Authors: Candia McWilliam
We began in a corsetíre, so old-fashioned that the photograph of the monarch was in sepia, tinted with the icing pink and green of poisoned cakes. The attentive yet disembodied nature of the assistants made it not at all improper for a man to be there. I was able to see no hint of flesh as Anne was fitted behind the curtain. Cora sat on a little chair next to me, and wandered off after about half an hour. I heard women’s voices, intent, expert, nurselike. I almost went to sleep, until I heard the whisk of Anne’s curtain and saw on the wall of the compartment where she had been a battery of what appeared to be light engineering tools; some of them looked like my own instruments, glistening hooks and clamps and pins. There was an alterable metal hoop, like a sieve without the stiff bowl of veil; it looked like a speculum for a huge but frail mammal. I also saw a bunch of what appeared to be pale onions, but soft, as though one of Anne’s modern sculptors had forgotten them from the handle-bars of his soft bicycle. These onions, though, were not plump and shiny and alive but the grim pink of institutionalised femininity. I realised that they must be prosthetic breasts and I wondered if Anne needed them. How little I knew about what clothed the skeleton. How much about what it housed. We left together, Cora having mysteriously reappeared.
‘For women’s clothes, London isn’t really the place, but it is wonderful for men and for unmentionables,’ said Anne. ‘Did you like that basque lacer?’
‘I got them to use it on me,’ said Cora. ‘The very grand one with a pleated mouth told me there are girls who come and get laced tighter and tighter. Very popular with husbands, she said. Less so with lungs, I guess, but then – one’s got two of those.’
‘Spare me,’ I said. ‘And what is a basque lacer?’
‘The sort of giant boiled-egg decapitator at the back of my booth,’ said Anne. ‘Do you believe in trepanning, Cora? We might go sometime if you’ve a moment, I’ve a friend whose life it changed. She can go up and down stairs entirely unattended though she still cannot deal with horizontals, they’re too committing, she says.’
Anne was certainly teasing Cora with some malice. I opened the door to allow the tall girl into the back of my car and reobserved her shoes. Over the high blue heel of each something hung, and on the smooth blue leather that capped each heel something was written. The left heel bore a tiny red telephone receiver and three figures; I knew what the right would bear – a tiny red telephone and four figures. Had I not noticed, I wondered in horror, were her ankles linked with a stretchy coil of red telephone wire?
‘Shoes,’ I said to Anne.
‘Lucas does admire your shoes,’ said Anne. ‘Are they to tell the world you are engaged?’
Of course, I was cross, but forgave her when she continued, ‘I just do need some more slippers, Lucas. Do go on, Cora, and let’s get you some too.’ This was kind and rescued me from feeling compromised. Anne of course had slippers for a thousand and one nights.
In the back of a men’s shoe shop were lasts for both of Anne’s feet. While Anne went behind yet another curtain, Cora sat among a pile of silvery grey slippers. They looked like the perfect wear for a cat burglar. She took off her prostitute’s shoes. In haste, the novice shoe votary put them away in a box. Cora put on pair after pair of leaf-grey slippers until she found some snug enough. I had not seen her in flat shoes since she had worn my socks in the night. The canting of her body changed; her hips went forward, her hands towards her pockets, her shoulders back. She looked less English than ever, but still had her awful bag which looked like the severed hump of a dromedary stuffed with waste paper, and her earrings, which, I now noticed, pursued the telephone motif, being small but unmistakable telephone booths.
‘May we have a black pair and a grey pair of the slippers and have you any ready-made shoes for ladies?’ I asked the young man with his soothing confidential manner. He was like a pimp provided by the state for municipal health reasons. He knew about younger ladies and older gentlemen. He may have recognised me. Two days before, there had been an article about my latest operation; opposite it was printed the photograph of a girl whose only garment had been a fishing rod and her own hands. Her caption had been ‘
two that got away
’. ‘My’ caption had been ‘
big-hearted big knight
’.
We bought a pair of navy-blue shoes for Cora which were unremarkable in all but price. How did she feel, being treated as a pet or as a child, by people she hardly knew?
Cora and I crossed the road and entered the glass corner of Fortnum and Mason’s Fountain. Anne continued her game of hunt the slipper. At the table next to us a couple transparent with age, she in velvet and marcasite and he in a town bowler hat, each wearing a grey coat, faced each other over a shared quarter-bottle of champagne. Her hat resembled a black cat which had swallowed a squeeze-box. She was beautiful and wore pince-nez; blue veins stood out on their hands, which were linked. These veins were all that moved. Two pairs of gloves lay together on the table.
Cora ate nothing and drank two glasses of iced tea. The once compendious and prolix menu had dwindled, the splendiferous blonde Irishwoman had disappeared. No wonder, when one saw the changes. For Anne I ordered a chocolate ice with chocolate sauce, and for myself crumpets with salt and a pot of tea. Anne and I had spent hours here during the twenty years we had known each other. Overnight, it seemed, the Fountain had changed. The only way to react to the frosted glass facelift was to ignore it. Plastic oranges bobbed in a tank in the corner. Gone were the watery mural, the sugary illicit atmosphere.
‘My God, what has happened here?’ cried Anne, when she arrived, carrying a thin paper bag. No one responded, so deep is the English teataker’s terror of lunatics. So Anne spoke up. Two Americans forking plywood
mille-feuilles
, at the table on the other side, facing the lacy grey couple, looked uncomfortable.
‘Anne,’ said Cora, and tugged at Anne’s mauve sleeve to pull her to sit down. At the same time, she indicated to her that the old woman was trying to get her attention. The grey-coated woman moved her head very slowly, with its strange hat; it was as though Nefertiti’s bust were being rotated by a rapt Egyptologist. She caught Anne’s eyes with her own and then mouthed, making not even a breath of noise, ‘My husband is blind. Do not make him see the change.’ The silent head rotated back among its pale goffering. Her eyes once more faced the witty, sightless gaze of her companion. Anne ate her ice-cream. I saw Cora looking at her with envy and greed, the face I have seen from time to time on my patients as they watch their visitors eat the grapes they have brought. While there is still that greed, I do not despair of an energy to sustain life. But Cora was not an ill girl, just a vain fit girl who had decided not to eat. When Anne laid down her spoon, Cora seemed relieved, as though she had feared that her own hand, in spite of herself, might lick out to take the sweet brown ice.
Anne raised her head to me and said, ‘I hope you like what I’ve got here,’ and she indicated the thin bag. ‘It’s for Cora.’
She unpacked from this narrow envelope of paper a wool suit. How had it been packed so flat? A white fall of tissue paper, volumes of it, was all about our feet, landing with the sound of flexed wing feathers.
‘It’s a real one of what you’ve got on, and, frankly, I don’t know if it’s as nice, but let’s see, shall we?’ Anne’s voice was barricading itself against a patronising tone. It would not be kept out.
She picked up the jacket and shook it by the shoulders as you might a child who is going to sing his party piece. She looked at it with proprietary pride. Inside the neck was stitched, by two loops of ribbon, a very small gold chain, to take the feather weight of the jacket, during, perhaps, some meal taken in mime with other women clad in sumptuous modesty. The wool of the suit was the blue of a starling in sunlight. Its buttons were as considered as those on an expensive gramophone.
‘It is exactly what I have always wanted,’ said Cora. ‘And now please take it back, or I shall always want more, and never be able to relax with you. When I am very old I shall still be in your debt, and who knows, I may have become wicked in order to satisfy my need for hand-hemming. I’ll be’ – she gave a smirk and blushed, and yet did not stop herself – ‘hooked, on the needle, kind of thing.’
‘Worse things happen, Cora,’ said the serpent Anne to our unfallen Eve.
‘I can’t afford it,’ Cora said, ‘in any sense. I just do not dare to start accepting things.’
‘Very well,’ said my naïve sophisticated friend, ‘but how do we pack it up? You should know,’ she went on, ‘you work in shops.’
I was embarrassed for Anne. Did she honestly not understand about other people and money and the infected bondage of obligation? I think she was innocent on that afternoon, and simply wanted to spoil Cora, and then wanted to hurt her when the girl rejected the gift.
Did we appear, from the outside, to be a family, two parents and their leggy daughter?
‘Who is Angel?’ I asked, trying to save us all from embarrassment, while Cora ineptly folded the blue wool and creased tissue paper. Her face was red, as though she had been hit. I saw the old couple full with years and moderate in their ways and I felt sad for Anne. What could be making her behave in this way? She looked suddenly up as though she heard something. It was twenty past five, when angels pass.
‘Angel is great. She wears weird clothes and she’s wound up in a lot of causes.’ This lazy language was in Cora insolence. She was showing Anne and myself that she was alive and young and needed nothing more than her body to give her fun. Hal does it to me, often. I think of my father who spoke English hardly at all and the closed firework-box of his Polish growing damp over the years. But Cora’s feelings had been hurt, I imagined, so I persevered.
‘Causes?’
‘Yup – you know, animals, all that, comets, rhinology . . .’
‘She’s a kidney expert?’ I tried to make a joke. I failed.
‘No, the nose being, you know, symbolic of the rest of the body. Each bit having its own bit of the body.’ She was still sulking. She was leaving herself as few words as those poor newspapers. I considered momentarily the congruence of circumcision and nose-bobbing and held my tongue. Where in the nose was the heart?
Where, for that matter, the tongue? ‘It gives you a whole new outlook on noses,’ said Anne, in a doped religiose voice. As she said it, she squinted wildly, and held her hand on Cora’s wrist, and they both laughed. Anne looked as though she had closed a drawer on a cache of rusty knives.
‘But the main thing is animals, with Angel. She likes them better than people. She thinks they should be free to run their own lives. She says a hare is better than any rabbi.’
I took this as a reference to that form of spiritual superiorness which entails promiscuity and sententiousness in equal parts.
‘How did you meet?’
‘Oh, in the shop. We even do vegetarian dog-food.’
‘Is it popular?’ asked Anne. She had many characteristics of the conventional British woman. She loved animals in a straightforward way; this involved feeding her dogs on what dogs eat.
‘Not for dogs, but it’s cheap, and a lot of people buy it for themselves. There are people poorer than you know,’ Cora said, rather wildly, not addressing me, not daring to address Anne, truce being too recent. Somehow my money was meritocratic, I supposed.
‘I know someone who’s going that way,’ said Anne.
Whether she referred to vegetarianism or poverty, I doubt if she knew. They were remote, exotic states.
‘There’s a lot of it about,’ carried a voice.
It was Tertius.
Tertius was misleading to look at, but when he spoke he left no uncertainty. At the dinner party, he sat between his old friend Anne and his cleaning woman Cora. I had not particularly wanted him to be present when I introduced Hal and Cora, but he had ensured that things fell out thus when we had bumped into him. He had been delivering a frame to Cam’s just opposite Fortnum’s, a very little frame, he had said, but chased silver and what
is
chaste nowadays?
Tertius was a pantomime queer. He was too old for camouflage chic; I refer not to the fashion for wearing army drab, but to the fashion for appearing to camouflage among the heterosexuals, which was, I must admit, what I wanted for Hal. A fat man, Tertius had the red hair which announces its ubiquity at neck and cuff and ankle. His bottom had the mass, in its invariable grey flannel trousers, of a tired old circus elephant’s. He had huge shoulders, even for his size, and all his clothes were covered with checks, squares, dogsteeth, tartan, plaid, shadow-paning, windowpane or other designs playing the not many variations on ninety degrees. I had seen rooms shatter into a mosaic of squares once Tertius entered, as though dividing into those grids used by painters of fresco and mural to control their matter. A flower placed in his buttonhole would, you felt, marshal and bevel its petals to squareness. It was nothing so clear as that Tertius the seller of frames saw everything, as it were, through a square or rectangular frame; it was that he was so strong a presence, so colourful and so vivid a sight, that curves lost their importance wherever he was, confronted with his bulk and squareness. He re-emphasised perception, shook it up and squared it up. Perhaps the only thing which might have reasserted curvature in his life, a Fat Lady, was not at all what he wanted.