A Case of Knives (24 page)

‘It’s a quince. Put one in your sheets and you’ll smell your wedding night all year. But not very nice in fact until boiled down to a pulp with a lot of sugar.’ Speaking in his voluptuous room against the dying light, he looked oriental.

‘I found it,’ I said. ‘About the house and the child. Thank you more than I can say. I’ll try to deserve your kindness. What did Hal say?’

‘You will earn it, never fear. Hal said, “Are you ever the fairy godmother?” Shall we discuss plans? Have some more wine.’

Chapter 20

I left the seeking of our house to Hal. It was his job, after all. I had not yet met his parents.

Hal and I chose the feast of St  Nicholas for our wedding day, to give his family a space before they had to start Christmas. It was as though Christmas was a section of railway, arduously to be built of Yule logs and glistening ribbons of line, cut through the dark green forests of December by the poor Darbos, working in the heat of the snow.

Whenever I had thought of Hal’s brothers, I had imagined the architectural orders. Could their parents have named their other sons Saxon, Norman and Roman without seeing their, no doubt, upstanding boys, turbanned in stone, flanking a small doorway into a hidden chapel, or grimacing in ammonite-haired glee from a boss of Purbeck marble? I played with the idea of three
pâtisserie
-coiffed daughters – Ione, Dorrie, and, what else, Corinthia? I did not tell all this to Hal.

‘Six December, that’s nice, does your mother think it’s nice?’ said Mrs Darbo over tea the first day I met them in their very warm sitting-room. She was nervous, pretty, shockable. I was perhaps twice her volume and spoke twice as loudly. In her ears slept little gold snails and her hair was like a party cake. She kept her knees together, pushed to one side, as though she were a summer chair, put away for the winter.

Hal had driven me to meet his parents. Parents are about as intimate as you can get, more intimate than sharing a toothbrush. They show you the past and the past is as tender as worn clothes or a mourning brooch. Meeting Hal’s family was like meeting a nest of tables. They were separate, flat-topped, and fitted together by no more metaphysical means than by being of different dimensions. Saxon, Norman and Roman, certainly not stone-hatted, were like Hal but not as well-pointed. He was the first-born, the prototype. They did not possess his golden-silver colouring, but then, I was sure, nor did he, naturally. His mother, being a woman, was not of the mould. She was perhaps the smallest table, the one with the most ornamental legs. The father, Rex, was, naturally, the big table, big and brown and square. He was also made for carrying drinks.

They did not drink heavily, the Darbos, but they drank methodically, to mark time. Gin at eleven, sherry at twelve-thirty, something with lunch, a mantled puddle of something creamy afterwards, and starting again at six, with a different, more racy, routine on Sundays developed around what they called Bloodies. All this kept Mrs Darbo very busy with mats, because she hated rings on tabletops.

‘Dead,’ Mr Darbo was mouthing of my mother to his wife in the absence of my reply, without making a noise, but for the twin d’s which leave little doubt.

‘Mmm, dear?’ said Mrs Darbo, at once pulling her skirt down and crossing her ankles. I said something to Saxon, to spare Mr Darbo realising that I knew my mother was dead, and he explained my trouble to his wife. My mother’s death, however else I had thought of it, had never appeared to me as an unacceptable personal odour, but I was aware of its being thus classified by Mrs Darbo. She had a word for such things.

‘How aggravating,’ she said. She cannot have known what she was saying. In that room, refulgent with polish and glaze and calf and walnut and brass (a club fender like the jaws of a small hell) it was my swelling belly which was aggravating.

For the beat of two ticks of the rocking Dutch fleet on the grandfather clock, we were without words. Then we remembered the reason we were gathered together.

‘It’s nice you’re tall,’ said Mrs Darbo. ‘You can carry it.’

What do I carry? The baby? She was a blameless woman but she made me want to yell.

I smiled. If I did it without showing my teeth, she did not shrink away.

‘The dress. I love a pattern,’ she revealed. I had decided, in order to give all the preparations some point, to allow Mrs Darbo to fulfil her dreams on me. I agreed with everything she suggested. Her ideas changed frequently, and she brought her menfolk into line with each hard-taken decision, but we were at the moment following through what Mrs Darbo called a ‘motive’. Means were provided, I suspected, by Lucas, the concealed opportunity by the baby. When I thought about the whole business, I felt ashamed. I had to keep these thoughts away, for I was not taking anything serious seriously, except the desperate need for a future for the baby. And I could not even dare really to consider that. How soon would the baby’s amiable and hoodwinked grandparents be bringing it a Perambulator, straight up, on the tray with the Sidecars? Would Johnny himself not have been better as a husband? The truth is, I thought, he wouldn’t have had me. A blot on the escutcheon.

The ‘motive’ we were following through for the wedding was currently that of the holly and the ivy. We had had Jack Frost, the Snow Queen, and Christmas Roses. The objections had respectively been glitterdust in the church, artificial snow fumes and the fire insurance, and the terrible cost of fresh blooms. I had suggested that we celebrate St  Nicholas’s Day and have a big white horse and a little black boy and clogs full of chocolate, but Mrs Darbo costed it up and decided it would be effective but a bit unusual. I appreciated ‘unusual’, it was like different. It meant Jewish. It meant funny peculiar. It meant tall. It meant
not the same
. Had Lucas met Mr and Mrs Darbo? I thought I wouldn’t ask them. We returned to the dress, which was to be trellised with ivy on the skirt, at the back. Not holly – ‘Too full of pricks,’ said Mr Darbo bravely, his wife’s pinched lips daring him. I did not ask about the merry organ. All this was my own fault and if I looked like a west wall that was my fault too. Ivy, the fingery destroyer of houses and stealthy embracer of graves, crept over me. What about a nest with a cuckoo in it on my head, and two eggs?

I had two eggs, in fact. They were from Lucas and they were my engagement ring. They were two oval pearls, and they were the faint pink of the eggs of the Petran sparrow, which lays its eggs precariously on the ridges of the rose red city. The ring was thin and old, its metal gentle like old mirror, and the big paired pearls were held only by being caged from behind. How could Hal allow his friend to buy these things? ‘I’ve no false pride,’ he’d say, ‘and I like things nice for you. Lucas didn’t pay for it in actual fact. He had it knocking about.’ I supposed it must have been Lucas’s mother’s and let it bind me further to him.

‘With your height you can take this bold front,’ said Mrs Darbo. She was a needlewoman of fearsome dexterity and output; undecorated spaces of colour were a challenge to her. She was planning to corset my torso in a casque of quilted ivy leaves. The poisonous black berries of the ivy were not to be omitted. There was nothing negative in Mrs Darbo’s capability; her work, of which there were examples all over ‘Cranford’, had the hyper-reality of souvenirs. The black ivy berries to be sewn on my breast we had found in a craft shop; they were sold as eyes for soft toys. There were several boxes on a shelf below the clownish bolts of sheeny implausible fur; they were clearly labelled ‘Eyes, teddy’, ‘Eyes, squirrel’, ‘Eyes, rabbit’. The eyes came in pairs, twisted on a single string. For one-eyed bunnies or Persian pussies with odd eyes there were no allowances in the nursery world.

Precipitated into intimacy with Mrs Darbo, I was grateful for her hobbies. They gave us material for conversation. She was kind to me, though I did not receive the impression that it was a kindness called up by sympathy between us. She was kind because I was Hal’s, and if I had genuinely been so, this amnesty-bestowing love would have been enough. As it was, I felt shifty about receiving kindness from her. Her first-born was clearly her favourite and she showed no desire to have a daughter. She was the broker of feminine power in that house.

Sometimes in the days before the wedding, I found myself staring at some neutral particle of the complicated celebration about to take place, and would snap to, aware that I had been giving a cold ham or a ribbon or a list of names the evil eye. But there was also a pleasant sense of being just a leaf in the flood, as the days wound towards The Day. Mrs Darbo referred to December the sixth like this, which gave it a Last Trump sonority. Hal and I did not refer to the day between ourselves. Had I cared to think about it, he might have been a mystery to me, but a mystery implies a desire for solution and I certainly did not want to find a solution. Once or twice, I wondered why he had implied to Lucas Salik that the Darbo family sat safe among expansive lands in grand decay. But I was in such a hurry to be over with the entire business that I really just thanked God that for some reason Hal wanted what I wanted, and stopped my eyes and ears to almost everything else. I was not interested in him. I do not think that I thought of him as a person, with his own secrets and desires and bad nights. I was smug with solitariness. It may have appeared, buffed to a sheen by my pregnant glow, like rapt early passion.

Mrs Darbo kept the dress in tissue paper which was pearly on one side. She had what Rex Darbo, doting and virile, called ‘Monica’s room’ and the whispering parcel was hung up in it, a calico-covered torso. ‘God knows what she gets up to in there,’ he would say. Rex had an equivalent room, referred to by his sons and wife as ‘Father’s study’. The word study is almost exclusive to people with awe of and distaste for books. Gloria had once asked me whether I had studied all the books in my room. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘That’s a relief,’ said Gloria, fetching a stage sigh, ‘I can’t get around to studying a plain book.’ A plain book is a book without pictures. Being a Roman Catholic, Gloria is used to holy pictures. Hal’s father, Rex, had many coloured books, mostly concerned with stupendous feats of engineering, or what he called ‘man’s conquest of nature’.

There was bounty in that house. Warmth and food and drink induced a bovine content. Hot water flowed almost silently into deep baths whose sides were lapped in carpet. The walls never trembled with passing traffic, as did my walls in London. The windows showed a garden featuring a tennis court and a swimming pool, now laid down under taut blue latex for the winter. There was a patio to catch the absent sun, and a pair of urns containing small rubbery plants. The bird table had a porch, and its three chalets were of different sizes, to segregate the different classes of bird. I had seen no villainous crows in the taller trees about, hints of the old New Forest. It was as though crows were too obscure for this bright world. I wondered where Hal and his brothers had had their childhood in this secretless place? Had they had to escape to grow up? For all the security of the house, I was thirsty whenever I was there, as though my secret were parching me like swallowed pumice, and I felt like someone staying in a luxurious hotel, not to his taste, and not at his own expense, who can nevertheless not escape the fear of the bill. Each big cold unslaking drink would appear on the eventual tally.

A large tent was to be put up in the Darbos’ garden. Mrs Darbo selected green and white stripes as the most suitable colour scheme to promote the theme of holly and ivy.

I told Dick and Gloria about the holly and the ivy. They were in the basement room in our shared house. The room smelt of railway tea. They were dyeing startling white lace in buckets of strong tea, for the Marschallin’s nightgown.

‘Holly and Ivy,’ they said. ‘Sounds like a pair of queens.’

Seeing them together, I considered how easy things are for those who have work which they love, and how happy twice over they were since they worked and loved together. Gloria wrung out a squeaking hank of lace over a bucket, doubled it and wrung again. He was stronger than he looked.

‘Jasmine tea would’ve been nice,’ he said.

‘Save that for
Butterfly
,’ said Dick, and pulled another pin from his mouth. He was crouched on the floor, pinning the hem of a dress the ochre of old mixed mustard. It was frogged, like a dressing-gown for a levee.

‘Which grandee is that for?’ I asked.

‘Oh that’s not for
Rosenkavalier
. It’s a beggargirl’s dress for something else, but you have to do it in all this posh cloth. Rags don’t look good. They don’t look believable. You don’t believe the real thing.’

‘Not enough impact, the real thing,’ said Gloria, and he dried his hands before giving Dick a touch on the shoulder. Dick was so accustomed to the affection and its source that he did not turn around.

It was December the first. Dick and Gloria were very gentle with me in these days. They took me out a lot. We were having a valedictory honeymoon with each other. They cooked for me, which they had not done before, nicer things than I would have made for myself. Preparing food made me ill, anyway.

I had given my notice to Angel that morning, explaining that I was to be married in five days’ time.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m looking forward to it. I’ve not replied to the invitation yet, I’m afraid. I’ve been busy.’ I supposed Hal had invited her.

Dolores looked up. They both wore collars of jewels today and had come through the snow in serapes of bright wool. They wore clothes in a way which made these clothes appear to be fetishes.