Conversations With Mr. Prain

by Joan Taylor

“No.” I raised my glass to him again and drank.

  He looked at me with a concerned frown. “You know, I never thought you had a personal interest in me. You seemed rather detached, until you learnt I was a publisher.”

  “Well, there you are,” I said, a throwaway statement covering sharp thoughts. Why hadn’t he kissed me, now we were together alone in the kitchen? Why no affection? I had to work at keeping back all sorts of things I wanted to say. I had felt so sensitive all day, and now I felt truly like a warrior, wanting to challenge him. My words could be a spear. Fuelled by food, and provoked by irritation, I was incited to grab this spear and throw it.

  “Strange, isn’t it?” he said.

  This comment irritated me further. I imagined responding: “Strange, because you have made it strange. Strange in a very English way.”

  “Why very English?” came his imagined response.

  “Because it could not have happened in many other places. There aren’t the same social divisions—differences in money and power, yes, but not like here. People say the British class system is dying, but it isn’t dead, and it’s ingrained in you. It’s possible for me to forget about it in my circles, but once I go out from them I realise how much I am in a foreign land. I am ‘beneath you’ in a way I could never be beneath anyone in New Zealand, and you’re someone from a different tier in society that I should never have met if it wasn’t for a coincidence. There are upper class people who have descended to live in Camden—they have rejected the laws you respect and you would rather not think about them. But you belong to the old order. You will allow yourself to make conversation with me, even sleep with me, but then there is a barrier. It would be embarrassing to you to include me in your social set. If we had an affair, I would always be someone you kept hidden and never wanted to talk about.”

  Now this could all have been a subtitle to my actual words, which were a vague, “Yes, I suppose so,” followed by silence, or else you can imagine a divided film screen, with our actual conversation on the right, and the imaginary one on the left. In the imaginary one I was suddenly fiery and confrontational. In actuality, I was careful, and conciliatory. We spoke in short bursts, punctuated by silences.

  “So you think I’m a snob?” “ ‘Snob’ is not the right word. It’s a middle-class word. You’re a victim.”

  “Too strange?”

  “A victim?” “Of your mother. You said your grandmother had married a touch beneath her, but I get the feeling that your mother would not have had you make the same mistake. And you can be dismissive and blasé about her only up to a point. What would she have thought of me? She would have considered me

  “It doesn’t matter to me if it is. I’m used to strange.”

  entirely unsuitable, even if you claimed I could write poetry and had a degree. Your class may accept stars, even from the lower orders, if they are really famous and rich. But there’s nothing “At Camden Market?”

  exceptional about me. There are many society beauties who could outshine me physically, and many clever writers. You’ve simply fallen for me. You can’t

  “Everywhere in my life.”

  explain it. Neither can I. But you forbid yourself from letting me into your world. You cannot imagine participating in mine more than you have done already. “You like it that way?”

  So you have decided instead to have a lasting remembrance of me in stone, “I don’t know.”

  because we cannot be lovers, at least not for long.” “You think I’m a coward then?”

  “No. You’re rather old-fashioned and decadent. You would rather be decadent than be exposed. Otherwise, you would never have proposed the deal to me, and wished so much to control this afternoon.”

  “Perhaps we shouldn’t complicate things by being lovers, especially if you were to accept my offer. That would be too strange.”

  I put down my fork. I was no longer able to eat with this complex division of conversation in my head, with all the dialogue of my imagination and the awkwardness in reality. I was being jerked in different directions.

  “You would rather have a work of art than me?” I asked, though it was not really a question. That was what I had said to Monique. Perhaps he had already heard me express this assumption.

  Edward Prain, I thought, you really are so decadent. And you could never have existed in New Zealand. We do not have such heights from which to fall. You could not exist anywhere but in Europe, and perhaps nowhere other than in England. It’s that mixture of culture, class, money, cleverness, arrogance even. It feels as if I have travelled twelve thousand miles to find you. I never could have found you anywhere else.

  He was not looking at me. He had long since dropped making a pretence of eating. He was leaning his elbows on the bar and pressing his index fingers against his lips, in his prayerful aspect, and looking down at his wineglass. He suddenly looked rather sad, and not at all powerful or in control. I have won, I thought. I have won. God Almighty.

  And then I too felt rather sad, as if we were two people who had become lost in some terrible maelstrom, and had just happened to find each other, but did not know where to go, or what to do, or even whether we liked each other very much.

  “Any cream pastries left over?” I asked.

  He brightened a fraction, and put something of himself together. “Perhaps … in the fridge.”

  I got up and looked, miraculously chose the right cupboard as the fridge, and found a few cakes on a small plate. I took them out and placed them in front of him. “You have to eat one of these. It’s compulsory.”

  He smiled. “You wouldn’t let me see you eat one this afternoon.”

  “You were a voyeur. I was trying to be a lady. Ladies can’t eat cream choux pastries unless they’ve learnt the art at finishing school.”

  He was smiling, despite his sadness. “I didn’t want you to be a lady. I’m tired of ladies.”

  “I know,” I said, liking him a little.

  And then he pulled me over to him and put his arms around my waist. He kissed my belly and my breasts, all those floral motifs of my dress, and moved his hands then under the fabric to feel my skin. This effect he had on me sexually was appalling! What kind of mutual admiration society was this? Oh stop, I partly wanted to say. I can’t take this kind of feeling. Nothing came out of my mouth but a kind of gaspy moan. So then he kissed me on my lips, reaching up and pulling me towards him, so that I was melting into him, a fusion of metal and stone, annihilation.

  chapter ten | three rooms

  The next morning, I opened my eyes to find I was alone in bed. I felt lead-headed. Sleep had been sporadic, interrupted by further sexual engagements with Edward Prain. I had woken once in some sort of shock, and been completely unable to remember where I was or how I had got there, and who this man was in bed with me. I had become hungry again. Then I had been aware that at some time very early in the morning he had gone, but I was too sleepy to worry about why or where, and dozed fitfully.

  I got up, went into the bathroom, pulled out a white towel from the oak chest and turned on the shiny bath taps. I filled up the bath fuller than I had ever filled a bath before, and then stepped in. When I had soaped myself, I lay back to wallow, recollecting the events of the past day and night, with a weird, sinking feeling.

  After a few minutes I heard creaking floorboards and tinkling china in the bedroom. The bathroom door opened. Edward stood leaning against the door frame in a cream dressing gown. He looked tired.

  “Hello,” he said, in a falsely bright voice.

  “Hello.”

  “I’ve brought you a tray of tea and toast. Will that be enough?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  I pulled out the plug, stood up, got out of the bath and rubbed myself down in front of him. He remained standing there, watching me, though when I looked at him he kept his eyes on my eyes, not on my body. I went over and kissed him, still wet.

  “Oh Stella, we’ve got to get moving,” he said regretfully. No mor
e time.

  “Where did you go?” I asked, stepping away and drying.

  “To my study. I needed to read some papers before my meeting today. I had intended to do this yesterday evening.”

  “So what time did you get up?”

  “Around half past four. I was wide awake, and famished. Did you sleep well?”

  “No.” I glanced at him. “Only after you left.”

  He seemed suddenly coy. Funny. Coy man.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Nearly eight o’clock.” That was later than I thought. But the sun was rising later now, in preparation for a change of season.

  I wrapped a towel around myself. He went over to his shaving things and placed them in front of the mirror, and he looked at me through it, as if wondering about something. As I was about to pass him by, he stopped me with his hand and kissed me again, on the side of my neck.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “I’m very well thank you,” he said, with mock politeness. “We’d better get ready.”

  I went through to the bedroom and sat down on the four-poster bed, where I drank tea and ate toast from the tray he had set on the bedside table. I chewed in silence, listening to BBC Radio 4 news and weather on a small clock radio I found beside an ornate lamp. Another crisis. Another fine day. The Dow-Jones index. The voices of the newscasters made it unnecessary for us to talk to one another. I did not feel I had very much to say, and he seemed a little distant, as usual. After a few minutes he emerged from the bathroom and put on his clothes in front of me. He did not have much alternative but to do this, though I suspected he wished I would busy myself with something. I pretended to listen intently to an item on the radio about how in some British cities a walk in the city centre is equivalent to smoking ten cigarettes. I felt some satisfaction at being able to watch him, however, and to note the features of his body. After all, he had studied me. He handled my scrutiny gracefully enough, without showing any serious modesty, and glanced at me once or twice, inscrutably. I found myself smiling. I liked his body.

  “If we hurry, we might get the quarter to nine train to Marylebone,” he said, while he was selecting a tie. “Then get a cab. If we miss it there’s one at five past nine.”

  He pulled up his collar, placed the tie around his inside collar, and looked at me through the wardrobe mirror, with an expression I could not quite fathom.

  I decided I had better get dressed too, and quickly donned the few items of clothing I had to wear. I wished I could ask to borrow his brush or comb, but somehow I felt that would be presumptuous, and he would not like it. I did not have any make-up with me except concealer, mascara and lipstick, and these were in the bag I had left in the study. He should have thought to bring it to me.

  “I’ll just go and get my bag,” I said. “Shall I meet you downstairs?”

  “Oh … yes,” he said, as if aware he had omitted doing something a gentleman should have done, but not apologising.

  I went down to the first floor, and along to the study, or rather first I went to the second floor and into a completely wrong room (a bedroom) and then another (a broom cupboard) and then managed to backtrack and find my way to the study. I entered the still, musty darkness, with its hundreds of bits of the past, the misericords, the archaeological objects, the books, the paintings. There was a residual aroma of something sweet and floral, mingled with coffee (which I assumed he must have drunk in the small hours). I went over to the window and recovered my bag from its hiding place beside the chair in which I had been so uncomfortable. I wondered if the photograph was still leaning against the side of his chair, and looked for it, but it had gone. He must have taken it back to the gallery. I opened up my bag, took out my wide-toothed brush, brushed my hair, tied it up into a neat knot, and then I applied what make-up I had as quickly as possible. I put my things away, and turned to go.

  And then I turned back. I had just noticed that the rose he had picked for me was still on the table, in its little crystal vase. Now, when I first started writing about what took place at Walton Hall, I thought I would simply note that there was a rose on the table, without explanation, but I have already mentioned that it was Edward Prain who brought it to the study, in a gesture that was curiously romantic, and now that I am stuck with having relayed that piece of information I will let it be. The fact that there was a rose on the table at that moment was not something that reminded me of his gesture. It reminded me of something else entirely. When he had picked the rose it had been a bud, beginning to bloom, but overnight it had carefully fanned out its petals into a great cushion of pink. I instinctively bowed down to it, and breathed in its heavy perfume.

  That smell, and the appearance of the rose, brought back an association far beyond the confines of Walton Hall. All at once I was in the living room of my Nana Marsh’s house, my maternal grandmother’s home, in Pukerua Bay near Wellington, in the sultry New Zealand summer. I often went there with my cousins. It was warm, windy and raining. The dark clouds pressed down like a sponge on the variegated greenness of the bush-clad hills and the pale houses. The seagulls cried out warily, buffeted by gusts, but we were inside playing a board game, safe and dry. Outside, the roses of Nana’s award-winning garden hung their heads, and dripped softly. “It’s a blessing I cut the best before the storm,” she had said, and we’d agreed, as we played our game beneath a great cascade of roses of every colour imaginable that she had placed in chunky, high vases.

  “What a scent,” she’d said. “Tell me then kids, which is the strongest?”

  And we had sniffed and sniffed, and decided the one with the most powerful perfume was a pink rose, very like the one that was now unfolded before me.

  Of course. I was named after a rose. “Stella,” she’d said. “Fancy that.”

  “Stella’s smelly,” my cousin Mark had said, laughing.

  “Ah, there’s nothing like a rose,” my Nana had said, shaking her head at him.

  Stella, my name, is the name of a rose. There I was, in my rose-patterned dress, in my rose-pink shoes. I had unconsciously dressed in accordance with my name. I stood in Edward Prain’s study, caught by the memory, as if my skirt was caught by a rose-thorn in Nana’s garden, and then gradually became aware of myself as I was, there, with my bag in my hand.

  I had to go. He wanted to get on. I did not want to be the cause of delay. I did not take the rose, but left it to bloom and throw its perfume into this place.

  I turned again, thinking that secret passageway from the study to the kitchen was the quickest way down. One of the wooden panels? I glanced around, and saw a panel slightly jutting out just behind his desk. I would just nip down there. Great.

  “Great Scot!” as a professor would say in a 1930s murder mystery.

  Déjà vu again. But this time, to my amazement, I found its source. Something of my recollection of childhood had allowed it to surface. It felt as if certain disparate things had all at once met and been fused together. A board-game. We were playing a game on the floor, my cousins and I, at my Nana’s house, that day. The rose. The board-game.

  Yes.

  Cluedo. A secret passageway from the study to the kitchen is exactly what you have in a game of Cluedo. I cannot say that this was the game we were playing at the time of the “smelly Stella” incident, with which Mark tortured me for years after, but it might well have been. Whatever the case, my Nana had Cluedo in a stack in the lounge book-case—Scrabble, Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, Cluedo, Chess—underneath the row of traditional children’s stories—Little Red Riding Hood, Goldielocks and the Three Bears, Hansel and Gretel.

  Let me tell you about Cluedo, in case you are uninitiated into its dynamics. Each player is both a person and a colour: Rev. Green, Miss Scarlet, Col. Mustard, Mrs White, and so on. You have your particular starting places around the board. You throw the dice and move, one step, two steps, and then you’re in the study, or the billiard room, or the conservatory, or whatever. The board is laid out like
a sizeable country mansion.

  The aim is to find out who committed a murder. Who killed Mr. Black? And it could be you, for all you know, temporarily struck with amnesia. In the beginning, you have no idea. You have a list of murder weapons, rooms and suspects, and you move about the board, making guesses every time you enter a room. The player to your left, or another around the board, at each guess, will give you a vital clue by means of a card, after which you can narrow down your options.

  I suddenly realised something. It was as if I were a small character moving from one room to the other, in Walton Hall, investigating who was the culprit. Who killed Mr. Black?

  With a rush of something like panic I looked around the room. The study. It had the same antiquated feeling as the drawing in the game, but here it was, equipped with furniture, books and artefacts. And where was the weapon? As I said, in the board game, when you go into a room, you have a chance to suspect one of the occupants of this spacious country house. You have a series of murder weapons they could have used. My eyes suddenly rested on the ornate Nordic knife on display in a cabinet. A knife.

  Really?

  Then all at once I was rewinding the day and fast-forwarding in a kind of weird delirium. The bedroom: there was a pistol above the door. The bedroom was no location in a Cluedo game though. It was as if the Cluedo house had expanded out and up, no longer a two-dimensional space but three-dimensional and wider, including new zones: the bedroom, the gallery, the garden, the studio. But still, was this where I was, in a giant installation of conceptual Cluedo?

  There was a plastic knife in the gallery. The gardener was holding a spanner. There was rope hanging in Monique’s studio. For God’s sake—candlesticks in the drawing room! Monique packed knives into the dishwasher. Where was the lead piping? Surely there must have been lead piping somewhere, maybe in the workshop I had passed through so quickly. Then all the murder weapons of the game were accounted for, with knives featuring most prominently in the assemblage.

  And who were the players? We were not to be identified with those little plastic figures of the game, clearly. Just as Walton Hall was expanded, different, so were we. Ha! I knew. Edward could be Mr. Cream, Monique Miss Brown, the gardener Mr. Grey and me—well obviously I was Miss Pink. I looked at all the roses of my dress and at my Barbie-doll shoes, the pink rose on the table. Stella.