A Case of Knives

by Candia McWilliam

  ‘I think they meant them to cut orchids,’ I said, and we all laughed. Dick and Gloria held their groins in faked pain. Higher now in my belly, the baby pressed against my heart.

  Chapter 21

  I had four full days to go. Before going to bed in London on the night of the first of December, I had received a telephone call from Monica Darbo. It was clear that she found my passivity fitting. I wondered whether she felt the great contusion of will deep in my malleable manner.

  ‘Some last things, Cora,’ she said. I thought of last things: urns, caskets, cerements, the emergency rations of Egyptian graves, a few raisins and a slave. There is a congruence about weddings and funerals in Christian life; but for the hats, they are where we most nearly meet our Maker’s eye. Christenings are more dangerous because the children, squibs who have not yet learnt good taste, keep lighting on things unmentionable.

  ‘Fire away, Monica.’ She made me talk as I strictly do not. As we grew older, would I speak to her through birth and bereavement as though she were someone pleasant enough whom I had met in a middle-class queue, at the butcher or the lingerie sale?

  ‘The heaters go on in the church two days before to take the chill off, expensive but there you are, and it’s not as though church was the living-room. But the flowers and foliage prefer a bit of an edge, so I’ve said to keep it parky in the vestry, where we’ll be signing. You won’t mind that, will you? Then the green stuff can stay in there till the last moment.’

  ‘That sounds most reasonable. Thank you for doing all this, Monica,’ I said into the receiver.

  ‘It’s what I’m here to do. It’s not as though you could be here with Hal.’ Her voice implied that we would somehow mark each other and appear as ‘seconds’ at our wedding.

  ‘How is Hal?’ I was just a good enough actress to ask.

  ‘Out, he’s so busy at the moment. Such a lot to do. But you must just get yourself as beautiful as possible for the day.’ My looks were not in her style, nor were they at their best. Had it not struck her either, who had girdled my waist with satin leaves, that I was growing like a cuckoo, in the heart of her own nest?

  ‘And Cora, I’ve got plastic bags to put over the bridesmaids’ heads. You know, in case it rains.’

  I thought of the three little girls, plump, oven-ready, behind plastic, no breath clouding the clear bags, the satin feet like little trotters.

  ‘How sensible. What if there’s snow? Or a hurricane? Won’t the tent blow away?’ But I must be careful not to be too satirical.

  ‘On the whole early December is pretty still round here.’ The air was like jelly all around ‘Cranford’.

  ‘I’ve had Mrs Hall do two identical cakes, so people don’t feel fobbed off by the bottom layer.’ Do you dream then of your husband to be only if you have a slice from the top tier of wedding cake under the pillow? Perhaps a slice from the second tier leads to dreams of adultery?

  ‘And the bottom tier is already in the freezer for a christening.’ Her voice was unprurient. A baby would be like a car, what one had. Which was lucky in the circumstances.

  ‘I’ve made buttonholes of laurel and mistletoe for the groom and best man.’ She was referring to her two elder sons, yet their rank must be mentioned. She was like a service wife speaking of her husband to an NCO.

  ‘Mr Hall is going to wash the car, in and out.’ The Darbos’ car smelt of pine and new carpets. ‘There’s a new lavender fascia polish I like the look of.’ The car was of a colour referred to as ‘heather’ by Mrs Darbo, who never called colours by their bolder, more general names. Her bath was lemon, her suitings aqua, almond, sky. There was a good dash of gouache-like white thickening her perceptions.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ I asked, a bit too late.

  ‘No, love, as far as that goes, we just want you to look your best and say the right things.’

  I was shocked to tears by the endearment. Like a deformed face touched, my heart swelled dangerously, and I said in a voice colder than I intended, ‘Good night, and thank you.’

  I slept very well, waking up with a child’s appetite, refreshed by the hours of crying I had put in before sleep. Dick and Gloria had made black coffee in a jug and there was a pot of milk on the old stove, whose thorny trivets rattled when the milk approached the boil.

  ‘The trick’s to catch it while it’s all froth and no liquid, and not spill a drop,’ said Gloria.

  ‘Tasty,’ said Dick. He stressed the second syllable. He was quiet in the mornings.

  ‘Was that Holly or Ivy reduced you to tears last night, then?’ asked Gloria. Like a lot of untidy people, he was very neat in some ways, and one of these was to keep dirty talk in the bedroom.

  ‘Could you hear? I am sorry.’

  ‘It’s only natural, four days off and counting.’

  ‘Don’t be nice to me, Dick, or I’ll start again. Give me sugar, jam, honey, anything to fill me up.’

  ‘You’ve got fatter. Don’t overdo it. Brides are meant to melt away. Anyway, you’ve got love, you don’t need sweets.’

  ‘Does it show?’

  ‘What?’ they both asked.

  ‘The fatterness.’

  ‘Only to us. We watch waistlines all day, remember. Too much body in the corps and we’re on to it. But yours isn’t food, is it, or is it?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  They both spoke at once. From ferociously respectable homes themselves, they were faced with something they understood – a shotgun-bride. Probably they had seen it dealt with before. Gloria anyway was often in touch with saints Anthony, Jude and Rocco, for lost things, lost causes and lost potency.

  They fell back on kitchen witchcraft, warm drinks and old sentences.

  ‘Two birds with one stone . . .’

  ‘Can’t cry over spilt milk.’

  ‘Dry your eyes and drink up.’

  They were incurious about Hal’s attitude to the baby. Probably they assumed he knew. We were so near to the wedding that I felt I could ask them not to tell.

  ‘I don’t want to spoil it for everyone,’ I said.

  ‘But babies are the point,’ said Dick.

  ‘Don’t back-seat drive, love,’ said Gloria to him. ‘We won’t say. Now or never. It’s not her fault we’re experts. A doctor wouldn’t know yet. Or does he?’ he said, turning his head over his shoulder to ask me. They were both very curious about Lucas, probably on account of his celebrity in the newspapers.

  ‘No he doesn’t,’ I said. The thought of him made me so empty I wanted to suck on a spoon of honey all day. I was viscous with self-pity. Like all lonely secret-keepers, I was near to telling everything. It was only fortunate that my discoverers were Dick and Gloria. It could as easily have been Stanley, the tramp who sang and masturbated all day on the bench outside. It could have been the woman in the supermarket, who had picked my leeks up, looked at them very closely, and told me her husband did not like foreign food.

  ‘Will you be all right if we leave you till tonight?’ asked Dick. They were taking more notice of me than ever before. It was horribly touching. There was one word I could not bear them to say.

  It was their last word as they left. ‘See you later, little mother.’

  After they had gone, I made a loaf into sandwiches. I made golden syrup sandwiches. I made sandwiches with hundreds and thousands. I made sandwiches with strawberry jam, the cooked berries like anemones at low tide. I made molasses sandwiches, which smelt like horses in winter. I made them all before eating them, and I put them on a white plate. I was in my nightdress and by the time I had finished it was dirty with stickiness. I was not full, though my teeth tasted like seaside rock. But the ulcerous hunger was still there. Sometimes I could feed this emptiness with a bout of destruction. I walked to the bathroom, and looked at myself in the mirror, face only. I looked until I had made rivers of the red veins in my eyes, creeks of the lines on my forehead, rainforest of the roots of my hair. I blew up the image of my face like a photograph, until I
saw it so grotesque and so enormous that I could imagine myself dancing around each black follicle on the waxy white floor of my scalp. I imagined nits grazing like sheep on these uplands. I blew the horrid picture up, till the grain was like a magnified photograph of a murder victim. I made myself dead.

  Then I took the mirror and threw it into the bath, so that I could no longer see this ugliness.

  The bits of mirror, white in the white room like seagulls in snow, lifted and settled like ice. After the one big noise, there was only the sound of settling. The white pediment of the mirror’s frame was dusty with old powder, like a ruined doorway after shellfire.

  I resumed the day.

  Washing the white plate and my smutched nightdress and tidying the bathroom took most of the morning. I turned on the radio. It made me included once more, member of that family of unseen listeners. I felt it gave decency to me, so reasonable were the speakers who returned familiar as friends but not as personal. There must be other girls listening, girls in the club. Yet this was not the radio of contact and access and phone-in – I was nervous of that – but the radio of made jokes and prerecorded surprise. The only real surprises on this radio station were the big ones: wars, strikes, murders.

  The programme was Desert Island Discs. ‘And one book . . .’ I moved away from the radio to put my shards of mirror, now wrapped in newspaper, into the dustbin. The castaway is also permitted to take one luxury. I had often considered this. Lipstick, women say, but the clever ones know they can suck the red Morocco of their Bible for that. As it was, with the baby, perhaps I should ask for a luxury for him. A father was rather more than a luxury. Maybe the baby was my luxury.

  I took a pot of cooling tea into my bedroom and started to pack my things ready to move to the house Hal had found. He had liked the idea of what he called investment property, which, as far as I could see, meant very expensive and bound to become more so. It was in a part of London I did not care for, Fulham. I was obscurely pleased about this, as it dissociated me further from my own life. He was welcome to fill it with sunken baths and kitchen peninsulas. Yet it was a present from Lucas Salik.

  I felt that the house was from Lucas Salik to someone else, I did not know whom, not to Hal and myself. It was as though we were to squat in it, or at any rate I was to do so. The house was being fitted at unseemly speed with expensive things. There was nothing money could not buy. The garden, now filled with old paintpots and propped trestles, its pond stacked with discarded accoutrements of departed lives, too vulnerable for the open air – a clothes horse, a carpet beater like a pretzel, a clyster perhaps for wasps’ nests – would, I was sure, be neat if unleafy on our return from honeymoon.

  It is impossible not to feel a honeymoon as a holiday apart from other holidays. I do not think there can be such a thing as a second honeymoon, though perhaps it is different if you belong to a church which can annul. But I think, like virginity, a honeymoon can come only once. I did not know where ours was to be. ‘Nowhere too poor,’ said Hal. ‘But not too expensive either.’ This did not leave anywhere very much, and I imagined that real honeymooners would surely like best the rich savannas of whatever bed in which they found the other.

  Towards four o’clock, I finished packing up my possessions. They looked like stage properties. There was no menagerie of toys, but the toy clothes of girlhood – shorts, little skirts, ballet shoes, braces with redcurrants sewn down them – allowed themselves to be packed small, as though they had shrunk. I boxed away the shoes like snakes in which I had first seen Lucas Salik. They, like the shoes with telephones at the heel, were products of afternoons of prototype-making, when I thought that I must be able to make and sell shoes. There is a market for gimmicks, as long as you are not too original, or so I told myself, sent away by shoemakers, and having left no glass slipper at anyone’s threshold. ‘Imaginative, but unwearable,’ they had said. I was determined to prove them wrong. But, of course, they were exactly right.

  My books looked smaller, and the dust lay on them like ash. Green Greek and red Latin, the parallel texts packed neatly into a single box. ‘Dead languages,’ Hal had said, and I felt very tired as though I might crack of boredom if I heard myself reply. ‘What use is Classics in today’s society?’ he said and I resented the singular verb and bit my tongue.

  I left out from my packing a sponge bag. My nightdress was drying round the tun of the immersion heater. A small suitcase packed for the unknown destination of my honeymoon – our honeymoon – stood like a hod of bricks at the side of my fort of boxes.

  I went to the now mirrorless bathroom and pushed the bathplug into its socket. It was a universal plug, such as travellers to Russia use, and it would not fit snug. I tipped a mogul of blue salts into the tub and turned on the taps, which called a seabird’s cry from the heater, and a dim roar. There was a smell of matches as the boiler ignited. The water rose, blue and troubled, up the sides of the bath. I stepped in, thinking, if I was thinking at all, about making a cake for Dick and Gloria. Perhaps I could even bake something into it as the prison visitor bakes in the file, two bachelors’ buttons maybe. I rocked. The baby rose to the top of me as I lay. It rested like cream over milk.

  I awoke, and heard Dick and Gloria themselves. The bath was not quite cold. The wind was getting up outside, flapping like a sail going up. The gusts were caught among the masses of the city, an inconsistent, interrupted wind.

  Dick and Gloria sounded quiet, like nurses.

  ‘She’s not in the bedroom, only a lot of boxes,’ said Gloria.

  ‘Cora, are you about?’

  I pulled myself out of the bath as out of a rocking chair in sand, my pregnant body off its centre, and put on a towel.

  ‘Hello Cora.’ They looked embarrassed.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve not got any clothes on. My nightie’s wet and I’m afraid the bathroom mirror . . .’

  ‘Get a drink,’ said Dick to Gloria, and he pulled me into their room which was like the parlour of an out-of-season house in Chekhov, the furniture covered with the dustsheets of the tea-impregnated lace.

  We had brandy from thick glasses. Had they not been thick, I would have cracked mine into my palm.

  ‘We raced with the telephone. We thought Hal might get you first. Something rather bad has happened to Lucas Salik.’ They were that good. They did not draw to themselves the glamour a bearer of bad news can claim, with suspense and banner headlines.

  I felt three things. One was a sharp deep pain, as though I had been sliced. One was guilt, at not having loved him enough to provide a protection. The third, as involuntary as a smile at a funeral, was relief. There could be no wedding now.

  ANNE

  Chapter 22

  I was not looking for it. I saw it first in the paper. The only reason Tertius did not get in with the news beforehand was my insomnia, which had held off till about four in the morning and then arrived and faced me out like a clock whose hands will not move. I opened my shutters and watched the London darkness change beyond the balcony. It changed from deep festive blue to cupreous green to rusty red. There was a wind which came from no fixed quarter. The leaves had been swept away by a giant with dust in his hair and a stiff besom. His coat was shouldered in reflecting plastic which was as proclamatory as a white stick; it said, I am very slow, do not run me over while I sweep up leaves before your car. His cart was made of some base metal like zinc, frosty with arcs of fanned shimmer. Metallic too, the moon showed sharp in the changing sky. I moved to the other, cold, side of my bed, and took up my book. I could as well have written letters or cooked a small feast, but there is a night-shift loneliness to these things, done alone; with the one other, of course, they are transformed.

  I read my book by turning its pages. I had no presentiment, for I could not feel time passing. I jerked to complete alertness with rough eyeballs and a snapped neck when the papers came slapping through the letterbox like fish.

  I receive all the newspapers in case there is one I feel like reading.
There is no nonsense about ironing them, but at Stone the tabloids go into the low Aga for ten minutes and in London I wear white cotton gloves which get black on Sundays. If you read one of those tabloid papers without wearing gloves and then went out and killed a man, the police would have you by the evening edition.

  Today there was no time for gloves. I am used to pictures of Lucas in the newspapers, but these pictures were cropped. I recognised the photograph; it had been taken at a party. His face, repeated in various sizes on the front page of each paper, looked facetious without the body, at ease, one hand no doubt holding a glass, from which it had been separated. I was used to seeing photographs of Lucas with children tented up in bed or parents looking like lottery winners. But these reproductions of this personal photograph suggested not the saintly surgeon the papers as a rule promoted. He looked vulnerable and exposed. I did not read the words till I was back up in bed, where I had dropped the papers from my bundled nightdress. If I don’t read the words, they will go away, I thought. I’ll phone him and he will be there.

  He had been attacked, it seemed. He was not dead, though he had been left for dead. An attendant had found him; attendant of what, the papers did not say. Like the street sweeper, there must be people who sweep up corpses. I wondered if the attacker realised just whom he had been assailing, if he had read of his victim in the paper the morning before, if he connected the surgeon and the falling, bloody man. He had been robbed. He had been beaten and cut about in what the police were able to describe as ‘a brutal fashion’. Show me the kind cut.

  None of it was at all unusual in these violent times. Sir Lucas was a well-dressed man, distinguished looking. The implication was that the streets are not safe for those of this description. Only the poor and already halt should go out; let the others stay in their well-appointed quarters. Some papers implied that he had simply conducted lightning, that fame has its black side. Some spoke of the ingratitude of a society served by these – immigrant was the word – healers; there was a declamatory piece of hysteria about blood for blood.