It was, like all news, a game of ambiguity. Read one way it meant one thing, read in the other way it meant another.
There was a fog of implication about the whole thing, which suggested that the papers were going to see which way things went. If he died, he would be honoured richly. If he was kept alive by heart surgery, all well and good, rather a coup for the biter bit school of thought. If he mended very quickly but there wasn’t much else in the way of news, well . . .
I supposed it must have been a boy. The newspapers would not be unaware of this but it was not yet of any use to them.
I could see him in my head. He was calling. He was very pale and he was bandaged. He lay on his side as though in a painted deposition. He looked stretched. The blood was very clear, not brown, and it kept coming and coming. It came in a regular seep and surge, seep and surge, as he grew whiter. This picture left me and I thought back to the actual time of the attack. What I could not bear to think of was the moment when, as I assumed it must have, desire had changed to fear. At some split, sectioned, second the fear which was part of the desire must have eclipsed it. It was the touch of the inorganic knife which must have done it. I did not know, but thought he must be used to cuffs and kicks, of a regulated kind, held within bounds. I do not understand his need but I do not fear it or dismiss it on his behalf and I knew that Lucas did need it.
I could not stop thinking about him, about his last moments. He must have passed out. I thought of his head, low in dirt. I knew, as I knew at Mordred’s death, that this was something which would not leave me. Not that it would haunt me, nothing so insubstantial. It was a positive constant, like love. I thought of him as I arose and washed and dressed. It was not a gentle folding of thoughts about Lucas, as though preparing him for the gradual washing-out we accord even the dead we have greatly loved; it was that nothing did not remind me of him, dirty and broken and bloody. The dawn was late. There was a magnesium brightness low under the fading wheel of moon. The sun came came up like revenge, red.
But, look, I had him dead already. He might not be.
Tertius’s telephone call was a relief. To talk about it was for a second to abscond from the fearful cinema of blood in my head. It was clear that he had not yet worked out a way of distancing himself from it; I was not sure of Tertius’s own tastes (do you know if your neighbour sucks oranges or cuts them up or just eats the smiling pieces as they come?), but he must have felt a guilty relief that it was not he who had been cut down. Later, if Lucas lived, Tertius would be the first to say, ‘Lucky old you, I’ve never managed to get them to go that far,’ and look around the room to see the effect, but now he was all officious spokesman and helpmeet. He was crying. I blessed him for it. He sounded like someone who is swallowing blades. My tears started to come; they were cold. They would not stop. I was disgusted at my own unbloody, clean state. I wished it could have been me. At least then I should not have to think about it, I could just die.
‘Can I come to you?’ I asked.
‘Are you all right on your own?’
It was as though murder was catching. I would be murdered if that would make him out of pain. I hated the slits in his body. Entrance into the body is private, not for strangers. I hate clean cuts, they make cheese of flesh. I hate the glimpse they afford of within, shiny and meticulously packed. A sharp knife to my finger, and I am holding it aloft like Liberty, to bring the blood back to my heart.
How would they hang this whole man aloft to retain his blood?
‘I’m not all right on my own. I’ll be better with you. I’m coming,’ I said.
‘I’ll ring the hospital.’
I could not drive myself, I was shaking too much, in irregular spasms, as though my body were trying to throw off a weight, which it could not. People jerk like that when they are exorcised. It seemed unfair to me as the taxi drove through the awakening streets that I was free to do as I wished with my body, but Lucas had had that taken from him. The taxi was surprising and beautiful to me, a barouche of leather, glass and steel. Its several blacks, of rubber, hide, paint, were too much for me to take in. A bunch of flowers would have slain me with colour and variety. I felt like someone whom a bullet has missed in war. I could see nothing but the futile beauty about me, for the bullet had hit my beloved friend, but its sharp trajectory had been enough to make me see how bright life was and how close death.
‘I feel like the shit who pushes his way into the last lifeboat,’ said Tertius at his chambers. ‘I doubt I’ll ever forget this day.’
‘December the third. Oh my God, worst of all, the wedding,’ I said.
‘What do you mean, worst of all? Can’t you ever let up? Please, Anne, have a care. He’s not a social problem, he’s our best friend.’ I saw that Tertius was pleased to carp at me. It was restorative. His last sentence was not convincing.
‘You know what I mean, “worst of all”. There’s nothing so dreadful as calling-in festivities. It’s bad enough when the bride decides she’s got to join a cult in Devon, but as for this . . .’
Tertius began to laugh. ‘How would you suggest the wording went?’ he asked. ‘“On account of the untimely demise of the groom’s – ahem – benefactor at the hand of a warrior unknown though to be honoured in a white wedding world where boys and girls live happy ever after, we are holding not nuptials but obsequies”? I’m certain in these enlightened days, Anne, you can get them ready printed.’
Bitterness is wanton, like showing the hangman the gauge of your neck, even wearing a pretty silky slip-knot around it in readiness. It also comes easily to lazy sentimentalists; it bestows an articulacy which sounds like thought and fires up the clay of sentiment till it resembles a vessel which will hold water. Mostly the bitter ones started with little sweetness, anyway. But Tertius’s sexual-guerrilla talk was caused by something, I was sure; he seemed very upset at the thought of the cancelled wedding, and the upset was coming from him in shocks of irritation quite apart from his grief about Lucas. I felt it from him as you might feel the irritation of a man who has missed a plane in an earthquake. The unheroic side of life continues. That is one of the hardest things to face, the banal form of life after death.
‘What did the hospital say?’ I asked. There was so much emotion in the room that I wanted to bring it to heel before we had a fight, just to stop it swallowing us. I sat in the window seat. A shute of sunshine ended in my lap, full of motes. I had no idea at all of what to wear; oh God, let him get better so I can tell him that he has discovered the occasion of my not having a thing to wear.
‘They said did he have any parents? I said that they were his employers, did they have no records? They said that I was clearly overwrought and that they advised two Disprin and a book but no, at the moment he was serious, not out of danger.’
‘It makes him sound like a little ship. Can we see him?’
‘Certainly not, unless he gets worse or better. To put the pennies on his eyes or in his mouth or wherever, or else to take him round adult games and deli food, I suppose.’
‘Have you spoken to Hal?’
‘I can’t find him. I have tried Lucas’s own flat, Hal’s parents, the nid d’amour in Fulham . . .’
Like his boisterous clothes and cubic cufflinks, his expression seemed tactless but gallant, as though his show must go on.
‘He’s not at his work?’
‘No one seems to be able to find him. And I don’t want to be the first to tell Cora.’ He pondered for a moment. ‘Do you really think the wedding should be called off?’ This seemed to worry him a good deal.
‘I think we should all think about it seriously. I suppose we should try to do whatever Lucas would want us to do.’
Tertius looked shifty, like someone blaspheming in his sleep on a train, who has awoken to find his carriage full of nuns. He did not seem able to stop his face assuming a barker’s jovial untrustworthy expression. Poor thing, here he was, miserable, but his big red face could not accommodate it.
‘I’
m sure Lucas would want us to go on,’ said Tertius. He made the marriage sound like the attainment of a summit. He was an incongruous man of action.
As Lucas’s oldest female friend, I felt that the ordinances and stratagems of the next few days would be up to me. Like cleaning sinks, organising rites of passage falls to the women. Lucas’s own mother I knew was dead, his father too.
‘Very well. This is what we’ll do. We shall decide nothing about the wedding till we have spoken to Hal and Cora. We cannot visit Lucas in hospital, but we must make sure they have each of our telephone numbers and we must call them every hour if we are not at home. We have two days clear before the wedding. Either he must die quickly or he must show a big improvement soon.’ I felt very strong and completely breakable, tense as frozen metal.
It was as though I had pushed Lucas out to sea. Life and death were too great for my control. I was left with the trivial and comprehensible, a party which would or would not take place, its provider either rocked in the deep or sunk beneath it. I prepared myself not for the first time in my life for a midwinter spring of assumed competence.
Radiant with self-control, I kissed Tertius’s red face with my cheekbone, and went out into the wind. I knew what to wear.
I would keep him alive with my will.
Chapter 23
I took a short-cut home past the shop of Mr Virtue, in its mews off Bond Street. As a rule, there is in the window one slung masterpiece of vair or blue mink, the restraining chains against robbery unconcealed. At night the window is screened with mesh as solid as the marble fretwork in a mosque, though Mr Virtue would not like that comparison. It was on grounds sartorial rather than religious that he was suspicious of Mohamedans, making for them as he did coats of great splendour which might never be publicly seen. But their taste must have given him some variety in his work.
I have been to synagogue with Lucas, though he told me he preferred church with me since it was less personal (but what could be more personal than that bleeding man on the cross?), and the upper level where the women stand was all sheeny dark fur seamlessly stitched by Mr Virtue and men like him, every coat the same – though without the effortless uniformity of the original contents – being tailored, cut and fitted for the new but secondhand wearer.
Today, the shackled trophy was not in the window; the grille was down as it should not have been during the daytime. Like a star, but not the evenly pointed star of David, was a crazed burst in the glass before the grille. A policeman dignified the door of the shop, giving it almost diplomatic status. I pitied him in the bitter cold; he was not wearing gloves, which seem to be the preserve of the enemy. Burglars, stranglers, aristocratic Nazis and collaborative wops may wear gloves; junta leaders, despots and dictators wear gloves, and the Guardia Civil; but bobbies do not. While they may not have cold feet, they must have cold hands.
Today it was not a shock for me to see this ugliness and indication of violence. They accorded with how I now knew the world was, unless I could outwit it.
The unreal self-control made me able to think about the policeman’s gloves at the same time as I grieved for my friend. I decided that I must investigate what had happened here. I had trained myself to stay sane in the face of horror. By dissociation and observation, I reminded myself that in the midst of death we are in life.
Robberies at furriers’ premises are not uncommon, though it is more usual for the workrooms or the storeroom to be chosen. I approached. Haloed, as in a war comic, by the starry hole in his window, was the face of Mr Virtue. He was wailing. His wailing seemed to come in cantos, as though he were telling an old story.
‘Please let me in,’ I said to the policeman.
‘Sorry, lady,’ he said, ‘the premises is not open to customers today.’
‘I should think not,’ I said, ‘but Mr Virtue is my friend.’
‘Who shall I say then, lady?’ he said.
‘Can I not just go in?’
‘Security. We must obtain the names of all people who go in and come out.’
‘Lady Cowdenbeath,’ I said.
‘Not a friend, then,’ said the policeman.
But he let me in with a new resentful deference. Uniformed security forces fear the aristocracy. Plain-clothed detectives in fiction merely defect from it.
Mr Virtue could not stand still; he was walking about the room picking up and letting drop the pieces of glass which lay across each other like ice. The grey room was foggy with fur, as though enormous cats had been fighting; the surprising thing, one felt, was that there was no blood, when the scene was so clearly that of the aftermath of violence. The impression was that of those perverse poised photographs of beautiful young women in red underwear and icy gems. The shocking thing about the wreckage of Mr Virtue’s shop was the elegance of it. Sheeny caterpillars of monkey fur and snowy lianas of fox-tail crawled down the walls. A silvery grey conversation seat the shape of the symbol for infinity stood in a drift of smoky mink pelts. The grey walls, covered with a damask which changed with the light, fitful, as the wind blew clouds over the white winter sun, had been cut open. Through these fraying gashes were visible panels of some insulating material; the purchasers of very expensive goods like not only warmth but quiet.
Mr Virtue was making a noise like the breathing of a large unwell animal in its earth. He stepped over a heap of mauvish and lavender skins; they had the grey bloom of grass tussocks near the sea, and where the skin showed it was bleached like drift-wood. It was as though the animal owners of these reassembled skins had returned and spent the night fighting, reincarnated inimical species in a tame setting. The mess looked like none that humans could make.
‘Look at the paper behind the sound-proofing,’ said Mr Virtue. He had a strong accent. His ears and nose grew black hairs and where he shaved was blue. Over each ear was a long curl of black hair and his eyebrow was a line over his khaki-pouched eyes. He wore the white overall of a butcher or a scientist, but it was sewn at the breast with his own name. From his pocket protruded a folding ruler. His hands were white with French chalk. He was a small man with tiny feet. He kicked, not so as to hurt, the soft mauve pile of fur. Beneath it, face down, were fans of papers. His accounts, I supposed, whose figures were to tally with the mending of his burnt child’s skin.
‘Mr Virtue, what is this, do you know, why did they not take the furs they found here?’
‘Look at the paper behind the sound-proofing,’ said Mr Virtue. He was still making the noise as though he had breathed burning gas. I thought that I must do as he said, just to keep him from strangling on his indignation. He moved about the room like a dog with nowhere to go, shaking, dainty on his feet, having a care to his back. He looked unbearably cold.
‘The paper?’
‘Where they have split the panel. Look behind it. Just snap a bit off. It doesn’t matter.’
Polystyrene snaps like rice-paper. I broke off a long triangle and dropped it among the splintered glass. It landed without sound.
‘I thought so,’ said Mr Virtue. ‘But I did not want to discover it on my own.’
‘What is it, Mr Virtue? Can I help?’ I felt unable to touch him but was sure that that was what he needed. ‘Where is Mrs Virtue?’ I asked, feeling useless and out of place. I wished he were a stranger so that I might embrace him.
‘Mrs Virtue, thank you, is at the hospital with Tomas. Look at the paper, now, be so kind.’
‘It is ordinary striped paper, about fifteen years old, nice enough.’
‘And I worked for twenty-five years to afford it and twenty more to afford to cover it up and who cares at all?’ My Virtue began to cry without any help from his body. It seemed to be fighting him. ‘I think it is a perfectly nice paper as you say and I wish I had perfectly nicely left it on the perfectly nice walls so that this perfectly nice person could come and perfectly nicely put their knife into it. Why did I waste the time? Why did I improve myself whatsoever? The police say this is what I must expect. I tell them that it
is what I have learnt not to expect, and it has taken me my whole life to learn not to expect it.’ In between his words, Mr Virtue’s breath was sawing in his chest. He looked not violent but ashamed. There was a trace of something very alarming to me. He was indignant, frightened – and unsurprised.
‘Who, and why, Mr Virtue, and what do the police say?’
‘The police say . . . the police say’ – Mr Virtue drew breath – ‘that this sort of thing is to be expected where things of great value are found. I tell them that the people who have been here are not thieves or they would have gone to where the things of great value are found. This is my workroom. They think I do not speak English properly. I explain again. They say your thief nowadays is just after a few bob till the next fix. I say he is not my thief. He is theirs. I say they read too many bad newspapers and why don’t they listen. Nothing has been taken. And they say they will leave this baby outside with his bare hands and big feet while they notify a lady Inspector who will come and speak to me when I am myself. They cross the road and buy some coffee at the sandwich place and go away.
‘Eating on duty,’ concluded Mr Virtue.
‘Should I stay with you till the woman comes?’ I enquired. I wondered whether this would insult him. The policewoman might think that this frightened small foreign man had asked one of his snooty clients for protection. I did not mind; I have seen the police antagonised by an officerial male, but they are flummoxed by a woman treating them as upper servants.
‘No, but thank you.’ Since our new relation, bestowed by the crime, he had not used my name. Before it had been a fender, protecting us from each other. ‘But will you help me tidy up?’ he asked.
‘Did the police say you could?’
‘And you too see too much television. I am tidying up. I am not sitting here, thinking. As a matter of fact, they did say I could tidy up. They have done the notes and the prints as they put it.’
A Case of Knives Page 20