Mendel's Dwarf (25 page)

“I’m a genetic one.”

She frowned, as though I might have been making a joke and this was not the time for jokes. Or being sarcastic. But this
was
the time for sarcasm. “Is Mrs. Miller a patient of yours, sir?”

“She’s a friend, a colleague. Is she hurt?”

“The doctor’s seen her,” she said. “There’s nothing too bad.”

I followed the policewoman’s large blue backside down a corridor. I was at just about the same level. Blue serge and black lisle stockings. Legs like Indian clubs. For a moment I wondered how the woman would appear, shorn of the uniform of officialdom, stark naked and wobbling as she moved. Little more alluring than me, I guessed. Then she, opened the door onto an interview room and I forgot all about that, because there was Jean sitting at a table, clutching a mug of tea in her hands. She had a cut and swollen lip and a black eye. One cheek was puffed up, and there was a plaster over her left eyebrow.

“I didn’t know if you’d come,” she said quietly. And she apologized, actually apologized as though she were to blame—as though she had been brought in for drunken driving or something. “I’m sorry, Benedict. I’m awfully sorry. They wanted me to go into hospital for observation, but I said no. I just gave them your name. I know it was silly, but that’s what I did. The thing is, when you’ve been married for a few years you don’t have many people to turn to, do you?”

The policewoman looked at me doubtfully. “Mrs. Miller’s had a nasty experience. She’ll need a bit of peace and quiet.”

“What happened?” I asked. I wanted to put my arm around her, of course, to bring her that fragile thing that we call comfort. But of course I couldn’t reach.

“We were called by the neighbors,” the policewoman said, but I hadn’t really asked her.

“And Hugo? What about Hugo?”

Again it was the policewoman who answered. “Mr. Miller is in custody at the moment. But unless Mrs. Miller brings charges, there’s nothing much we can do.”

Jean looked at me with those absurd eyes. “I don’t want that. That’d be awful, wouldn’t it?”

“Not as awful as what happened.”

She sipped her tea and shook her head. “Awful,” she repeated.

And that was how she came to stay. An angel of mercy, I was. Cherub. A cherub of mercy. An ugly, aged cherub of mercy, bereft of wings. She still had some of her things at my place, and we bought others, going round the shops almost like a husband and wife, laughing at the looks we got. We were, in a way, happy. In my shadowy basement flat I think she felt free for the first time in years, because of course I imposed no restraint on her. I couldn’t dare to. She settled into the flat and she seemed quite unconcerned about the incongruity of things. “Snow White and her single dwarf,” I said once, and she grew really angry. A delightful sight, Miss Piercey angry, as angry as when I remember her catching someone sneaking out of the library back home with a stolen book tucked away in a carrier bag. “Benedict Lambert, don’t you dare say things like that! We are what we are inside, not what we look like.”

She sounded like my mother. She had a childlike sense of optimism, and the mere fact of my existence couldn’t cure her of it. She was convinced that “things would work out.” We were therefore a ménage of opposites: hopeful against hopeless, cheerful against acerbic, tall against dwarf.

She didn’t bring charges of assault or battery or any of the other things the police suggested against her husband, but the courts did put some kind of restraining order on him anyway. “Restraining order” sounds like a muzzle, but it didn’t stop his phoning her
at work and abusing her. “Got a man, have you?” he would ask her. “Nothing but a fucking tart.”

She tried to reason with him, but it was pointless. Hugo Miller appeared to be partway round the bend and straining to discover what was beyond the corner. “You’re not supposed to be telephoning me, Hugo. And apart from everything else, it’s bloody inconvenient interrupting me at work.” I don’t know whether she got the expletive from me. It wasn’t the kind of word she used normally, but then times weren’t normal, were they? Times were bloody abnormal, in fact.

“I’ll have to get somewhere of my own,” Jean told me. “I’ll have to get out of your hair.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort.”

“You want me here? You’re always snapping at me, always telling me what’s wrong and what’s right.”

I explained that that was just my manner, that when you’ve been in my business for long enough, the didactic manner becomes normal, that I was nothing more than a bore and should be told to shut up if necessary.

“You mean you want me?” She laughed. “Want me here, I mean?”

“Of course I do.”

“But I’ve kicked you out of your bed and everything. You can’t forever go sleeping on the sofa. It’s not right.”

“It’s all right by me for the moment.”

“Until?”

“Until you invite me in with you.”

A pregnant silence, if you’ll forgive the expression.

“Is it true what they say, then?” Eric asked one lunchtime.

“What do they say, Eric?”

He drew a pint of bitter and sniffed, as though considering the matter. “That you two are shacked up together.”

“It’s not what you think at all,” Jean said indignantly.

“Who says that?” I demanded. Among other things I felt a stir of pride. Quite unjustified pride of course, but then all too often pride operates without justification.

“People,” Eric replied carelessly.

“People should mind their own business.”

He nodded, as though at one of the eternal verities. “They never do, though, do they? Anyway, good luck to you, I say.”

Jean eyed me curiously over the steak-and-kidney pie. “Cheeky devil.”

“Me or him?”

She pursed her lips in that way she had. Her two eyes, the green and the blue, considered me in their own, asymmetric manner. “Both of you,” she said.

I’m looking for a moment, of course.
The
moment. Was it then in the pub, when Eric brought the subject up, thrust it, so to speak, into her consciousness? Or was it the morning when she suddenly and without apparent reason smiled and reached across and touched my cheek as we sat at the breakfast table? Or when we ate at that French restaurant and talked of trout? Or later, when we went to a piano recital and heard some unknown Czech pianist play
On an Overgrown Path
with such intensity that Jean actually wept, there in the recital room among the suppressed coughs and the faint air of tedium? Or was it one Saturday afternoon when there was a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition at the Tate Gallery and a party of schoolgirls stared after us as we moved from
The Moulin Rouge
to
Jane Avril
and one of the girls whispered in a voice that echoed from the ceiling, “Look, Miss, it’s
’im
.” Jean laughed. It was a bitter, ironic laugh. She was learning. As the wretched schoolteacher hurried her children into the next room, Jean looked at me and laughed. Was that the moment? Materially, no. Materially it required other things, a concatenation of events. But, beneath the plain material cause of things, was it then, as she looked at me and laughed?

After the exhibition we walked out into the afternoon and
strolled along the embankment. The tide was out. Gulls cried in the wind. The heavy slick of the river slid past like bile. A small steamer was battering its way downstream toward Chelsea while on the mud flats a pair of herons picked fastidiously over the debris. Across the river, the bulk of Battersea Power Station lay like a vast, inverted dining table. Jean glanced down at me. “Can I tell you something, Benedict?” she asked, and her tone was portentous, the sound I dreaded, the sound of doctors about to deliver judgment. I’
m afraid there’s nothing whatever we can do…

“Please don’t.”

“You’re so brave,” she told me. “I mean, I’ve got problems, but compared with yours they’re nothing. And you never mention things. Never. You can even laugh.”

Things
.

“It’s not being brave,” I assured her with the famous Benedict carelessness. “To be brave you’ve got to have a choice. You’ve got to have the option to be a coward. When you’re like me there’s no choice.”

She looked at me with those eyes, and I read a muddle of pain and pity there. “If you weren’t like you are …”

“It’d be another world.”

She stared into the wind. Those eyes, those matchless eyes, were glistening with tears. But the wind might well have done that. It was cold and raw, coming from the Essex marshes. “It’d be easier,” she said. “That’s all. Easier.”

We got back that afternoon in a shared mood. Sentimentality, perhaps. Sentiment, certainly. The two float dangerously near each other, like related bacteria in a culture, infecting each other with plasmids, passing the genes for mawkishness and insincerity, love and lust, back and forth. And laughter helped. And alcohol. All these things.

“What do you want to do?” she asked as she cleared away the supper dishes. We had drunk more of a very ordinary
vin ordinaire
than was good for us, and had laughed immoderately over
el cheapo
and
chateau plonc
.

“That’s up to you.”

Miss Piercey was a different woman. No longer a mouse. A rat, a laboratory rat, white and sleek and with a mind of her own. We looked at each other through some kind of haze of alcohol and pity, and, in tones clouded with embarrassment, she told me that she wouldn’t mind. It was just … It wasn’t easy … It’d be difficult … if I saw what she meant … “There, I’ve said it,” she ended up, having said nothing. She began to wash the dishes brusquely, as though angry about something.

“You’ll break the plates,” I warned her, but she took no notice. We drank coffee without talking, and then she put the cups in the sink and announced that she was going to bed.

I’m looking for
the
moment; but perhaps it doesn’t exist. Perhaps that is just the way our minds work, thinking that a significant event must have a cause. Perhaps it is no more than chance, the terrifying machinations of chaos. I sat there and listened to her moving about the flat, going to the bathroom, flushing the lavatory, splashing around in the basin or the bidet. Doors banged shut. A kind of silence fell. What had been said? What, if anything, had been agreed? The arrangement with Eve had been so much simpler.

I tiptoed along the corridor to her door and tapped softly, in case she might hear.

“Who is it?” she called, in case it might be someone else.

“Can I come in?”

“Wait amo’ …”

I could hear sounds beyond the wooden panel. Then: “Turn off the light.”

I did as I was asked, and opened the door into a blanket of darkness. The air was scented with her perfume, the smell vivid in the dark—slightly florid, slightly overstated, entirely dangerous. “Over here,” she said softly, as though I might not know the layout of my own room. I closed the door behind me and crossed the room to the bed, putting out my hand and finding the cool touch of the sheet; and then hot, soft flesh. She stirred in the
shadows. I touched silken skin, an edge of bone, a declivity that ended in a deft thicket of hair. She made a sound that was difficult to interpret, a small, voiced exhalation that might have been distress.