Mr. Fox (13 page)

Having been set on her feet again, Mrs. Fox caught sight of her disarranged hair and wailed. Mr. Fox went downstairs and, as he spent a few minutes charmingly obstructing the caterer’s efforts to finalise preparations, Mary watched Mrs. Fox pick up her wedding ring and slip it onto her finger. Mary watched Mrs. Fox rub at her ring finger as she redid her chignon, pushing the gold band first above and then below her knuckle, until at last she yanked it off and crossed over to the sink in the next room, where she plunged her hand under a running tap, so relieved by the cold in the water that she fell to her knees and splashed her face and her dress. Mary would have liked to speak to the woman, to try and offer her some kind of assurance that she would be happy at a later date. The urge to do so became overwhelming, so she left. Mr. Fox was out in the garden, smoking his pipe. He murmured a pleasantry, which Mary ignored.

“Mr. Fox. You’re not going to change, are you?”

“I don’t think I will, no.” His tone was light but measured.

“For example—you’re working on something at the moment, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Tell me what it is.”

He looked at her, considering. “You really want to know?”

“I really want to know.”

“Well. It’s about a man who works hard as an accountant all day and likes to go out driving late at night, to . . . to relieve his stress. And one night he’s driving so fast he doesn’t see a woman who’s trying to hitchhike from the side of the lane, and he knocks her down. But he keeps going because he’s afraid he killed her and would be arrested and go to jail and all sorts of unpleasantness like that. The next night he stays at home. But the night after that he goes driving again, and, well, he more or less deliberately knocks someone down. Over six months he makes a real career of it, knocking down pedestrians, mainly hookers. . . . It really relieves his tensions—”

“Stop,” Mary said brusquely.

“But I haven’t even told you the best part yet.”

“You’ll always refuse to see—or refuse to admit that what you’re doing is building a world—”

He smiled slightly, and she amended her words: “What you’re doing is building a horrible kind of logic. People read what you write and they say, ‘Yes, he is talking about things that really happen,’ and they keep reading, and it makes sense to them. You’re explaining things that can’t be defended, and the explanations themselves are mad, just bizarre—but you offer them with such confidence. It was because she kept the chain on the door; it was because he needed to let off steam after a hard day’s scraping and bowing at work; it was because she was irritating and stupid; it was because she lied to him, made a fool of him; it was because she had to die, she just had to, it makes dramatic sense; it was because ‘nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman’; it was because of this, it was because of that. It’s obscene to make such things reasonable.”

He shrugged. “These are our circumstances. I’m just trying to make sense of them,” he said.

Mary was silent.

“Everyone dies.” He smiled crookedly. “I doubt it’s ever a pleasant experience. So does it really matter how it happens?”

“Yes!” She put a hand on his arm, trying to pass her shock through his skin.
“Yes.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been wasting your time,” Mr. Fox said softly. The darkness in the garden absorbed the blue-black mane of his hair and made it look as if the sides of his face and the top of his head had been chiselled away.

He asked her: “Do you want to stop playing?”

Mary began to answer him, but the guests arrived, in pairs. Three couples in all, and each brought wine, even though their hosts had plenty waiting. A blonde woman named Greta was very huffy with Mr. Fox, refused to surrender her cheek for a greeting kiss but somehow made a joke of it. Her husband, a sleek blond man with a strong jaw, touched Mrs. Fox’s arm as he kissed her hello. The blond man’s accent had the slightest hint of the foreign to it, and everyone called him by his surname: Pizarsky. Even his wife called him that. Pizarsky . . . Mary recognised the name. Her eyes widened.

Pizarsky looked at Mrs. Fox often throughout the evening, and each time he looked it was for a moment longer than was casual. His gaze was hesitant. Almost meek.

Nobody seemed to notice this but Mary, who saw it all from her place outside the window, her heels grinding into the flowerbed. Should Mr. Fox fear this Pizarsky, as a rival? The man was so quiet that it was impossible to tell. The other husbands vied endlessly for the most outrageous comment of the evening, planned a forthcoming fishing trip in great detail, and addressed Mrs. Fox with elaborate compliments on the food. Mrs. Fox, pale-faced, accepted their tributes without a single guilty blush. She displayed her wedding ring for five minutes or so, then kept her hand beneath the tabletop. She and the other women spoke of ascending and descending skirt hems, and how difficult it was to hit upon the right length. Their eyes danced with the satisfaction of secret society members talking in code. They interrupted one another. “Do you remember . . .” they said. “Do you remember when . . .”

After dinner, the six of them moved to the drawing room. Mr. Fox had a dab of sauce at the corner of his mouth—Mrs. Fox removed it with a swift, affectionate gesture and the corner of a very white napkin. Mr. Fox kissed Mrs. Fox’s hand. When the teasing started up he mildly remarked that he thought a man might kiss his wife in his own drawing room on a Sunday evening if he felt like it. The others laughed hysterically. They’d started out sipping genteelly from glasses, but as they got drunker the drinking grew more lavish, and was done straight from bottles. They played charades, very badly, and were unable to establish who had won.

To Mary it looked like a great deal of fun.

T
here was a death on the plane back to London. It was the woman beside me. I didn’t know it could happen like that. I mean, I knew, but I didn’t believe it.

We pushed our seats back at the same time, our eyes met, and we laughed. We’d both ordered vegetarian meals. “I hate this food,” she said. “But I like getting it before everyone else.” Her name was Yelena. She was from the Ukraine, she told me, and I reminded her of her younger daughter. She was fifty-something, I think. Late fifties. Her fuzzy brown hair, her round, shiny eyes. She reminded me of a duckling, a greying duckling. I’d only just met her, but I liked her. I don’t know. We talked about New York. She’d been visiting her eldest daughter, a journalist for a fashion magazine. “You don’t know how far she’s come,” she said. What else . . . She showed me a group photo of her eldest daughter, her son-in-law, and her grandson. They looked happy and wealthy, suntanned in winter. I told her that I’d just been visiting my mother. “Good daughter,” she praised. I shook my head. “Only child.” She asked me what my mother does, and I said she’s a yoga teacher. I almost always lie about my mother. This woman, Yelena, started watching a sitcom and giggling, so I put on my noise-cancelling headphones and drank three-quarters of a bottle of cough syrup. I like it because it wears off faster than sleeping pills. I licked my lips. My stomach felt full; it seemed to sigh. When I looked out of the window sleep came down over it, steadily building black, softening my neck so that my head lolled, gathering me up in its vapour so that I drifted above the cramped angle of my seat. At some point my neighbour began to drum a fist upon my arm, then she began to groan and gripped my wrist; I shrank away and turned my face deeper into the flight cushion. I was dreaming.

I dimly recall hearing a beeping sound, and another noise, like a toy rattle being shaken. But they might have been in the dream. I love sleeping. Waking is more and more hateful the older I get. I say this as if I’ve lived too long. I’m twenty-two.

I woke as they were taking her away. Everyone was talking—everyone, in every seat. I felt their voices through my back and in my hair. There was still daylight in the cabin, but the overhead lights were on. Two male flight attendants carried Yelena away down the aisle, wrapped in blankets. And a balding man with a stethoscope walked behind them. I kept my head very still and just took my time to look and listen, without saying anything. Yelena’s arm kept trailing; her palm touched the floor, and the attendant who had the upper half of her kept catching her arm but couldn’t keep it aloft. Not to worry, said the flight attendants, and the man with the stethoscope said something similar with every step. They were taking her through to first class, which was almost empty, something Yelena and I had complained to each other about at the beginning of the flight. Someone asked if Yelena was dead. The flight attendant said something about her having been “taken ill.” But you’ve covered her face, someone else said. A beige silk scarf had been laid in a floppy triangle over Yelena’s eyes, mouth, and nose. Someone behind me started praying, in Latin, and rattling beads. People kept looking at me, and at the empty seat beside me. There was Yelena’s handbag, beneath the seat in front of us. Her tray, with the remains of her meal on it, had been hastily pushed on top of my own tray. Her seat was still warm. The sitcom was still running on the little screen. I kept listening to what was being said: I heard the words “cardiac arrest.” I should look after Yelena’s handbag. When would they come back for it? Should I take it up to the front . . .

The stares from the other passengers grew fixed, and I realised that my lips were moving, so I stopped moving them. Someone asked me if I was all right. Yes, I think so, thank you. Someone else asked me if I was all right. Yes, I think so, thank you. She seemed fine. Maybe she wasn’t well but didn’t want to say so. . . .

I shouldn’t have drunk so much of that cough syrup. A quarter of a bottle would have been sufficient. Half at the most.

The people around me kept asking if I was all right. Their voices were very kind, filled with concern, as if it was I who needed their concern. I couldn’t see exactly who was talking to me—it all seemed to be coming from every direction at once. My nose ran. Tears fell; they stung, like hail. Sorry, I said. Sorry. Eventually someone came and took me away, and I scooped up all my things and Yelena’s and followed behind the air hostess, dropping books and bottles and passports. Leave them, leave them, Miss Foxe, the air hostess said. I’ll bring your things along for you in a minute. I had a moment of bewilderment—
Who is Miss Foxe?
—then I just let everything go and went to first class, which is where they wanted me to sit so that I could tremble out of sight of my former cabin mates, so that I wouldn’t distress them, so that I wouldn’t complain later about how I’d been treated after the incident. Yelena was six seats away from me. There was an empty row in front of her and an empty row behind her. They’d arranged her in the seat as if she was sleeping—her face was still covered, but it looked better now that she was upright; it looked as if covering her face was something she did just to help her sleep. Her hands were folded on her lap. I know it sounds strange, but I calmed down a bit once I could see her. She looked lonely, but I didn’t want to join her. The air hostess put Yelena’s handbag beside her and brought me some gin. I huddled up under a blanket, dipped my thumb into the glass and sucked it. Yes, it was like that. . . .

I closed my eyes and tried to do some stupid breathing exercises.

“Only two hours until landing,” a man’s voice said. It seemed he had addressed the words to me, so I opened my eyes. He was sitting to my right, his whole body turned toward me, his chin on his fist as he studied me. I hadn’t heard or felt him draw near. He was older than me, but I couldn’t guess how much older. He was good-looking. Enough to make me feel uncomfortable. Tall and dark, etc. There was room between his eyes for a third eye of the same size—I’ve read that that’s one of the standards of classic beauty. He was wearing a black suit, but it looked as if he’d slept in it for a week straight—wrinkles within wrinkles. “I’m glad to hear it,” I replied.

“That woman over there is dead,” he remarked.

“I know. I—I was sat next to her.”

“What happened?”

“I think she had some sort of massive heart attack.”

He said, “I see,” and spent a second or two thinking about it. “Did you know her?”

“No.”

“Your eyes are just like a cat’s,” he told me. His voice was husky. There was gravel in it, and waves. I blushed. It was the way he looked into my eyes, unfalteringly into my eyes, as he spoke to me and heard my replies. As close and as direct as the look exchanged when standing face-to-face after a kiss, or at the peak of a bad fight. Worse than that, actually. Closer than that.

He lifted a lock of hair away from my face. “Why is this part white?”

“I was struck by lightning when I was little.” A lie I tell everyone. It made him smile. I liked that he didn’t believe me. I liked that he didn’t question the story but let it stand. We talked a bit more. His name was St. John Fox. (St. John . . . I thought that had died out as a first name centuries ago. Posh. He was definitely posh.) We made a halfhearted fuss about having almost identical surnames, wondered about being distant cousins. He’d just presented a paper at a psychiatry conference in Manhattan. I made a joke about him being Dr. Fox and he said, seriously, that he preferred “Mr.” I asked him what the subject of his paper was, but he said it wasn’t particularly interesting. Which meant he thought I was stupid. I wished I hadn’t told him that I model. To make up for it I told him about my psychology degree, and he said, “I’ve got one of those, too.” We talked until the plane landed, and then I broke off and stood up when the economy-class passengers started filing through the cabin, whispering and staring. I didn’t want them to see me lounging around in first, chatting with a handsome doctor. I waited around to see what would be done about Yelena—the airplane staff told me they had to get everyone off the plane first. St. John waited with me, though I hadn’t asked him to. I spoke to the doctor and a representative from the airline; I answered their questions and told them all I could think of. We waited until they asked us to leave. That made me think they were going to do something bad. Stick Yelena on a trolley with some luggage, something like that. There was no wheelchair waiting. This worried me.