A Case of Knives (21 page)
Authors: Candia McWilliam
I had given
my
pressed tongue to Dick and Gloria for what they described as a ‘bit of a do’ backstage. ‘At least you can’t skid on tongue, or there’d be the hell to pay with cueing – “Oh, so sorry, I just tripped over my tongue,”’ they said.
My mind was wandering. This was, I was certain, to be the luncheon during which I became engaged to the young man of my contemplations.
Hal ordered smoked salmon, which unaccountably was not the rectangular brown sort found in sandwich bars, but ragged rosy slices of it with a big pithy half of lemon and proper untriangulated bread and butter. ‘They’re partialish to me here in point of fact,’ said Hal.
Anything which followed would serve me right. But the baby must have a father.
The prongs of my egg mayonnaise fork were connected with a sticky web, as though the person before me had eaten shredded wheat. I ate my egg (it was
an
egg) with my pudding spoon, one, two, half ellipses. Hal did not notice. Would I be able to carry on regardless in our marriage too? I started to develop the idea. But my heart was not in it. That heartless stylish hypocrisy was gone, killed by good intentions, romance, and the horrible consequences of promiscuity. I ceased thinking of ‘adultness’, or ‘going my own way’, and looked at Hal. If I concentrated on feeling drunk, he looked handsome enough.
‘You’re beautiful, sweet, and you’d be a wonderful mother,’ he said, and I could have sworn he was addressing himself, ruddy now after two glasses of Quink and the meaty salmon, as he saw himself reflected in the towering glass behind my head.
‘Cora, will you marry me?’ asked Hal, speaking to himself in the mirror. He clearly accepted at once.
I was so relieved that his question made me happy. After all, I would do my best.
‘Thank you, Hal, but are you sure?’ I could think of so many objections, it seemed strange that he could not. Perhaps he required to be married. But why would he then so touchingly, as though reading a script, have given me that conventional triple necklace of courtly compliments?
‘Are you ready for the second course?’ asked the older pederast. He addressed Hal. ‘Was it satisfactory, sir?’ He did not ask me. He knew the answer, but I was lucky to be there at all. I was not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs from under the table.
We accompanied the tongue, and Hal’s game pie, with champagne, which showed a complete conformity to the routine of almost every lunch Hal ever had. It would almost have been more remarkable not to have it. He might recall a lunch without as ‘the lunch of the unhad champagne’, something like the unbarking dog.
‘Hair of the dog,’ said Hal. ‘I’ve been drunk most of the time since I last saw you.’
I could not think of much to say. ‘I hope it wasn’t to do with me?’
‘Nope. Nothing.’ It must have been something pretty serious, for he had the clammy look of one who has not been sleeping easily for days. I would hate to have put him, or anyone, through that.
He put his hands on the table as though to keep them under his eye.
‘Nothing at all. D’you get?’ and he looked at me with nasty eyes. He looked at himself in the glass again and modified his gaze to represent new love.
As we left his club, I saw, leaving from the entrance reserved for members unaccompanied by ladies, Johnny. It was a grey afternoon. Ribbons of fog stirred low against buildings. A flower-seller pulled change from his long green apron, as he stood among his schooled shoals of flowers. Hal put his arm around me. The champagne, the optimism, the relief, conspired to make me feel tender towards him. I smiled at him as though I loved what I found in his face.
I heard skidding feet at our backs. Soon we would be looking in the windows of a ring shop.
Do the proprietors see and believe all that fresh love, or do they wait for the probate valuations to see if it has endured? I was prepared to face anything now, me, Cora, and Hal. And the baby.
‘Cora, Hal.’
It was Johnny. In front of his chest he held, as a bossed shield, a bouquet of white chrysanthemums, each like a head of coral.
‘Let me be the first to congratulate you,’ he said. Then, like a fish, he was gone, among the fluctuating crowd, which was tenebrous, grey, dark blue and black, parting now and then for the passage of a sleek car.
I had seen engaged couples before, and there can be a spooky air of conjunction about them, but I was surprised that Johnny had seen our state so quickly. Can it be that a proposal of marriage acts upon the processes as conception does, setting in train a sort of beacon-relay of festival synapses? I had thought that I was fairly undelighted, and Hal was not perceptibly enraptured. But some solitaire corpuscles must be pumping through my veins, telling my heart to tie a ribbon around itself and display its soft centre. Little chips of happiness were coalescing in me, it is true, but whether they would fuse as a champagne hangover or as a three-carat drop of pure joy, it was too early, on the very afternoon of my engagement to Hal, to say. I expressly did not covet the signs of engagement. As I am a greedy girl, not merely swayed but waltzed into orbit by appearances, this might have been surprising, but I explained it to myself. The baby was there, the soon-to-be visible sign of more than engagement, and I had not the brio to display at once a pregnant belly and a blushing absorption in the cut and colour of diamonds, aprons, lower-ground-floor apartments, and going-away costumes. I felt like a pig, who, having been slaughtered, is keen to be made into collops, loin, blood pudding, head cheese, trotters, and ells of nutritious, quotidian, sausages.
I longed for the dailiness of life. Had I had a companion who knew about the baby, she might have told me that I would shortly be in receipt of the dailiness and the nightliness of life, but as it was the only sources of information were the magazines and baby books I read and threw away as a man might throw away pornography which can no longer work its magic. I threw away my baby books, though, in case they somehow contributed to, even enlarged, the crescent stranger within. I drugged myself with superstition, like a child knowing she will dodge the devil if she goes upstairs three at a time. I was certain that I was performing the correct actions to keep chaos at bay. I had been finding my unplotted life too shapeless to carry further and had taken steps to freeze its slippery form in order to bear it, in all three senses. Rather than attempt to carry alone a leaky vessel, overfilled, meniscus atremble, full of spilling, tricksy, watery, changeable life, I preferred to strike the water solid at a blow, like a hard frost, rendering it clear and portable as ice. I forgot for a time that ice burns are as savage as the burns of heat and steam. Ice also carries less weight than water, and displaces more.
I wanted things solid and clear and marriage appeared to me then to be the only means of achieving this. I was astonished that it was so easily come by. I had been lucky in finding Hal, physically so suited to be the father of a child of Johnny’s and also, it appeared, keen to be married himself. The enormous gap, the certain absence of love between Hal and me, appeared an advantage. It made crystal clear the icy fact of our marriage. I liked, too, the way we did not discuss our love, or rather its absence. I felt modern, light. Where love for Hal should have been were the ether of my great true love for Lucas Salik and the fleshly love for my growing baby. Spirit and flesh, they joined to provide something equal to what another girl might have felt for the man she was to marry. In fact, very possibly superior to it. Hal and I, I thought smugly as we walked past the queue of people awaiting taxis outside Claridge’s, had a very tidy beginning, uncluttered by illusions and undusted with fragile spun hopes. He must realise this. We were embarking on a minimalist life. I had been to the flats of people who believed only in black and white and uncluttered space. Used to the gluey clutter of Dick and Gloria, and to my own dusty trophies and tableaux of soaps and flowers and pots, I had wondered what they did with all their things. Now I knew.
They did not have them. No chest of drawers, no drawers, no wardrobes, no robes, no hooks, no hangings. A floor, a ceiling and walls are all that are required to contain light. This thought gave me a satisfying sense of weightlessness and purity. In a world silted up with choice and variety and brought to the edge of chaos by plurality, we would be starting our adult life uncluttered by emotions which would be certain to sag, to grow dusty, to be holed by moths of doubt and irritation. I felt light with the optimism of a person who has just completed a great job of cleaning. I felt a suffusion of almost renunciative brightness; I felt supernaturally tidy. That was that, I thought, as you might after taking the veil.
The queue of people outside the lighted entrance to Claridge’s was marshalled by a tall doorman with the olive froggy face of a Spanish duke. His umbrella housed those nearer the front of the queue, sheltering them not so much from the light rain which was beginning to fall as from the vulgar gaze. ‘Look at them, weighed down with commitments and addled hopes and transmuted or tarnished love,’ I thought. ‘Look at the couples who not only hate each other but have paid to accompany each other, over an ocean perhaps, in order to pay to share a room and a series of hollow outings, costly, shared and disappointing. How terrible that they hate each other; how much worse that they once loved each other. How fortunate we are to be without that indignity. Look at that old pair, holding gloved hands like children crossing the road. How can they face the disintegration seen in the face of the other, the betrayed desires, the secrets unspoken and left to curdle? How can they look at each other, leathery over breakfast in their sleeping suits, and face that once they could not bear to separate, that they said into each other’s ears things which revealed they were afraid of the dark, or liked this or that.’ How shocking to realise that you have given your time to an old stick with ordnance survey cheeks, when once you thought him a king. I would never be disappointed and nor would Hal: we had no high hopes, no low hopes, no hopes. We had acquired each other as you acquire a refrigerator, to prolong cold storage. Our life would be clear and unmetaphorical.
Hal was simply himself. It was reductive not metaphorical, his style. The only implications were the obvious ones of image. I was convinced he would straighten, by being only himself, my bent for complication, for fossicking out alternatives, for organising problems, for arranging difficulties. I felt as though he made me as he was. I would be his paper consort. When I was with Lucas Salik, it was true I was paper consumed in his fire, but now I had become engaged to Hal I must tame that feeling. Or at any rate when we married.
Anto had teased me about the way, given the coloured board of my life, I had fretted it about till it was a jigsaw with pieces which would rearrange in too many different ways. He had laughed at the complication. He liked things simple, he often said, they were complicated enough even then.
So he would be pleased about Hal. Who could tell, perhaps he would like him.
My life appeared to me now as one unending television advertisement, all appearance and flawless fitting of intention to function, untroubling of conscience, unstirring of those ambitions which lead to error and tragedy. Nothing could go wrong in a world where things appeared so perfect. The baby would be fitted for our century by this life, would never be disappointed, having grown to expect only food for the eyes and body. He would be raised without ideas. He would not learn the discrepancies and shifts which are there for those who see them and absent for the amoral, the enviably blind. Unburdened by religion, by knowledge with its implications of more knowledge, the child would be as blessed as an animal, untroubled by interpretation, unvisited by nightmares. And Hal, the father, would see to this.
‘When do you think?’ asked Hal. We had just walked through Shepherd Market. Not a tart in sight in these days of outraged nature. I’d heard from Anto that this was where the golden-hearted ones still had their beat, and I had been shooed off once by a mansized tart who had thought me a rival, but it was quite empty now save a notice, ‘
family butcher: brain’s, heart’s and galantine
’, illuminated by a bluish light, raisined with dead flies. There was a dry-cleaner in whose window flashed a sign, ‘
french pressing
’. Hal and I emerged opposite a bookshop where I had spent afternoons. I said goodbye to its bow window. Inside were towers of books; there was a chocolate-house atmosphere to the place which gave to the passerby who entered the feeling that he belonged to a literary group. Hal would not understand, and why should he? But I saluted it as I went by, for its not having moved with the times, and for what it had lent me. Like Albany, it had shown me an older world, one which was richer than the world
I
knew of carefulness and re-impacted soap and the car used only in emergencies. Some of the patrons of the bookshop could not read, some bought books according to the colour of their spare rooms, but even these had given me pleasure. I said goodbye to all this and turned to my modern lover.
‘Very soon,’ I replied to his question.
‘I’d better tell Lucas.’ It was Hal who spoke, though he spoke my own thoughts.
‘Not your parents first?’ I asked.
‘Them too,’ he said.
His voice was not that of a bearer of good news. I could tell he would fit in his telephone calls between those to clients in the morning. Thinking of the morning, I realised that we might, now bound to each other, have to spend the evening and the night together. I did hope not. I wanted to husband, if the word was the correct one, my resources, and now we had come to our conclusion I wanted time alone. I wanted to get it all done with as little fuss as possible.