In the King's Arms (2 page)

Down the hallway, doors were creaking and slamming. She could hear boisterous voices, English-accented (no: now she was the one with the accent), engaged in territorial frolics:

“Painsley! You sow! Want some coffee?”

“I’m ab-so-lyute-ly knackered!”

“MacAree’s just down the hall.”

“Where’s the ruddy hammer, Pickles?”

She locked the door, sat down on her steamer trunk, and bawled. A minute later, her head picked up smartly as a key turned in the door. A sturdy West Indian woman strode in, dragging a vacuum cleaner.

“HALLO!” she boomed, looking directly into Lily’s face. She wore a wide red headband and a blue housecoat. Her face was badly scarred, burned perhaps.

Lily wiped tears off her chin.

“I Hoover your dust balls,” said the woman. “I Mrs. Dancer; yes. I wake up your lazy bones in the morning,” she added, turning on the vacuum with a matter-of fact kick.

“YES!” she continued, bellowing over the wailing machine, “WHAT A DUST, WHAT A BIG DUST I FIND HERE, OH MY GOD....” She ferociously pursued every inch of the room, and Lily sat, watching her. She envied her busy, purposeful life. She wondered how old Mrs. Dancer could be. Her calves were covered in coarse, pilled stockings, but her hands and feet were delicate and girlish.

Mrs. Dancer motioned Lily off her trunk, shoved it aside forcefully, and took care of the big dusty rectangle now exposed in the center of the room. “Yes,” she said, kicking the machine off, at last. “Yes,” scratching her nose with a long finger. “I knock up de lazy ones and make de bed tight like a drum.” She noticed that Lily had been crying.

“I empty your bin.” She swung Lily’s trashcan up to her face, and peered inward. “Nothing in dere. You fill it up presently. You fill it wit your odds and ends, my dear.” She gazed at the girl frankly, questioningly.

“Yes, I will,” Lily conceded. She found herself having to cry again, at the assumption, hardly far-fetched, that she’d be living in this place for a good long time, and filling her bin up.

“You come from far away?” Mrs. Dancer stood at the window, leaning on a hip, pensively staring out into the world. From the frantic way she worked, one wouldn’t anticipate the peaceful kindness she radiated at leisure. Lily stood next to her, shoulder to shoulder, looking out through the leaded windowpanes. A great, grey sky, heavy with moisture, dark with the tolling of bells. She pulled the window open and smelled the wet meadow grasses.

“Yes,” she replied, “From New York City.”

“You don’t look English.” A trace of approval.

Lily didn’t know what to say to this. People were always puzzling over her looks. Her hair was light brown. (Some called it “dirty blonde.”) Her eyes were green, like her mother’s, and like her mother’s, her nose was sprinkled with pale freckles.

“Almost Austrian,” her mother would say (“almost”—Lily thought it sounded a bit like “dirty blonde”); “we could have smuggled you through.” Probably not through England, in any case; Mrs. Dancer’s evaluation was accurate. Lily’s cheekbones were as wide as a Tatar’s, her eyes sliced long, and few Anglo-Saxon women had breasts as round and full. In England, her lush hips seemed somewhat decadent, assailable.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“Jamaica.” She was still looking out the window. “I from Jamaica, Kingstown, you know.” Up close, her eyes glistened, two precious stones in her ruined face. She sighed patiently. “What’s the time, dear?” Lily told her. She turned and left, sliding her heavy vacuum behind her.

O
XFORD CARESSED LILY’S SENSES in a bittersweet way. Church bells tolled from Gothic spires, summoning in her a nostalgia she couldn’t trace. Inside, fair young men sang Evensong, weaving dusk into dusk, spinning her backward into history. Five hundred years ago, they might never have met. She was very near them now and they were very near her. She could hear them, see them fly by on their jingling bicycles, scarves streaming. Her feet matched theirs on the echoing cobblestones. They were gentle and young. A decent folk. Now that she’d traveled across time and the great Atlantic to see them, could they but be kind to her? She was thinking of “kindness,” like an orphan.

If you asked Peter Aiken, he’d say that he rescued Lily from the worst possible fate at Oxford: association with the “wrong people.” She was lonely, looking up at the crumbly yellow-brown stones, following the white ribbon trail of swans on the River Isis, shopping for cream-cakes in the covered market, sipping mulberry wine in an ancient tavern. It was all too scenic to enjoy. Peter discovered her in that ancient tavern, quite by accident. He’d taken some girl into the alleyway to kiss, while Lily’d been moodily strolling by, glass in hand, and literally bumped into them. The girl, Flora, she recognized from her college. She was one of those girls with the V-neck sweater and the neat row of pearls. But she didn’t think she’d ever
seen Peter before. He had a high forehead, a mixture of nobility and a tendency to baldness. What hair he had was beige as an Afghan hound’s and hung entirely behind his head. He kept his neck and throat bare. An excellent choice: they were pure Modigliani. And he wore yellow kid gloves (“gantlets,” he called them).

“I’m sorry,” she said, as Peter wiped some wine off Flora’s skirt. “You look familiar,” she added loonishly to the girl. This was no time to strike up a conversation; Peter and Flora still retained a hot and bothered look from their necking; they did not seem in need of chums just then. They stared at Lily. Then Flora said, politely, “Oh, yes! I’m sure I’ve seen you in college.”

What a kind soul, thought Lily. Then she noticed Peter’s baleful expression.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

“What do you mean by that?” he said.

“The way you’re looking at me.”

“Are you a student here?”

“Of course she is, darling,” said Flora, soothingly.

“Well, what are you doing in this bloody tourist’s pub?” he bellowed. “Where one is meant to find no one whom one knows! Where one is meant not to be spied on! Haven’t you any sense at all? I tell you this for your own advancement!”

Lily burst out laughing. Peter had a ridiculous pink face. Then he laughed, too, a trifle reluctantly. He asked Lily if she was a “Yank.” She admitted it. She said she was Austro-Hungarian “by blood,” though, descended from impoverished royals, deposed but proud. Peter actually seemed to believe her. He nodded slowly, approvingly.

“Do you dye your hair that color?”

“Yes,” said Lily. “I do. Its natural color is white like Andy Warhol’s.
We came over from Hungary together. He’s albino. Mine’s white by accident of fortune. The fright of my family’s sudden departure to the New World turned it overnight. That, and saying goodbye to all the faithful servants.”

“Do you like New York? Are you a millionairess?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I never ask. I demand. I demand to know. But I suddenly couldn’t care less. You’ve got lovely Magyar cheekbones. Come here. What’s this you’re drinking? Fruit juice?” He stared at Lily’s mulberry wine. “Never drink this vomit again!” Flora fidgeted restlessly.

“Now,” he said, taking Lily’s glass away and throwing it at the stone wall. “Would you like to have a Pimm’s cup in my room?”

“O.K.”

“Flora, if you’re going to sulk like that, just go.”

“It’s nearly suppertime,” said Flora. “I’m eating in Hall tonight. I had better go.” She played with her scarf. “Will I see you in The Grapes later on?”

“You might,” he said. “Don’t eat brussels sprouts, just in case.”

He walked off with Lily. His college was Christ Church, and his room extraordinarily studied. An antique mirror bearing poorly distinguishable comedy-and-tragedy masks hung on the wall over the bed. A sheepskin rug was tossed on the floor, and upon it a copy of
Les Fleurs du Mal
was exhibited, the moaning nudes writhing on the splayed cover. The wall across the bed was plastered with art postcards from around the world. Peter could identify them all, and liked to. He made Lily a Pimm’s cup. She sat in an armchair that was draped with a ratty fur stole.

“So you’re new,” he said, draping his bones on the bed. “A fresher.”

“Yes.”

“I’m fourth year,” he said, proudly. “Modern languages.” Actually, Lily, pursuing a second degree, was no younger than Peter.

“Which ones?” she prompted.

“Italian and German. It’s quite tough. Had to go to Munich last year.”

“Didn’t you like it?” Boy, she thought, her mind humming. Munich. Dachau’s neighbor. And this new chum of mine was there, oh so casually.

“No. I loathed it. Fatheads. Boors. The girls had thickened calves. You’ve heard of ‘the fatted calf,’ haven’t you? Those girls had two, each. Ankles like tree trunks. It’s no wonder they lost the war. No pretties to die for. None that I saw, at any rate. None like you.”

Lily was just thinking that she found him sexually repulsive, although otherwise quite genial.

“I spent my spring vac in Vienna,” he continued. “Even worse, those women. Cows. Nasty, too. A ghastly, fin du siècle feeling. And everyone eats far too much.
Schlag. Schlag
on their coffee,
schlag
on everything,
schlag
on their
schlagged
-up arses.”

“Did you know it means ‘beaten’?”

“Of course I’d know, fish-face. Like ‘whipped’ cream or ‘distressed’ leather. Hmmm . . . What of it? Getting randy, are you now? Pimm’s does that to girls.”

“No!” she giggled. “It’s just that my mother uses that word when she tells me a particular story about—”

“Yes, I’m sure I understand. About beating the servants in the Schloss. Poor Austro-Hungarian Royal. You must miss your waltzes now and then.
Mein Liebe . . .
”

“Well, not really,” she said calmly. “You see, we’re not all that homesick. You see—we’re—we’re Jewish. So we took the world tour on a flying boot kick. Mother survived the death camps. She uses
the word ‘
schlag
’ to illustrate a tale of being beaten on the head.”

That shut him up. Peter’s left eye twitched a hair’s-breadth.

“My father hid underground in Poland,” said Lily. “A Polish family told on him. They’d dug up the grave of his infant son, saw that the baby was circumcised, and found my father, not ten yards away, hiding under a barn. He went straight to Dachau. It’s conveniently situated near Munich. Where you had such a bad time with your fatted calves. Small world,” she concluded, with a thrill.

“What do you want me to do about all of
that
?” he said sharply. “It’s you who’s small. Dragging your wretched family into my anecdotes. I’m really rather impatient with ‘tragedy’ anyway, particularly when borrowed. Look at you, unscathed. What did you suffer?”

“Well, looking at all the corpses hanging on my family tree hasn’t always been fun. I’ve lived in that world all my life. And they’ve always reminded me that I could have been born earlier, in Europe. You’d have watched me taken away.”

“But you weren’t born then. And neither was I.”

“Anyway, you’re not Jewish,” she muttered, “and nothing truly shattering ever happens to inbred Aryans like you.”

“What rot. We have our tragedies.”

“Not mass ones.”

“Oh, shut up, you envious, grudge-bearing witch.”

“No, you shut up, you pretentious snot ball. I don’t like you anymore.”

“I don’t like you either. What’s your name, smiley?”

“Lily.”

“Lily—quite a pretty name. I find this conversation tiresome. You take things too much for granted. I try not to. What are you reading?”

“Medieval English Literature.”

“That’s respectable. Learning to speak properly is always a challenge, not that I would know, as I was born articulate. Are you at all clever?”

“Clever enough to be here without centuries of family connections.”

“Parvenu. I’m the cleverest one in my family.”

He got up suddenly and put a record on the turntable.

“You’ll like this,” he said.

The singer screamed:

“Don’t like music?” Peter lay back on his bed, laughing. Lily’s face was scrunched up amusingly, as though she’d sipped quinine. “Wait. There’s a ballad coming up. You’ll love the ballad.”

The ballad went like this:

“Enough,” said Lily.

“It’s not over yet.” Peter shot her a look that made her nervous.

“Peter, I’m leaving.”

“All right, I’ll turn it down.”

“Off!”

He turned it off.

“You’re really very pretty,” he said. “Very tasty.” He had one hand on his lips, sizing her up. She noticed that his fingernails were black.

“Peter, you have a girlfriend.” And thank God for that, she thought.

“But Lily, I don’t know what you could mean.”

“Well, who was Flora, then, your niece?”