A Case of Knives (35 page)

Hal explained that he carried a knife for digging into the lath of houses he was selling. It was like tasting a cheese. The judge looked up. Not all stupid, then, this boy.

Of course, Hal was not telling the truth. I knew that Lucas, unable to speak to Hal, to tell him what to say, was miserable at the stupidity of his lies. Lucas would have made a neat case which as nearly as possible exonerated Hal. His love would have grown in protecting him. As it was, he saw him accused. I think he may have wished Hal had killed him.

Hal spoke like a child saying his tables, and getting them wrong. He appeared to think that repetition and vehemence might compose truth.

After one day which had been very long, dull and frightening, like being shut in with a snake, Lucas said to me, ‘I wish it was an inquest on me and Hal had skipped off to a life of ease.’

‘Did you see him when you were attacked?’ I asked.

‘How not?’ he replied. ‘I even see him when he isn’t there. I was pleased to see him. But it wouldn’t have come to anything, not sex, because I know him. By now I have him too deep for thrills. With him the thrill is the distance, the holding off. The only way it could have come to something would be if he had finished me off. I should have died happy.’

‘Would you tell everything, to save him?’

‘Nothing can save him utterly,’ he said.

The trial was cursory. Fear kept us silent. We were all compromised by what was unsaid. Hal did not reveal that he knew Lucas more than casually – socially, he corrected. Sex and money, attendant on the meanest trial, hung about oppressively outside, but never got in. It was as though the immune system of the established order was enclosing this symptom of things being different to how they seemed, and breaking it down, to immobilise it. The establishment, well inoculated, was safe so far.

I am a Scots Calvinist, so used to the idea of there being unjustified sinners, and I did not take Hal’s conviction hard. He was to be away for three years. I felt sure that good behaviour was not beyond him, and his time would be correspondingly tailored. I know prisons, and was pretty certain that Hal would adapt well. He was good with fear and used to authority; he understood hierarchies and was comfortable with deceit. He was a solipsist and he could write joined up. He would therefore, I imagined, plan the perfect crime and write love letters to the wives of his subordinate colleagues, for a small payment of tobacco, drugs or chocolate.

But Lucas suffered. He knew that punishment is not equal to crime, that somewhere there is short change. He would have died for Hal, without question, long before that became more than a figure of speech, in December. He knew that much remained unsaid. He would have spoken to save Hal, but he saw that it was best to act simply, to be the dignified physician. He saw that it was a smaller crime for Hal to attack a rich man he hardly knew than for him to attempt to kill a man who had him toiled about with love, provision, money and even a bride. He cannot have helped wondering why Hal had done it, but he did not speak of this.

Cora was a character witness. Huge, she stood and dared the men in wigs to question her. Her status as the defendant’s almost-bride was made clear. She spoke well of him. Her state was allowed to speak for itself. To advert to it, since the baby was not Hal’s, would be to lie, but in order to allow the silent witness to speak below its mother’s bland face, the defence made sure that she wore tall heels and a dress tight as an arum’s packed velamen.

Lucas had recovered in body; his walk had changed. I saw his back once when I visited him in hospital and they were moving a dressing. Rods of white cicatrised it, disorderly as kindling; I thought of the first pain he must have felt.

What gave him hope was the baby. Though I did not ask him, I could tell. It may have been because it was a life so far untouched by all that had happened, indifferent as the moon. Sometimes I was afraid to leave him in a room alone. I did not think he would kill himself. I feared he would die of shame.

‘Though why
he
feels like Judas, I can’t think,’ said Cora. ‘He never even said anything.’

‘It’s the containing of a secret,’ I replied. ‘He had hoped to get the whole lot off his chest, I suspect. It never works. People hear what they have ears to hear. If he had stood up and shouted his secrets, he’d only have been ignored. Then everyone would have cleaned their ears out and he would be relieved of his job and he’d’ve got old suddenly and turned this flat into a doss for refugees. But they wouldn’t’ve been real refugees, they’d’ve been lazy scams who know a milchcow by its guilty eyes.’

‘You are very sure.’ Cora was in Lucas’s upstairs bath. Not much water was required to fill it deep about her. She could no longer get out on her own. The soap was a pink oval, transparent. There was blossom frothing by the canal and the sky was a pale blue which lay reflected on the top of the bath-water like a floating pennant. I was pushed on by spring. It does not forbid mourning, but it gives it white underskirts.

Since the trial, we had been with Lucas almost every day. I sometimes stayed in his white spare room and sometimes went home. Cora turned his upstairs room, which I had always found too much of a good thing, into her bedroom. So she lived with me and she lived with him, like the child of a happy divorce, and other modern fairy-tale princesses. Together, the three of us had made of the upstairs room a nursery for the baby to come.

Lucas found a cradle which resembled a small skiff. I asked Mrs Virtue, on one of my visits to their family, whether she would sew curtains for the cradle, voile sails. I spoke to her with fingers and thumbs and smiles. Tomas, her boy, was at ease across her knee. He wore shorts and a jumper with the sleeves pushed up, and he stared up at the underside of his mother’s chin as if in wonder anything could be so old. He flicked at the strap of her watch. He was hardly scarred. His face was smooth as a petal, his arms and legs merely boy-bruised. Mrs Virtue was a keen sewer, she told me. ‘Or my hands worry,’ she sighed. Her English was growing.

She and I began to spend grandmotherly afternoons planning mist, snow, cloud and all other conditions of whiteness and wool and cotton, to be made into small clothes. She had a book of needles the shape of a crinolined lady, the needles kept in her petticoats, needles which were so thin they bent. They were thinner than the thread they drew. The box of white clothes grew in Lucas’s room upstairs.

Cora sat with Lucas a great deal. I did not hear them talk much, but she read to him and she made him food. When he first came home, he took a long time to get upstairs, but he spent more and more time there now. He was working again, but the newspapers were neglecting him. He had so nearly destroyed the black and white of their categories. Read all over it would have been indeed, had the truth come out.

On occasional Sundays, I took them both to Kew, and we sat, like a family, and walked, and sat again. Because they both moved more slowly than I, they walked together and I went on. He leant on her. He might have been her father or her husband.

She had told me about her father the night before Hal gave himself up. He and her mother were dead. I should have guessed. It was no doubt why she had fixed on Lucas, or the idea of him, cold, skilled, unfleshly, controlled. We talk easily of falling in love, but we allow the process only to lovers. It happens all the time, among the family we choose for ourselves, the family of friends. I had fallen in love, perhaps, with Cora as a daughter, she with Lucas as a father, and all three of us again with each other when we saw the tangle between us resolve itself into a knot. Cora had invented her memory of her father, her sources books,
Sara Crewe
,
Daddy-Long-Legs
,
The Thinking Reed
. School holidays were spent with the families of other children, so she had picked up several vocabularies and a palette of protective colours.

Sometimes I wondered whether her story was all true, if she thought her life was not interesting enough, if she prevaricated to keep my love, and this made me sad. But she proved it was true one day when she brought out an old pale blue box. It had once contained chocolates, and had that thick scent. When she opened it, a tight fit on account of the purple-brown paper and perforated-paper lace lining it, it contained her few certificates. They added up to what she had told me. Dead parents, and a very little money of her own.

‘I wasted that. I’m sorry for it. And for wasting time,’ she said.

It was as though she were giving me the deeds to herself.

‘You are very sure,’ said Cora in spring from the bath in Lucas’s upper room. Lavender and the yellowless green of lichen, the dancers made flat merry on the walls. Her hair was up in a scarf, pink like a tulip, and the sails of the cradle hung in the light air. She soaped her feet with effort, bending over herself, separating her toes with the equivalent fingers, making the water play against the enamel.

I had bought a few toys for the baby. It would not like them until it was older, by when they might well have been lost. I treasured a teething ring of ivory; was it made of the milk tusks of elephants, or have they only one growth? I find it harder than ever now to find logic in our dealings with dumb creatures. The age of the teething ring made guilt difficult. Am I sorry about the evicted polyps from the baby’s coral necklace wasting in the drawer? I can make no more sense of it all now than I could on the morning when I found Mr Virtue lamenting his savaged shop.

All I can say for sure is that an animal in pain must be put out of its pain.

I did it to Mordred, as I do to any animal. I put him out of his misery. It was at point blank, and it was strange to go to the conservation meeting afterwards. He fetched me to do it, a wounded creature trusting to my courage and cold blood. I do not know how he made it to me. He had come, dragging his gun, from the hothouse to my writing room. He had shot himself in the hothouses from considerateness. Water for sluicing, and nothing to be stained. The white wrought iron could be hosed and orchids do not mind blood, even prosper on it though they prefer it unfresh. But he missed. He came, pulling himself, to my room. The carpet has a pale, silvery nap, like the poll of an olive tree under the breeze. As he pulled himself over the floor, he left a double trail of blood and of lightlessness where he turned the carpet’s nap against itself. I put him out of his misery and made arrangements. Fingerprints are invariably taken, but not the prints of lips. I kissed him and kissed him. I had not heard the first shot from his gun. Ours is a house not of mercuric brick but of secret-bearing stone.

Of course, Lucas knew.

In March we went home to Stone.

Chapter 30

For the last month before the birth of the baby, we lived at Stone. Both of them knew it, though neither had spent solid cuts of time there, unless that time had been taken carefully off the bone, made light and untaxing by careful, practised, hostly division.

I had not been home for four months. It was the longest separation from my house since my marriage to Mordred. I had never before spent Christmas away from Stone, but this last one before the baby I did spend with Lucas and with Cora in London. We ate preserved foods from jars and went for a walk in the afternoon. There was no one in the streets. Fountains had frozen, exuberant and still, like storks’ wings. The high-smelling tramps were indoors, entertaining their benefactors, who are often more lonely than they. When we got home, I gave Cora her present, a Roman mirror I had bought from Tertius, who was so pale and thin now that his clothes looked like an Auguste’s pyjamas.

‘My appearance? Anno Domini at my back,’ Tertius said. ‘Sounds like a delicious little Caprese, but I can tell you it’s nothing so fitting. That’s it, cross my palm with silver. I think I’ll be away next Christmas.’ Whether he was contemplating heaven or Elba I couldn’t say. He was too polite to me nowadays, and I felt I could hurt him with a word.

‘Join us,’ I said, not wishing him to.

‘I rather thought I’d do a bit of your thing,’ he said. ‘Prison visiting. It can’t be all beer and skittles for Hal in jug.’ Jug sounded so friendly. I wondered whether Tertius had any idea of the grimness of prisons.

‘It’s not beefcake in chains,’ I said.

‘I’ve been,’ said Tertius. ‘Here’s your mirror. Who knows what it has seen. Have a Christmas, I can’t say happy after all this, and joy to your babies.’ He did not mention Lucas, nor did Lucas any more speak of him. There had been a lapse as though someone had stopped seeing a joke.

Tony drove us up to Stone. Cora and Lucas slept. We drove through the night. I awoke, as I always do, as we crossed the border. I have never outgrown that. The first small towns, with bannock in the windows and hosiery shops with the word spelt out in red and white stockings, the ugly villas with names tooled into the keystone – ‘Ardrishaig’, ‘Kinphail’, ‘Sgreadan’; even the foodstuffs have celtic names – ‘Glenwheat’, ‘Tobermac Fish Bits’. No other country has fallen so hard for its own image in the funfair mirror. Tartan rock, and a Scottie dog for every pot. But it is to me the only serious place to be. The road opens out into rearing country after the border, and the coarse grass and blue roads shiver under the grudging, then hospitable, sun. Nowhere dirties the air quicker than Scotland with all its swearing, drinking, cigarettes and dying factories. The gas towers over Grangemouth hold sulphur orange and a copper green up into the sky like brushes full of poster colour. But there is more air to dirty than in the rest of Britain, and each morning is new, the old day having cleared its throat and gone during the short night of the north.