‘His lust isn’t bad, Cora.’ Oh God, I would shortly be explaining to her about the little seeds. ‘It’s bad for him in the case of Hal,’ I went on, ‘because Hal has cunningly diverted it so that Lucas expresses it in every way but the only way. It is very painful to see.’
‘Something has always prevented me from revealing what I really thought of Hal,’ she said. ‘Vanity, I think, as much as anything. I did not think I could be seen to marry someone I had advertised as a nasty bore, but when I first saw him I was stunned. I thought he was like a tart, flash and curves and jut and paint, and my face must have said it all, but then I saw he was what I needed . . .’
‘You sound like a mad eugenist,’ I said.
‘I am one, I suppose. The father of the baby is hale and hearty, even quite nice . . .’
‘Who is he?’
‘John Croom.’
The prompter at my shoulder acknowledged another royal flush.
‘He is my nephew. My son was his age, a little younger. Your baby is my great-something,’ I said.
‘Great nuisance,’ she said.
‘I am so pleased. I want to tell Lucas. Oh God I’m so pleased. Can’t you tell John? He is nice. A bit of a cold fish.’ The child’s relation to me gave me yet more strength for Lucas.
‘I call him that too. He doesn’t like it. I don’t know. He wouldn’t have me. I’m soiled goods. Leavings, as well as pregnant. And Hal and I haven’t yet called off the wedding. It’s all far too complicated.’
‘It may be far too complicated, but it is a deal simpler than the other way. Anyway, leave it for now.’ I was being hypocritical. I was filling with resplendent middle-aged energy, but I knew not to nag the girl.
‘I haven’t really explained to you about Lucas and Hal.’
I had decided not to tell her about Lucas’s fearful drag-hunting at night; I had not the words, everything sounded arch or brutal, as though one was describing a disease. It was in any case the kind of thing it is easier to understand once you have learnt some analogous bent in yourself. Nor would I tell her, pregnant, recently disembarrassed of her blind filial – I supposed – passion for him, that Lucas had selected her as Hal’s wife because she was malleable, a rag doll who could be tossed away.
‘Hal was desperate to marry, quite suddenly, and Lucas was so hurt and downcast that he wanted at least to have a say in the choice of bride. And that’s you. So you see he likes you.’
‘It’s odd to want, suddenly, to get married, isn’t it?’ she asked.
‘You did.’
‘Hal can’t be pregnant.’
The talking was tiring me, though my brain was full of emerging tallies and rallying hopes. I still had the sense of being pregnant myself, with Lucas’s state, and felt the deprivation of his actual presence, but I knew he would be all right, now that there was so much to live for.
‘Let’s ring the hospital,’ I said to Cora, who seemed even a bit lively.
‘Fingers crossed,’ she said, and she crossed all the fingers of each hand over, so they looked arthritic.
‘Not the left hand, Cora, it’s bad luck,’ I cautioned.
I got through to the hospital and spoke to someone whose voice called down a corridor and relayed an echo-foreshadowed dispatch.
‘There is hope,’ the voice said.
We had been through weeping and laughter, love and desire, and now, from the hospital, that strange unclosing bank of life and its irreducible overdraft of illness and injury, came hope. Cora and I each took half of it to bed on the night of the third of December.
Chapter 26
I cannot sleep unless I have made some sense of the day. I like to shake it out and fold it, arms to sides, collar straight, no marks unexpunged. I should like to see my time as a cupboard, the days, colourful, pale, bright, in their places, individually of use, collectively beautiful and bright. But this was a white night.
My immanent narrator is for me as the sea can be. It takes no decisions, comes to no conclusions, although it can help me to do these things. I lay in my bed, on watch for Lucas’s life. The wind was unresting. It pushed through the white iron of my balcony as through the deserted bridge of a pleasure craft going into the wind. Ribbons of draught insinuated themselves between the window and its frame, lifting the muslin of the curtains.
I have always spoken aloud. It is not the same as talking to oneself, which elicits no answers and is the first sign of madness. Talking aloud, I can hear whether or not what I say is true. It is like reading aloud. False quantities and loose thinking make themselves audible. Declaiming, it is hard to deceive yourself, perhaps easier to deceive others. Though I do not doubt that the perfect voice with which to wash people’s brains is their own. The wind was loud, but its noise firmly without. The curtains, sieving out the last drift of the wind, moved in high but silent waves. I talked on. Once, when I stopped for a time, I heard someone else talking. It was the trace of my own voice, like a star drawn on a misted window, with a finger. When the wind was again the only thing I could hear, and, though wild, abstract behind glass, at last I slept.
I awoke again, the sky no paler, my eyes flinching in their sockets. I was guilty, not with the superstitious guilt I had grown used to over the past hours, of having allowed Lucas to be hurt, but with ordinary social guilt about Tertius. I had not telephoned him, as I had promised, to tell him what I had discovered of Hal and Cora’s decision. Strictly, I supposed that I had come no closer to what it was, and I had learnt some new complications which I knew it would be rash to confide, as he would instinctively turn them into a divertissement to the grand drama of blood and death. Tertius must have awaited my call, drinking till he could not have heard it had it come, I was sure. Unless Angelica Coney, who has self-possession like a skin, had stopped him. But I thought that she enjoyed seeing people behave like animals. Or, as she had it, like people. She enjoyed the humiliation of men with the Homeric ruthlessness of a goddess, and seemed frequently to be mysteriously present when it took place. I had watched her grow up and seen her stand, uninvolved cause of the rout, by knots of bloody, muddy, boys. When Alexander was small and they played together, she would make him drink and drink then tie him to the banisters at Wyvern and leave him to soak himself. I learnt this later, or I would have hit her, but he told me only when that was no longer the worst thing he could remember.
She told him bogus facts of medicine, was quite scholarly about it. I found a vivid little book she had bound herself in yellow buckram and given him. It smelt of size, from the hand-marbled papers. It was illustrated with flat cross-sections of mustardy paunch and lumpy swags of gut. Crude red arrows nibbed points where, the ill-spelt text explained, most pain would be felt. The pictorial style was knockabout and free with blood, like block-printed mediaeval marginalia. The words were convincing and literal. The certainty of children, as of very few grown-ups, is undeniable. To see these pictures was never to forget them. Who is to say that children make things up? Perhaps we just cannot make the same things out. Angelica told Alexander more than I can know, since he took the knowledge with him. I am sure that she made of the stork a vulture and of the gooseberry bush a thorn tree. They played together, all the usual games. She took his innocence. When I think of my boy, I don’t think of him with his lashes dry. He was always laughing or crying. And then he drowned, and they were wet again.
The morning came only slowly, and to occupy myself I went into my cupboards and lifted and tended and rebedded my shoes. I then went through scarves, folding them in layers of colour like soft sand. Touching the cloth, I thought of Penelope unmaking her weaving by night. The surprise of it was surely that she was not found out by a drop in standards, a slack weft, an unmatched tint, for why should you care if it is all to go? But one does, and as I thought of Lucas and Mordred and Alexander, I held and buffed in my cupboard, preparing it for the day of judgment, sorting and selecting, finding wanting, disposing. Unlike Penelope, I had no suitor and the only persistent gentleman call
er appeared to be death, waiting to collect Lucas, having been satisfied in his appointment with the other two.
A tentative dawn was announcing itself not with birds but with the sibilant awakening of the house. Which part of the body is first attacked by grief? The heart breaks, we are told. But I felt that whatever was water in me was returning to itself. I heard voices in the conduits of the house. Pipes chuckled their malice. I heard the murmurous concern of the taps, requiring a single twist to bring them to copious weeping. I was all lymph. I wanted tears.
I awoke elastic and restored, with empty eyes. The house seemed to have been consoled. It was late. Cora was by my bed.
Cora was by my bed; we were past the protracted courtship of women. It had been accelerated by emergencies of life and death. I was happy to see her.
I liked myself more when she was there. My having had a child was of use to her. It was not embarrassing, because inevitably recalling his death, as it was with other friends. She restored to me the more ordinary side of my past; without this ordinary past what was extraordinary would have been so much costume drama.
‘We are going to see him in an hour. I thought you might be someone who dressed for occasions,’ she said.
I do not habitually ask girls into my cupboards. They take it all too personally. They perceive it as an unfair advantage, of course. Then they look at me and realise that all this contemplation and cut gives me something which is not their careless appeal, which is not beauty, and they see that it has taken time, and they are impatient. Like active men who cannot see the pondering point of Plato or his lucid beauty, they want to deny it. I do not make such grand claims for clothes, naturally, but there is something so civilised in their necessariness, when it is made beautiful, that I am suspicious of those who dismiss them. They are generally people who cannot make time for whatever it is of which time is the point.
But I could hardly keep my new child out. She herself was dressed in what she had been wearing the night before. The garments were arguing less than they had been, and were buttoned to the neck. Her shoes, unsuitable but for once unvulgar, were the grey slippers which we had bought on the afternoon I had tried to get her to be tempted and clothe herself to hide her shame. She had won that skirmish, and I had no heart for more.
‘What did the hospital say? Is he that much better? Are we going to meet his secret wife?’ I asked.
I was allowing her very close to me.
‘I wonder who it was? Not Hal, with a conscience. God, his conscience must be more than pricking him, it must be cutting him up.’
I didn’t need to point out to her what she had said. Language is a case of knives.
‘Tell me. The only thing that matters is how is he? Last night there was hope, today we can see him. So what’s the difference?’
‘They never say, they can’t or they’d be priests, but what has happened is apparently that he has turned the corner. He is out of danger.’ Again the little boat, this time tacking, leaving the reef behind, waiting for the wind.
‘I think it’s more comforting that they talk like that. It draws the thorn. We would not understand the medical words and could not bear the emotional ones.’
‘It’s like a police state, only told what we should know.’ She stuck her chin out.
‘Nonsense, Cora, if pain isn’t an official secret what is? Privacy is a democratic privilege.’
But she was messing about in the cupboard.
‘I never thought anyone did it so carefully,’ she said. ‘You must be worried you’ll get run over by the State Coach, not just a bus. I have never seen such things. And they are clean as though for inspection.’
‘I like that,’ I said. ‘It makes me happy. It stops things going out of control. One for wash and one for wear, and then you can turn the other cheek knowing that there . . .’
‘Are three more cheeks,’ said Cora. I like cheap jokes when I am overwrought, but not many people see this part of me.
‘I was going to say knowing that there is another cheek.’ I put her down, but I was laughing.
‘I knew,’ she said. The I was long and indulgent. ‘But you have had to turn so many other cheeks you must either have several faces or be black and blue.’
‘I cover it up. Choose me some clothes.’ I did not even say it wanting to see her attempt to find something to her taste among my monotheistic vestments, and that a gloomy god. She put me into what she had chosen, zipping me up and hooking me in like a mother before a party. It was a piece of blue cloth which committed itself to the bones of the body only at the wrists and knees and in between flirted with the flesh. Until it was worn, it looked like a dead raven.
‘Lovely on,’ she said, making the ‘on’ as camp as a belted marquee.
‘Try this for size. We always say the nicest things come in the smallest parcels,’ she said, continuing the vendeuse game. I had not played like this since Alexander. She had handed me a really enormous coat. It was as heavy as a packed chandelier. It had been Mordred’s, and was far too big, black, with the shawl of beaver fur traditionally worn by capitalist oppressors. It was out of the question for me to wear it.
I am small.
‘You can wear that, Cora, if you don’t mind being taken for my girl.’ I meant it in the twilit sense, Oppie’s niece, and she took it in the maternal and gave me the uncoordinated type of embrace which must be reperformed neatly at once or be the cause of shyness for a long time to come.
‘I cannot think of anything rather, better, more, nicer. And you put this on. I wouldn’t like you to get a cold.’
Mordred would say that the English, inhibited inhabitants of a cold country, express family love with enquiries about weather-proofing – Are you warm enough? Will you be cold? Take a jersey. I was alarmed and pleased that Cora and I were expressing our love. I was afraid it might be rained off. Mordred and I had wanted a daughter. As a small boy, Alexander had asked if he might have Angelica Coney for a sister.
‘The devil you may,’ said Mordred. He was an old-fashioned man, who could invoke nothing worse than the devil. God and his adversary had not yet been moved on by the words in Angel’s little buckram pamphlet, blasphemy dethroned by pornography.
No one since Mordred had worn the coat. I did not want her to feel odd about this, but I self-indulgently wanted her to know the privilege she was enjoying.
‘It must be your husband’s,’ she said in the car on the way to the hospital. ‘I am very lucky.’
‘It doesn’t do to make a fetish out of things,’ I said.
‘I believe you, but not many people who have seen your cupboard would.’
‘And why do you?’ We were approaching the hospital. On the tiles under the original windows, green-gowned pre-Raphaelite sawbones stood about with their curly lips and lily-white hands. The modern part of the hospital, Lucas’s part, stood up like a tusk.
‘Because I know that you care for what you have lost and cannot bear to lose again, more than for all that treasure trove.’
‘Here we are. Watch out for the granite gorilla, or do you know her?’ I have never been good at declarations. I elicit them and then do not know where to put them down.
We were both, I think, as excited as children about to claim a reward. To get what we want, to retrieve a life, we will make awful bargains. But I had done no trading with the devil. I had sworn to my prompting power that I would use only will. And he was well enough to be seen, after only a day and a night, proving that either my will was indomitable – or that it was quite immaterial.
We went in past the granite mother and child, a small bobble hat by the stone apple. The hat had flaps, as small as a puppy’s ears.
He had a room to himself. Cora motioned to me to go in alone. Then I saw her thinking that what I saw might distress me, so that she had better come too. She stood at my back, in her long wool and sombre fur, the grey slippers making a Sienese courtier of her. Her big face had the smoothness of fresco. Its features had an absence of radia
nce to be seen on the faces of worthies attendant on a painted crucifixion. She was young, but then, in the fifteenth century, twenty was middle-age.
Lucas was pale and bandaged so his body in the bed made a long barrow. Bladders of liquid depended from tall metal trees at his head and feet, and to each side. There was no red, anywhere. I had prepared myself for it, and there was none. I had practised, thinking of all the most bloody things I had seen. I had even thought of the thing which I do not think about, Mordred’s dying.
‘Anne,’ he said, ‘don’t be scared. Or are you disappointed?’ He spoke slowly, as though he was thinking something out. His face, with its prominent bones, resembled the false heads placed in their beds by prisoners escaping, built of papier mâché and the will to live. I could think of no word to tell him how the sight of him affected me. What we had said to each other over the years was composed of the same twenty-six letters which I wanted now to be able to shape into a perfect sentence of love.
‘We didn’t bring you anything,’ I said.
‘Nothing would have been enough to thank you for what you have given us,’ said Cora.
‘You look as though you have got something for me,’ he said, looking at her. She had taken off Mordred’s coat, and had sat down beside him in a chair on his right, between his bedside and the thin silver tree with its serous fruit and hanging tubes. Seeing him alive, and with the resilience of her state, she had blossomed. Robed to the neck, and with her hands in her blue lap, Cora looked at him. Her hands were empty, her lap full.
‘I may not be God but I am a doctor,’ he said looking at her. ‘A life for a life is it? How long till this baby is born?’
A Case of Knives Page 23