The Jeweller's Skin (20 page)

Her hands smelled of rosemary.

She reached back over her head to clutch something.  The soft spokes pressed themselves prickling into her palms, the roots and tough stems resisted, as she’d wanted.  The sky was bluer than seemed possible; or perhaps more southern, through her half-closed eyelids.

When she let go the plant to cover her face, there was the sweet, pungent smell, strong enough to make her eyes water, if she’d not already been weeping.  The smell stayed close to her face for a long time.  Then she felt sorry for him, and opened her eyes.

He was sitting up, perplexed.  As if a phrase in Schubert would not come right, however he sang it and she felt it in her hands.  She pulled off a twig of rosemary, and held it out to him.  Still the grief held her closely, like a sheet.

She had no words, let alone in English.  His shirt was open.  She put her hand flat on his chest.  His body-heat seeped slowly back into her.

‘Can you tell me…?’ he began, but she shook her head, and pulled him down onto her, so that he couldn’t watch her any more.  He kissed her forehead; that was good, as if he were giving her her father’s blessing.  Her body sobbed again, once, but she stopped: enough.

When they were dressed and the twigs and earth brushed off, as they walked towards streets and buses and work, she took his hand tentatively, and said, ‘Felix, you must know, I am glad.’  Then she laughed and made him smell the herb on his hands.

‘I do not want that you regret,’ he said.  So his language had slipped out of place, too.  She was pleased or perturbed that it had mattered for him.

They walked hand in hand, their two shadows leaning along the grass,  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I am a
domestic servant,
and now I have done this as the servant girls do, in the open air.’  She pulled him to run down the slope of the open field, before he could protest about
domestic servant. 
At the bottom, just before the hawthorn hedge, he brought them to a stop, swinging her round into his embrace.  ‘Nora,’ he said, into her thick bobbed hair.

‘Narcisa.’  She tasted her name, strangely, saying it out loud for the first time, ever perhaps.  ‘Narcisa, my name is Narcisa, say it, Narcisa.’  She made him practise, before they climbed over the gate, till he could say it with almost no accent.

*

‘Humphreys,’ Miss Ainsworth said, as Narcisa raked ash from the kitchen boiler.  ‘Your young man may call to collect you from the house, you know.’

Her scraped-back hair looked especially like iron.

They had been observed.  Debated: the two old women by the fire, when she had brought them the coals, making their judgment.  She wanted to say
He is my music teacher,
but knew it would sound ridiculous, from a servant.  And in any case, who knew what had been seen?

Not the afternoon with the rosemary, or she would have been straight out of the door.

‘Thank you, she said.  ‘It is not necessary.’

They would have to go farther.  ‘Brighton,’ he suggested, ‘the Pavilion.  But you will think only about the servants.’  It was his complaint: at Kenwood, after Rembrandt and Vermeer, she’d wondered how many maids were needed to do the floors.

‘Of course,’ she said, teasing, ‘you look at the harpsichords, and I look at the kitchen range, if they let us see it.’  Nevertheless he was uncomfortable, she knew: that she could not put aside her occupation, and be the woman that she might have been.

In any event, they did not go to Brighton.  So few Sunday afternoons.

July: almost the end of the school year.  The boys, he said, were restless, squirming in class, anxious about re-entering their families.  To distract them he taught them German drinking songs: ‘Both my subjects at once.’  The headmaster asked questions, but was pacified.

His mother expected him home in Königswinter.  For the summer;  perhaps forever.  His contract was renewed for another year.  Narcisa knew now that he had had ambitions, to break into the London music scene.  She imagined him climbing in through a smashed window.  The windows had been too high, or too far away.

Perhaps he had spent too much time with her, instead of with the daughters of opera-goers.

His mother, she supposed, would learn about her.  He was asleep, on the grass on Wimbledon Common; she was sitting up in the sun, making daisy-chains, as Edwin’s younger sister had once taught her.  He had showed her a photo of his parents, the father tall and stooping, with a moustache; the mother big-breasted, with curly hair: ‘the same colour as mine,’ he had said.  She knew, as he must too, surely, that a woman eight years older, who had once been married and perhaps still was, working as cook-housekeeper,  would not be welcomed
.   Let alone
the rest, she thought, in new English.

His father’s party believed in the superiority of Germans. Felix was indignant; she was not.  ‘All people believe this about themselves,’ she said.  ‘Certainly the English.’  ‘And yours?’ he’d demanded, standing by the piano.  ‘I am a goldsmith by race,’ her father had once claimed.  She laughed: ‘No, it was difficult even for us to believe.  Though some did, I am sure.  I was too young.’

She arranged the daisy-chain on his face, like a beard.  He opened his eyes and closed them again.  A small girl in pink ribbons stared, dragging at her father’s hand.

I am younger with him than I have been for many years.  Sometimes, at her stolid tasks in the house, polishing silver, or washing yellowing sheets, she felt amazed that she could be both people: an efficient woman of no age and with no choices, and this irresponsible girl who played Schubert.  Though not so irresponsible, perhaps.  ‘I do not want to
fall pregnant,
’ she’d told him, at the music lesson after that first time, using the phrase she remembered Clara using.

She lay back beside him, head resting on her handbag, looking up.  There were heavy green branches, the chestnut tree behind them; and a mid-blue sky, with a few rags of white cloud.  Some men were playing football not far off; she could hear their cries to each other, though not the words.

Suppose he wanted me to marry him?  Is it possible?  This is not a Catholic country; perhaps it is.  Perhaps I am already divorced from Edwin.  Or to live with him without marrying?  I would not mind that, but I think he would.

She imagined them in the Michaels’ cottage, he setting off for the school on his bicycle, she making the fire, then sitting at the piano.  Or a maid, even: the fire already lit when she came downstairs.  It seemed a luxury quite unreachable.

He stirred.  She put her hand on his forehead, to keep him lying there while she considered; but he rolled onto his side, and leaned to kiss her.

1935

There is a ticking sound like a great slowed cricket.  The field in front of her is oak-brown, the tractor making a dark border of turned earth.  The slope of the field is flexed, like a stopped wave.

She stands on the footpath opposite, just out of range in case it should crash down.

To the left of the ploughed field the grass is thin, chalk showing through like the webbing of a carpet.  There are sheep, small and almost motionless, fat and creamy in the slanting sunshine.

From beyond them the sea breeze streams between the downs.  She sits with her back against the trunk of a tree. Little pieces of twig, broken leaf and beech-mast are scattered around her on the dry brown earth.

She has not come far.  It was simple.  Her blue leather case is at Victoria, in the left luggage.  Miss Grey and Miss Ainsworth, back from doing the church flowers, will have found a steak pie ready and her note.  She imagines they won’t be surprised that it doesn’t say much.

She has been in this country more than twenty years, and did not know there was anything like this.

She took the train yesterday to Newhaven, not even knowing why she had heard of it.  It came through suburbs she knew and others she might have: redbrick, back gardens.  She thought: there is nothing more than this, anywhere.  The land heaved up steeply but the buildings clung on.  Then there was more space, flat, and a line of bare hills.

At Newhaven she watched a ferry docking.  Spray blew sideways off the tops of waves, and made rainbows briefly.  There just out of sight was France, and beyond it Switzerland, then Italy, then at the far end of Yugoslavia, Prizren.  She leaned on a railing, a freed lock of hair beating in the sea wind against her hat; but the little half-pictures of Prizren stayed separate: the stone bridge, the low domes of the hammam, the steep street.  Stone the mind could imagine, but not people.  She had no idea even what clothes they’d be wearing.  She walked back through the town, and watched by the side of the road as the flat bridge opened and a cargo-boat went slowly up the river.

Beyond the warehouses there was a tow-path, and reed-beds, and up ahead the line of the tall downs.  The water was thick and mildew-green.  She crossed over a painted foot-bridge.  The light was going, the bright copper leaves in the woodland in front of her blurring.

She went into a pub, as if she were used to it, and sat in the window with a glass of beer.  It tasted like dried fruit, dates or prunes.  After an hour or so she asked for a room.

*

The man driving the tractor is out of hearing, and in any case absorbed.  His rectangular journeys, up the left-hand slope, along the top, black against the pale sky, then down the steep right-hand edge, seem to Narcisa a kind of ceremony; but perhaps he is worrying how to pay the doctor.  In any event they are not forced to speak.  A while ago a woman came with a small dog along the path, and said Good morning.

At the pub they are courteous, and ask nothing except, ‘What would you like for your breakfast?’  She sits in the empty bar, and food is served her.

How long is she staying?  ‘You’ll be staying on tonight,’ the fair-haired woman asked, or maybe stated.  There is nowhere she would rather be than this.

She woke last night in her attic bed in the pub, at about three, and thought: Am I having a breakdown?  Her mind and her feelings seemed to her quite clear.  Perhaps that poor soul she’d seen in the street in Epsom, bare-legged, in a patched frock, felt the same, wailing outside the grocer’s, ‘I want to go home.’

At least she knows she does not want to go home, wherever that is.

The sheep have moved closer together, up at the top of the field.  Where they are is still in sunlight; most of the rough grass is already dulled.  The dark ploughed border encroaches slowly onto the oak-brown.

1947

The rain had stopped.  The clouds were still low, but massive and whitish-grey, moving steadily across a soft blue sky.  Anthony looked up, as a light wind passed across the nape of his neck.

The bad-egg smell of the drains lifted heavily into the three men’s faces.  Dr Whitchurch stepped back from the trench.  ‘Is there anything else we need to look at out here?’

He was new, Anthony thought; wanted to make things happen.  No doubt he thought the hospital very old-fashioned.  He watched the younger man struggle with nausea, standing small and strong, the breeze riffling through his fair hair.  Well, and a good thing if he starts to change it; god knows the place needs modernising.  Good to have someone young and keen to tackle it. 

Mischievously, though, Anthony made him wait, squatting down at the edge of the newly-dug trench and prodding at the cracked pipe with his slide-rule.  Beside him the overalled knees of Colin Allen, the Works Manager, were broad and immoveable, just in his line of vision.

‘You can bodge it,’ he told the Deputy MS.  ‘But you’ll be calling me back again in less than a year.’  His thighs started to cramp, and he stood up.  ‘What do you think, Allen?’

There was a pause.  He could feel the doctor’s impatience from across the trench.  Colin Allen would need to assemble his thoughts, like the parts of a motor, before he spoke.  A tractor rumbled up the lane behind them.

‘To be honest, Mr Shearer, I think these drains have always been rotten.  As long as I can remember, they’ve blocked up; and that’s getting on thirty years.  I don’t think it’s just wear, I think it’s how they were laid.’ He looked from Anthony to Dr Whitchurch, square-shouldered, stubborn; a good man, Anthony thought, with a rush of warmth.

‘And you, Mr Shearer, do you agree with that?’

‘I agree with Allen,’ Anthony said calmly.  ‘It’s poor quality piping, and probably always was.  The builder cutting corners.  Plus it’s not laid with a sufficient incline.  If you really want to solve the problem, you need to dig the whole lot up and re-lay them.  That means closing the place, for maybe three months.’  He watched Dr Whitchurch, who didn’t blench.  ‘Not easy, I appreciate.  The alternative is you have regular blockages, and leaks like this.’  He pointed down.  ‘Of course there is also the public health question.’

‘I’ve said that.’  Colin Allen was emphatic.  ‘I’ve been saying for years, all these upset stomachs and so on, I thought it had to do with the drains.  But the MS, I’m sorry to say, he wouldn’t have it.  Said it must be the cooking.’

Narcisa, Anthony thought, and felt something hollowed out under his ribs.  So the old bastard Bosanquet was blaming her.  He looked away from the two men, towards the brightening chestnut-trees by the gate-house.

‘Can you give us an estimate for replacing the drains?’

‘Certainly,’ he said, regaining his calm.  ‘In the meantime’ - he turned to Colin Allen - ‘you know how to patch up that crack, don’t you?’

‘I’ve done it often enough before.’

‘Then thank you, gentlemen,’ Dr Whitchurch said. The courtly words hovered awkwardly above the trench.  A cloud spread upwards and dulled the light on the flattened grass and the pile of clay-ey earth.  ‘Heading back to London, Mr Shearer?’

‘No, no, I have to be at St Botolph’s in the morning.’  He was going to say more, something chatty about the country inn where he was staying.  Instead he shook hands hastily with the two men, before walking with mud-caked shoes back to his car.

*

It was still early: ten to five.  The sky had cleared slightly; the black bonnet of the car reflected the top of a tree in the mild sunlight.  Twenty minutes till he picked up Narcisa outside the church.  He drove slowly out of the grounds onto the lane, waving thank you to the gate-porter, a thin bald man whose name he could never remember.  His hands on the wheel and the gear-lever tingled slightly.

Did she know that Bosanquet blamed her for the health problems?  He was indignant again on her behalf.  He wouldn’t tell her.  Though it was quite possible that she did know.  She was so stoical; he could imagine her hearing the insult and swallowing it, letting it stay inside her, like a pill to be taken, along with everything else.  Though what everything else was he had little idea.  Her mother had died when Narcisa was quite small; well, that was hard.  Enough to make you a stoic, he supposed.

A van overtook him on the bend of the lane, the words
Hartley Purveyors
in red script flashing past.  Fool, he thought mildly as the van sped on, having survived the blind curve, towards the town.  He wondered if he’d handled the meeting badly.  He wasn’t too bad, the new Deputy MS.  A bit conscious of his position; but that could be nerves.  Still, they wouldn’t re-lay the drains, that was obvious.  What have I ever done that they’ve used? he asked himself.

At that moment he caught sight of Narcisa, tramping along the road, hands in her pockets; and the pleasure and fear threatened to overwhelm him, as he pressed the horn, and drew in just beyond her.             

*

‘You were looking sad,’ he said as he drove off, through the market square and out towards the Downs.

‘Sad?’  She considered and then smiled.  ‘No, I was thinking there is a hole in my shoe’ - she raised her left foot and pointed down - ‘and I must find someone to repair it.  Before the war there was a shoemaker’s shop in the hospital, but they have not opened it again.’

He was silent a moment, looking for the turning.  ‘Right, here we are.’  It was a lane like a tunnel, beneath lime-trees not yet in leaf.  The sunlight came and went across the windscreen.  ‘You used to have everything there in the hospital.’

‘Everything.  It is only now’ - she hesitated.  Did she mean with him, he wondered - ‘now I see how different it is from the rest of the world.  My clothes are washed, my room is cleaned, I am in charge of the food but when I sit down to eat it is what we all eat.  Now they say even they will have a cinema, show films for us.  If my bicycle needs repair, I take it to the metalwork shop.  You see?’

He thought about it, manoeuvring the car on the muddy road, past farm buildings with corrugated roofs, and up the steep slope.  Perhaps it was part of her strangeness, to have lived and worked so long in that closed place.  He smiled and laid his hand lingeringly on her knee.  ‘At least for some things you have to come out of there.’  Though of course she could have had affairs with her colleagues.  He winced.

‘Here we are,’ he said, and pulled in on the grass beside a whitewashed building, the hanging sign swaying in the wind. 

She got out and stretched, and looked around.  ‘You are staying here?’

‘I thought it would make a change.  And with the car, it is so much easier.’  He took his suitcase out of the boot and slammed it shut.  She was moving towards the front door, holding her hat on with one hand against the wind, but he called her back.  ‘When we sign in.  I think you had better use my name, you know.’

She turned to face him, her eyes blank, the lines of her face suddenly dark.  ‘I must sign in?  But I cannot stay.  I am working in the morning.’

I will drive you back in time, he wanted to say, but it wasn’t the moment.  He had not told her all of what he’d planned.  ‘You will be with me for the evening, I trust?’  But she didn’t smile.  ‘Of course, if you would rather not sign, I can probably do it for both of us.  You know what these places are like.’  But she doesn’t, fool, he told himself.

‘You will write Mr and Mrs Shearer?’  The front of her coat flapped twice in the wind.

‘Come on,’ he said, afraid she would go, walk back down the lane holding her hat like this.  His voice was hoarse.  He took her elbow and to his relief and surprise she let him guide her in through the thick oak door, into the warm bar that smelled of beer and smoke, and leave her standing while he spoke to the manager.

*

Before supper they sat in the back bar, not far from the fire.  She said, ‘I remember a pub near Newhaven.’  She seemed to him to have withdrawn somewhere.  Her green knitted jumper showed the shape of her small breasts.

‘When were you in Newhaven?’ he asked, but she didn’t answer.  I’ve played this wrong, he thought.  She’s still offended.

A black labrador lumbered past them towards the fire.  He held out his hand; the dog sniffed it once and moved on.  He said, ‘This afternoon I was wondering whether the work I do at Holywell is worth it.’

She was sitting quite still on the high-backed bench, holding her beer-mug in one hand.  He wasn’t sure if she was listening.

‘They called me in to look at the drains, and I told them, if you want to deal with it you should replace the lot.  So they ask me nicely to send an estimate; but it’s hardly worth the effort, they won’t do it.  They’ll go on having sewage leaking into the soil beneath the buildings.  I’m sorry’ - he interrupted himself, awkward.  ‘Not the thing to talk about before dinner.’

She turned a little towards him.  ‘They will do nothing?’

‘Oh, they’ll mend the drain - patch it up.  Then it will leak somewhere else again.  I’ve had this conversation before, not with this guy but one or other of them.  And really I don’t know why I mind.  They pay me enough.  Professional pride, I suppose.’  He could hear his voice, a little high-pitched, strained.

She took a drink of beer and put the mug down.  The firelight glowed in the facets of the glass. 

‘I do not think I understand,’ she said.  ‘You were hoping this time they would change their minds?’

‘Narcisa, I didn’t have you down as a cynic.’

‘Cynic?  No, no, I am not.’  She was looking away, at the dog asleep by the fire.  After a while she said, ‘I suppose in other places they are different.  Where you work, I mean.  If you have a choice, probably it is better not to work here.’

He managed to make a joke of it: ‘Wouldn’t you miss me?’  But she didn’t say what he’d hoped for.  She looked as if she’d only just noticed him, frowning, her eyes deep-set and very dark.  ‘Probably I will leave too.  Or I will be fired.’

A man in worn dungarees came round, picking up glasses from the other tables.  The acrid smell of his clothes reached over to them. 

‘Fired?’  He turned to her and held her shoulder.  The bones felt angular, hard, through the green jumper.  ‘Narcisa, you’re not really worried about being fired?’  But there was Bosanquet, blaming her for the drains.

She shrugged, and the movement made him take away his hand.  The man with the dungarees came back and threw a fat, bark-covered log on the fire.  The wood hissed; a thin line of steam rose from one end.

She seemed to decide something.  ‘I do not think I am very professional any more.’  She smiled.  ‘Certainly the Assistant Cook thinks so; and as she tells me, she is very experienced.’

‘Is she after your job?’

‘Probably.’  She considered.  ‘Of course she is.  Perhaps she should have it.’

‘You said - ’

‘I said I wanted to leave there.  Yes, I know.  Only it is better to leave than be fired, don’t you think?’

He slid along the bench and put his arm round her shoulders.  ‘Why so sad this evening?’

‘Am I sad?  I don’t know.  Perhaps I am.’  She sat and looked into the fire, very small and distant.  He waited till she seemed to bring herself back.  ‘But really, Anthony, why should I stay here now?’

For me, he wanted to say, and felt ashamed. 

‘Anthony,’ she said in a little while. ‘Have you ever met again someone you have not seen for many years?’

He looked at her, puzzled.  ‘I don’t know; let me think.  Well, an uncle of mine, my father’s elder brother, came back from Canada just before the war.  I suppose I hadn’t seen him for ten, fifteen years.  Why?’

She drank down the last of the beer, and sat quiet, so that he wondered if she’d heard the question.  He was aware of the great tracts of her life that he’d never seen.  He was still for a minute, watching her, in case she wanted to tell him what it was.  The taste of the beer was strong in his mouth, like molasses.

Slowly she turned back to him and smiled.  ‘Another half?’ he suggested awkwardly.

‘I can finish it with the supper?  Yes, why not?’

Then the fat landlady waddled over with their meal, the steam rising from the two green plates on the tray, the knives and forks clanking together as she walked. 

*

In bed Narcisa lay on her back, docile, her eyes on something he couldn’t see.  After a little while anger rose in him.  He held her wrists together above her head, and came into her grimly, watching her face.  He lifted almost free of her and plunged again, and felt triumphant as her body lifted up not to lose him.  Then he let go her wrists and thrust deep into her, and felt himself dissolve into despair.

She laid one hand on his head till he stopped sobbing.