Mr. Fox (27 page)

“Did you put something in my wine, Mary? I’m just wondering how I’m keeping my temper. You just swan in, take my husband with one hand and offer me a hobby with the other. . . .”

Mary’s hand hovered over mine. “We’re going to be all right.” She flexed her fingers, closed her eyes ecstatically, and breathed in and out. It was embarrassing, and I told her to stop making herself conspicuous.

“Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all.

I had a lot of questions for her. Whether she and St. John could read each other’s thoughts, what her first memory was, things like that. The first thing she remembered was a shilling with King George of England’s head on it. It had been very well taken care of, polished and kept clean, and it shone in St. John’s dirty hand down where he crouched in the trench. He’d swapped something for it—she couldn’t remember what he’d swapped, but she knew he’d wanted the shilling because it was bright. She told me about the first job St. John took after the war. He’d been a bill collector, but he doesn’t say much about those times. It was fascinating listening to her.

“He was one of the best,” Mary said, wolfing steak down as if she’d heard there was going to be a shortage. “He hounded debtors door to door, plucking away the false names and new addresses they tried to hide behind. He developed a method. Firstly, he paid no visible attention to the poverty or misery of the people on his list. Secondly, once he caught up with them he’d only ever say one sentence, demanding what was owed. That was it, his method. He repeated that one sentence over and over without changing the formulation of it, until he was paid. You should have seen him, Mrs. Fox. He was really kind of magnificent. Sometimes he’d get punched or interrupted or outshouted while he was saying his sentence. And, well, he’d just wait until the interruption was over. Then, rather than starting his sentence again, he just went on as if nothing had happened, picking up from the precise syllable where he had been forced to stop. It drove people nuts. His collection rate was outstanding. It doesn’t take much to horrify people who are already frightened.”

She frowned. “He was good at being a bill collector but it wasn’t good for him. For days at a time he hardly talked to anyone but me. And sometimes at the end of his workday he’d walk into walls and closed doors. He saw them up ahead but he just didn’t stop walking.”

I asked her about the first story he wrote, and she told me about the crummy boardinghouse he was living in back then, just a bed, a desk, a chair, and a few easels, which he placed open books on, to look at. Art monographs and cookbooks, poetry, a guide to etiquette, a dictionary, a Bible. He’d get back from work and walk from easel to easel, picking up fleeting impressions. Mary turned the pages for him.
Gentility is neither in birth, manner, nor fashion—but in the MIND.
Next:
And what if excess of love / Bewildered them until they died?
And:
A woman is always consumed with jealousy over another woman’s beauty, and she loses all pleasure in what she has. . . .
After that:
Be careful that the cheese does not burn, and let it be equally melted.
Then he’d spend the night bent over his notebook, writing in zigzags, his pace irregular.

She was very reluctant to answer my other questions, about the war, and I thought it must be because of terrible things he’d done, or because he’d been a coward. But she said it wasn’t that. “If I answered the questions you’re asking me,” she said, “you’d wish I hadn’t told you, because you wouldn’t know what to say. I think he worries that people sneer at him for coming back safe and sound, or think that he must have been taken captive and put to work tending enemy vegetable patches. But just trust me. Mr. Fox was decent in those times. He did what he could, and he was as decent and as brave as he could be.”

We changed the subject. Mary told me she had been doing some reading of her own.
Hedda Gabler
and
The Three Musketeers,
so far. “The women in these books are killers!” she said, her voice escalating with each word so that by the time she reached the last one the diners around us were looking around for the killers.

“Did you think they couldn’t be?” I told her about one of my favourite villainesses, a flame-haired woman named Lydia Gwilt, who died changing her ways.

“Of course she did,” Mary said, frowning. “This is worse than I thought. If you make the women wicked, then killing them off becomes a moral imperative.”

My first thought was,
But they’re not real,
and my second thought was,
Under absolutely no circumstances can you say that; you’ll hurt her feelings.
So I devised a title for the book I was going to write—
Hedda Gabler and Other Monsters,
and she cheered up at the assurance that everyone would survive.

She wanted to experience things; she had a list. She planned to attend a big band concert, and she planned to walk through a field of yellow rapeseed, and she planned to get an injection, and anything else I might recommend. She promised me she’d settle down soon, and I found myself telling her to take her time. Growing up, I was glad to be the only girl, with big brothers who teased me and acted with unerring instinct to keep the heartbreakers away from me. But it might have been nice to have had a little sister, and to have helped her out from time to time, with advice, and chaperoning, etc.

Mary said she was going to sleep in St. John’s lighthouse, on Cloud Island. I told her I wouldn’t hear of it, I wouldn’t sleep for thinking of her all alone in that weird old place. But she’d already stolen the keys from him, and she said she thought it was nice out there. She said she liked to look at the sea, that it made her sing. “The first time Charlotte Brontë saw the sea—she was about seventeen or eighteen, I think—she was utterly overcome. . . .” she told me. She didn’t seem to notice she’d slipped into a British accent, and I didn’t point it out to her, I just listened. “. . . After all those years on the moors. She’d imagined what the sea was like, over and over, of course—how could she not—but when she saw it, it was more than she’d imagined. Didn’t someone write that nothing’s greater than the imagination? I think that’s nonsense, don’t you?”

She said all this to me in the back of the taxi that was taking us home. She was sort of panting, then she was out-andout sobbing, and to hell with the static, I held her and smoothed her hair and pushed the dimple in her cheek until she was able to smile. “You’re very kind,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s just taken such a lot for me to get here.” I saw what she meant. All I could do to help was treat her as if she was ordinary.

Still—I had to know. I mean, it was a hell of a thing. “How did you get—here, Mary?”

“We were fooling around with stories. We put ourselves in them,” she said flatly, as if she didn’t even believe herself. Too much awe. Like someone explaining a house fire that burnt down their whole block: “We were playing around with matches and gasoline.”

“What—where are these stories? Can I read them?”

She leaned forward and told the taxi driver to drop us off by the dock at Cloud Cove.

I told her that the last boat must have gone an hour ago. I told her to come back with me. I told her that St. John would have to know what was going on sometime. That she was real now, that she ate steak and talked to the neighbors and was probably going to have everyone in town, men, women, children, trying to get next to her before the week was out.

“I’ll swim over,” she said. “I like having a secret from him. I’ll be all right, honestly. Come and see me tomorrow, and you’ll see I’m perfectly cosy out there.”

I looked back as the taxi drove away from the dock—she fiddled with her hair, seemed to be tying the lighthouse keys into a tight knot in her hair. That would be hard work to comb out in the morning. She peeled off my shirtwaist, my favourite lilac shirtwaist, discarded it, and dived into the water. The taxi driver saw her, too. He raised his eyebrows but not too high. He was a taxi driver. He’d seen a lot of things. “Well, it is summer. And she’s from out of town.” That’s all he said.

 

 

St. John came out of his study as soon as I opened the front door. Very quietly, he told me that Greta had phoned for me.

“Oh—what did she say?” I asked. Then I remembered that I was supposed to have been at dinner with her. And I shivered, a chill in my back that made me feel as if I was falling even though I stood quite still. He shivered, too. Much more noticeably, as if tugged by strings.

“She said she’d call back tomorrow.”

“Okay.” I switched a lamp on. It was frightening to be with him in the dark, seeing him shiver like that and listening to him speak so impassively. When I saw his expression I wanted to switch the lamp back off again. Anger. It was etched all over his face, the lines drawing up into a snarl.

“Why did you lie?”

I looked at him and didn’t say anything. He took a step backwards, and I don’t know how I didn’t scream—he seemed to be readying himself to spring at me.

“Are you going to tell me who you were with?”

I don’t think I could have managed a single word, even if I’d wanted to. I knew it looked bad. And it was going to look even worse if I told him whom I’d really been with. It would look like mockery, throwing something he’d told me back in his face.

“I think I’m going to knock you down,” he said. “If you just keep standing there like that I’m really just going to knock you down. Go—upstairs, to hell, get a room somewhere with your damn Pizarsky, just get out of here.”

That stunned me; I don’t know why I laugh when I’m hurt. “Oh, Pizarsky! Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Then you could put another plus in Mary’s column—‘Doesn’t run around with John Pizarsky.’”

I turned towards the front door—but where, as a rational adult, did I mean to go? Did I mean to swim over to the island, as Mary had? Burst in on Greta and J.P., or the Wainwrights? I slid past him and went up to the spare room. I dragged a chest of drawers over to the door; it was just the right height for me to lodge a corner of it under the door handle, which turned ten minutes later, to no avail. Then he must have rammed a shoulder against the door—it shuddered, and my heart hammered in my ears. He did that just once, without saying a word. Then he went away.

I sat up late, late, looking out over our garden. There was lightning, and rain battered the ground, and I thought of Mary Foxe, miles away, watching the storm through the lighthouse window. I thought of the things she knew about St. John. I saw a shiny shilling and a dark-haired young man with eyes like stains on glass. Alone in a big city, walking into walls. Everyone hurts themselves in the city; then they just pick themselves up so as not to get in anyone else’s way. And then he went home, to company devised for him alone; he went home to a girl who wasn’t there. I envied Mary for being what she was, for being so close to him; I was so jealous it burned, and I knew I had to let it alone or I’d break something inside me.

The night changed me. I built a scene in my head, better than that line I’d come up with about modesty and rouge. I pictured a woman alone at her dressing table, getting ready to go onstage. She’s exotic-looking—maybe dark-skinned, maybe an Indian—she’s had hecklers before, guys saying really filthy things, and now she’s really going at it with the makeup, just plastering it on, drama around the eyes, making herself look like a woman from another world so the audience will just sit there with their mouths open and let her sing her song and get out of there in peace. And while she’s getting ready this woman is talking to someone sat behind a screen—I’m not sure who that someone is yet. Anyway, the woman at the dressing table—her heart’s breaking. It breaks three times a week on account of people treating her so badly, and she knows that all you can do is laugh it off. She’s saying, “Let me tell you something, kid. Love is like a magic carpet with a mind of its own. You step on that carpet and it takes you places—marvelous places, odd places, terrifying places, places you’d never have been able to reach on foot. Yeah, love’s a real adventure! But you go where the carpet goes; after you’ve stepped onto it you don’t get to choose a goddamned thing. Well . . . there’d better be a market for magic carpets. ’Cause from tonight, mine’s for sale.”

And that’s how I plan to begin
Hedda Gabler and Other Monsters.
I think I’ll cut the part about the magic carpet being for sale, though. It might come off as tacky.

I moved the dresser away from the door at about four in the morning. I had to go to the bathroom. Then I went into our bedroom, mine and St. John’s. He wasn’t there. I went downstairs and found him in his study, asleep at his desk, drooling a little on some newly written pages so that the ink ran. I pulled the pages out from under his arms and put them aside without looking at them. He woke up, but he didn’t open his eyes. “I can explain about dinner,” I said. “In the morning. Just come out to Cloud Island with me, and I’ll show you.” He made no answer, and I pinched him. He opened his eyes, then, and gave me a sulky look.

“How’s the book going?”

He winced.

“Will you read me some? Please?”

“It’s not ready.”

“Just a little.”

He read a couple of pages aloud, very quickly. Then he saw that I wanted to hear more and he slowed down. He writes beautifully but without hope. Odd that he could be responsible for a little dancing cinder like Mary. He reached a particularly stressful part of a chapter and I came to crisis and said, “Oh, Lord,” before I could check myself. He looked up from the page. “Bad things are going to happen, D.”

“To the two of us?” I held out my hand to him. He took it and touched his lips to my wrist. Pins and needles, as if all my blood was rushing back into me.

“Yes, to the two of us. It’s inevitable.”

“But good things are going to happen, too.” He opened his mouth, seemed to think better of it, closed his mouth. “Were you going to say I sound like Mary?”