Authors: Candia McWilliam
‘We are getting near. It’s called “Cranford”,’ said Cora.
‘I have seen that on your invitation, fool. You were to have been married tomorrow, remember? Is it this one? You can’t imagine getting homesick for it can you? Poor old Hal.’
A woman was running towards the car. She must be Hal’s mother. I regretted my snobbery. She looked so wretched. I wound down the car window. She was turning and turning her hands at the bottom of her cardigan. Her clothes were the rubbery texture of scrambled egg, the synthetic tweed uncreased. A small marcasite brooch, a sailing dinghy, rocked on her breast. The colour she wore was a colour reserved for bedjackets or re-usable picnic items, a green unreminiscent of grass or trees or sea. It probably washed like a dream. I prefer my dreams dirty. Or is the truth that I do not do my own washing? She was speaking, and making gestures of welcome and apology. I did not see that she should apologise. The years of being a widow have made me able to assume the astringent tone of a man in an emergency; I extended my hand to her, and smiled, calm and slow like a politician with bad news, but not so bad that it cannot be talked out.
‘Bad news, oh bad news, oh, oh,’ she was saying. But my firm frostiness reached her and she calmed down enough to ask us in.
‘The boys are out. All day.’ They would arrive after we had gone to drink strong drink and speak of a merciful release.
‘Cora, dear, how are you?’ Mrs Darbo looked almost happy when she contemplated the scruffy fatso who had almost been her daughter-in-law.
‘As well as can be . . .’ began Cora.
‘. . . expected,’ said Mrs Darbo. We were in the sitting room. It was so comfortable that there was nowhere to sit without being compromised by the chairs’ embrace. I wanted air.
‘A coffee?’ asked Mrs Darbo. I felt as though Cora and I had found ourselves on the set of a television quiz show. The room was full of appliances. Nothing looked old. All the wood that was intended to look old had a vivid, unconvincing richness, like a suntan. There was one flower arrangement, for arrangement it was; it resembled a cauliflower, painted by a Persian, turreted pompoms embowered in straps of green. The ribbons flowing from it had the lemniscous curve of Arabic letters. It was, I was sure, Cora’s wedding bouquet.
‘Some coffee would be very nice, thank you, Monica, let me help,’ said Cora. She looked, thank goodness, more depressed than I had seen her for two days. The expectant radiance was gone.
They returned with a tray of coffee.
‘Biscuit, Cora?’ asked Mrs Darbo. There was a selection. A pink wafer and a custard cream with a ruby drop of jam in its navel would, I knew, tempt Cora.
‘The thing is,’ said Cora, ‘I don’t really like biscuits.’ I wondered to what, then, Mrs Darbo would ascribe her fatness.
‘Horse-radish is what you need,’ said Mrs Darbo to Cora.
I wondered if it was like mandrake. What was its use to those with child? Was it an abortifacient? Could Mrs Darbo see the truth?
‘It does wonders for fluid retention.’ Poor Mrs Darbo, her eyes mauve from crying, she must have been keen to retain some fluids.
She began to chat. Illness and complaints are an area of amnesty in women’s conversations. We boast a little of campaigns waged and won, of corners defended, of ambushes repelled. We were on neutral ground. We did not discuss children, whether on account of some tact for my sake from Mrs Darbo I did not know. Surprisingly, she did not mention Hal, whom Cora had told me I would hear described in hyperbolic terms.
We made play with coffee, milk, sugar tongs. Mrs Darbo gave us each a small mat, embroidered with a posy.
‘French knots for the hollyhocks, quite hard to do but rewarding. It was to be for their’ – no need to ask whose – ‘new home but I thought waste not . . .’
‘. . . want not,’ I said. It was not difficult to converse with Mrs Darbo. One performed an antiphon of platitude. She appeared calmer. Perhaps her coffee had calmed her down, but I smelt menthol on her and it reminded me of a governess who drank, steadily and without subterfuge, during afternoons of teaching me stem stitch and birdsfoot hemming. When she went out for a nip, I sucked the silks. Purple was most delicious. At the roots of Mrs Darbo’s teeth was a ridge of primrose yellow and a red thread of blood. I wondered if her husband drank too. I thought of Hal, again, with something which was not sympathy. It was a willingness to share his apprehension of his cosy, airless home and his unhappy mother.
At times of great disaster, there is invariably one get-together which is rich in funny possibilities. When Mordred died, I suppose it was going to the local conservation society meeting that evening. No one knew of his death, and I could not let them down. We passed paste sandwiches and discussed the susceptibility of cowslips to loud noise. Stone, like the rest of Scotland, is often under exploration for oil. The seismic records show that this is knocking the kangaroo of Britain all askew from the waist up.
‘I like to think of the cowslips nodding away long after we are all pushing up daisies,’ said Mr McIver.
‘Uh huh’ – which is the scots for ‘Yes, but’, meaning assent with conditions – ‘speak for yourself,’ said Miss Erskine. ‘I prefer cut blooms. More in keeping with a bereavement.’ And the Scots, so neat in death, do prefer cut blooms, placing them against the weather in glass bells on flat discs of white marble which are handy later for the fresh keeping of the creamier cheeses.
This coffee ceremony with Mrs Darbo was not funny now, but I could imagine, if Lucas lived, laughing about it with him. It was not she who was funny, nor the house, nor the garden, furled up now but potentially as garish as a golf umbrella. There was cotoneaster spidering over the slabs, which were weeded, as clean between as dominoes. It was just that we had reached the overspilling point where nothing more of a terrible nature could be borne, so the slightest thing was funny. I wished there had been an animal there, a dog, to give us innocent fun, to give us a reason besides hysteria to laugh.
‘I have decided to save the dress in case one of the boys marries someone statuesque,’ said Mrs Darbo. I had been curious about this.
‘And the flowers,’ said Cora, ‘where have they gone?’
‘Well, it was most awkward that they couldn’t go to a hospital, but then I had a brainwave, really.’ Perhaps, sensibly, they were going to keep them and give a party anyway?
‘My husband has connections in the afterlife and we are allowing them to go to the undertaker at Poole. It’s most respectable.’ This is what she said.
As we left, she took the bouquet from its vase, wiping all unsightly dampness from its stems with a pink cloth which was immediately wet through. She sought an invulnerable surface on which to place the damp cloth, and gave the flower-cauliflower to Cora. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said at the door. It was cold. She wanted to be inside her house, to shut out strangers and the wind.
‘Amazing she’s taking it so well,’ I said as we turned left on to real road, and away from their golden conifers and pink gravel.
‘It’s not that amazing. She feels guilty.’
‘
She
feels guilty? When for no very clear reason her son’s wedding is called off and she has to sort it out two days before. Guilty? Have a heart, Cora, do.’
‘She told me something in the kitchen. I never quite believed her and her family. I’ve never considered them seriously. But Hal has done something which makes you take her seriously.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked, asking as much on account of her tone of voice as from a desire to know.
‘He’s given himself up to the police. He did it this morning, just before we arrived. She told me in the kitchen. And she said that I would never be good enough for him, so perhaps it was a blessing . . .’
‘. . . in disguise,’ I chimed, as we swung north up the direct route to the city’s broken heart.
It was March before I could get them to Stone. It took so very long because Lucas had to be well, not, as he had indicated, to resume his work, but to see Hal tried for the attack. The trial was incidental. The tragedy was not there in the cold court but long ago when Lucas first saw him. He fell in love with his own angel of death. But, perhaps because it was dark, perhaps because he was afraid, Hal had not completed his task. He was not even Lucifer, though I am sure Lucas thought him the bearer of light as he saw the golden head he loved before the knife struck. But angels are messengers sent by higher authority, and Hal’s message was a garbled one.
A jury does not find the desire of men to embrace each other in lavatories simple. There is a new righteous wrath, a new nosology of morals. The man who just used to
suspect
he did not like chaps in cravats drinking gin-and-it now has a flaming sword to bar their entrance into happiness. These creatures of disease, thinks the heterosexual, so tenuously preserving his right to promiscuity, had it coming to them, for the way they looked, for the way they spoke, for the way they were. Pox comes from llamas,
aids
from monkeys. He’s all right, he never sleeps with either. Boys who had entered the decade pioneers, with innocent brio and a taste for the design and redevelopment of the inner city, were leaving the decade lazars, and the cities ghost-towns. That the disease is shared by users of drugs, prostitutes, yes, and black men, puts power fair and square in the reins of the horsemen of the apocalypse. Like all plagues, it gives work to liars and cowards and power to the bullies. A scourge of the unrighteous, a blessing in disguise. The disease is a news vendor surpassing babies with new hearts, surpassing glandular freaks of womanhood, surpassing even crowned heads. A great game of Russian roulette for us, who do not touch the gun, to watch. It is of course a matter of time before the sickness is available to us all. And then there are the innocent, how do the righteous explain the babies and the mothers and those whose blood will not stop running out of them? Is it the god of wrath accelerating the apocalypse? Or is it just as sad and without point as war?
It has a name, innocuous, helpful,
aids
, a succubus not succouring. I was reading an article in French about something I imagined must be a new cult: ‘
sida
. Ça va vaincre le monde?’ Like all religions, it is catching. I have read, indeed, that there is fear among Communicants that the disease may be passed by chalice. It is like someone who has just left the room, everyone is talking about it. Like a secret which is out, it is killing trust and splitting groups. It is also evoking new and fearful braveries. Could you have imagined a world where it was brave for a restaurateur to serve his clients, for a forensic scientist to perform an autopsy? Even if there is nothing to fear, the fear is there, and it calls up courage. Tertius is growing thinner. Is he on a timely diet? Did he see himself in the glass and feel a little worried by his sea-lion bulk? Or is he wasting away? The dangers drawn by Lucas’s black trysts were once rejection or attack. There was, he has told me, a thrill in the closeness to danger. It was a melodramatic, erotic danger, to be feinted but not fulfilled. There is no such frisson to the consideration of a more lingering and more painful danger. Yet Lucas and men like him need the anonymity, the lovelessness, like a fighter the fight. Should isolation hospitals become brothels?
aids
is grand with metaphor, like all plagues. The lists of love become trenches of horror; this new germ warfare is thoroughly modern, though it is attired in the mediaeval dress favoured by death and his troupe. Leeches will come back, and embrocations of rue, as this new disease, decked out in the theatrical dressing-gown handed down to him by fear and bigotry, walks abroad, putting his hourglass into the hands of boy lovers in cocktail bars.
I am determined to ignore it. It is simple enough for me to do this, naturally, since I am not in utero, intravenal, haemophiliac or homophile. It is easier for me not to take all this illness and dying too personally. But it is starting to touch the people I love. It is like attending a masked ball; the one in your arms may be Venus, or a lifetime of mercury. But
aids
is without the energy of the pox; its acronym makes it hard to nickname. It lives with us but will not be treated familiarly. Careless talk is costing lives again; a whisper about a man leaves him alone out on the turret, being offered the third cigarette.
So, the jury were suspicious. They smelled a ship of rats, but were put off by Lucas’s repute, his frailty and by Hal’s cut and dried story.
The press were waiting, pest-control officers with a taste for gassing. Their weasel words have learnt since Wolfenden many tricks of omission and suggestion. Lucas was made much of, but his stock epithets were now, as well as ‘brilliant, pioneering, brave’, ‘never married’ and ‘childless’. His foreignness was stressed more than it had been. Once delighted to boast of his parents’ choice of domicile, the newspapers began to suggest that perhaps he, Sir Lucas, should have kept himself to himself a little more, not become quite so Englished. Whether they wanted him to wear a gingham blouse and weep into his black bread after stitching up their children all day was not clear. The bolder newspapers suggested that of late he had been favouring the heart problems of other people not always of British extraction, and that this might have something to do with money. The Afghani boy became ‘the son of a prince we cannot name’, suggesting great riches and the, in the end, peculiar unspellability of foreign names. Lucas’s full name was read out in court. ‘What a mouthful,’ said the papers, over a photograph of Hal looking like a girl, taken at the seaside long ago. The copy was dull enough, just Lucas’s full name, and a little piece about his father having been a seller of gherkins. I do not believe they spelt his names correctly: they just snored zzzzzs through a blanket of Catholic names.