A Case of Knives (30 page)

She interrupted me.

‘I think he is rather like those cars which stretch round corners, with a great flat eagle on the nose and a whole torture chamber of silver pipes and prongs and a horn like the last trump and a man in a moustache leaning out. The whole car is built of enamelled toothpaste tubes around a musical box engine, and the driver is one of those boy dolls children learn to do up poppers on and make short wars with till they are bored – only bigger. But on the whole I do not think of Hal.’

‘You are going to marry him on the sixth of December. You are then going on the last complete lotus-seek of your life, during which time you will see no one but him because you will tactfully be left alone by everyone who observes you are on your honeymoon. And everyone will observe that you are, because you will respond with enthusiastic conversation to every rug seller and waiter. The only time I ever contemplated infidelity to Mordred, whom I adored, was on our honeymoon, because I was frightened that the happiness would run out if I kept on taking it from him, but also because he was always there, his voice, his signature, his opinions, his past, his presence. It is a great change and all people are terrified of a beginning, as opposed to its potential. Once the beginning comes you have actually started walking across the unmarked snow, and you cannot stop. So now you know what I think. There are other things which I begin to think you should know, though it is breaking a promise.’ And if he lives, Lucas will be entitled to tell
my
binding secret to whomever he pleases, I thought. But he could not have foreseen his death, though God knows he took steps to court it. He must have left his card with death’s footman often enough.

‘What other things?’ asked Cora. She appeared less disjointed. I had seen her lift her hands over her stomach as though it was a bowl of suds. The baby was kicking. I was again surprised at my own early interest.

‘What do you know about Lucas?’ I asked her.

‘I know that he is good and beautiful and true.’

‘No one is all those things, Cora, it’s not a fault to be bad and ugly and untrue.’

She interrupted me with the vehemence of a fanatic who will not hear the rumour of a whisper without calling treason. She was twenty. I did not know her well. Lucas was beautiful, for sure. Goodness and truth seem to little girls to come with beauty. The fairy tales she had read about him must have fanned it to what seemed to be a crush, so much more sore than love. There was no need to be rough with her. I had had the same once, for a choirmaster with a red beard. I thought the cathedral grew from him like wings as I watched him sing. I must not demolish her necessary infatuation, but transplant it respectfully.

‘I love him I love him I will make him well,’ she declaimed, standing up, shaking, shrieking like a burning witch, belly out.

‘Sit down. You’ll wake the baby,’ I said, and she did sit down, before the preposterousness reached her. Her body was practising obedience to motherhood. I wondered whether Lucas would be pleased about the baby. It would be something to live for, something surely greater than seeing his own passion twist the lives of it and its mother, and, of course, that of Hal himself. Had this not happened to Lucas, would there have been the same urgency to Hal’s marrying? Lucas might live, but crippled perhaps, or maimed, and then the pleasure of perhaps seeing Hal eventually disillusioned with the girl Lucas had pimped for him would be a bitter one. I could not tell what Lucas really wanted from Hal – to know that he absolutely needed him, perhaps. And why was Hal so very keen to marry Cora? Was his saving grace love? Had I judged him cruelly? It is of course a mistake to say the shallow cannot feel; they can, to their depths. But Hal was without lovableness. He had no charity. What did he want from this particular girl? Why had he not purchased a shrink-to-fit girl who would not mark easily? I had felt an uninventive sadism in him from the first, an uncerebral and effective cruelty.

I have never explained sex to anyone. Mordred explained it to me, not only with words, and Alexander died. I summoned the courage. But did this girl, so modern, so free with bad words, know about Lucas?

‘Did you ever think Lucas would . . .?’ I asked. I had not intended to finish the sentence.

She left the silence for a while, then replied, ‘I hoped. Then I realised that it wasn’t possible. The baby. And he’s old enough to be my . . .’

I spoke quickly.

‘Mordred was old enough to be mine.’ Where was the benign censor? In all this emotion, I was welcoming any opportunity to be as I had not been for years, female, reminiscent, soft. Weak.

‘Nothing else crossed your mind?’ I went on, forcing her to find out on her own. It was not hidden, after all, nor even that shocking. ‘About Lucas? His friends? Hal?’ I said, digging out the buried bone and handing it to her, daring her not to find the poor skeleton in the cupboard.

‘His friend Daniel had married very late,’ she said, proving that we see what we will, not what pokes us in the eye.

‘Lucas will not marry. He is not the sort of man who will marry.’ I refrained, thank God, from saying, ‘Unless he marries an old rich woman when he is bound to his wheelchair.’

I have never before seen someone suffused with temper, like a small child. She went black with affront. Apparently so easygoing, in fact so afraid, she showed insult, rage, fear. Something which could not be changed tomorrow had stood in her path. This alarms the very young. They start to see fences, walls, cordons, providing not shade, allotment, discrimination, but exclusion and exception. Then there are the newspapers, which are a now daily journal of the plague year, the poor sad gay men their pariahs. Children of Cora’s age are more conservative than we were at that age. I wondered what she would say.

‘At least no other woman can have him,’ she said, and I wondered whether my household god had adopted Cora, abruptly so well-mannered and gentle that we might have been discussing his taste in music. Then she looked angry again, not black, but exasperated as though she had caught St  Jerome with an alleycat, having thrown out the lion. ‘Does he really love
Hal
?’ She said ‘Hal’ now as though the word were a hair she was taking from among her teeth. ‘Anyone but that. I suppose that was why he was going to pay for the wedding? How odd not to notice. I was in the middle of my own life. He keeps Hal, really, I think. I thought it showed not his lust but his goodness.’

‘His lust isn’t bad, Cora.’ Oh God, I would shortly be explaining to her about the little seeds. ‘It’s bad for him in the case of Hal,’ I went on, ‘because Hal has cunningly diverted it so that Lucas expresses it in every way but the only way. It is very painful to see.’

‘Something has always prevented me from revealing what I really thought of Hal,’ she said. ‘Vanity, I think, as much as anything. I did not think I could be seen to marry someone I had advertised as a nasty bore, but when I first saw him I was stunned. I thought he was like a tart, flash and curves and jut and paint, and my face must have said it all, but then I saw he was what I needed . . .’

‘You sound like a mad eugenist,’ I said.

‘I am one, I suppose. The father of the baby is hale and hearty, even quite nice . . .’

‘Who is he?’

‘John Croom.’

The prompter at my shoulder acknowledged another royal flush.

‘He is my nephew. My son was his age, a little younger. Your baby is my great-something,’ I said.

‘Great nuisance,’ she said.

‘I am so pleased. I want to tell Lucas. Oh God I’m so pleased. Can’t you tell John? He is nice. A bit of a cold fish.’ The child’s relation to me gave me yet more strength for Lucas.

‘I call him that too. He doesn’t like it. I don’t know. He wouldn’t have me. I’m soiled goods. Leavings, as well as pregnant. And Hal and I haven’t yet called off the wedding. It’s all far too complicated.’

‘It may be far too complicated, but it is a deal simpler than the other way. Anyway, leave it for now.’ I was being hypocritical. I was filling with resplendent middle-aged energy, but I knew not to nag the girl.

‘I haven’t really explained to you about Lucas and Hal.’

I had decided not to tell her about Lucas’s fearful drag-hunting at night; I had not the words, everything sounded arch or brutal, as though one was describing a disease. It was in any case the kind of thing it is easier to understand once you have learnt some analogous bent in yourself. Nor would I tell her, pregnant, recently disembarrassed of her blind filial – I supposed – passion for him, that Lucas had selected her as Hal’s wife because she was malleable, a rag doll who could be tossed away.

‘Hal was desperate to marry, quite suddenly, and Lucas was so hurt and downcast that he wanted at least to have a say in the choice of bride. And that’s you. So you see he likes you.’

‘It’s odd to want, suddenly, to get married, isn’t it?’ she asked.

‘You did.’

‘Hal can’t be pregnant.’

The talking was tiring me, though my brain was full of emerging tallies and rallying hopes. I still had the sense of being pregnant myself, with Lucas’s state, and felt the deprivation of his actual presence, but I knew he would be all right, now that there was so much to live for.

‘Let’s ring the hospital,’ I said to Cora, who seemed even a bit lively.

‘Fingers crossed,’ she said, and she crossed all the fingers of each hand over, so they looked arthritic.

‘Not the left hand, Cora, it’s bad luck,’ I cautioned.

I got through to the hospital and spoke to someone whose voice called down a corridor and relayed an echo-foreshadowed dispatch.

‘There is hope,’ the voice said.

We had been through weeping and laughter, love and desire, and now, from the hospital, that strange unclosing bank of life and its irreducible overdraft of illness and injury, came hope. Cora and I each took half of it to bed on the night of the third of December.

Chapter 26

I cannot sleep unless I have made some sense of the day. I like to shake it out and fold it, arms to sides, collar straight, no marks unexpunged. I should like to see my time as a cupboard, the days, colourful, pale, bright, in their places, individually of use, collectively beautiful and bright. But this was a white night.

My immanent narrator is for me as the sea can be. It takes no decisions, comes to no conclusions, although it can help me to do these things. I lay in my bed, on watch for Lucas’s life. The wind was unresting. It pushed through the white iron of my balcony as through the deserted bridge of a pleasure craft going into the wind. Ribbons of draught insinuated themselves between the window and its frame, lifting the muslin of the curtains.

I have always spoken aloud. It is not the same as talking to oneself, which elicits no answers and is the first sign of madness. Talking aloud, I can hear whether or not what I say is true. It is like reading aloud. False quantities and loose thinking make themselves audible. Declaiming, it is hard to deceive yourself, perhaps easier to deceive others. Though I do not doubt that the perfect voice with which to wash people’s brains is their own. The wind was loud, but its noise firmly without. The curtains, sieving out the last drift of the wind, moved in high but silent waves. I talked on. Once, when I stopped for a time, I heard someone else talking. It was the trace of my own voice, like a star drawn on a misted window, with a finger. When the wind was again the only thing I could hear, and, though wild, abstract behind glass, at last I slept.

I awoke again, the sky no paler, my eyes flinching in their sockets. I was guilty, not with the superstitious guilt I had grown used to over the past hours, of having allowed Lucas to be hurt, but with ordinary social guilt about Tertius. I had not telephoned him, as I had promised, to tell him what I had discovered of Hal and Cora’s decision. Strictly, I supposed that I had come no closer to what it was, and I had learnt some new complications which I knew it would be rash to confide, as he would instinctively turn them into a divertissement to the grand drama of blood and death. Tertius must have awaited my call, drinking till he could not have heard it had it come, I was sure. Unless Angelica Coney, who has self-possession like a skin, had stopped him. But I thought that she enjoyed seeing people behave like animals. Or, as she had it, like people. She enjoyed the humiliation of men with the Homeric ruthlessness of a goddess, and seemed frequently to be mysteriously present when it took place. I had watched her grow up and seen her stand, uninvolved cause of the rout, by knots of bloody, muddy, boys. When Alexander was small and they played together, she would make him drink and drink then tie him to the banisters at Wyvern and leave him to soak himself. I learnt this later, or I would have hit her, but he told me only when that was no longer the worst thing he could remember.

She told him bogus facts of medicine, was quite scholarly about it. I found a vivid little book she had bound herself in yellow buckram and given him. It smelt of size, from the hand-marbled papers. It was illustrated with flat cross-sections of mustardy paunch and lumpy swags of gut. Crude red arrows nibbed points where, the ill-spelt text explained, most pain would be felt. The pictorial style was knockabout and free with blood, like block-printed mediaeval marginalia. The words were convincing and literal. The certainty of children, as of very few grown-ups, is undeniable. To see these pictures was never to forget them. Who is to say that children make things up? Perhaps we just cannot make the same things out. Angelica told Alexander more than I can know, since he took the knowledge with him. I am sure that she made of the stork a vulture and of the gooseberry bush a thorn tree. They played together, all the usual games. She took his innocence. When I think of my boy, I don’t think of him with his lashes dry. He was always laughing or crying. And then he drowned, and they were wet again.