A Case of Knives Read online

  A CASE OF KNIVES

  CANDIA McWILLIAM

  TO MY FATHER AND MY STEPMOTHER,

  AND FOR MY MOTHER

  My thoughts are all a case of knives,

  Wounding my heart

  With scattered smart,

  As wat’ring pots give flowers their lives.

  Nothing their fury can control,

  While they do wound and pink my soul.

  George Herbert, ‘Affliction (IV)’

  Contents

  LUCAS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  CORA

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  ANNE

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  HAL

  Chapter 31

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  LUCAS

  Chapter 1

  I needed a woman. Or, better, a girl. A woman would be too set in her mould. I required for my purposes something unrefined and eventually ductile. I would perform the smelting and hallmarking myself. I wanted the pure substance I obtained to be worth my effort. I was thinking in terms of ingots, not of pigs.

  I have found out recently of women, that, although they are less than pigs to me, since I do not have to eschew the devouring of them, as I do of pigs, to some these fleshy creatures are precious and worthy of the assay.

  Occasionally I see in the street a man whose bearing tells me he has endured many of the same privileges and ostracisms as I, and read many of the same books; we have what is called a lot in common, yet we care to remain separate, poised, attentive and distant above our secret parishes, like birds of prey. Our quarry is shared, and our romantic hunger common. We require, like policemen or vicars, a beat. What we hunt is monsters who will turn on us, victims who will show themselves panthers and Calibans; they may be meter-readers, good husbands, fine fathers, but briefly, in the dark or the excoriating snowy brightness of under ground, they are to me, and to these other well read, civilised, gentle men, everything we have wanted. I have never woken up in the bed of someone I have made love to; nor has someone who has made love to me woken up in my bed. The people I have seen in that touching, crumpled state of waking up have all been my patients. One cannot feel violence towards a person one has seen asleep.

  But then there was Hal, and he changed the regular, discrete, unadmitted quarterly satisfaction of this essential service in my life. It was clear at once that I could not forbid this boy my home, nor deal him banknotes just out of the lamp-posts’ sight.

  When I first saw him, I was thirty-nine and he twenty. He was entering a chemist’s shop in St James’s Street. The Palace looked on, a toy fort full of courtiers. I saw at once that he was not to be picked up. Even in St James’s, there is provision for that sort of thing. I fell in love with him as I looked; the sensation was of sinking, without end. As I sank into the sight of him, I caught on nothing. I saw he had no archaeology. He was simply what he appeared to be. My past is full of bones and ghostly shapes traced in salt and acid. I saw he was an untroubled English boy, his past a simple matter of roots and earth.

  My appearance is elegant. I wear conventional clothes. I have been told I look like a man who has had at least one child. Whether this is on account of my profession, I do not know. At any rate, it has been useful to me.

  In the chemist’s, this young man and I each purchased a wooden bowl of shaving soap. I said, to the assistant, but of course to the young man, ‘I find the floral soaps leave you with the blue cheeks of a baboon.’ He smiled – did he even shave? The respectable shop fronts were dark but festive as we walked up the street, as though khaki cigars and chestnut hats and dusty-shouldered green bottles were emblems of love.

  But that had been six years ago and now I needed a girl.

  Here, I thought, she was, smiling, her back to a tall looking-glass, her arms athwart the marble mantelpiece. A woman with her back to a mirror is a rare enough thing, one who will keep her hands still almost unique.

  I even felt something of the twinge of recognition which is a presentiment of intimacy. Housemaid’s memory, Tertius calls this, meaning the realignment of recollection so its nap lies smooth with the velvet of sentiment and comfortable untruth. His snobbish name for this emotional editing has its source in the frequent employment of the device in detective novels. When his Lordship is found dead on the library bearskin, the housemaid remembers that his Lordship always was funny about bears, never could abide them really. When you come to like someone, you recall the first meeting dignified by time’s paragraphing; they were not drunk, they were recently bereaved, their orange sombrero was a welcome note of colour at the funeral. It is far easier to reorder memories than to admit to repeated errors.

  I was struck by this girl. She appeared to meet all my superficial requirements. Classical beauties draw to themselves light, their faces pearly in any room. This girl drew to her face and arms not light but colour. A painter will tell you these are the same thing, but at first glance they are different. Light is all take and colour is all give, at least until you look again. She flashed colour like a witchball, bright not pale. There were some pearly girls in the room, and they would surely wear better, if kept in padded cases and held close always to scrupulously soaped flesh, but they were not to my purpose.

  Had she held, balanced on her lifted face, a disproportionate sphere, glowing like ectoplasm, she would have resembled one of those Art Deco lamps which have twice been fashionable this century. She had the uselessly sportive length of limb, and the base-metallic glow. She appeared covetable without being unattainable; had auction houses dealt in young women, she might have been picked up quite reasonably at a fairly popular specialist sale in Geneva, with invited bids. She was listening far too attentively to an old Greek three-quarters her height. She looked down her face to his, and moved her features in response to his. The thick brows of the Greek beetled; her thinner eyebrows flinched. His eyes, the red-brown of prune flesh, gave a warm leer; her blue eyes hid behind mauve lids. His grey jaw jutted; she tucked in her chin like a dove. Unless she really was horribly shy, this submission was unconvincing, and gauche in one so big.

  Her clothes were not those of a shy girl. She appeared not to realise her size. Unless she learnt soon that her little ways would sour and leave her, like a pale old cheese, on the shelf, she would be wasted. But if she grew into herself, well, then, she would be the perfect picture for the frame I had in mind. In her appearance there was something unEnglish which appealed to me. I was pleased to see this combination of confidence and unease; it is a suggestible compound.

  The girl seemed also to have big breasts. I wanted that, too. It was, perforce, to be a full-length picture.

  I sought our hostess. Anne was upstairs in her fur cupboard, shivering. There was no sign that anyone had been with her.

  If it is possible to admire a person intellectually for their storage system, I did Anne. Her clothes cupboards were tall lozenges of space, obscure and cool. So all cupboards might be described, but hers were a cathedral of sartorial labour, its craftsmen Siamese mu
lberry tenders, French button piercers, Amazonian crocodile skinners, small men pulling shards off beetles in jungles below warring helicopters, men in palazzi weaving fields of cloth from dreams of past power. The guildsmen of bonded beauty all contributed to her cupboards’ satisfaction, and, unlike Nana, the end of all this endeavour was not the pleasure Anne might give men, or the money and power she might gain from this pleasure. She was like the bibliophile of pornographic books. She had all these lovely things created solely for adornment, yet her pleasure was in their contemplation more than in their employment. She told her clothes like a miser, but dressed almost invariably in immaculate constructs of no definite colour.

  From the east of her cupboards came the glow of sequined dresses beneath stoles of chiffon; there was a lady chapel of underwear sewn by nuns. Anne’s own faith, as far as I could tell, was the limiting of chaos by external control, the absolute control of passion by ritual. Anne kept her clothes in an order logical and convenient, ready, like a soldier, for any contingency. Her cupboards were a thesaurus of social possibilities. I would tease her by inventing absurd putative events and making her select clothes to wear to attend them. She could always do it. We played in her cupboards like children.

  Both Anne’s houses contained their air-conditioned armoury of skins, muslins, wools, and the braced infantries of shoes. Each item bore a card which was inscribed with the date and place of its last wearing. I once asked her whether she notched the satin heels of her evening shoes for each conquest. She replied that she had her conquests made into coats. I was not sure whether she had lovers.

  This evening, I sat with her in the gloom among the furs, the coldest part of the clothes-cathedral, giving a faint winter smell of naphtha and gauze-bagged dry flowers, downy buttons of immortelles, with their petals like small fallen pointed fingernails.

  The furs were shouldered with shawls of chiffon to prevent chafing. These capes looked, on the congregation of sleek or brindled shoulders, pitifully domestic.

  Anne was not vain. She had short light hair which lay where it was placed, a creased face with prominent cheekbones, very pale blue eyes, and an expression without guile. She was thin, not slim, and never wrinkled her nose, swivelled her hips or licked her mouth before or after telling a lie. So far as I knew, she had never told me one. Her posture was that of a sailor; she was always braced against some greater force, hooked to a chair, set against a wall. Her skin and hair were of a similar light brown, which grew more differentiated in sunlight. After prolonged exposure, her skin would darken to the colour of soft brown sugar, and her hair lighten to the colour of caramel. She was always neat, but she pushed her sleeves up from her wrists. She had thin feet and hands and the eyebrows and gaze of a boy. She had no greed but I sometimes worried that she was easily bored. I despised this, but she never seemed to be bored by me, so I was mollified. She was never bored, she said, at Stone. Stone was home, the house of her dead husband.

  ‘Lucas, come in at once, take a pew.’ Anne would adopt phrases, use them or a time in a voice different from her own to show she was joking, then forget to highlight them in this way, so that they became assimilated into her speech.

  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.’