The Jeweller's Skin (2 page)

The music pulled at her feet like flat waves.  Narcisa almost looked down; as if a line of white foam might lap from under the row of wicker chairs, move forward up the nave of the little church.  Insistent waves, demanding her attention.  But there in her mind was the hospital; the new approach, all the changes they wanted, right down to her kitchen.  And here at the concert there was Anthony Shearer, his flecked tweed sleeve all but touching her right arm.  At the front of the church a shiny grand piano, a tall hunched woman.  Stop fussing, she told herself, and closed her eyes.

The wave needed all its strength to lift, even so far.  It fell, discouraged; began again.  No longer pulling, she thought; had its own concerns.  The piano testing itself, such concentration.

Her father, standing at the workbench, looking down.  He turns a wheel, and gold is drawn through a steel plate to become wire; a fine line of light, stretched out from the plate and wound onto a drum.  The ratchety sound of the wheel in the usual quiet. 

The piano took up the gold wire and made it heavy.  The music was bound round her in heavy loops.  She held her breath.  The music made her sit still; bound down her arms.  For a moment she saw a canvas straitjacket, the flat tapes tied round and round; but no, it was wire.  It fell away from her body, the circles softening, the loops of gold light piling on the floor. 

Leave me alone!  she felt as it started again.   She opened her eyes; Anthony Shearer’s tweed arm was trembling to the rhythm.  A navy-blue feather on a hat kept quivering.  They’ll let me out; who was it used to say that?

Clara.  It was Clara, very thin, tubercular they found out later, in the shapeless blue asylum uniform, speaking slowly so Narcisa would understand.  A high cracking voice, determined.  Narcisa had never seen hair so fragile.  ‘They’ll let me out, I swear it, they will have to.’  In the ironing-room; steam from the sheets rising up to her pale face.  So Clara coughed; laughed; put out a hand and stroked Narcisa’s arm. 

The piano had stopped.  Someone murmured; the navy-blue feather leaned delicately to one side.  Anthony Shearer turned and smiled at her.  He thinks I’m not used to going to concerts.  She nodded to him, and closed her eyes again.

But starting up the piano was now cheerful.  This is not right!  she thought, suddenly angered.  Is this war-music?  She had had enough forever of brass bands.  Good for morale, one of the doctors had told her.  She waited impatiently for the gold chains to return.  Was that what he thought, the engineer Anthony Shearer: good for morale?  They had not had a discussion about the war.  For her it was young men crying on the wards; pamphlets instructing her on savings in the kitchen, when already she cooked on next to nothing.  As for what happened beyond the hospital, beyond the English coast (she had seen it, arriving the first time on a ship at Dover) she knew nothing. 

And yet she did know; she couldn’t block out the chatter in the kitchen.  ‘All them against us, Italians, and everyone.’  The grocery man, delivering his rant to her turned back.  She was beating her pudding mixture with a long wooden spoon.  Am I one of
us
, then?

Oh but this is too clever, she said, her eyes now open.  The woman leaned jealously over the keyboard - pounced.  Crash!  The chord juddered through Narcisa.  Such speed; she felt it rock her like anger.  This woman wants to make us forget the opening.  Narcisa tried to recall what that phrase was, the gold wire dropping in loops around her ankles.  There was too much now, the jolting chords and the predatory runs.  Her hands remembered that rush down the keyboard: glissando.  You can’t look back after all, she thought.  Though once during the war Clara did come down, with her two grown children; the older boy a bit fat, taller than Clara.  Who was still thin, with lines around her mouth.  They had tea in the Copper Kettle.  You can’t look back.  There was a pause - the woman’s hands hovering - and please, Narcisa was saying to her, again.

What returns is never good enough, she thought, and moved dismissively on the wicker chair.  The church was cold; she felt the draught on her ankles.  The woman bent forward and let the music fall.

*

‘Remarkable,’ Anthony Shearer was saying, as they moved slowly between the rows of chairs, Narcisa pulling on her knitted gloves.  Now he would want to talk about the music.  A mistake to come to a concert with anyone.  She had been to hopeful recitals in small-town theatres, and slipped out at the end, a small middle-aged woman in dull clothes, invisible.  What was it people said to each other about music?  They were all talking, the couples and the few old men and old women, shuffling out of the church; they were all saying something.  Let him talk, she reassured herself; I can just listen.  Or not listen; I know how to do that.

At the back of the church he bent towards her: ‘Come and look at the font.’  His hand rested briefly on her shoulder-blade, through the wool coat.  The stone, he was saying.  She stood docilely while Anthony Shearer the engineer crouched down, smoothing the worn carved figures with the flat of his hand.

‘Well, Cook!’   A young man’s confident voice, blaring.  The last people leaving the church turned round to look.  ‘How extraordinary to find you here!’  It was the young bald doctor, Mr New Approach, in a good black winter coat, a girl with a pillbox hat smiling behind him.

Narcisa stood still.

‘Mrs Humphreys,’ she heard Anthony Shearer say with precision, ‘might find it equally extraordinary to find you at a concert, Doctor.’

She watched the young man flush, laugh, point at the font.  ‘Wasn’t it lovely?’ the girlfriend said to Narcisa, peace-making.  ‘So intense.’ 

The three of them seemed to expect her to do something.  The vicar strode cheerfully down the aisle towards them.

Narcisa walked past him into the air.  She had almost forgotten it was afternoon.  The tree at the gate was covered in red berries; down at her feet there were crab-apples, turning brown.  They could be making crab-apple jelly, she thought.

*

Why did I do that?  she asked herself ten minutes later, walking down the High Street.  Anthony Shearer had invited her, and paid for the concert tickets.  Didn’t that mean some kind of obligation?  I don’t know how these things are handled, she thought; then shook herself, really shook her head so the blue hat almost came off.  That’s not the point.

She stood looking in at the chemist’s window with the blue and red jars.  Have I become that sort of person?  Meaning: rude to people, ungracious.  Perhaps I have.

She walked on, faster, past the Post Office and the George, where the month before Anthony Shearer had calmly escorted - that was the word, escorted her up to his room.  That wouldn’t happen again.  She wondered if he had booked in at the George this time.  Probably he had imagined taking her there, after the concert, or after dinner, perhaps.  But he was the ill-mannered one, she thought, angry, hands in her coat pockets, waiting to cross the High Street.  I have to work with Doctor What’s-his-name; he doesn’t.

Was that what men expected, she wondered later, sitting on her bed, a cup of tea warming both hands.  To speak for you?  Edwin had had to; she didn’t speak any English.  She could remember her mother-in-law’s drawing-room; Edwin, careful as ever, sitting forward on the dark chintz chesterfield, explaining; first to his mother, then in French back to her.  If she remembered him ever, that was what he was doing: explaining.  How exhausting for him, she thought for the first time.  What was he, twenty-four?  Hard for a young man.

Still, there was no need of that with Anthony Shearer.  Oh, men, she thought, like the women she worked with in the kitchen, like half the women she’d got to know here; oh, men.  Which meant, she now realised, you have to forgive them.

But why?  She put the cup and saucer down.  It was dark already; an edge of cloud seemed to flap across the crescent moon.  Because of what we did in bed together?  Then it can’t be worth it.  She picked up her hairbrush and brushed hard at her hair, wishing it was long again so she could fight it, pulling out the tangles.

She was restless; she wanted to be moving.  It was dark but not late: six?  And no more blackout.  She took down her coat again, tugged it on as she closed the door to her room.  The gate-porter would wonder what she was doing.  Tomorrow it would be all through the hospital: Mrs Humphreys came back and went straight out again.

She took her bicycle out of the shed and checked the tyres.  A few years back she’d have had to get permission.  She rode slowly along the gravel paths, her front light flickering over a pruned rosebush, the bole of a tree.  Already the motion was starting to pacify her.  She rang her bell and the gate-porter opened: ‘Off out again, Mrs H?’  She rode into the lane.

This is who I am, she thought, feeling the damp air on her neck and cheek, the strength of her thighs as she pedalled up the slight slope.  The poplars behind the hospital fence rustled.  The phrase from the piano sonata came back to her, the gold chains loosening.  If I’d been on my own I’d have remembered it sooner.

She rode down the alleys, past the backs of houses.  A woman was unpegging pillow-slips from a line, her hands and the linen blue-white in the dark.  A small dog yapped at her wheels as they clicked past him.  There was a smell still lingering of Sunday dinners.

She remembered, abruptly, his hand on her hip, pressing.  She had come back into town; she passed a pub where the lights were coming on.  It must be nearly seven: opening time.  A young woman, hugged close to her young man,  turned to wave to her as she crossed the street.

Opposite the George Narcisa got off her bike, and stood wiping her face with her handkerchief.  Her legs throbbed a little; not so young.  She got her breath, felt the sweat on her back quickly cooling.  Do I want to do this?  Then she called to a child, and gave him a shilling to go in.

The train drew into a station: Ewell West.  The young woman opposite Anthony stood up, fastened her cloak over her nurse’s uniform.  Already other people were in the corridor, waiting to come in.  A tired-looking couple sat down, on either side of the door, a little boy babbling, letting himself sway between them.  ‘Sit down nicely, now, David,’ the woman said.

Anthony looked out at the dark back gardens.  What an extraordinary woman Nora was!  But that was what the young doctor had said, that had made him so angry. 
Cook
indeed!  in a church full of Surrey house-owners:
cook!
  As if she slaved for him in his own kitchen.  So he had surprised himself, speaking out like that; and Nora had gone, had simply walked out of the church, to the town centre, and caught a bus back to the asylum.  Not, as she’d told it, having a tantrum; not, he was quite sure, teasing him to run after; but because they were all there
expecting her to do something
.  That was as far as he’d got her to explain.  He had insisted, sitting in the rather worn lounge of the George; and Nora had shaken her head and said nothing, and kept on looking to see that her bicycle hadn’t been stolen; and said in the end, ‘You all expected me to do something.’

Another station; the whistle, the wave to the driver.  The little boy had fallen asleep against his mother, who leaned forward, hands held out in front of her, looking down, while the man was speaking.  A striking woman: poor, obviously; tall, with thin arms, a rather old-fashioned hairstyle, all swept up; an interesting woman.   But the astonishing thing, Anthony went on telling himself, was that Nora Humphreys had come back again.  She had cycled in the dark back into town, and like some tragic Victorian heroine, someone in Wilkie Collins, or Conan Doyle even, she had bribed a child to come inside and find him.  There
was
something Victorian about her; the stilted speech, some accent he’d never placed; and something that might have been a sense of duty, knowing her place, almost.  And yet: he remembered vividly the other time, her naked body bearing down on him, sturdy, her skin-tone sepia in the darkened room.  I might have been shaving, he thought, ridiculously.  I might have gone out to meet someone.  What had she wanted, coming back to him?  It was flattering, he had to admit that, an attractive woman taking some kind of risk.   It was a risk,  certainly, even after the mad freedoms of wartime; to get a reputation, for a woman.  More so, no doubt, in that shut-away institution.  And she wasn’t young.

So I’m flattered, he acknowledged.  It was Wimbledon station; the family got out, the child carried sleeping against his father’s shoulder.  There seemed to be many people on the platform, but for some reason none came in to join him.  He stretched his long legs and yawned.  He was tired, a little; he’d worked a long day at the hospital; it was satisfying.

What had she wanted?  Was it just to make peace?  She was a fair-minded woman, he could see that: she wouldn’t want to leave him confused over what had happened.  But for that, a letter would do, surely?  It was difficult for women, he thought: for an independent woman like Nora Humphreys.  For most women, his wife Mina for instance, it was not an issue.  But for someone like Nora, with her professional correctness, her silence, her attractive foreign determination; she couldn’t say, could she? if what she wanted was to make love again.  A man could; he could say I had to come back to you, and the woman, Nora for instance, would understand. 

Coming through Battersea, he closed his eyes, and imagined her in his room at the George, standing in her unfashionable light-blue hat and her plain coat, hands in her pockets, saying: Anthony, I had to come back to you.  This is self-delusion, old man, he told himself, and smiled.  He had not, this time, taken her to his room.  They had sat as if they were visiting some respectable aunt, on flowery chairs set at right-angles, in the lounge.  He had ordered tea, and watched her tasting - a professional, testing, almost - the hotel scones.

He could see the river: the Tate, that pretentious sugar-cube; then Millbank, the Houses of Parliament.  The train slowed down behind St Thomas’s, stopped.  Was I kind enough to her?  He was moved now: she had taken this risk, she had come out to find him.  He wished he had hugged her - that at least; but even for that they would have had to go up to his room.  In a small town.  I did apologise about the doctor.  But that wasn’t enough; he was sure it wasn’t enough.  Next time I’m down there.  There was nothing planned, so far; but no doubt the hospital would summon him soon.  That’s the nature of these affairs, he told himself: you have to be patient.  He wished she had taken off the light-blue hat.

The train shuddered forwards again towards Waterloo.  Anthony Shearer pulled down his suitcase from the rack.  It was five to seven.  Half an hour on the underground to Hendon; ten minutes’ walk up the hill, and he’d be home.  A pity the boys were away at school; he missed them.  Mina would be in the drawing-room, probably sewing.  And Renée was staying, Mina’s elder sister, whose husband had died early on in the war; the two of them would be chatting away.

He swung down with his suitcase onto the platform, a tall man, rather thin, almost no grey in his toffee-brown hair.