Authors: Candia McWilliam
I liked him for his campness and his explicitness. He was what I was not, for certain. And then, he was what I was.
My mother would refer to people who were kind all through as ‘fat souls’. Tertius, I thought, was a fat soul. He was certainly a fat body.
We began with a cold soup of red fruits. Using sour cream, I had written the initial of each person in their soup. With those same perfectly steady hands I had that morning reinforced the interventricular septum in the heart of a small brown baby. His mother had lost two boys already from the same cause, after the same operation. She had three daughters, cursed, I thought, with perfect health, looking at their flashing-eyed father as he visited his wife and son that evening. The little girls, in pastel trousers and long tunics, had come the night before and laid their heads against the side of their mountainous mother as she watched the baby boy. Perhaps some of their life penetrated her pyramidal form. The whole family wore woolly cardigans. The father, with his astrakhan hat, moustache and blue eyes, looked particularly compromised by his cardigan. The sternum of his little son, like a bird’s, would soon, I knew, be safely enfolded in canary cable stitch. God send it keep him warm. The small girls were so respectful of their parents that not even their hair was disobedient; it just receded, at the end of each silken pigtail, to a point where it was no longer visible, at the tunic’s hem.
I had chosen with care the balance of guests to make our dinner party up to eight. I wanted no one to outshine or to show up Cora. It was as though I loved her myself, with such care did I consider her and exactly how she was. I had selected a couple who had married late and who loved each other, an advertisement for the married state. He was a rich man whose hobby was cancer, his main luxury giving money to conferences on the subject in countries like India, which had their own special cancers, dictated by climate and way of life, cancers related to the carrying of braziers or the consumption of fish. She had been a nurse. She was pretty and tired and since her marriage had become a garden historian. He would help her file plants by colour, on the floor of their music room. He had index cards made for her in every colour there is, including sixteen different greys. They were called Daniel and Flo Bayley and he was her dream come true; I doubt whether he had dared to dream, since he had no hands. He wore false hands, ungloved, so unhorrific, and his metal fingers were eerily deliberate in movement. On account of Daniel’s hands, I had avoided cooking anything too fibrous, but I will not make those tone poems on a gout of sauce either. It was a stew with dumplings, each dumpling filled either with an apricot or an almond, and flecked green like mossed eggs. After that, a salad and small potatoes, to absorb the gravy. I find it hard to talk and eat salad, but, as I had anticipated, this did not inhibit my eighth guest. Her name was Dodo, for Dorothy, and I had chosen her for her swift smallness, calculated to show up Cora’s grand scale and her latent wit. Dodo bound books. Nerves and the passing years had made her preen and namedrop and assume. Tertius, Anne and I all knew her and knew she meant no harm, but I wanted her to be at or near her worst that night and she did not disappoint. Her face looked like those eighteenth-century caricatures which you turn upside down to discover what they could be. One might imagine poor Dodo as ‘the week preceding Matrimonie and its aftermath’. Dainty at first glance, her face was coarse; it was not easy to look her in the eye, the nakedness of her desperation was such, and her scrub of unshining curls was not the texture of the hair of the head. Dodo seemed never to close her mouth. She had bracelets of flesh at wrist and ankle, and was very thin in between; she moved as though her waist were a single ball and socket joint, with none of the dip and swoop which must as far as I can see be something to recommend women. She did bind books very well. ‘Like an angel,’ said Tertius, ‘the Recording Angel.’ Certainly, her work looked to me serviceable and unlaboured. She had a friend of dim dazzling beauty who had enjoyed a season’s fame with a copy of Brillat-Savarin bound in the skin of a tanned goose with inset into it a garlic-tooth of ivory and a gilded rosemary sprig. Dodo, painfully whimsical in life, did not affront the page with this chicanery.
Hal sat opposite Cora and between Dodo and Flo. He wore a plain grey suit, a white shirt of silk, with his initials sewn upon it at the left breast, and a pair of black velvet slippers whose shield-shaped toes were each decorated with a forkful of gold thread, his initials, as though his feet were members of some club. He was without a tie.
I was dividing my attention. All my motor activities were concerned with the meal; all my thoughts were occupied with Hal and his reaction to Cora. My eyes were drawn to Hal, as they always were; but today I had to conceal this. The means I found was to observe Cora. To see her seeing Hal for the first time had been to feel lightning conducted. I had introduced them – ‘You two know each other?’ – and left them for a moment. She stared at him as though it would pain her gaze to cease, and so it was throughout the meal, though they did not speak much.
Dodo spoke to Hal about things ostensibly objective, their burden her own unmixed relief and sense of independence at not being obliged to spend time with men. Or even a man. None the less, her indiscriminate voracity for anything, not disqualifying a tapir, for company, was clear. When Hal responded, in, reasonably enough, objective vein to this talk, he became useless to her and Dodo began to talk over him to Flo, who lived for the company and ease of one man, and had probably never reached the tapir-state, finding quiet monogamy pure cream after the chalk and water hospital life. Their childlessness was a warmth between Daniel and Flo and went unpitied among their friends, which is rare since people will wish children upon the most wretchedly mismatched couple, perhaps to make themselves feel that their own broken nights and fractured ambitions are no more than the price of being human. Dodo invariably wore clothes covered with that small sprigging with which the wallpaper of an attic room will conceal misplaced pipes, bulging ceilings, and botched plastering. This suggested, as did her stiff motion, that her entire body was an artificial mechanism beneath the too pretty cloth. Why did she not just out with it, like Daniel with his hands like kitchen utensils?
Dodo was a Catholic; she lodged with a Kosher family who did not like her to use the telephone. I used to think that this must be relief to her, since she would not feel obliged to pretend to have friends, ringing up no one, like a child. It was food laws, I am certain, which were the barrier to her using the telephone. Perhaps she had been eating prawns in her room? Her landlords charged her next to nothing for rent, and were not avaricious.
We came to know Dodo because she had been at school with Anne, a fact which Anne remembered when we required in a hurry someone to bind a series of essays as a
Festschrift
for the Galenic scholar Gilbert Marjoribanks; blue and silver and very plain, it came. The immeasurably thin paper edge at the top of each page was lightly stained, and when the book was closed you saw why; there was a moonlit marsh with a flight of geese; pages making the soft released purr of wings above the marsh banks. Dodo could do with stamp and die and leather all she could not do with her own self.
‘It’s completely secluded,’ she was saying to Flo of her room at the top of a smallish and busy house in Archway. Flo lived in a quiet yellow rectory by water. ‘So there at last I can just be little me.’
‘How do you do that?’ asked Flo, who had no poetry and had not considered being anyone else but big her.
‘I mean I can relax at last.’ The implication was that Dodo could take a recuperative bath in peacock-egg albumen before being whirled off again, if, of course, she wished to be.
‘The great thing about those snatched moments is the freedom to read,’ she continued, as though books were forbidden to bookbinders, as Tertius tells me love of great pictures is to art dealers. ‘And how I love to read. At the moment I am on one which tells you how to . . .’
I rescued her, coming to take her plate.
Daniel, being kind, said to her, ‘Do go on, Dorothy, or may I call you Dodo?’ He had turned from Cora to whom he had spoken through the first half of dinner. He had not asked her about her work, either with perfect instinct or with the understandable egoism of a happily married man who has all he wants and finds himself being asked all about that self by a pretty, younger, woman. He put people at their ease, so they talked well. His hands and his fine head discouraged do-good flirtation to make up for the hands. He was funny. Yet Cora’s eyes often lifted over the table to Hal, whose mouth was just mauve with the soup, so that his eyes were heightened to the bright blue of stones. In fact, he looked, so vivid was his clothing, as though he could, like Dodo’s paper, have been touched with paint. Cora, like a mother, had managed to keep her attention on him, while seeming to give it all to Daniel, who was now listening to Dodo. Dodo’s gestures and near tearful cheeriness suggested to me a thyroid condition. What would Daniel be seeing there? Not a cancer, certainly. Nothing so faithful. She was made for transitory relations, even with illness.
I returned to my place when I had made sure that everyone had their cheese and dry biscuits. I had put a bowl of preserved green almonds on the table, with a silver fork, and a bowl of shaggy peonies was flanked by a flat glass bowl of lime jelly, whose smell, as it melted slowly among the candles, was like a woman’s perfume. To go with the jelly, made with a calf’s foot and twelve sour green fruit, was yellow cream in a silver jug. Tertius and Anne had been talking together in a way which, to my irritation, I could see titillated Hal. They spoke of people and of places which were public knowledge, but which were, at any rate to Anne, private fact. Very many of the people they discussed were related to her. She did not see Tertius’s over-enthusiasm, being innocent in that way. He was watching her as some men will a car which they have been allowed to drive for an afternoon. He even began to show off on his own account.
‘My new friend,’ he was saying, ‘Angelica Coney, she does so much for charity.’
‘If you admit she is your “new” friend you must have met her an hour ago. I’ve never known a nine days’ queen like you,’ said Anne. She was not angry with Tertius. She did not like charity as practised by her class, and was irked by his borrowing of it. ‘Dressing up to feel better about people who can’t dress up.’ ‘Do it, but don’t say,’ she would state. I suspected she did it, but I did not know what form it took.
I watched these people, two of whom I could say I loved. I sat at my end of the table and saw to my right Anne and Tertius, he red with wine and she by now white with smoke, laughing. Were they happy? He was satisfied and greedy, his personal life was regulated as library membership. She was almost certainly not happy but had world enough to make others so.
Opposite me, Daniel was flirting with Dodo. Happiness made him free with charm. I could see her assembling, from this crippled handsome married man, a romance, which she, selflessly, for Flo’s sake really, since Flo would never really get another chance, not really, would turn from, to bury herself once more in her books on Tarot, chick peas, tantra and the old lie, something for everyone. I turned my head to talk to Flo, plain and regnant. What I then saw was what I had wanted – Hal talking to Cora, his pale head inclined over the white and black and silver to her dark one. Her mouth was as loose as though he had only just let it go. I was as jealous as sin.
At midnight, Tertius left; he was drunk. He said he would drive Cora home, but this made Daniel offer to do so. His car had been adapted to his hands. The head of the gear stick was a gel-filled knob, so that his metal fingers could have purchase. Cora said goodbye to Anne, smiled brokenly at Hal, and came to stand next to me in the cold doorway.
‘Thank you
so
much. Perhaps I could do something for you?’ and she kissed my cheek. She did not have to strain up to do so, as most women do, but gave a little lift because she was wearing her grey slippers, no snakes or telephones.
Would Hal stay with me? If I could have my desire that night, it would be to sit and discuss the evening with him. I miss this joy. My parents had it. They gave it to me.
‘Well, that was a good enough feed, Luke,’ he said. He spoke to me in this caricature of buddyspeak for Anne’s benefit, as if she had not thought out the nature of my love for him.
‘It was lovely, Lucas,’ she said. ‘And now let me stretch out.’ I saw that she had decided to stay, that it was with her I would have to go through the evening. I did not mind so much.
‘I’ve got to ease now, Lucas, in fact, as I said I’d meet a couple of friends. Who was the tall one in the great clothes anyway? I could favour her.’
I felt as though I had to eat the tip of my own tongue, cut off. In choosing the girl for Hal was I cutting off my nose to spite my heart? I thought I was ensuring that he went to someone whom I could make certain was a cypher, so that I could keep him all mine.
‘She’s a friend of mine, actually, she’s been up to Stone,’ said Anne, saving me and saving Cora the slur in Hal’s eyes of having been procured by me. ‘And now off you go like a nice boy please.’
She was sparing me pain yet I could have slapped her for it. I knew that had Hal stayed to talk he would not have stayed to sleep with me, yet I said to myself that I was angry because I wanted to trail more bait towards the gingerbread house of marriage to Cora.
‘Well, you two look set fair for a cosy and I must fly,’ he said, putting his hand into the silky dark tunnels of his greatcoat’s arms. He buttoned up. Dressing, the fastening and knotting and tying and lashing, the closing of gaps, must be for a child the first test of dexterity unconnected with the body’s feeding. Hal pulled from his pocket a pair of black leather gloves; he inserted his hands and pulled at the wrists to install every digit. They moved like crabs. ‘I’ll ring you,’ he said. ‘I’d like the big one’s number.’