hoped that they would not perceive this. I have never liked being teased.
They began to sing. Clues like this would sometimes encourage me to think that I had at last found out their age; but the only way to do that would be to hook them and tell over, as with sharks, their stomach contents, and that must wait till the Resurrection. As I would rise again with my son, so they would each produce the devoured souls of armies of fallen, rich, subjugated men.
They sang:
Last night I dreamed a dreadful dream
Beyond the isles of sky
I dreamed I saw a dead man fight
And that dead man was I.
Their voices were not thin like children’s, but swooped like cats’ cries.
‘He’s here, and we’ve got to split. We’re seeing a man about a dog. Take the afternoon off.’
I was grateful and surprised. Angel took the keys of the shop from her cinctured waist, and we all went out. Before I could introduce Angel, or Dolores could show her surgeon how well she remained, they were gone, tails in the air, starry behinds twinned, and I, heavy with assumed nuptial glee, was in the car of Lucas Salik.
‘Cora, it’s very good news, I know you are doing the best thing.’ Not, I know you will be very happy, I thought. Perhaps doctors are wary of such prognoses.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’ve known Hal for six years and can promise you will always be diverted.’ No sermons, no backbone of England references, then. ‘And that is a better promise than almost any. The cardinal virtues can be learnt later.’ I had a picture of Hal, red-hatted, buttoned into his covering gown, swiving, poisoning, machinating, as cardinals will. Mandrills and bishops have purple in common.
‘I’m happy with the ordinal ones,’ I said.
He turned to me as we drove. I do not like this, it makes me fear a slip, a skid; I prefer to speak to eyes in the mirror.
‘I prefer the cardinal ones. The big ones, if advertised, are absent, and, if present, are like mountains, so great that you can’t see them till you’re away from them. I mistrust anyway what is larger than life. Saviours, statesmen, generals, saints, they would all be dreary at dinner. I like sinners with besetting virtues. Great big men are like constellations, their faults made fiery by night’s blackness all right, but also rather humbling, and, on bad days, making you shake your fist at their splendid absentness.’ He spoke to me as though I understood what he said, which made me happy.
‘Do you love your patients?’ I asked.
‘Do you want to ask me that? I love them intensely when they begin to cease to depend on me. I feel as though I created them. Then they leave and they are as they were before, and I have been nothing but a cloud which fell over their life and moved off. It is like a mother, perhaps. I do all I can and I can’t do more. But my hands can do more than my brain reports back to me, and that instinct is like love, it is blind but sees clearly too. Shall we eat at home? Do you have to go back? Those girls look like twin Siameses.’
‘You know one of them.’
‘Do I?’
‘She was one of your patients. Dolores Steel.’ Did he know she had been in prison?
‘Your question is answered, then. I was as deep inside her as a person can be but I don’t recognise her. Still, some love is like that.’
‘What love? Surely not.’ I could not tell what he meant. I would know you in a shaven crowd of skeletons, I thought, and then thanked God I’d not said it. I have seen pictures. I threw away a book I found in the public library. Not to save me, to save them. I felt thrilled by it and was terrified. The book had been borrowed more than any other I’d seen, papered with borrowing slips. The man who wrote the book had been in one of these camps, and now he lived in Wigtown. ‘He was the last man in the Wigtown telephone directory,’ said my teacher. ‘It’s one of those names you deny thrice, all zeds. But I expect he counts himself lucky to be there, even the last man in Wigtown. And if you look at that sort of stuff again you’ll turn into a toad. It’s pornography.’ So I would just look at these books in the library, in between bodice-rippers and ballet books. Like most girls brought up in a town, I featured in a series of small violations, among them a sad dark man in a jumper and a duffel coat who felt my knees under the fabloned table in the library one smoky afternoon as I skipped through The Rise of the Reich, The Diary of Anne Frank and The Scourge of the Swastika, looking for pain. Then I took home The Leopard and was on the way to recovery.
‘I thought you would like to eat in my secret room now that you are one of the family, Cora. I’ve put it all up there.’
I had not realised that his tall flat had another floor. It was big enough already. He led me upstairs, cautiously, as though he were going to present me to someone whose behaviour could not be predicted.
I took a liberty. ‘Do you have a secret life in your secret room?’ I asked.
‘Don’t be arch. I thought you were over that. And don’t get hurt feelings. Women always have hurt feelings and it’s all show. Wait till you are really hurt. There you are.’
He opened the door into a large warm room between whose high windows was drawn a bath. That is, there was a bath, the old-fashioned sort with feet and smooth flanks, full of water, fuzzed with steam. It was a real bath, though almost everything else about the room was not real, but painted. On all four walls were depicted dancers, tumblers, musicians. The room was a clearing in the heart of a crowd of pastel celebrants, all shown in noisy joy, and all flat and silent. Harlequin, masked and with his nose erect, clasped coy Columbine in her wafered chiffons to his grape-groined body, chequered with kites of cinnamon and bosky mauve. Pierrot mooned over his tortoise-bodied lute. Ribbons of lettuce green hung from it. Among these figures of the commedia walked, danced, embraced and drank real people, if you could call them that, the damsels and queens for a day of rustic picnic. It was stylised, yet domestic, unreal in the uniformity of the faces of the revellers, which seemed, like the faces of ballet dancers, to have more in common than simply eyes, nose, mouth, even the actual cast of those features. It was as though the painter had codified the faces, for what was variable and distinctive was the colour, pattern and texture of the limbs, clothes, tents, instruments and bowers of the figures. Swagged, paisleyed, pied, piped, tasselled, pelmetted, stippled and dappled with a lemony sun which was gently overlaid and contradicted by the real pale sun from outside, as it washed in, checked by the windows’ astragals, the scene was as busy but orderly as an enormous textile. Appearance was everything. It was not a tidy room but everything in it appeared to be placed, not put. It was full of broken light. The shadows of the last leaves on the trees by the canal showed trembling over their still, painted counterparts. Painted clouds showed flocky underparts where the real sun fell. And the clouds of steam from
the bath were not, as nothing was, what they seemed to be. The bath was foaming over, I saw as I came closer, moving past a shawled piano, with a deep head of baby’s breath.
‘It’s customary for brides,’ he said.
It was all too lovely.
I am an intellectual snob. In really lovely rooms, I have eaten canned ravioli and hairy toast, with great painters whose trousers are their painting rags. I mistrust loveliness unaccompanied by a little salutary privation. Battered beauties, ruins, were what I was used to. There was something too groomed, too purchased, about coexistent beauty and luxury.
‘Don’t be a prig,’ said Lucas Salik. ‘You are a young woman, and engaged to be married for the first time, so leave your high mind on the hatstand and have some of this.’
The feast was cold. It was like the meal which Beauty eats in the house of the Beast before he appears. This was clear delicious food unmixed, primary on the flat palette of the plate. There was red salmon, and red tomatoes dewy without skin; there were red plums and yellow plums and a bowl of green and purple leaves. These leaves were glossy, and there was a smell of oil and wine. Chinese white, four peeled eggs lay like decoys on a blue pond of dish. There was a loaf which was torn in pieces, of a white just warmer than milk but not as deep as cream; the top of this bread was shiny, its declivities and heights grape-shot with seeds. White butter, white cheese and red wine were wax and chalk and ruby in the sinking sun. The room smelt of one other thing, not smoke, or flowers, but something between, with the pervasive strength of the one and the sweetness of the other. On a glass dish flat like a lily-pad lay platelets of sugared carmine jelly.
It was a meal to be painted not eaten – but have you never wondered in what state still lives are by the time their beauty has been transposed into paint? The caterpillars on the plums must be chrysalids on prunes by then, and the game riced with grubs, its feathers long poached by the painter’s wife for her hat.
A Case of Knives Page 17