A Case of Knives (17 page)

In his kitchen I opened the fridge. I do it automatically, like reading letters. I was too excited really to concentrate. I wanted to keep all my observation for later. The cold air from the refrigerator and its hum restored to me some calm. I took a glass the shape of a sconce and returned to him. He put his own glass and mine upon the floor and poured lackadaisically and incidentally, a bronze man in a fountain. He did not look either at the tilted bottle foaming into the deep narrow glass or at my face. Could he be nervous?

I spoke gently to him. Perhaps he liked the illusion of chastity in his girls and I had gone too far beforehand. I sipped and slipped out sweet words.

We were obviously to do it at my house. I could understand that. Why should he sully his own? It was a long drive, but fast, and I felt pleased with the certainty I had that his trap was closing round me, that soon I should be nothing but a thing in his clutches. I felt like the fox, who, we are told, having enjoyed the chase, gives in to the teeth and the rending. I had not believed that the fox feels like this before, had even been to meetings with Angel and Dolores, but now I was keen to have my mask and my brush cut from me.

‘Goodnight,’ said Lucas Salik on my doorstep. ‘Why not give me my clothes when next we meet?’

I watched him till I could not see him any more and then I watched where he had been. It was six hours since I had first seen him. It was nearly eight months till my child was due to be born.

Chapter 14

When he telephoned me, I was not expecting to speak to him. I was thinking of him, but I had not prepared my voice for contact with his. I did not fear that he would fall short of the perfection with which I had endowed him, but I knew, as time passed, that I would grow fatter and slower and that I should have to hide from him. None the less, loving him had made me perform all actions with care and conscientiously, as though he were watching me from a star above. I knew nothing of his daily life, so I could not imagine him locking up his house or greeting his colleagues or pulling off the surgical gloves. I could imagine him only in the most fanciful and unreal way. I allowed myself to picture him taking me from all the muddle and worry, not in his already improbable car, but on a caparisoned horse or in a boat with wide sails. I let myself do this partly to fill the dreaming my body was dictating to my mind. Perhaps other mothers dream of the child. Will he have the father’s hair, will he be a doctor? There was at the moment only one doctor for me, and only one healer.

When the telephone rang, I thought it might be Johnny. I could no longer remember how the child was conceived, but I feared he might wish to remind me. How do fish reproduce? Isn’t it all quite vague and haphazard and impersonal? Had I perhaps left a sac of eggs behind a plant in a restaurant, and he absently slipped past it on his way to somewhere quite else? It was astonishing that a child could be the product of such a nothing. Most of all, it was sad, for human children should not be conceived thus, and I needed a father for the baby, about whom to think as the foetus grew, so that the child would receive not only my jolting worries but a nourishing flow of thoughts about the man who would shelter it. At the moment, the child was being fed an indigestible diet of wild dreams and dreary panic. It would be wicked to deprive the child of Johnny, at this rate. Was it anyway wicked?

When Lucas Salik asked me to dine with him, it was as though I had stopped falling through bottomless air to nowhere, unsupported, my ballast my baby. I was at once slung safe from a large steady balloon, moving at a stately pace over green fields. I could even see my own shadow again. I was once more real. Time reassumed shape, stopped being something to be killed. Two things about the telephone conversation were awkward: he proposed buying clothes for me, and he made me change my afternoon’s work at the charity shop. Clothes implied a liaison through time, which could not be. But it was a thought so tempting that I allowed myself to admire it, rather as though he had offered me a cat. There was the same suggestion of shared life. It was like planting bulbs, like conceiving a child. It was not to do with stimulus and boredom, like my friends’ amours. I let myself think of him and me in a shop, choosing unobtrusive clothes because he did not want other people to see me decked out vulgarly. I had thought of this person constantly since meeting him, but I was glad we were not to spend the afternoon alone. Finding words and assembling sentences in his presence was not easy. I am not inexpert at it, all my life I have talked too much to too many, but he lost me my tongue.

Since first meeting Anne Cowdenbeath, I had liked her. We met at Kew Gardens. I was alone and she was with Anto Cranley, a redfaced fat man with unamiable blue eyes and small hands and feet. He was the author of a scurrilous train of novels called
The Stations of the Crossed
, and he had about him an air of fresh scandal, though all I knew was that he was good at cricket and idle in other ways. I had watched him cook meals involving immeasurable quantities of very extravagant stuff, which he would combine and reduce to exact reproductions of favourite dishes otherwise easily to be found in a tin. A morning of peeling, dicing and deseeding effortfully tracked down oval tomatoes and liaising them with double cream and salmon coral would result in an orange liquid, thickish, sweet and comforting, indistinguishable from tinned tomato soup. Every pan and tool would have been used, and Anto would be exhausted and nervous until extravagantly praised. I would indulge him, go to specialist shops, find fresh bass or corn meal or white saltless butter from the barrel, and then, while the dreadful clattering from the kitchen was at its height, I would speculate about what he might produce – fish fingers, perhaps, or saveloys, or baked beans. How Anto knew this well-dressed woman who was looking at the cacti with disapproval, I did not know. I had known him since he picked me up in Hatchards.

‘I don’t like the way cactuses just sit there,’ said this woman to Anto.

‘No. But what do you expect? Roots aren’t made for walking.’

‘They don’t have roots, Anto, I don’t think anyway, and you are being obstructive. You know what I mean. They are stolid and their flowers are arbitrary. Like hats on the wrong person. They have none of the poise and short life which is so nice in flowers.’

‘Hello Anto,’ I said. I had been looking forward to the Temperate House since I too do not much care for cacti, but love instead the sweet damp warmth and the light through banana leaves.

‘Anto, won’t you introduce us? So this is the light at the end of the bushel.’ She grinned at me, which women do not often do, grin I mean, and even less do they grin at me. She gave a great deal with her face, keeping no secrets; it was an open face, not pleated with vanity and self-consciousness. It wore no make-up. After that first meeting, she had asked me to parties and to dinner and once to her house in Scotland, where I went with Tertius, before the party where I met Lucas Salik. We had not become close, but I had come to like her and to respect her. She was not like most women, who mark stages in friendship with increasing revelation and confidence. With Anne, there was no creeping, clinging, vegetable advance; she was just there, crisp and placed and rootless as the cactus flowers she disliked. Not that she was without family, but she was without very close family, and this seemed to disinfect her of her past, as though she had wilfully sterilised her memories, instead of carrying their complicated odour as people do. It was as though the past were an appendix and Anne was better off without hers, bearing not even a visible scar.

It was strange to observe today, with Lucas, that she was without the plain grace I had grown used to in her. The presence of a man will often knock askew women’s friendships, but this was a shock because Anne was not, I had thought, like that. She was brittle, patronising and eventually rude on that day, and I felt wretched. I was sure I had done something. All I could imagine was that she must love Lucas. Who would not? It was hubris to imagine that I, new to their grown-up, ordered lives, could storm him. Of course, he would prefer a woman of the world. Why should he degrade himself with a raw girl whose years were still unshaped? I felt fonder of Anne, the more badly she behaved. It was like a huge oversight in grooming, as though she had left off her blouse. I felt I could see her more intimately. The worst moment was when, already a little weak with a childish self-pity from watching Anne wolf her sweet brown ice-cream, I had to find a way of refusing a present she had bought me. It was a blue suit, it was a bribe, it was a humiliation. Or so it would have become had I taken it. As it was, I did not, and a blue suit it remained. It had shimmered with temptation, its cloth as subtle as the skin of a snake.

It even distracted me for a time from looking at the dark head of the man who just once, before I became a wife and a mother, in that order (or was I a mother already?), I wished to love me. I felt him watch me all the time as though he were weighing me up, and this pleased me, though I wanted him to be so close that he must cease assessment, appreciation even, and just breathe me.

But I was still acting. I’ve learnt that my speech can put men off. The big vocabulary and qualifying give an impression of arrogance, and, worse, unsexiness. It is sexy to be stupid. If there had been more time available for me and Lucas Salik, I should, of course, have allowed words to find a companion volume for my bookishness, but I had no time.

If there had not been the certainty of eating dinner together in the same week, I might not have found the strength in my colonised body and besieged heart to behave properly. The reward for my good behaviour was the arrival of Tertius, who joined us, looking very interested. Perhaps it was his clothes, but he had the air of a betting man who sees two trainers and a horse and senses a few tips to be had.

For a round man, Tertius was all angles. I don’t just mean the repeated checkings of his garments. He was touchy and opinionated. He had firm but short-lived opinions and did not care for people to disagree with him. Perhaps what he welcomed really was the chance to be put out when people did disagree with him. This was necessarily often because of his changeability. I did not think that he changed his opinion because of deep convictions or considered argument, but really because he was bored. Other people were the meat of his conversation, not, you felt, because they interested him as problems or because he was fond of them, but because his attention span was so short that only the inexhaustible but unpredictable swivels of human behaviour could keep him amused. I imagined he might go out like a candle without air if there were no gossip for him. In the manner he talked, he read. There were books with broken spines all over the floor, unrespected. He came to life when there was what he called a bit of meat in the book, just as he stopped coasting in conversation when he felt the approach of a stimulating feud or taking of sides. His chambers were dignified but, until I arrived the morning after a torpid night of paying with my flesh for some veal and six prawns, they were squalid. The few rooms, darkly painted, with handsome ceilings, were a muddle of splendour and dog-ends. Nothing had its place and the telephone was always in a drawer or under the carpet. Apart from a few ‘fine pieces’, by definition impermanent, since Tertius, a natural dealer, would sell any of them to the right person, the possessions were few but deployed so carelessly, all open, or ajar, or splayed, as to suggest profusion. Dimly lit, the rooms could give an impression of richness and lavishness, but the daytime, until I brought order, revealed a tinker’s lair. I was not sure why Tertius liked me. It cannot have been just the dusting. He could have got a boy to do that and given himself that pleasure. For everything about boys, Tertius would say, and especially watching them, presumably while Hoovering as much as while doing anything else, was superior to its counterpart in girls. This is not an exceptional view – in Tertius’s world it was the only view, an iron rule – but so much did he like to talk about it that I occasionally suspected he was an exhibitionist, and that he liked to have me there to shock me. Why else, after all?

After tea in Fortnum and Mason, then, Tertius turned to me and said, ‘Cora, love, there are a couple of little tasks I’d be so grateful if you could do for me before tomorrow when I’ve rather a big fish coming by.’ I said goodbye to Lucas and to Anne and we walked to Albany. Tertius was shrewd and I did not want him to see the opening of my heart to Lucas when we parted, as though it were being drawn from my body into his, on a thin, excruciating wire.

On our return, Tertius gave me a few unarduous chores. I washed his pots which were on the top of the stove. He did not wash up between meals, so a pot stained blue with red cabbage could be left with a rime of coffee grounds and a small Gainsboroughian thicket of cauliflower. The stove top had when I first came been syrupy with varnish.

‘Like this do we?’ asked Tertius, and his red head and a tie like a dangling lamprey appeared round the kitchen door. His malmsey butt body was clothed in russet and heather checked tweed. In his right hand was a mirror. It was a hand mirror, and it was a mirror not a looking-glass, a dull but polished moon of metal with a spindle shaped handle seemingly just pulled from the same piece. It was so simple that it suggested the actions required to make it – the beats to flatten the metal, the pull on the appended silver, the immersion in cooling water to set it. The impression it gave was that it would, whether by magic or euphemism, show to the person who looked into it their own self beautified.

‘It’s lovely.’

‘It’s yours.’

‘No Tertius, I’ve already been tempted today.’

So he extracted from me the story of the suit. I found ways of not mentioning Lucas too frequently, to avoid exposing myself, and also to keep him clean, as it were, to avoid mentioning him to this clever but degenerate man, so different from himself.