A Case of Knives Read online

  ‘I mean, after all this time, I’d have thought it might be easier with . . .’

  ‘Oh Anne, it’s not easy at all . . .’

  I thought, forgetting the bleaknesses and humiliations of the past six years, of all I had relished and shared with Hal, the recitals and sea walks, the years of his youth and my prime. Thought is too slow and too unvoluptuous a word for what was more like the swell of a note in music, resonating long after it was inaudible.

  ‘Isn’t it easy, Lucas, darling? You can hardly be surprised, I suppose, since she is so very young.’ It is not often that I detect coquetry in Anne. She is rich enough not to play, and confident of her ugly face and clothed body; but at the word ‘young’ she had curled both hands about her glass as though it were too heavy for one wrist, and lifted her eyes to my face. She showed me her eyes under the fringe as though hypnotising me.

  ‘Don’t you think she is the right age? Why on earth not? I’m keen for it to be someone I can train and prune,’ I said.

  ‘People aren’t hedges, darling, you can’t do topiary on them. Or, if you do, be prepared to find nests in the branches, like the old man with his beard.’

  ‘But a hedge is exactly what I want, do you see? I want a hedge against the future, against getting old alone, I suppose, and, without being too coy . . .’

  Even Anne is not innocent of a woman’s need to talk about babies.

  ‘You quite fancy a nest in those branches,’ she interrupted, ‘don’t tell me, and that’s where the youth is especially advantageous, and you a medical man . . . All eggs in one sound enough basket. But how are you on breaking the eggs to make the omelette? On cutting the mustard? On making bacon? Or is that offensive to you for dietary reasons . . .?’

  Anne was crying. She must have been drunk. I know whisky does make Scots lachrymose. I had not specified to myself that I would like Hal and Cora to have children, but Anne had instinctively led me to see that this must be one of the reasons I had not gone mad when he said he was going to get married. I would like children, to leave my money to, of course, and to vindicate the expense of Hal’s seed on Cora. But that was far in the future, well beyond the marriage which was at present my concern. And here was my dear old friend wiping her nose on her brocade elbows, hugging her knees, shaking. I assumed she must be thinking of her one child, wilfully sucking up his death.

  ‘And the other thing is, Lucas, love has made you lose your sense of humour. God Almighty, a hedge against the future, will you listen for a moment? One minute it’s all privies and privates and now it’s layettes. The first thing you’ll do I suppose is drop all your old friends? It’s bound to do you no end of good professionally as well. Most doctors are whited sepulchres anyhow but at least it’s swabbing the sister in the bloody chamber not trunking a dumb ancillary worker down among the kidney bowls.’

  For the second time that night I was shocked. I considered my life organised, separated like a shell into chambers. My colleagues at the hospital knew me for a talented professional man with no private life. The tabloid newspapers had supplied me with a knightly character, and hinted at no errancy. The boys, I was almost certain, knew me as nobody, just another randy man hiding beneath the sheep-belly of class and decency. Hal knew I went to what Tertius called cottages. And Anne had known, but never said a word. She had kept a seemly silence. What was the source of her rage? Is the vanity of all women affronted by any man who will not desire them so that they may – sweetly, reluctantly, fragrantly, lingeringly – reject him? Not Anne. It must be the thought of drowned Alexander which was making her cry. I do not as a rule trust centripetal grief, all tending to one source laid down long ago, but I could see that the voluntary deaths of her husband and her son could not go unconsidered. And then, she must be menopausal. I do not care to think about that. Perhaps she, whose one child was dead, was jealous of Cora, who carried the pods for more children than her years might give her time to bear? I would comfort her.

  ‘My dearest Anne, are you sad because you can have no more children? Don’t wipe your eyes on your brocade, it must scratch.’ She was blubbering. The golden threads of her jacket were webbed with mess.

  I leant to take her in my arms, a magnanimous thing to do since I would be gummy with tears when once she was comforted. Up came her hands, soft fur at each wrist. She hit me, right, left, so I could feel each cheek burn with the imprint of a hand. She was severely discomposed. Could I, as one must with an hysteric, hit her? I did not. I laid her back against the cushions of my sofa, lifted her feet and pulled them out from her body, so she was completely stretched out as though for sleep. She was shaking. I must loosen the tight frogged collar of her jacket, and cover her with something warm.

  I fetched from the arm of a chair a folded Kashmiri shawl. It will pass through a wedding ring and is light enough to lie in the air. I placed it over Anne, pulled it over her pretty shape and enveloped her feet. I knelt at her head and bent to unhook the fastenings at her breast.

  ‘Is this to practise, or to get back at me for my cheap crack about bacon?’ asked Anne in a normal voice, not the pleading whelp she had been using since the tears began. ‘Either way, my darling, you may have developed a taste for it at this late date, but I prefer it nowadays with people I don’t love.’

  ‘Are you mad, Anne?’

  ‘You are mad; concealing, dreaming, plotting, keeping everything from me,’ she said, the hysterical tone returning.

  ‘What can you be saying?’

  ‘All this getting married stuff, I’m just so upset you couldn’t tell me. I thought we had it so clear between us, no secrets but the linen, and that’s clean enough since we both go to outside contractors, and now you tell me you’re getting married because you want respectability and a washing machine and little ones. And you are insulting me twice; once as myself, your friend, by not telling me your plan, letting me help, and twice as a woman by callously choosing some chit – for strictly eugenic reasons. And now, come to think of it, a third time, Lucas, you brute, by thinking you can wreck our happy closeness by committing sort of friendship-incest just as a boast to show me how well you are getting on with female anatomy.’

  ‘Are you drunk or hallucinating or is this a product of indigestion?’

  ‘You wicked cold fish, I am sober, I take no drugs, and you are a good cook, as you know. That’ll come in handy since I’m sure little Missy has never chopped a liver in her life. Just hearts.’

  ‘There is no need to talk of Cora like that. Besides, she is, or do you forget this, your friend?’

  ‘And you select her from my menu as your personal feast. Do you think that pleases me? Moreover, without including me. I would have been the Marquise de Merteuil for you, you know that, Lucas. Besides, you can’t but be an amateur when it comes to choosing eligible young women; I would have helped you there. I am after all disinterested.’

  ‘Your exhibition this evening leads me not to believe that.’

  ‘Speak straight, Lucas, since you are determined to pretend to live so.’

  ‘Anne, there is a misunderstanding. I think that there may have been one since last week. But before I explain to you, let me ask you. A fearful thought has struck me. Are you in love with me?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘It seems the only explanation of your behaviour this evening. We have always been easy together, and now this storm. I thought we were close.’

  ‘That is exactly it, you oaf.’ At least she was not snivelling. ‘No, I am not in love with you, but you are being obtuse if that is the only reason you know for violent jealousy. You must see that it is a shock for me to hear that you plan to marry. It is usual for eminent homosexuals to equip themselves with wives in order to continue with their upper worldly life of contribution and exposure, but I would like to have known. As to being in love with you, it’s not that, but I’d have thought you more canny and more likely to be happy if you had allowed your marriage to be chaste and expedient, and what could be more suitab
le than a quiet wedding one afternoon at a Register Office to a widow of substance and position, one whom you have known for twenty years? Perhaps I do sound like a bitch in the manger, but you appear to be choosing a sweet enough young girl with lots of It and none of anything else, and you have no use for It. I am also miffed by the suggestion that I am past bearing a child. I am not. So, if you were to want children as much as you think you do, we could have one, or two, and it would be balanced, rich, clever and the apple of our eyes.’

  I was curious. ‘So not chaste, if expedient.’

  ‘We could steel ourselves. Even, with your connections, do it in vitro,’ she laughed. ‘We could call it Ming.’

  Weak jokes leave a bleak little silence. It would take time for me to trust Anne as I had before. Was she as objective and sensible in her absurd proposition as she was pretending? I thought not. But I must, before I made her an enemy, explain to her that I required Cora not for myself but for Hal. Perhaps she would even help me, though I must realise that losing Hal would leave me so to speak undefended, should Anne really want to marry me. Was it even so impossible an idea? As a plan, it had everything in its favour. But, though I was willing a comparable arrangement upon Cora, I could not feel honourable about living in that closed vice called an open marriage with Anne. I had wanted, before her unpredictable outburst this evening, to laugh out our last years with each other, cackling in the wardrobe, choosing clothes in which she might rise up at the latter day. I thought now that we would lose our domestic ease if we married. Her money would ease the chafe of marital practicalities, but then married people as a rule have the rosin of sex.

  I began carefully. ‘Anne, it is not I who am mad, nor you, though I did think earlier on that you were. We have just been misinterpreting each other. I wish, in a way, I must say this, though it may wound you, that you hadn’t made your gallant proposal. It would have been better unsaid. But I see that I was ambiguous. What were you thinking in the Fountain at Fortnum’s?’

  ‘Why was I so rude to the little witch, do you mean? Because, if I must admit it, I couldn’t buy her with the suit.’

  ‘What for? You must realise that you are more likely to desire her than I?’

  She looked surprised. ‘I wanted her to show she was nothing, so that she would be unimportant in your life. I am your female friend, you don’t need a little sugardrop, you’ve got me, all the best traits and none of the muddle. Or so I thought.’

  ‘I must say, I was quite pleased she didn’t accept your generous public lobotomy, because what I require from her is just that moral keel, and little else but big breasts and long legs.’

  ‘How refreshing it is to meet a man who is unafraid to admit he is a pig. And you are going to marry a girl because she’s got a big keel. All the better to support the angel’s wings, I suppose, when she has to rock the cradle and ignore your periodic late returns from a night-time operation, or should I say dog fight?’

  ‘Annie, the great thing I have learnt this evening is that you are a vile mixture of malice and stupidity. You are also blind.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll get myself another drink.’

  I let her pour the whisky, walk over to the mirror with its golden lion and the standing men in their chariot, check not her face but her clothes, and return to the sofa. I could not see how she had been so obtuse. Then I realised. Hal was not for her the centre of the world. She was the centre of her own world, and I somewhere near it. Hal was there, but he had his place in the cosmogony, somewhere between Bayreuth and guipure lace for importance. Living in a denatured universe, without husband or son, she had come to trust only herself and what she could control; she had allowed me to come close to her and I had introduced a vagrant pull into her orbit, a new, unignorable moon. Poor Anne.

  ‘Cora is not for me. I want her, and have since your party where I first saw her, for Hal. On the morning of your party, he told me he was going’ – and now my voice went out of control – ‘to get married, but he had no one in mind. All he admitted to wanting was breasts and legs.’

  ‘Oh, darling,’ said Anne, and had I not been afraid of her feelings for me, just in those raw hours, I would have lain on her comfortably undivided bosom. ‘Oh, love. And it’s you who wants the moral keel.’

  ‘I thought it as well.’

  ‘Why is that? Surely you haven’t noticed an insufficiency in Hal?’

  ‘I can’t argue over Hal now, Annie, please, so don’t be ironic at me.’

  ‘And who wants the babies?’ she asked.

  ‘I hadn’t honestly thought of them until you started. I’m in the early days, they aren’t married yet, after all, but when you spoke of children I rather cared for the idea.’

  ‘You rather cared for the idea. Lucas, no wonder you have to go and get violated by Nibelungs, you fool, this is life, the thing which even you can’t sew back into leaky bodies. You have let a dragon out.’ The note of management, of knowing better, which I fear in the voices of my ward Sisters, crept in. ‘No harm done, though, nothing has happened, after all. You can’t ensure they will like each other, let alone marry, and surely if Hal suspected that you were calculating this match, he’d run.’

  ‘Leave it to me, Anne, please, after all Hal is mine.’

  ‘He is not, nobody is yours, Lucas, not even those little unborn cherubs. Do you know how crazy you are? You are experimenting with human flesh. You are doing something which, if it were surgical, would be as repulsive and unnatural as . . .’

  ‘Transplanting the heart?’ I asked, pleased with myself, but on edge.

  ‘As obscene as what you tell me it is cheek in Gentiles to mention.’

  ‘Was Mrs Bennet guilty of that when she planned for her daughters’ future?’

  ‘Do not be disingenuous, Lucas. A natural desire for one’s child’s security is not the same as finding a hale consort for your catamite.’

  ‘That he is not.’

  ‘No. He is something worse. If he were that, these complications would not be facing us and half your life would not be lived in either the baleful light of illusion or the dark of rough trade.’

  My whole mien discourages criticism. There is a perfect control about me which deflects fault-finding. I am conscious of it because I forged it, link by link.

  ‘It’s true, darling. If you lived openly with a boyfriend, there would be no fear of discovery because there would be nothing to discover. But then, I think, and I must be quite careful here, it wouldn’t be as thrilling. Also, if you did live with him, you might see him as he is, not the prince in his tower.’

  ‘So, what do you suggest I do, Anne? Forget it all, let him cut loose, lose my last six years, have no one to live for?’

  ‘Oh, you great self-pitying thing, who have I to live for, for instance? We live for life. Not for another person. Or at any rate no person to keep us in a sufficient state of misery to endure life. Did your mother and father suffer for you to suffer? They did not. Come into the sun. If I can do it, you can do it. You commit idolatry with Hal. Why not settle for a godless universe if you cannot find a true god? He is a golden bullock. I’d be happier for you living in open sin with a wet fishmonger than this mawkish abdication from hope for the sake of a puppet queen. We have not spoken of this before because I had not wanted to hurt you, but you have gone too far and now I can’t stand by and see you throw a perfectly nice girl to your pet puss. You have drawn his teeth, Lucas, but his claws are there in the paddy paws. Poor little Cora will just be left like a mouse after the cat has played with it, only the skin and spleen left. How dare you do it, Lucas?’

  ‘I shall do it, Anne, and you will help me. I am sorry to use desperate measures but I must have your co-operation now. I have told you what I intend to do. In the end, you may come to see I was correct.’

  ‘What, when you and I, in the cere and yellow, see Hal, by now in the fullness of his years and for once at home and upright, dandling little Hal, Cora mysteriously absent, in the home for battered wives? Plea
se.’

  ‘Anne, you told me about Mordred, do you remember? You would gravely dislike anyone else to know. I love you, I am not in love with you, and I ask you to permit me to blackmail you.’

  ‘Good of you to ask,’ said Anne.

  I had won.

  Chapter 9

  The tiredness after that night brought a sleep without dreams, until just before I awoke. There is a vivid crack of bright dreams just before waking up. Whether it is the red of one’s eyelids being interpreted by the brain I do not know. All dreams have to do with love and death.

  My dream was of Anne. She and I were fighting over Hal, who was dead. He was not decomposing, but rather flowering. When we pulled at his flesh, it came away, but in drifts and bunches. It was like dismembering a man of petals and fruit, an Archimboldean harvest-festival man. At length, we were tired, and settled among the fruit and flowers to eat. We ate meats brought to us by Cora, who wore no clothes. Anne and I were dressed for a Presbyterian Sunday. She wore mittens of grey lace and her little hands were clawed. When I awoke I was afraid, but pleased when I remembered that I now had an accomplice. I had made Anne swear that she would not include Tertius in my plan. He has a wagging tongue in a small world, with its four corners, trade and sex and money and class, enclosing a formal maze. To introduce a girl into its geometry would be to forfeit entry, and Tertius was not only my friend; he was guide in the maze, the one who told me in what shade next to seek ease, and who held the other end of the thread to tweak me back when I was lost.

  I had the false energy of hangover, but my crapulousness was not from whisky but from the gambler’s fear; had I loaded my dice so heavily that I would be caught? I left a note for Concepçión, who came to wash up for me before her day of sluicing Embassy kitchens began. She earned from the Embassies perhaps a sleeve of one of my shirts a week. I gave her the equivalent of a couple of cuffs beside. I liked her boy, who sat and played wherever he would least disturb his mother. He did not like the Hoover, which he called Dog. One day he called me dog and I spent the following morning thinking of ways to win him back. In the end, I chose a box of that coffee toffee the Dutch eat. He put a cube flat in his mouth, flat hand to flat cream face, and Concepçión said, ‘How nice.’ She washed the boy’s hair in dishwasher liquid, she told me. It did shine like black china.