Authors: Candia McWilliam
I am fond of unthinking regular activity. I like to chop and dip and slice. She left me to myself. I found the flour and eggs and ice. I even found some sour cream. I made my batter in a jug, and each fritter but the first came out like hot syrup spilt in ice, a frozen gold splash, lacy. I recollected my mother making these fritters, and I made, as she had made mine for me, Cora’s copperplate initial in the smoking fat.
‘Eat it while it’s hot,’ I said, and put salt on it for her. I put the other fritters to keep warm. She had the dazzled look of a child on a snowy morning and she bit it as though it were going to be very sweet. I was hungry.
‘What did you make this afternoon?’ I asked this girl. I could have been anywhere but here, with my peers, or with my hulking inferiors. I felt that I had sunk a degree or so off my dignity. I did not know how to put her away from me. Anyhow, in the end it would only be to pull her back into Hal’s and my charmed circle.
‘Cold chicken and ice-cream and wafers,’ said Cora. And, God, hospital food to eat, I thought.
But she seemed to be busy in her kitchen, and not fussing. There is a type of English cooking which is loveless. It is a factual sequence of unattractive nourishment in which nothing is what it appears to be and everything causes atrabiliousness. It restores the dear dead days of rationing, I think. If Cora had prefaced her menu with tomato soup, she would have made a paradigm of this type of food. I am sure the Royal Family eat that food.
If I was not anticipating my supper with any pleasure, I was longing to see my darling. So it is odd that, when he arrived at nine o’clock, I felt edgy. That must be what women do, give you a cow’s warm company, then kick you just as you settle to milk them.
Hal was untouched by rain and he spun like a man in a spotlight, throwing out his arms from the elbow and talking as fast as a jackpot. It was clear he knew Cora’s house quite well.
‘Hi, Lucas, long time no see, and how is it at the hospital then? In Gloria and Dick’s room then, Cora? God, I’m hungry. I could eat an army.’
‘Gloria and Dick?’ I asked.
‘They are the couple who live in the basement,’ said Cora.
‘Hence the sets and props and all that. They work at the Royal Opera,’ said Hal.
‘That shelf up there is all hat steamers,’ said Cora, and she indicated a row of metal shapes, some like buckets, some like cones, and a small one like a pewter-coloured skull, about which I enquired.
‘It’s for smoothing out bald-pate wigs,’ said Cora, ‘so people’s heads don’t look worried from behind.’
‘Do you like opera, Cora?’ I do not usually listen to the answer to this question. Those who do are tedious and those who don’t are ignorant and opinionated and tell jokes about inflated tenors and bouncing Toscas.
‘More as I get older,’ said Cora, and I liked her for not wanting me to think anything in particular of her. ‘What,’ she continued, ‘would you like to drink?’
The three of us crossed to the room of Dick and Gloria. Cora had laid the table plainly. It was very white in that damascene room and the gypsophila hung above its vase as though it might at any point disappear, like gnats. She brought the crisp fritters and we dipped them into the horseradish. We dropped the eel into our throats.
‘Sold this fantastic property out of town today. Pool, sauna, paddocks, the works, and a heated cellar for turtles too. For soup, you know. I mean, would you believe?’ said Hal.
My parents had told me of pre-Revolutionary palaces with tanks below for turtles, but each generation is surprised again, and how touching he was in his discovery.
‘Doesn’t that come into
The Grand Babylon Hotel
?’ asked Cora, and Hal scowled, then reached across the table and wiped his hand on the upper part of her breast.
‘Best thing of all, fishy fingers,’ he said. He did not realise, in his artless compliment, that I had been responsible for this part of the meal. The cold wine set fair in my head and I felt smug that I was able to feel a tactician’s satisfaction when I saw him touch her in a way that suggested they were intimate. Cora left the table. Her face looked turned, as though she had tasted something bad. I imagined she was off to trail some watercress over the slabby chicken. It was fortunate I had brought so satisfying a first course.
‘Getting on?’ I could not resist asking Hal. I wanted to hurt myself before another could.
‘Getting off,’ he replied. I wondered how he liked this cosiness, which he had been at pains to avoid with me. It must be different with a woman.
I went to find Cora. She was wedging the now pale tongue into a tin. It was steaming and the room smelt of boiled socks, instead of herbs and butter as it had.
‘I just had to nip out to peel it, and I nearly forgot,’ she said. ‘I hope this doesn’t happen again.’
I was so soothed I had forgotten the early evening.
‘Sit down, Lucas, or, even better, take this.’ She gave me an oval pottery bowl. Upon it, its skin thin and brown as strudel, was the cold chicken. Half carved, in lines straight like harp strings, it sat in a pool of white and green. Between the flesh and the skin was a layer of this same marbling. Cora brought a bowl of green noodles and a dish of salad of those tomatoes shaped like the muzzle of a boxer dog. It smelt of fresh oranges and red wine and was drizzled with sugar.
She carved like a man, I could see that from what she had done already, but when it came to offering more, she asked Hal to carve. Not me, though I was senior, but Hal because he was her lover.
‘Have you been to see . . .’ began Cora.
‘Don’t let her start, Lucas,’ said Hal, and Cora, blushing, looked down. I, his not-lover, was often treated as the enemy, but where there was a girl we were linked against her. She was feeding us well; tonight was the sure fanfare to the overture of what I wanted. Why, when I should be feeling as though I were watching the champagne break on the prow of a ship of the line, did I feel equivocal? Was she not after all the right girl? It must be the tongue in the car.
Who
couldn’t talk?
Hal was pulling at the legs of the bird, and he dug his spoon into its cavity like a sexton.
‘Wake up, Lucas, she’s not that bad,’ said Hal, and he clicked his hand before my eyes, as shocking as a flashlight. ‘Been sleeping badly?’
‘I have, in point of fact,’ I said. ‘I think it must be the change of season.’ The season is always changing, but I did not want to admit to having been alarmed by a lipstick scrawl, and I could hardly tell him and the girl I wanted to mate with him that I was undergoing a painful gestation until at last they married. It felt like that. I was pregnant with Hal’s future.
Half of that future, or the nominal half, Cora, my zombie, took away our plates and returned with a fez of smoking, pale yellow sorbet. The smoke was the smoke of cold breath in the warm room. Inside this chilly cream were rimed cranberries. The wafers were of that sort which snap like unsafe ice.
I regarded my plate. Hal and Cora faced me through the flowers. I took a spoonful. Cranberries are celebrated in America, in malls and boulevards and marts. There are landscapes of them. Cranberry liquor in milk is a good head start for a life of hard drinking. They are a sour fruit, and sweet, and their colour heightens to the pink of monoxide-poisoned blood as they grow transparent in the pan. They jostle for closeness like snooker balls, but can never touch all over, as nothing spherical can, as our corpuscles even cannot. We are infinitely divisible. What can touch us, ever, all about? When I am host to this pointillist perception, I am nearing danger.
I was drunk. I kissed my future, he and she, goodbye, and drove home with the motor co-ordination of a medical man who is disobeying the law.
‘Could we take a spin down to the docks?’ asked Hal. His voice was not clear. He must be telephoning from one of the sites he was selling.
‘Which ones, Hal, and when? I am committed every day after today for a week.’ This was not true, but I had not heard nor seen him since the lamplit evening in the opera-room half a month before and was starting to crave him. Autumn was here, and the hospital was preparing itself for Christmas. It was dark early enough for me to
cinq à sept
, a Tertiusism, at four o’clock, straight after a long morning operation. I was getting lazy, often went to the same place.
John Payne was watching me for symptoms; my own feeling of expectancy about Cora and Hal may have looked to him like the preoccupation of love. He was friendly to me now, as though I alarmed him less. Dolores Steel had become well; this meant that she had reached a steady plateau of malice and sulk. The nurses were pleased to lose her and did not enjoy the bag of rambutans she left for them, like torn-off tigers’ ears. I did not miss her, but I had dismissed any suspicion that she could have been in prison. Anne had been away, seeing her aunt Oppie in the Carse of Gowrie. The aunt soothed Anne. She farmed soft fruit and small potatoes and remembered the golden days of Sapphism with pleasure and sadness. She took her name from the rhyme which goes:
Artifex and Opifex,
Common are to either sex.
I did not know her proper name and had met her only once, for tea at the Stafford Hotel, where she had asked the maid to pour into a teapot the milk and sugar, to save effort later, exhibiting hereby both practicality and imagination and their direct opposites. She dressed in fawn, tan, buff, and her clothes were the shape, too, of envelopes, with a little deckling of lace at the lifted chin, and perhaps a pale mica window of blouse underneath. She did not accommodate the opinions of others, she did not see the need for it, with the result that people agreed with her, all save Anne, who was treated as heiress to this infallibility.
Hal replied to my direct telephonic questioning, rare for him. ‘Today is great. Would the tank make it to Chatham?’
I was already planning, and replied, ‘That would be perfect, just before the winter. I shall collect you . . .’
‘Don’t bother with that, I’ll come to you right away.’
I had forgotten that I could not go inside his flat, and would have to wait outside in the car. I respected his containedness.
When he arrived, he looked pale to me, and there was no brightness in his face. I wanted this, but not until they were safely spliced, when he might have had demonstration of women’s strength-sapping. The pretty birthmark on his lip was clear honey on the white face. For the first time, I saw a growth of beard, like splinters, on his chin and cheek. Even the soft hair looked less bright. It must be the absence of the sun.
‘Car going all right?’ he asked. He sounded nervous and bored.
‘Job going all right?’ I asked. I would not give him a bouquet for a bunch of stalks.
‘As you see,’ he said.
‘Much of the car’s working is internal too.’ I could not stop myself.
‘About that . . .’ he said. Like many people who will not ruminate, he was trapped into introspection in the passenger seat of a car.
‘Yes, Hal.’ I kept from my voice the breaking hope that he was going to blurt out that after all it was not marriage he wanted, but love, and that with me.
We were leaving London, making for Kent. For this day it would be nice to be away.
‘I’m in love, Lucas,’ he said. He spoke as though he were testing the words in his mouth. He spoke as though he were reading the words of another man. I realised how much it must cost him to tell me this, and was moved. There was no music in the car, and outside were the heavy brown fields of Hal’s own country, the land of married men and regeneration of history less recently interrupted than my own. In some fields, spring corn was starting to show; it would be reaped, perhaps at the same time as Hal married, strong and straight. Englishman’s bones would make terrible bread. It would not rise. Polish ones would cause the bread to rise like Jacob’s ladder.
‘Tell me, darling.’
He did not react to the endearment, which I had fed myself as a cachou.
‘I love Cora.’
I was so relieved that I was almost pleased to hear him say he loved another, not myself. Now I would not even have to feign dislike to secure him on her hook. It was moving fast. I overtook a field of cars, my heart leaping. We were approaching the hop country, with its leaning staves like a struck camp.
‘Do you want to marry her?’
‘I’m not asking you. I’m telling you,’ he said. ‘And I’ve done the same to her.’
He made it sound like a single action, not the beginning of a changed life. But I did not care; they would be happy, then unhappy, and the weak world would give them their caging freedom, and there I would be, the keeper with the keys, waiting for Hal, at the door of his open marriage.
‘Are you happy?’
‘As a hatter,’ said Hal.
‘Why do you care for her?’ I was pleased with this soapy phrase.
‘She’s beautiful, she’s sweet, she’ll be a wonderful mother, and she loves me.’
The grey air was full of unfallen rain and the horizon was thickening as we drove seaward.
‘Children, Hal, so soon?’ I was still unsure what I felt about this. When they split, would any child stay with Cora? Could I bear Hal’s child not to live with me? I do not know many well children. Perhaps they are not so agreeable as sick ones. ‘My blessing goes with you always,’ I said. The inside of the car, its walnut and leather, were apposite for this conversation. I felt like a parent, a trustee.