This coffee ceremony with Mrs Darbo was not funny now, but I could imagine, if Lucas lived, laughing about it with him. It was not she who was funny, nor the house, nor the garden, furled up now but potentially as garish as a golf umbrella. There was cotoneaster spidering over the slabs, which were weeded, as clean between as dominoes. It was just that we had reached the overspilling point where nothing more of a terrible nature could be borne, so the slightest thing was funny. I wished there had been an animal there, a dog, to give us innocent fun, to give us a reason besides hysteria to laugh.
‘I have decided to save the dress in case one of the boys marries someone statuesque,’ said Mrs Darbo. I had been curious about this.
‘And the flowers,’ said Cora, ‘where have they gone?’
‘Well, it was most awkward that they couldn’t go to a hospital, but then I had a brainwave, really.’ Perhaps, sensibly, they were going to keep them and give a party anyway?
‘My husband has connections in the afterlife and we are allowing them to go to the undertaker at Poole. It’s most respectable.’ This is what she said.
As we left, she took the bouquet from its vase, wiping all unsightly dampness from its stems with a pink cloth which was immediately wet through. She sought an invulnerable surface on which to place the damp cloth, and gave the flower-cauliflower to Cora. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said at the door. It was cold. She wanted to be inside her house, to shut out strangers and the wind.
‘Amazing she’s taking it so well,’ I said as we turned left on to real road, and away from their golden conifers and pink gravel.
‘It’s not that amazing. She feels guilty.’
‘She feels guilty? When for no very clear reason her son’s wedding is called off and she has to sort it out two days before. Guilty? Have a heart, Cora, do.’
‘She told me something in the kitchen. I never quite believed her and her family. I’ve never considered them seriously. But Hal has done something which makes you take her seriously.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked, asking as much on account of her tone of voice as from a desire to know.
‘He’s given himself up to the police. He did it this morning, just before we arrived. She told me in the kitchen. And she said that I would never be good enough for him, so perhaps it was a blessing . . .’
‘. . . in disguise,’ I chimed, as we swung north up the direct route to the city’s broken heart.
Chapter 29
It was March before I could get them to Stone. It took so very long because Lucas had to be well, not, as he had indicated, to resume his work, but to see Hal tried for the attack. The trial was incidental. The tragedy was not there in the cold court but long ago when Lucas first saw him. He fell in love with his own angel of death. But, perhaps because it was dark, perhaps because he was afraid, Hal had not completed his task. He was not even Lucifer, though I am sure Lucas thought him the bearer of light as he saw the golden head he loved before the knife struck. But angels are messengers sent by higher authority, and Hal’s message was a garbled one.
A jury does not find the desire of men to embrace each other in lavatories simple. There is a new righteous wrath, a new nosology of morals. The man who just used to suspect he did not like chaps in cravats drinking gin-and-it now has a flaming sword to bar their entrance into happiness. These creatures of disease, thinks the heterosexual, so tenuously preserving his right to promiscuity, had it coming to them, for the way they looked, for the way they spoke, for the way they were. Pox comes from llamas, aids from monkeys. He’s all right, he never sleeps with either. Boys who had entered the decade pioneers, with innocent brio and a taste for the design and redevelopment of the inner city, were leaving the decade lazars, and the cities ghost-towns. That the disease is shared by users of drugs, prostitutes, yes, and black men, puts power fair and square in the reins of the horsemen of the apocalypse. Like all plagues, it gives work to liars and cowards and power to the bullies. A scourge of the unrighteous, a blessing in disguise. The disease is a news vendor surpassing babies with new hearts, surpassing glandular freaks of womanhood, surpassing even crowned heads. A great game of Russian roulette for us, who do not touch the gun, to watch. It is of course a matter of time before the sickness is available to us all. And then there are the innocent, how do the righteous explain the babies and the mothers and those whose blood will not stop running out of them? Is it the god of wrath accelerating the apocalypse? Or is it just as sad and without point as war?
It has a name, innocuous, helpful, aids, a succubus not succouring. I was reading an article in French about something I imagined must be a new cult: ‘sida. Ça va vaincre le monde?’ Like all religions, it is catching. I have read, indeed, that there is fear among Communicants that the disease may be passed by chalice. It is like someone who has just left the room, everyone is talking about it. Like a secret which is out, it is killing trust and splitting groups. It is also evoking new and fearful braveries. Could you have imagined a world where it was brave for a restaurateur to serve his clients, for a forensic scientist to perform an autopsy? Even if there is nothing to fear, the fear is there, and it calls up courage. Tertius is growing thinner. Is he on a timely diet? Did he see himself in the glass and feel a little worried by his sea-lion bulk? Or is he wasting away? The dangers drawn by Lucas’s black trysts were once rejection or attack. There was, he has told me, a thrill in the closeness to danger. It was a melodramatic, erotic danger, to be feinted but not fulfilled. There is no such frisson to the consideration of a more lingering and more painful danger. Yet Lucas and men like him need the anonymity, the lovelessness, like a fighter the fight. Should isolation hospitals become brothels? aids is grand with metaphor, like all plagues. The lists of love become trenches of horror; this new germ warfare is thoroughly modern, though it is attired in the mediaeval dress favoured by death and his troupe. Leeches will come back, and embrocations of rue, as this new disease, decked out in the theatrical dressing-gown handed down to him by fear and bigotry, walks abroad, putting his hourglass into the hands of boy lovers in cocktail bars.
I am determined to ignore it. It is simple enough for me to do this, naturally, since I am not in utero, intravenal, haemophiliac or homophile. It is easier for me not to take all this illness and dying too personally. But it is starting to touch the people I love. It is like attending a masked ball; the one in your arms may be Venus, or a lifetime of mercury. But aids is without the energy of the pox; its acronym makes it hard to nickname. It lives with us but will not be treated familiarly. Careless talk is costing lives again; a whisper about a man leaves him alone out on the turret, being offered the third cigarette.
So, the jury were suspicious. They smelled a ship of rats, but were put off by Lucas’s repute, his frailty and by Hal’s cut and dried story.
The press were waiting, pest-control officers with a taste for gassing. Their weasel words have learnt since Wolfenden many tricks of omission and suggestion. Lucas was made much of, but his stock epithets were now, as well as ‘brilliant, pioneering, brave’, ‘never married’ and ‘childless’. His foreignness was stressed more than it had been. Once delighted to boast of his parents’ choice of domicile, the newspapers began to suggest that perhaps he, Sir Lucas, should have kept himself to himself a little more, not become quite so Englished. Whether they wanted him to wear a gingham blouse and weep into his black bread after stitching up their children all day was not clear. The bolder newspapers suggested that of late he had been favouring the heart problems of other people not always of British extraction, and that this might have something to do with money. The Afghani boy became ‘the son of a prince we cannot name’, suggesting great riches and the, in the end, peculiar unspellability of foreign names. Lucas’s full name was read out in court. ‘What a mouthful,’ said the papers, over a photograph of Hal looking like a girl, taken at the seaside long ago. The copy was dull enough, just Lucas’s full name, and a little piece about his father having been a seller of gherkins. I do
not believe they spelt his names correctly: they just snored zzzzzs through a blanket of Catholic names.
Hal explained that he carried a knife for digging into the lath of houses he was selling. It was like tasting a cheese. The judge looked up. Not all stupid, then, this boy.
Of course, Hal was not telling the truth. I knew that Lucas, unable to speak to Hal, to tell him what to say, was miserable at the stupidity of his lies. Lucas would have made a neat case which as nearly as possible exonerated Hal. His love would have grown in protecting him. As it was, he saw him accused. I think he may have wished Hal had killed him.
Hal spoke like a child saying his tables, and getting them wrong. He appeared to think that repetition and vehemence might compose truth.
After one day which had been very long, dull and frightening, like being shut in with a snake, Lucas said to me, ‘I wish it was an inquest on me and Hal had skipped off to a life of ease.’
‘Did you see him when you were attacked?’ I asked.
‘How not?’ he replied. ‘I even see him when he isn’t there. I was pleased to see him. But it wouldn’t have come to anything, not sex, because I know him. By now I have him too deep for thrills. With him the thrill is the distance, the holding off. The only way it could have come to something would be if he had finished me off. I should have died happy.’
‘Would you tell everything, to save him?’
‘Nothing can save him utterly,’ he said.
The trial was cursory. Fear kept us silent. We were all compromised by what was unsaid. Hal did not reveal that he knew Lucas more than casually – socially, he corrected. Sex and money, attendant on the meanest trial, hung about oppressively outside, but never got in. It was as though the immune system of the established order was enclosing this symptom of things being different to how they seemed, and breaking it down, to immobilise it. The establishment, well inoculated, was safe so far.
I am a Scots Calvinist, so used to the idea of there being unjustified sinners, and I did not take Hal’s conviction hard. He was to be away for three years. I felt sure that good behaviour was not beyond him, and his time would be correspondingly tailored. I know prisons, and was pretty certain that Hal would adapt well. He was good with fear and used to authority; he understood hierarchies and was comfortable with deceit. He was a solipsist and he could write joined up. He would therefore, I imagined, plan the perfect crime and write love letters to the wives of his subordinate colleagues, for a small payment of tobacco, drugs or chocolate.
But Lucas suffered. He knew that punishment is not equal to crime, that somewhere there is short change. He would have died for Hal, without question, long before that became more than a figure of speech, in December. He knew that much remained unsaid. He would have spoken to save Hal, but he saw that it was best to act simply, to be the dignified physician. He saw that it was a smaller crime for Hal to attack a rich man he hardly knew than for him to attempt to kill a man who had him toiled about with love, provision, money and even a bride. He cannot have helped wondering why Hal had done it, but he did not speak of this.
Cora was a character witness. Huge, she stood and dared the men in wigs to question her. Her status as the defendant’s almost-bride was made clear. She spoke well of him. Her state was allowed to speak for itself. To advert to it, since the baby was not Hal’s, would be to lie, but in order to allow the silent witness to speak below its mother’s bland face, the defence made sure that she wore tall heels and a dress tight as an arum’s packed velamen.
Lucas had recovered in body; his walk had changed. I saw his back once when I visited him in hospital and they were moving a dressing. Rods of white cicatrised it, disorderly as kindling; I thought of the first pain he must have felt.
What gave him hope was the baby. Though I did not ask him, I could tell. It may have been because it was a life so far untouched by all that had happened, indifferent as the moon. Sometimes I was afraid to leave him in a room alone. I did not think he would kill himself. I feared he would die of shame.
‘Though why he feels like Judas, I can’t think,’ said Cora. ‘He never even said anything.’
‘It’s the containing of a secret,’ I replied. ‘He had hoped to get the whole lot off his chest, I suspect. It never works. People hear what they have ears to hear. If he had stood up and shouted his secrets, he’d only have been ignored. Then everyone would have cleaned their ears out and he would be relieved of his job and he’d’ve got old suddenly and turned this flat into a doss for refugees. But they wouldn’t’ve been real refugees, they’d’ve been lazy scams who know a milchcow by its guilty eyes.’
‘You are very sure.’ Cora was in Lucas’s upstairs bath. Not much water was required to fill it deep about her. She could no longer get out on her own. The soap was a pink oval, transparent. There was blossom frothing by the canal and the sky was a pale blue which lay reflected on the top of the bath-water like a floating pennant. I was pushed on by spring. It does not forbid mourning, but it gives it white underskirts.
Since the trial, we had been with Lucas almost every day. I sometimes stayed in his white spare room and sometimes went home. Cora turned his upstairs room, which I had always found too much of a good thing, into her bedroom. So she lived with me and she lived with him, like the child of a happy divorce, and other modern fairy-tale princesses. Together, the three of us had made of the upstairs room a nursery for the baby to come.
Lucas found a cradle which resembled a small skiff. I asked Mrs Virtue, on one of my visits to their family, whether she would sew curtains for the cradle, voile sails. I spoke to her with fingers and thumbs and smiles. Tomas, her boy, was at ease across her knee. He wore shorts and a jumper with the sleeves pushed up, and he stared up at the underside of his mother’s chin as if in wonder anything could be so old. He flicked at the strap of her watch. He was hardly scarred. His face was smooth as a petal, his arms and legs merely boy-bruised. Mrs Virtue was a keen sewer, she told me. ‘Or my hands worry,’ she sighed. Her English was growing.
She and I began to spend grandmotherly afternoons planning mist, snow, cloud and all other conditions of whiteness and wool and cotton, to be made into small clothes. She had a book of needles the shape of a crinolined lady, the needles kept in her petticoats, needles which were so thin they bent. They were thinner than the thread they drew. The box of white clothes grew in Lucas’s room upstairs.
Cora sat with Lucas a great deal. I did not hear them talk much, but she read to him and she made him food. When he first came home, he took a long time to get upstairs, but he spent more and more time there now. He was working again, but the newspapers were neglecting him. He had so nearly destroyed the black and white of their categories. Read all over it would have been indeed, had the truth come out.
On occasional Sundays, I took them both to Kew, and we sat, like a family, and walked, and sat again. Because they both moved more slowly than I, they walked together and I went on. He leant on her. He might have been her father or her husband.
She had told me about her father the night before Hal gave himself up. He and her mother were dead. I should have guessed. It was no doubt why she had fixed on Lucas, or the idea of him, cold, skilled, unfleshly, controlled. We talk easily of falling in love, but we allow the process only to lovers. It happens all the time, among the family we choose for ourselves, the family of friends. I had fallen in love, perhaps, with Cora as a daughter, she with Lucas as a father, and all three of us again with each other when we saw the tangle between us resolve itself into a knot. Cora had invented her memory of her father, her sources books, Sara Crewe, Daddy-Long-Legs, The Thinking Reed. School holidays were spent with the families of other children, so she had picked up several vocabularies and a palette of protective colours.
Sometimes I wondered whether her story was all true, if she thought her life was not interesting enough, if she prevaricated to keep my love, and this made me sad. But she proved it was true one day when she brought out an old pale blue box. It had
once contained chocolates, and had that thick scent. When she opened it, a tight fit on account of the purple-brown paper and perforated-paper lace lining it, it contained her few certificates. They added up to what she had told me. Dead parents, and a very little money of her own.
‘I wasted that. I’m sorry for it. And for wasting time,’ she said.
It was as though she were giving me the deeds to herself.
‘You are very sure,’ said Cora in spring from the bath in Lucas’s upper room. Lavender and the yellowless green of lichen, the dancers made flat merry on the walls. Her hair was up in a scarf, pink like a tulip, and the sails of the cradle hung in the light air. She soaped her feet with effort, bending over herself, separating her toes with the equivalent fingers, making the water play against the enamel.
I had bought a few toys for the baby. It would not like them until it was older, by when they might well have been lost. I treasured a teething ring of ivory; was it made of the milk tusks of elephants, or have they only one growth? I find it harder than ever now to find logic in our dealings with dumb creatures. The age of the teething ring made guilt difficult. Am I sorry about the evicted polyps from the baby’s coral necklace wasting in the drawer? I can make no more sense of it all now than I could on the morning when I found Mr Virtue lamenting his savaged shop.
All I can say for sure is that an animal in pain must be put out of its pain.
I did it to Mordred, as I do to any animal. I put him out of his misery. It was at point blank, and it was strange to go to the conservation meeting afterwards. He fetched me to do it, a wounded creature trusting to my courage and cold blood. I do not know how he made it to me. He had come, dragging his gun, from the hothouse to my writing room. He had shot himself in the hothouses from considerateness. Water for sluicing, and nothing to be stained. The white wrought iron could be hosed and orchids do not mind blood, even prosper on it though they prefer it unfresh. But he missed. He came, pulling himself, to my room. The carpet has a pale, silvery nap, like the poll of an olive tree under the breeze. As he pulled himself over the floor, he left a double trail of blood and of lightlessness where he turned the carpet’s nap against itself. I put him out of his misery and made arrangements. Fingerprints are invariably taken, but not the prints of lips. I kissed him and kissed him. I had not heard the first shot from his gun. Ours is a house not of mercuric brick but of secret-bearing stone.
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