Elementals (14 page)

Wendy’s gang, at playtime, sat around on the low stone wall round the netball courts and Rachel’s gang met in the bushes, in the sooty Victorian laurel-bushes near the gate into the school grounds.

I think, looking back, that Rachel had leadership qualities, and that Wendy didn’t – she was simply too agreeable, her gang clustered round her because she was a star whose star quality was a perfect normality. Looking back, I think you could call it grace. She did things – things she was asked to do, things she was expected to do, things she mildly liked to do – as well as she could, and was briefly surprised to find that no one else could do them anywhere near as well. Whereas Rachel was moody. You had to be on the right side of her, or she picked on you. No, I can’t remember any instance of her picking on anyone, nothing so precise. Just an atmosphere, a smoke, of possible danger.

There was a fringe of girls, like myself, who hung around the edges of the gangs, not sure if we were admitted as members or not. Because we weren’t sure, we were also uncertain what the gangs
did
. What was being discussed, in secret whispers, in smuggled notes in Scripture lessons, in the bogs. We thought, if we could be in the inner circle – both gangs had an inner circle of about four or five acolytes and the Leader – we would be part of something that was going on, we would be less bored.

I know now, I know the secret of what was going on. It was nothing at all. Or at least, all that was going on was the self-perpetuation of the structure of the gangs, the inner circles, the outer circles, the tension between Wendy’s gang in the sun and Rachel’s in the shade. We were in a green suburb of an industrial town, and when we crossed the town, on winter afternoons, to go home to tea, we saw
real
gangs, that is, active gangs, boys with bicycle chains, boys with knives and heavy boots, boys whose doings were reported in the papers, sometimes. We hurried past, looking unfrightened, walking together, safety in numbers. But our gangs were not
gangs
. Nothing ever happened.

Or at least, I think nothing happened. No, change that,
something
happened, but I do not remember how.

I had the idea, because I read so many books, that treachery would make the gangs interesting. A girl could betray the secrets of one gang to the other, if she could find any secrets to betray. I think I was interested in treachery because of the charm of Rupert of Hentzau. I hadn’t met that other charmer, Edmund in
King Lear
, I’m fairly sure. I may have hit on some narrative universal: what is interesting about boring gangs has to be treachery. It was a silly idea, because, as I said, there were no secrets, no plans of battle, no battles, nothing to betray. I watch Lara betraying me with all the inventiveness of her, our, fraught and hyperactive trade, and I look back on the innocent child I was, with my dreams of drama, with a sad pity. Our world is full of a buzz about surveys which have been commissioned which show that
one boring
commercial
can lose the audience for the whole commercial break round it, can even diminish the audience for the television programme into which our break breaks. She is putting it about, in whispers, that another soft-drinks firm has done a survey that shows that both my Spanaranja and my Grenadine films are infecting whole slots with boredom and apathy. I think, myself, she invented not only the findings, but the survey. It was, I have to admit, a resourceful idea, which will leave a question hanging like smoke in the atmosphere, even if I manage to get rid of the survey or demolish its hypothesised findings. She’s quick, and she’s brave. She lives in a world of interactive computer-generated gladiators, bomb-lobbers, kamikaze scantily clad dolls, headsmen with swords and laser-duellists my reactions aren’t quick enough for. She can fill screens with blood I shall drown in, at the touch of her glossy black fingernails.

I did have another idea, I think, about Wendy and Rachel. I thought, if some girl stretched a dark cord across the path, in the cross-country run, she could bring down Wendy in her pride as she strode past, leaving the way clear for Rachel, who would be impressed and grateful. It would be a
real
secret, something would really have happened, that could never be told. It would be real treachery, not just giggling and whispering. Rachel would be able to recognise the degree of difference, between talk and something really happening, for once. I didn’t have this idea, particularly, because I was in love with Rachel and hated Wendy. Or the other way round, because I was in love with Wendy, and she spurned me for her inner circle. She never exactly spurned anyone – her inner circle got there through the greater persistence of their greater desire. I don’t think I was in love with either of them, or with anyone, except Sir Lancelot, and Rupert, and Saladin, and Mr Rochester. I was afraid of being annihilated by boredom, of there never being anything else. Once I thought about talking to Rachel about my idea about the cord, of course, I saw how impossible the idea was. She wouldn’t have listened, and might have reacted quite nastily, or been put off, or even scared. The scenario of her secret gratitude was just that – a tenuous scenario, and I abandoned it. I was sorry, because I knew where the good place to stretch the cord would be, between the trees in a copse on the climb round the rough scree near the old quarry. There was cover for the traitor to retrieve the cord, and get away, in the confusion. The traitor would be dressed for the race, but would have skipped a large part of the circuit, cutting straight through the trees.

The thing that happened was, that Wendy, running easily, and well ahead of everyone else, did stumble and fall, in exactly that place. She fell quite a way, down the scree, and hit her head very nastily on a sharp stone, and broke a vertebra and a rib, and was in hospital for quite a long time. She was unconscious for quite a long time, too, and when she did come round was, to use a cliché which is conveniently to hand, ‘never the same again’. A light went out. She took the eleven-plus with the rest of us, and didn’t pass. Neither did Rachel, or not to our very superior school, and after a time I heard no more of either of them. I don’t know what became of Wendy after the Secondary Modern. I have a very clear memory of the piece of cord – sort of fairly thick garden twine, such as my father had in his shed, a dark khaki-green twine, completely invisible over dead leaves and puddles. I have the opposite of Alzheimer’s, I remember things I really think didn’t happen. After all, my job is scenarios, is finding props, is imagining lighting, the figure entering the frame, and ACTION. I remember Jael because the story doesn’t quite make sense, the emotions are all in a muddle, you are asked to rejoice in wickedness. I remember Jael because of the delicious red, because of the edge of excitement in wielding the pencil-point, because I had a half-a-glimpse of making art and colour.

Christ in the House of
Martha and Mary

Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
(detail), Diego Velázquez, c. 1618

Christ in the House of
Martha and Mary

Cooks are notoriously irascible. The new young woman, Dolores, was worse than most, Concepción thought. Worse and better, that was. She had an extraordinary fine nose for savours and spices, and a light hand with pastries and batters, despite her stalwart build and her solid arms. She could become a true artist, if she chose, she could go far. But she didn’t know her place. She sulked, she grumbled, she complained. She appeared to think it was by some sort of unfortunate accident that she had been born a daughter of servants, and not a delicate lady like Doña Conchita who went to church in sweeping silks and a lace veil. Concepción told Dolores, not without an edge of unkindness, that she wouldn’t look so good in those clothes, anyway. You are a mare built for hard work, not an Arab filly, said Concepción. You are no beauty. You are all brawn, and you should thank God for your good health in the station to which he has called you. Envy is a deadly sin.

It isn’t envy, said Dolores. I want to live. I want time to think. Not to be pushed around. She studied her face in a shining copper pan, which exaggerated the heavy cheeks, the angry pout. It was true she was no beauty, but no woman likes being told so. God had made her heavy, and she hated him for it.

The young artist was a friend of Concepción’s. He borrowed things, a pitcher, a bowl, a ladle, to sketch them over and over. He borrowed Concepción, too, sitting quietly in a corner, under the hooked hams and the plaits of onions and garlic, and drawing her face. He made Concepción look, if not ideally beautiful, then wise and graceful. She had good bones, a fine mouth, a wonderful pattern of lines on her brow, and etched beside her nose, which Dolores had not been interested in until she saw the shapes he made from them. His sketches of Concepción increased her own knowledge that she was not beautiful. She never spoke to him, but worked away in a kind of fury in his presence, grinding the garlic in the mortar, filleting the fish with concentrated skill, slapping dough, making a tattoo of sounds with the chopper, like hailstones, reducing onions to fine specks of translucent light. She felt herself to be a heavy space of unregarded darkness, a weight of miserable shadow in the corners of the room he was abstractedly recording. He had given Concepción an oil painting he had made, of shining fish and white solid eggs, on a chipped earthenware dish. Dolores did not know why this painting moved her. It was silly that oil paint on board should make eggs and fish more real, when they were less so. But it did. She never spoke to him, though she partly knew that if she did, he might in the end give her some small similar patch of light in darkness to treasure.

Sunday was the worst day. On Sunday, after Mass, the family entertained. They entertained family and friends, the priest and sometimes the bishop and his secretary, they sat and conversed, and Doña Conchita turned her dark eyes and her pale, long face to listen to the Fathers, as they made kindly jokes and severe pronouncements on the state of the nation, and of Christendom. There were not enough servants to keep up the flow of sweetmeats and pasties, syllabubs and jellies, quails and tartlets, so that Dolores was sometimes needed to fetch and carry as well as serve, which she did with an ill grace. She did not cast her eyes modestly down, as was expected, but stared around her angrily, watching the convolutions of Doña Conchita’s neck with its pretty necklace, the tapping of her pretty foot, directed not at the padre whose words she was demurely attending to, but at young Don José on the other side of the room. Dolores put a hot dish of peppers in oil down on the table with such force that the pottery burst apart, and oil and spices ran into the damask cloth. Doña Ana, Doña Conchita’s governess, berated Dolores for a whole minute, threatening dismissal, docking of wages, not only for clumsiness but for insolence. Dolores strode back into the kitchen, not slinking, but moving her large legs like walking oak trees, and began to shout. There was no need to dismiss her, she was off. This was no life for a human being. She was no worse than
they
were, and more of use. She was off.

The painter was in his corner, eating her dish of elvers and
alioli
. He addressed her directly for the first time, remarking that he was much in her debt, over these last weeks, for her good nose for herbs, for her tact with sugar and spice, for her command of sweet and sour, rich and delicate. You are a true artist, said the painter, gesturing with his fork.

Dolores turned on him. He had no right to mock her, she said. He was a true artist, he could reveal light and beauty in eggs and fishes that no one had seen, and which they would then always see. She made pastries and dishes that went out of the kitchen beautiful and came back mangled and mashed – they don’t notice what they’re eating, they’re so busy talking, and they don’t eat most of it, in case they grow fat, apart from the priests, who have no other pleasures. They order it all for show, for show, and it lasts a minute only until they put the knife to it, or push it around their plate elegantly with a fork.

The painter put his head on one side, and considered her red face as he considered the copper jugs, or the glassware, narrowing his eyes to a slit. He asked her if she knew the story St Luke told, of Christ in the house of Martha and Mary. No, she said, she did not. She knew her catechism, and what would happen to sinners at the Last Judgment, which was on the wall of the church. And about butchered martyrs, who were also on the walls of the church.

They were sisters, the painter told her, who lived in Bethany. Jesus visited them, from time to time, and rested there. And Mary sat at his feet and listened to his words, and Martha was cumbered with much serving, as St Luke put it, and complained. She said to the Lord, ‘Dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: but one thing is needful, and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.’

Dolores considered this, drawing her brows together in an angry frown. She said, ‘There speaks a man, for certain. There will always be serving, and someone will always be doomed to serving, and will have no choice or chance about the
better
part
. Our Lord could make loaves and fishes from the air for the listeners, but mere mortals cannot. So we – Concepción and I – serve them whilst they have the
better part
they have chosen.’

And Concepción said that Dolores should be careful, or she would be in danger of blaspheming. She should learn to accept the station the Lord had given her. And she appealed to the painter, should Dolores not learn to be content, to be patient? Hot tears sprang in Dolores’s eyes. The painter said:

‘By no means. It is not a question of accepting our station in the world as men have ordered it, but of learning not to be careful and troubled. Dolores here has her way to that better part, even as I have, and, like mine, it begins in attention to loaves and fishes. What matters is not that silly girls push her work about their plates with a fork, but that the work is good, that she understands what the wise understand, the nature of garlic and onions, butter and oil, eggs and fish, peppers, aubergines, pumpkins and corn. The cook, as much as the painter, looks into the essence of the creation, not, as I do, in light and on surfaces, but with all the other senses, with taste, and smell, and touch, which God also made in us for purposes. You may come at the
better part
by understanding emulsions, Dolores, by studying freshness and the edges of decay in leaves and flesh, by mixing wine and blood and sugar into sauces, as well as I may, and likely better than fine ladies twisting their pretty necks so that the light may catch their pretty pearls. You are very young, Dolores, and very strong, and very angry. You must learn
now
, that the important lesson – as long as you have your health – is that the divide is not between the servants and the served, between the leisured and the workers, but between those who are
interested
in the world and its multiplicity of forms and forces, and those who merely subsist, worrying or yawning. When I paint eggs and fishes and onions, I am painting the godhead – not only because eggs have been taken as an emblem of the Resurrection, as have dormant roots with green shoots, not only because the letters of Christ’s name make up the Greek word for fish, but because the world is full of light and life, and the true crime is not to be interested in it. You have a way in. Take it. It may incidentally be a way out, too, as all skills are. The Church teaches that Mary is the contemplative life, which is higher than Martha’s way, which is the active way. But any painter must question, which is which? And a cook also contemplates mysteries.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Dolores, frowning. He tilted his head the other way. Her head was briefly full of images of the skeletons of fishes, of the whirlpool of golden egg-and-oil in the bowl, of the pattern of muscles in the shoulder of a goat. She said, ‘It is nothing, what I know. It is past in a flash. It is cooked and eaten, or it is gone bad and fed to the dogs, or thrown out.’

‘Like life,’ said the painter. ‘We eat and are eaten, and we are very lucky if we reach our three score years and ten, which is less than a flash in the eyes of an angel. The understanding persists, for a time. In your craft and mine.’

He said, ‘Your frown is a powerful force in itself. I have an idea for a painting of Christ in the house of Martha and Mary. Would you let me draw you? I have noticed that you were unwilling.’

‘I am not beautiful.’

‘No. But you have power. Your anger has power, and you have power yourself, beyond that.’

She had the idea, then, over the weeks and months when he visited from time to time and sketched her, and Concepción, or ate the
alioli
and supped her red peppers and raisins, praising the flavours, that he would make her heroic, a kind of goddess wielding spit and carving knife instead of spear and sword. She found herself posing, saw him noting the posing, and tried to desist. His interest in the materials of her art did indeed fire her own interest in them. She excelled herself, trying new combinations for him, offering new juices, frothing new possets. Concepción was afraid that the girl would fall in love with the artist, but in some unobtrusively clever way he avoided that. His slit stare, his compressed look of concentration, were the opposite of erotic. He talked to the girl as though she were a colleague, a partner in the mystery of his trade, and this, Concepción saw without wholly knowing that she saw it, gave Dolores a dignity, a presence, that amorous attentions would not have done. He did not show the women the sketches of themselves, though he gave them small drawings of heads of garlic and long capsicum to take to their rooms. And when, finally, the painting of
Christ in the House of Martha
and Mary
was finished, he invited both women to come and look at it in his studio. He seemed, for the first time, worried about their reaction.

When they saw the painting, Concepción drew in her breath. There they both were, in the foreground at the left. She herself was admonishing the girl, pointing with a raised finger to the small scene at the top right-hand corner of the painting – was it through a window, or over a sill, or was it an image of an image on a wall? it was not clear – where Christ addressed the holy staring woman crouched at his feet whilst her sister stood stolidly behind, looking also like Concepción, who had perhaps modelled for her from another angle. But the light hit four things – the silvery fish, so recently dead that they were still bright-eyed, the solid white gleam of the eggs, emitting light, the heads of garlic, half-peeled and life-like, and the sulky, fleshy, furiously frowning face of the girl, above her fat red arms in their brown stuff sleeves. He had immortalised her ugliness, Concepción thought, she would never forgive him. She was used to paintings of patient and ethereal Madonnas. This was living flesh, in a turmoil of watchful discontent. She said, ‘Look how real the eyes of the fishes are,’ and her voice trailed foolishly away, as she and the painter watched the live Dolores watch her image.

She stood and stared. She stared. The painter shifted from foot to foot. Then she said, ‘Oh yes, I see what you saw, how very strange.’ She said, ‘How very strange, to have been looked at so intently.’ And then she began to laugh. When she laughed, all the down-drooping lines of cheek and lip moved up and apart. The knit brows sprang apart, the eyes shone with amusement, the young voice pealed out. The momentary coincidence between image and woman vanished, as though the rage was still and eternal in the painting and the woman was released into time. The laughter was infectious, as laughter is; after a moment Concepción, and then the painter, joined in. He produced wine, and the women uncovered the offering they had brought, spicy tortilla and salad greens. They sat down and ate together.