A Case of Knives (14 page)

My thoughts turned to money. Cora had none, according to Anne. Hal’s family were landed, I knew, but had they cash? I felt that it was immodest to speak of money so soon after we had disposed of the nature of Hal’s love for his Cora, so I said, ‘Would you like some music? Why not find something you care for? And take today as a holiday, Hal. It is the most important decision of your life and you deserve a quiet time.’

He was passive, seeming still a little tense, and he was cupping and uncupping his hands as though catching and releasing a stream of small birds.

He pushed into the machine what was already in it, not concentrating. The Commendatore was calling Don Giovanni to the feast. Through a fissure in the melody came the beat of unavoidable Hell. The voice was low and could not be refused. Giovanni tried his worldly charm, his excuses, circumstantial irrelevancies. But you cannot refuse a man of stone with a heart of stone. He just will not take no. I am afraid at this part of the opera.

The tape fell silent. There were two clicks. A voice, unsexed and didactically narrative, rather in my own manner, said, ‘Lay open the chest cavity, or, in the case of a pig, the thoracic cavity, taking care not to tear the skin, since, in the case of most laboratory animals, re-use is possible . . .’

It continued. I recognised the words because I had written them, in a paper, designed for a general audience, on vivisection, which is necessary, or so I feel, for my research. I think it is fatuous to deny this; one of my several quarrels with the idiots’ papers is their reporting of the question.

I pressed the button to eject this recording of my own words. I did not feel they were suited to this hymeneal day.

‘What happened there?’ asked Hal. He looked perkily interested, like a boy train-spotting.

‘I know you aren’t mad about opera so I added a little interest.’ I am not good at jokes. This one changed nothing. ‘I don’t know, Hal, to be honest, perhaps I recorded
Don Giovanni
over my broadcast on Righting Animal Wrongs.’ The voice was nothing like my own. My accent is very English.

‘Maybe you did. Do you get a lot of weirdos barracking you? I never asked, but there’s quite a bit in the papers at the moment about animals.’

This was untypically personal. Hal was asking me about my life. I wondered whether to tell him of the red words on the windscreen and the loose tongue on the seat. I did not want to spoil his day. But thinking of these things did alarm me. I had read of attacks on laboratories, on farms, even on graves. Beneath a grey photograph of two cutely mismatched animals, a pussy and a rhino perhaps, with its lightweight headline as full of double meaning as that below the uddered girl some pages before, would come an article, incoherent and sometimes directly contradictory of yesterday’s doctor-as-dragon-slayer article, describing the vile conditions and advanced tortures imposed upon animals. Inconsistent, but aphrodisiac to that sense of outrage which sells papers. I had seen facing-matter in those newspapers which came from two sets of premises. If people with those views met, they would not face each other save to fight. But the monster which buys and consumes these papers has not ideas but digestive juices, there to help it soften and digest neutral nutritious facts. I saved human lives, was ridiculously fêted for this, but I had also and indirectly been the cause of the death of many animals. Had someone made this link? If so, why were chops and steaks and sides not being burnt like books on street corners, huge barbecues of dissent? Why was I being singled out? As well put rattlesnakes in the boots of one single leather-wearer. That, of course, would be barbarous to the rattlesnakes.

It is abstraction which sets us over the animals. We live in the more than here and now, our memories hold more than modified and relearnt reflexes. Or so I feel, and must feel so that I do not go mad in my work, at least not until God, our great abstraction, bends down into my cage in his white coat and clips to me wires to still me as he makes ready to investigate my heart.

It was Hal’s day and he must be treated as a bridegroom.

We parked the car outside the main gate of the dockyard, and set off first for lunch. I would have made an autumn picnic if I had had more notice, with some game perhaps, but now we had to go to a pub. I did not much feel like meat. The bar was full of seaside references. There were pictures made of stuck-down shells and net bags of glass floats. We ate two fishermen’s platters. ‘I wouldn’t mind a “Sailor’s Plate”,’ said Hal, and I liked him for noticing the roundabout genteel language, and mocking it. His face wore almost a leer; I thought that the interrupted Giovanni must have upset him more than he would admit. I hoped the lunch would not be the main part of our day wasted, inside instead of out in the last of the light. My temples felt as though they were nearing each other, as we sat in the gloomy bar. The dartboard was the right breast of an enormous mermaid, cut from polystyrene. What we ate was a drenched palette of pink shrimps and a squeeze of oily yellow. You could imagine these assemblages being made as therapy by old sailors, six crescent squeezes of pink, a puddle of red, a wormcast of yellow, the lettuce-green rag and that’s two more done. We drank Guinness and Hal looked about him with that touching undimmed boy’s interest.

As the day was growing cold, we walked back to the yard without lingering. What I loved best about Chatham after the
Victory
’s dock was the terrace of sailors’ houses behind the Admiral’s House which stood alone looking out to the estuary. This terrace was small and each house built for a midshipman, his wife and their family; even the stove-in greenhouses had finials. The squint washing-line poles were cast iron and handsome as weathercocks. The back gardens were ragged now, but they must once have given the homelocked sailors a taste of the earth, potatoes and leeks and neeps after all those captain’s biscuits and dried fish like stiff vests. Each of the little houses had its fanlight, small and pretty, the houses smiling behind them, each with its proper approach, a gate, a path, and a knocker. The modest fans gave a touch of grace. In the gardens of a few, Michaelmas daisies, tenacious as wire, were not yet subdued by weeds. Late butterflies took in the last sun on sparse buddleia.

We progressed, each knowing perhaps that we were unlikely to return together without Cora for some time to the same places we always enjoyed, in the same order. Hal was not speaking much, but he looked about him all the time. We lifted up our heads to look at the grey webbed timbers of the great dock which had seen its last ship. I knew Hal’s family had ties with the navy and I wondered if he felt that British sense of insular romance when he watched the sea. I could see only one ship and it looked like a square rock, far out. As we turned back from the sea, I asked Hal if he would like to go in to some of the buildings. At first we just looked round corners into high stores. Carved at the back doors of what looked like warehouses were initials and drawings and some dates. The accomplishment of the lettering suggested that there had been a time when things were lovelier, more orderly and more careful. I thought of the sailors queuing for their guns and carving deep into the stone, standing with their seven-creased white legs, waiting to embark. I felt terrific sentimental lust. I wanted Hal because he was a boy setting out alone. I was sure other Hals must have carved that same name, digging with a marlinspike into the lee wall of the store, and I wanted to have their closeness with each other, with Hal. He made me feel landlocked by my Polishness. I was awash with self pity, an island in it. The feeling was not unpleasant. The cold wind, the seagulls, the dipping cranes and bare flagpole combined to make me feel pity for myself, no longer daring, young, combatant. The saltness of my face was for my youth, lost in effort, and Hal’s youth, to which we were saying farewell today.

I pushed against a door in a high building and it gave, into a hall of light, the size of a pasture. At first, I could see nothing but white, as though I were looking up on to snow. We were in a sail loft. All colour there was clear. The colours were the unobscured tints of heraldry, intensified by the white, as are the clothes of skiers. I could see no one, though I heard singing. I started to mount the ladder which led up to the highest rafter where the head of the vastest sail was made fast. These sails, though empty of wind, were hanging smoothly still; at their widest, they settled into glaciers of folds. I signed to Hal to come up, but he did not. I followed the singing, and turned a corner behind a swag of sail. I felt as though I were going backstage. A row of trestle tables receded from me, and the backstage impression grew. Six old women were bent over six sewing machines. A wireless played. The women were humming; the song was about love and rose gardens. I wondered whether they were the wives or widows of sailors. Over the table of each woman was spread her work. They were sewing flags, or rather pennants and ensigns, for these were rare work. One woman was fixing wings to a red dragon, another finishing the golden dots on the withers of a smiling pard. The hair of the old women and their spectacles were the only patches of half tone in the room. They might have been the imprisoned daughters of a king, stitching, stitching, stitching, in a fairy story. The black and gold machines purred. I was sorry Hal had not seen this.

‘Seen a ghost, dear?’ asked an old woman with pink hair. She had the voice of a parrot, among these parrot colours.

‘Good afternoon. No, I’m sorry, I am lost and I was enchanted with what I saw when I came in here.’

The old women set up that ribald cackle you will hear them exchange after confidences. They were refuting what they took as a compliment to themselves. I think they were suspicious of me with my posh accent and my long overcoat. I was not like an officer, but I spoke like one. My patronage was not naval, jocose. I was foreign. They did not know how foreign.

A woman, her puff of hair mauve, who was sewing a spiky red lion passant gardant on to a yellow flag, said, ‘Turn up the radio, June, dear.’

She had not seen me. It was time for me to go. We had no meeting ground. I wanted to give them all tea, to buy them all hats, to flatter them till they bridled. I wanted to rest their hands and legs and see them sitting in chairs with their feet out and their stockings down eating ices from tubs with little spades. I wanted to kiss them and cuddle them and show them a good time. I wanted them to be as sloppy as they liked, to leave the Christmas Club, to stop washing the front hall, to let their husbands go hang, to stop saving vouchers. I wanted to take off their glasses and give them back their eyes and deck them out, yellow and red and blue and green, and shower them with gold.

They wanted me to go away.

When I found Hal, he looked warmer and quite easy. His eyes were clear and he seemed in higher spirits. Darkness had come, and the cranes were lit, red and green, port and starboard. There were not many lights in the place, two in the Admiral’s House like calm eyes, and the high single light of the sail loft, not too big a window because sunshine would bleach colour from the flags, before the wind and sun might have them.

‘Did you find something nice?’ I asked Hal.

‘I found a place where they make ropes,’ he said. ‘I saw one being made. It was a mile long. It had a steel heart. It holds things together and can never break.’

‘Nothing cannot break,’ I said, and minded having said it all the way back to London.

Chapter 12

If anything, my having constrained Anne to be on my side had made us closer. It takes a good friend to lay down principles for your sake. I had, after all, blackmailed her. She was quite clever enough to agree under pressure and then to work in a subtle way to undermine Hal and Cora. I wondered how she would take the engagement, now it was a fact.

After the day at Chatham, I asked her to come and see me. The trees were almost empty and I had seen Hal and Cora together on several occasions. What impressed me in Cora was her meekness, her desire to please. She had begun to dress in a womanly way, as though she might have a unicorn on a lead outside. She listened charmingly to Hal when he spoke. I had told him after lunch one day that I would help financially with the wedding. He looked so surprised I was touched. Surely it must have crossed his mind, no matter how lapped in love he was? It made me diffident about confiding in him the main point of our meeting. I was again giving him lunch in Scott’s, to salute my own sense of symmetry. All that autumn I was making festivals of this nature, disengaging myself from the first phase of our love. I spoke quietly, to save Hal’s dignity, and said, ‘And, Hal, I’d like to get you a wedding present.’

‘Just not mats,’ he said.

‘I thought a house. Where would be up to you, but my one proviso is that it is not a poky bargain with views to a kill. And if you have children, that is, when you have children, there is a sum settled on them. Up to the limit of gift tax, I have done the same for you.’

I did not like couching it in these grey terms. Money is just a token of other things after all and they could buy for themselves with all this a ton of ortolans or one fine emerald or an education for ten sons. My money was the product of work and I wanted it to be spent in play. I had my father and mother’s shop money, I had magnified it with my diligence and I would have no children. I wanted to buy with it love for me and for the generations to come an insulated future.

‘That is good news,’ he said. ‘I’d been wondering about where we’d live. The thing is, I’ve come to see everything as a good investment. That is big of you Lucas,’ he said, looking straight at me like a man who is appreciative. ‘I am very appreciative. Let me give you lunch.’