Authors: Candia McWilliam
She had no blood which was not Scots, but often her speech was like that of those anglophile continentals who have tellingly twisted our tongue, somewhere between E.F. Benson and the War. I enjoyed seeing askance looks as she spoke.
I hear this, although I am not English. I hear also the diction of expatriates, speaking as though they are reading aloud the fourth leader of a four weeks’ late airmail
Times
.
I put on my camp, shopwalker’s voice, to disarm her.
We sat in the aisle, between the gowns and crusted capes, she on the floor, I on a set of library steps Anne used to reach her hat-boxes, white drums above us. Her gloves prayed in flat pairs above the silent drums. Above them, the air conditioners rarefied the air, charged it with ions and emitted it once more.
‘What’s new, Lucas, I haven’t seen you in an age.’ We had seen each other only the day before.
I had no intention of allowing her to know, although she was probably my best friend, that today had been a hinge in my life. She looked at me. Her eyes were as blue as eggs in a nest. She had a very nice face. Momentarily, I was tempted to tell her of my plan. To control myself, I concentrated very hard on the fabric of one of the hanging dresses.
‘One too many, dearie?’ asked Anne.
‘Annie’ (I did not like doing this; she was shrewd enough to hear the wrong note), ‘Annie, could you introduce me to someone?’
‘I hadn’t realised there were any who were quite your toolbag here, dear, but, why, yes of course, though you must realise that it could be no better than a pig, whoops sorry, in a poke.
I do not like the type of woman who habitually fraternises with homosexuals, though of course this sounds as though I do not like my own female friends. What I mean is women who seek to join in, to nudge, to use argot, to be all but men. They invariably claim also the privileges due to them as women, the softer flesh.
I become cold when this line is crossed. My lawyerly rectitude of manner stiffens.
‘It’s a girl, actually, Anne, the tall one being talked at by Leonidas. Have you any idea who she is? And please don’t tell me the only reason I am interested is that she is really a boy. I’ve seen enough, I mean she is showing enough, to make it quite clear what she is.’
‘I know,’ said Anne, serious now the subject warranted it. ‘Aren’t those clothes terrifying? But there is something there. With care, I think she could learn to dress.’ She spoke of this capacity as though it were as necessary as walking yet as magical as transforming matter into gold.
‘Why is she here? Who is she?’
‘Why do you want to know?’ The jealousy was not sexual. It was the jealousy of sculptors over an untouched block in which each sees different things. I gave the most evasive reply I could.
‘It’s to do with work.’
‘Lucas, darling, you’re not getting spare parts from the living now, are you? Did your X-ray eyes tell you a particularly fine pair of ventricles pumps beneath those breasts?’
I am a surgeon; I do not perform transplants very often, but it is surprising how even the most intelligent prefer to believe nonsense about something they do not understand. I specialise in the repair of the small hearts of babies and children. A new heart is about the size of a matchbox. Of course, I attend to adults too, but I must admit that the bulk of the fame and the money has come from the little ones.
‘I can’t say, Anne, I will when I can.’ Could she really not penetrate this false mystique, indispensable to the professional man?
‘Oh, Lucas, that’s fine, I’ll tell you, but she’s newish on me too. I met her a fortnight ago at home.’
‘Met her? In your own house? Annie, do tell.’ Ask a person to tell and they are back with their childhood and its plain little codes of decency swapped, a peek for a peek, an eye for an eye, a feel for a feel. Traded secrets are part of the old code. She looked down.
‘Tertius brought her, without asking. George and George were angry till they saw her and then they fell about to make her little messes on dishes and diddle in her vanity case.’ George and George were the butler and the footman. One was married to the cook, the other to the chambermaid. Or were they all brothers and sisters?
‘Where did Tertius find her?’ Old Tertius, older than me, living in Albany, cataloguing his frames, pinchbeck, ormolu, palisander, gesso, what could he want with a young woman?
‘Apparently she’s broke, she went to a vernissage, mostly for something to eat, got picked up by one of those wide-boys with a line in new masters of frigates in the spume, and, to cut a long story, woke up in the chambers opposite Tertius’s. She rang his doorbell to ask where she was, and when at last he heard he gave her an egg flip and took her on as the lady who does. And she does very well.’
‘Does she need to?’ I was interested. Particularly in Anne’s world, one was unlikely to find young women willing to take the job of charwoman to a total stranger. ‘Is she foreign, without a work permit?’
‘No, she’s English, as English as you or I.’
I am the son of Polish Jews and Anne makes much of being a Scot. I left it alone, because I wanted more information and even the most fair-minded women are distracted by anything they can possibly take personally, which includes objectively truthful correction.
‘But no money.’
‘No money.’
‘And family, what about that?’
‘Not much of it.’ As though it were a dry good, measured out like haricots or gems.
‘Name?’
‘Not a name name. Rather the sort it would be better to drop like a hot cake than simply drop, if you get me.’
I hate the idiom, to get, loathe it, but I did not say a word. I dream sometimes of faces close to mine screaming, ‘D’you get me, d’you get me?’ and I wake up afraid. The expression seems to push the breath of another hard into your own lungs.
‘Still, tell it me,’ I appealed to Anne.
‘Cora Godfrey.’
‘Cora. Miss Godfrey. Or does Tertius call her Mrs Godfrey as an honorific?’
‘Tertius seems very fond of her, Lucas, though it can hardly be anything remotely under the blanket.’
Tertius had damp unrequited feeling for boys in shops and long dry passions with very old multiple duchesses. Once a week, a man of upright bearing came to help with the dusting of the stock, and I imagined that, even were Cora Godfrey to dust all day, the upright man would have his place in Tertius’s timetable.
‘So, she’s gerontophile, clean, what else? How did she get on at Stone?’
‘Not a foot wrong, even the boot on the other foot in a way, a bit too good, trying too hard. Very careful with everyone, fetching and carrying for Tertius without being proprietary, asking me about the garden, knowing not to ask about Mordred, not jumping every time drowning was mentioned, and eating too much, attractively, as the young should. She did not roll her eyes about when Tertius got tertiary, nor did she fail to mend the cistern in the bachelor’s bathroom which I break as a trap for newcomers once in a while.’
Mordred Cowdenbeath had been Anne’s husband; it was said that he had been found by Anne, his gun at his side. She had told me one evening that this was not so. By definition a crime, but a crime of passion, she had said, and slipped the oyster into her mouth as the tears slipped out of her eyes, trebly fluent salt.
It is not that I believe in a good breakfast as you might believe in telling the truth, or in assisting the blind over roads. I believe in it as Anne believes in her cupboards. At least I have cut into the day and seen it unaddled. I like my life to be as pitched as a piano – with nothing lax and slippery to mar the tone, skew the hammers, slip between the snug keys. Before Hal, there was my curricular keyboard, the black notes of nocturnal jarrings struck only in timely order, when a sharp or a flat had been scored by lust. This plain upright opened into a grand piano with Hal; love opened up my ordered life.
It is not the case that a pianist must have long thin fingers, nor is it so of surgeons. What each requires is a broad palm, a wide stretch, and fingertips whose supply of neurones makes of each one the finder of exact destinations. I have hands like that. In other physical respects, I do resemble the surgeon of the nurse’s comicbook dreams. I am tall, dark, sad-eyed with a mien combining that of television intellectual and Dracula. I move quite naturally in a way conveyed only by the most swaggering and self-indulgent portraitists, Sargent or Boldini. I am etiolated but masculine. Until puberty, I looked like a tall, modest girl. At eighteen, I grew shoulders like coat hangers and rose to six foot four inches. Women fall in love with how I look. I frequently see women fall in love. It happens in hospitals; it is a form of gratitude. My looks are wasted there. The mothers with their repaired babies weep and embrace my fat and unpoetic-looking colleagues quite as much as they do me. The other women who fall in love with me are an inconvenience, sometimes worse. My looks feed fantasies which are not my own. The only real satisfaction I gain from how I look is the occasional mean one when an oily boy realises he is being crushed by expensive flesh, finer than that of any girl he can ever have. A solace is that Hal likes the way I look. He doesn’t love it; he doesn’t have the lover’s sponsorship of my beauty. He is content that I pass in most surroundings unrecognised for what I am.
My breakfast is unfaddy. I take porridge as a poultice if I am not operating in the morning. It keeps me warm. If I am operating it undesirably insulates my nerves. At the weekend, I have one (jugged) kipper (no smell) and during the week one egg.
I like a lot of mild coffee, brewed very strong; I dislike drinking it from thick china, or china with a raised pattern. I am fussy about what goes near my mouth and I don’t feel that embossed china can be very clean; I hate the knock of china on teeth. The teeth of spinsters on teacups in the consultants’ secretarial office is the most voracious noise I know, when I am jangled after a long performance. Naturally, I don’t have bacon.
My father sold it, though, in his last shop. ‘Cooked meats, speck, schink, rauchfleisch, tongue, back, belly, green, or there again nice cheeses . . .’ He would lift the bare-faced rind-stockinged hams and slice pink wafers from them, to fold in greaseproof, wrap in sugar paper and bag up only when all the purchases were assembled in soft white bags which were twopence the hundred and melted if anything leaked. Eggs came in bags, impossible to carry, even if there were no children, no other bags, no other shops to visit. At first the small shop in Clerkenwell sold little; it was just after the War and there was not to be for years the Esperanto of pimentos and the snobbery of refrigerators. Our first refrigerator ran on kerosene and had no name. Soon afterwards, with the last puff of Empire, came our Icecold Monarch. We bought our first car, a grey Consul, years after food rationing stopped; its name too smacked of victory, martial success and ascendancy, soon to fall away. We had sold the shop in Clerkenwell and even our most loyal customers could not make it to Bayswater to hear my father intone, ‘Nice olives, nice breads’ – that ‘s’! the profligacy, the delicious excess! – ‘nice butter salted or unsalted . . .’ Nice was a particle to my father; he never was quite at home in English, save with food, and then he used the language as his larder, cooking up sentences with happy gusto. His last shop was tall and thin, sausages hanging down six feet from the ceiling. Sugar balls in cellophane and strings of chillies hung in ribbons, and the shelves went right to the top of the shop. There was a smell of candy sugar and burnt coffee. My father, a small man but born tall, hooked items down with long tongs, tender as a gardener dead-heading a high rose. (That ‘items’ gives me away; ‘garment’ has on occasion unmasked some of the boys I grew up with, politicians or lawyers now.) Of course, they were ambitious for me, my father with his height taken from him and my mother impaling receipts in her kiosk at the back of the shop. I was well mannered. They had sacked a boy who had flirtatiously cut just two inches of the soft brown hair of the fat daughter of a regular customer with the knife he used to slice citron peel and angelica. I worked in the shop, and I worked at night. I think my bookishness then came from sex. It had that fanatical energy.
Not sex itself, perhaps, but things, for an adolescent boy, congruent. Sex is the brutal adultese for romance. I felt ennobled and powerful as I worked over books I could remember and forget swiftly, serially, as examinations required. My father and mother had diluted my Jewishness. Sometimes, now, eating or working with the
haute juiverie
of this country, I regret this; but I see that I could not be so polymorphous, so accepted, had my parents not to some extent diluted my flavour. I had no brothers or sisters; till they died my parents protected themselves from my unmarried state by saying I’d better wait till I was a qualified doctor, a GP, a consultant, a professor. He had owned a printer’s with a staff of a hundred and she played a piano with a raspberry-pink shawl and a vase like a silver cornet, the pinks for ice-cream, on top of it. I had seen the shawl and the vase, so I knew. They brought out little else. Polish is a difficult language; if it is your first tongue, you lament in all others; all sentences, said Polishly, sound sad. Mr Borzecki and Mr Sapietis would come monthly to make merry with my father. Mr Borzecki had a watchmending business with two dusty ostrich eggs in the window, each on a silver rest shaped like an eagle’s foot. Mr Sapietis was a Serb who made models of big cats in clay, fired turquoise; they were briefly popular in the 1950s and Mr Sapietis was miserable because he was bereft for that short time of being misunderstood. He had no fingernails for the clay to stick under. They had been taken from him. When they made merry, these three old gentlemen sounded sadder than ever. Their wives ate cakes, little tubs of short pastry filled with sour cream, a pistachio nut or a green
glacé
cherry on the top. Those green
glacé
cherries tasted differently, I swear, from the red ones.