A Case of Knives (19 page)

It was at about this time that I learnt that Tertius was a friend of Angel. He was rigid with snobbery, I’d realised that long before, but I could see that it was at once professionally necessary and also a cure for his boredom. I also cannot see that snobbery is more of a failing than it is a source of pleasure. ‘If
that
pleasure is not innocent, what is, now we are told that food and sex are toxic? That leaves snobbery and sleep as the last simple pleasures,’ said Tertius.

But snobbery could not explain why so lively a man as Tertius, and one so at heart conventional, should spare time for my colleague and tormentrix from the charity shop, Angelica Coney. Reared in a palace with different time zones for each wing, Angel was one of those sirens whose pull is all towards destruction. She was of any age between twenty and forty-five and she was a witch. I feared her and was dashed when she withdrew her lovely smile and pretty favours from me. She had black eyes and surprising blonde hair. Much of her power derived from her not speaking, or infancy. It was so alarming that you would resume worship to bring the sun out from behind her wrath. Her power was over all animals, especially men, but she used this power over them mostly to advance the boundaries of her princesspality, the animal kingdom. As a tiny child she had begun her career of animal-sympathy by releasing the hounds, the ark of her class’s covenant, the only animals invariably counted two by two.

Angel had ignorance. It clothed her impermeably. She had no Achilles heel where comparison and reference might strike her. Her attitudes were unqualified and unclouded by awareness of anything but her own feelings, and these were few but strong; there was no danger that she might bore her opponents with fact to support her statements. What Angelica loved was animals, though it was more and less than love, for it was not a human feeling. They were her familiars. She felt their pain. Human pain compared with it, she said, was a luxury fathered by time on speech. When she did speak, it was to say such things. Brought up where the worst pains were invisible or trivial, she had decided that all human agony was so. The worst she had seen was adultery and mismatched shoes. I suppose she believed in original sin without knowing it, and felt the animals were innocent.

She was dangerous because she had learnt disguise. She was considered human but the beast’s eyes stared out. She was the only child of parents whose name would die with her and whose great house, if she could achieve her dream, would be turned over to the animals.

Her ambition was the restitution of animals to their proper place. I had laughed at her, imagining a sort of cheery reversal of roles, teddy bears conducting buses and giraffes delivering letters, or maybe just a wonderful party for creatures, elephants dropping their chains and cats letting themselves out for the last time. I said as much to Angelica, who blazed, no smile on her tiger’s face. She had needed to say nothing about my misplaced anthropomorphism, patronage, indeed she did not know these words. Instead, she turned on me, and said winningly, ‘They will eat you and all people like you and spew you out because you taste bad.’

Angel was so cool and charming in her bearing that the fact that she was a lunatic was ignored. Her nobility would in any case have protected her from incarceration. I was not sure in what direction she organised her animal ambitions. I was sure the charity shop was some sort of front, and sometimes half expected to see a black panther in a fedora slink in, talking out of the side of its whiskers. Most of the time Angel was quiet, like a cat, and used her almost dumb vocabulary to hypnotise and stun men. She did, curiously, a lot of work for charities, all to do with animals. Her name, her passion for the beasts, and her beauty made her an adornment. I suspected that she licked men all over with a rough tongue before killing them, and when I saw her little hands, I would think of them laid, immovable leaden velvet, on the neck of some poor white hunter, before she inclined her little neck to begin the imperative neat destruction of her victim. Angel was as it were a vegan carnivore; cheese, eggs and milk she eschewed, but I imagined her coughing up hairballs of expensive shoe leather and silk ties after devouring a toothsome banker. She did not need it for herself, but she did need their money for her causes.

Angelica lived near the charity shop, which was itself in Sloane Avenue, when she was not at her parents’ house. I had not been to her London house. I did not much want to. I feared there might be people, stuffed, under tall cloches, like the kudu and jewel-footed eagles she had not been able to persuade her gentle parents to destroy at Wyvern. After all, their life was destroyed already. But Dolores Steel
was
a frequent visitor to Angel’s London house. She was unable to describe things save in relation to prison, where she had spent two years. Things and places were thus better or worse than prison. Nothing was the same as prison, not even, she had said to me in the charity shop the day before she announced she was about to go in, ‘Not even hospital. And I should know.’

Dolores Steel was Angel’s lieutenant. No, more secretive than that, I suppose. She was her crack division for desperate measures, for the extraction of money by means more forceful than charm and connections. I was not sure that Dolores ever did anything wrong, but her bearing was that of a man over and over polishing his gun, weighing it, spinning it, polishing again. But her gun was part of herself, you could not take it from her. Dolores looked like Angelica, though how her parents, a Spanish stevedore and a male impersonator from Hornsea, had combined to replicate the product of nine centuries of aristocratic jerrymandering and landlinked marriage was a mystery. Where Angel was fair, Dolores was black in all but skin. I thought her black-hearted, too, but I came when she called.

Dolores’s crackshot sex appeal and crazy past, whatever it was, left her with few friends, and I felt sad for her. I thought of her in hospital as I had seen her before, diminished by the little bed and six flowers in a jar next to the Lucozade, and told myself to remember to go and see her this time. So embroiled was I with my own interior, which made me not ill but not well, that I almost did not ask her why she was going to hospital. We were sitting, she, I and Angel, on the floor of the shop, sorting old clothes into piles. The room was badly lit, the paint stained, but beige anyway, like many of the clothes having been tinted for serviceability, not appeal. The clothes were improbably stained, as though they had been lent to a troupe of incontinents for amateur dramatics. The necks of the women’s clothes were biscuit-thick in orange make-up. Before a laundry hamper of these clothes sat Angelica and Dolores, small, dark-eyed, high-cheekboned, and made up not with the rose colours of other women but with toffee and black, their four eyes doubled with black, their clavicles powdered with gold. I did not want to turn my back on them. Here, among the wool on the floor, they might be my kittenish friends, always curled together or definitely apart as is the case with cats, but they did scare me. Indeed, in spite of my comparative height, they called me Mouse, when they wanted to tease. Their natures were similar, not more than that. At some point in the future their relationship would end, I considered, though I could not say who would be the winner. For it would be a fight. At the moment their parity was almost perfect, though in the end Angelica’s atavistic confidence must give her the ascendant. But they were infatuated with their physical similarity to each other and increased it by dressing alike. Their straight backs and poised heads, with beautiful dangerous tight throats, prevented their resembling expensive paired whores. Their doubleness did not look like a gimmick, nor did they appear to be sisters; as for being twins, it was not possible to imagine such a pair surviving childhood without the one drowning the other. At the moment, though, they appeared to live on some secret, erotic cream. Theirs was not a friendship; they were mutually completely useful.

‘You love people for their weaknesses,’ gentle sages say; Dolores and Angel loved their mutual and respective strengths. What might have been seen as weaknesses by a human interpreter – absence of imagination, of feeling, of gentleness – were inoperative in their world. But, as we folded the old cat-smelling clothes in the stained shop, I was concerned when Dolores mentioned that she was to go into hospital. When she said that it was for her heart, I hoped, while blaming myself for the selfishness of the thought, and realising that to preserve myself I must not appear too keen for information, that Lucas Salik was to be the surgeon in charge of Dolores.

‘D’you know who you’re under?’ I asked, and let this awful idea literally twist my heart with jealousy.

‘The great Front Wheeler himself.’ Dolores was indiscriminately racist; she hated all humans. Can the word for it be humanist? I hoped further. There is, however, more than one Jewish surgeon of the heart.

‘The one with all the publicity on account of his pretty face,’ said Angel, and her face was like a bad child’s, sweet with hard eyes looking out. ‘That might even be handy, Dolly, see what you can do.’

‘The point of all institutions,’ said Dolores.

‘Is to find and destroy their immune systems,’ continued, in chorus, Angelica. They had a line in barmy but plausible-sounding maxims. I was not much interested. I mostly ignore ideological recipes.

‘And they transplant animals’ hearts. I would not care about the people. They live on to drink beer and go jogging, but look at the creature casualties.’

I heard about creature casualties all day. I imagined them, rather quaint, a dachshund on crutches after driving heedlessly around a bend, a Louis Wain cat with toothache, far removed from the photographs Angel and Dolores purred over. These photographs were of split dogs and cats with their craniums neatly lifted off, replaced with glass and wire. I would sometimes see these photographs, blown up, fly-posted, lettered as though with a huge potato print, giving details of action to come.

‘Would you like a visit in hospital, Dolly?’ I asked, broaching the nickname as you might stroke a puma with a sick headache.

‘Why not,’ she said, with no inflection, as befits a royal person.

So, I went. It was Lucas Salik. After speaking to him on the telephone, I wondered whether I had succeeded in my attempt to make him jealous. I had spoken of Hal, who was after all a friend of Lucas’s, as though he and I were a couple. I have never known whether this alarms or challenges men. But, with time running out, I had thought to goad Lucas into some committing gesture, just one, to leave me free to throw away and dedicate my life on and to Hal and the baby boy.

I had so little time in which to reach him. It was a desire to have known him, rather than to know him, which drove me, as though a glimpse would give me that for which to strive through the rest of my life. Sometimes, dreaming of him, I would remark his similarity to our idea of death – tall, pale, dark – and wonder if that was what I wanted. But, if so, I did not think I would be lucky enough to die in childbirth. I have never been that well organised, or how should I have arrived where I was?

So, it was curious to propose something as ordinary as dinner at my house, with Hal, to Lucas Salik. After I had spoken to him on the telephone, I thought of several ways I could have improved upon the telephone call. By praying to him, perhaps, petitioning him, throwing flowers in his way.

Where he worked, where he performed his miracles, a hospital, seemed to me scented with clean sanctity. To my queasy pregnant nose, the disinfectant was a delicious uncomplicated smell, and I connected it with medical infallibility in the service of life. Dolores was burning bright with rage in her bed, but she ate the fruit I had brought quickly, cracking the lychees like little birds’ skulls.

To see him was not disappointing, but it showed me how unrealisable was my dream. He was a real, a busy, man. In a way, it was his colleague, a cheery doctor whom you could see mowing a lawn or washing a car, who made me feel that Lucas had a life which was ordered in a book, with a ballpoint pen, on lined paper. I had seen him only socially, at ease, where he was independent and unbeholden. Here, it appeared, that as much as his patients needed him, he needed them, to practise his skill. I felt that there was a system of ill health, which he required. I did not want to look at him in front of Dolores, for I knew she would see and use my naked self against me. Men’s attention turns to Dolores as though she were hanging by her teeth from a trapeze, naked, but Lucas appeared to want to leave.

Dolores’s glare may have unsettled him, for she looked at him not as though he had repaired her heart but as though he stank. I could not tell if this concerned him. I wondered if he noticed. Perhaps she was just a collection of faulty valves to him, as women are said to be to their gynaecologists. Or at any rate, by the wives of gynaecologists. But what of the gynaecologists of gynaecologists’ wives?

I liked the big blue car by now, it was an emblem of his distantness and competence and power, but I was not sure how to speak to this presence by my side. How can you address an idea? I wished for a secular collect with which to address him. I was terrified of embarrassing him. Things had become not more easy, but more difficult, with time. My affair, if that was what it was, with Hal, seemed trivial. So enormous yet simple were the things I felt for this man that I did not want to be too close to him. I required a new, formal language in which to address him, not the vulgate.

And then I felt a soggy mass at my side, lifted and observed it. It had escaped from its wrapping. I was surprised that he could face the further treating with organs, having presumably been dealing with them all day, but it was a tongue, uncooked. He had said he would buy something for supper. I have heard of ways of cooking it which make it edible, but I would as soon eat a bull’s eye. When I asked him, he seemed surprised. I wrapped the tongue in a newspaper which announced on its front page, yet again, Lucas’s operation on the little Afghan boy, the tones of the article waiting for the child either to take up his bed and walk or to die. Such papers were everywhere. There was also a scrap of paper within the newspaper. It must be the butcher’s receipt.