A Case of Knives (27 page)

‘I think we should all think about it seriously. I suppose we should try to do whatever Lucas would want us to do.’

Tertius looked shifty, like someone blaspheming in his sleep on a train, who has awoken to find his carriage full of nuns. He did not seem able to stop his face assuming a barker’s jovial untrustworthy expression. Poor thing, here he was, miserable, but his big red face could not accommodate it.

‘I’m sure Lucas would want us to go on,’ said Tertius. He made the marriage sound like the attainment of a summit. He was an incongruous man of action.

As Lucas’s oldest female friend, I felt that the ordinances and stratagems of the next few days would be up to me. Like cleaning sinks, organising rites of passage falls to the women. Lucas’s own mother I knew was dead, his father too.

‘Very well. This is what we’ll do. We shall decide nothing about the wedding till we have spoken to Hal and Cora. We cannot visit Lucas in hospital, but we must make sure they have each of our telephone numbers and we must call them every hour if we are not at home. We have two days clear before the wedding. Either he must die quickly or he must show a big improvement soon.’ I felt very strong and completely breakable, tense as frozen metal.

It was as though I had pushed Lucas out to sea. Life and death were too great for my control. I was left with the trivial and comprehensible, a party which would or would not take place, its provider either rocked in the deep or sunk beneath it. I prepared myself not for the first time in my life for a midwinter spring of assumed competence.

Radiant with self-control, I kissed Tertius’s red face with my cheekbone, and went out into the wind. I knew what to wear.

I would keep him alive with my will.

Chapter 23

I took a short-cut home past the shop of Mr Virtue, in its mews off Bond Street. As a rule, there is in the window one slung masterpiece of vair or blue mink, the restraining chains against robbery unconcealed. At night the window is screened with mesh as solid as the marble fretwork in a mosque, though Mr Virtue would not like that comparison. It was on grounds sartorial rather than religious that he was suspicious of Mohamedans, making for them as he did coats of great splendour which might never be publicly seen. But their taste must have given him some variety in his work.

I have been to synagogue with Lucas, though he told me he preferred church with me since it was less personal (but what could be more personal than that bleeding man on the cross?), and the upper level where the women stand was all sheeny dark fur seamlessly stitched by Mr Virtue and men like him, every coat the same – though without the effortless uniformity of the original contents – being tailored, cut and fitted for the new but secondhand wearer.

Today, the shackled trophy was not in the window; the grille was down as it should not have been during the daytime. Like a star, but not the evenly pointed star of David, was a crazed burst in the glass before the grille. A policeman dignified the door of the shop, giving it almost diplomatic status. I pitied him in the bitter cold; he was not wearing gloves, which seem to be the preserve of the enemy. Burglars, stranglers, aristocratic Nazis and collaborative wops may wear gloves; junta leaders, despots and dictators wear gloves, and the Guardia Civil; but bobbies do not. While they may not have cold feet, they must have cold hands.

Today it was not a shock for me to see this ugliness and indication of violence. They accorded with how I now knew the world was, unless I could outwit it.

The unreal self-control made me able to think about the policeman’s gloves at the same time as I grieved for my friend. I decided that I must investigate what had happened here. I had trained myself to stay sane in the face of horror. By dissociation and observation, I reminded myself that in the midst of death we are in life.

Robberies at furriers’ premises are not uncommon, though it is more usual for the workrooms or the storeroom to be chosen. I approached. Haloed, as in a war comic, by the starry hole in his window, was the face of Mr Virtue. He was wailing. His wailing seemed to come in cantos, as though he were telling an old story.

‘Please let me in,’ I said to the policeman.

‘Sorry, lady,’ he said, ‘the premises is not open to customers today.’

‘I should think not,’ I said, ‘but Mr Virtue is my friend.’

‘Who shall I say then, lady?’ he said.

‘Can I not just go in?’

‘Security. We must obtain the names of all people who go in and come out.’

‘Lady Cowdenbeath,’ I said.

‘Not a friend, then,’ said the policeman.

But he let me in with a new resentful deference. Uniformed security forces fear the aristocracy. Plain-clothed detectives in fiction merely defect from it.

Mr Virtue could not stand still; he was walking about the room picking up and letting drop the pieces of glass which lay across each other like ice. The grey room was foggy with fur, as though enormous cats had been fighting; the surprising thing, one felt, was that there was no blood, when the scene was so clearly that of the aftermath of violence. The impression was that of those perverse poised photographs of beautiful young women in red underwear and icy gems. The shocking thing about the wreckage of Mr Virtue’s shop was the elegance of it. Sheeny caterpillars of monkey fur and snowy lianas of fox-tail crawled down the walls. A silvery grey conversation seat the shape of the symbol for infinity stood in a drift of smoky mink pelts. The grey walls, covered with a damask which changed with the light, fitful, as the wind blew clouds over the white winter sun, had been cut open. Through these fraying gashes were visible panels of some insulating material; the purchasers of very expensive goods like not only warmth but quiet.

Mr Virtue was making a noise like the breathing of a large unwell animal in its earth. He stepped over a heap of mauvish and lavender skins; they had the grey bloom of grass tussocks near the sea, and where the skin showed it was bleached like drift-wood. It was as though the animal owners of these reassembled skins had returned and spent the night fighting, reincarnated inimical species in a tame setting. The mess looked like none that humans could make.

‘Look at the paper behind the sound-proofing,’ said Mr Virtue. He had a strong accent. His ears and nose grew black hairs and where he shaved was blue. Over each ear was a long curl of black hair and his eyebrow was a line over his khaki-pouched eyes. He wore the white overall of a butcher or a scientist, but it was sewn at the breast with his own name. From his pocket protruded a folding ruler. His hands were white with French chalk. He was a small man with tiny feet. He kicked, not so as to hurt, the soft mauve pile of fur. Beneath it, face down, were fans of papers. His accounts, I supposed, whose figures were to tally with the mending of his burnt child’s skin.

‘Mr Virtue, what is this, do you know, why did they not
take
the furs they found here?’

‘Look at the paper behind the sound-proofing,’ said Mr Virtue. He was still making the noise as though he had breathed burning gas. I thought that I must do as he said, just to keep him from strangling on his indignation. He moved about the room like a dog with nowhere to go, shaking, dainty on his feet, having a care to his back. He looked unbearably cold.

‘The paper?’

‘Where they have split the panel. Look behind it. Just snap a bit off. It doesn’t matter.’

Polystyrene snaps like rice-paper. I broke off a long triangle and dropped it among the splintered glass. It landed without sound.

‘I thought so,’ said Mr Virtue. ‘But I did not want to discover it on my own.’

‘What is it, Mr Virtue? Can I help?’ I felt unable to touch him but was sure that that was what he needed. ‘Where is Mrs Virtue?’ I asked, feeling useless and out of place. I wished he were a stranger so that I might embrace him.

‘Mrs Virtue, thank you, is at the hospital with Tomas. Look at the paper, now, be so kind.’

‘It is ordinary striped paper, about fifteen years old, nice enough.’

‘And I worked for twenty-five years to afford it and twenty more to afford to cover it up and who cares at all?’ My Virtue began to cry without any help from his body. It seemed to be fighting him. ‘I think it is a perfectly nice paper as you say and I wish I had perfectly nicely left it on the perfectly nice walls so that this perfectly nice person could come and perfectly nicely put their knife into it. Why did I waste the time? Why did I improve myself whatsoever? The police say this is what I must expect. I tell them that it is what I have learnt not to expect, and it has taken me my whole life to learn not to expect it.’ In between his words, Mr Virtue’s breath was sawing in his chest. He looked not violent but ashamed. There was a trace of something very alarming to me. He was indignant, frightened – and unsurprised.

‘Who, and why, Mr Virtue, and what do the police say?’

‘The police say . . . the police say’ – Mr Virtue drew breath – ‘that this sort of thing is to be expected where things of great value are found. I tell them that the people who have been here are not thieves or they would have gone to where the things of great value are found. This is my workroom. They think I do not speak English properly. I explain again. They say your thief nowadays is just after a few bob till the next fix. I say he is not my thief. He is theirs. I say they read too many bad newspapers and why don’t they listen. Nothing has been taken. And they say they will leave this baby outside with his bare hands and big feet while they notify a lady Inspector who will come and speak to me when I am myself. They cross the road and buy some coffee at the sandwich place and go away.

‘Eating on duty,’ concluded Mr Virtue.

‘Should I stay with you till the woman comes?’ I enquired. I wondered whether this would insult him. The policewoman might think that this frightened small foreign man had asked one of his snooty clients for protection. I did not mind; I have seen the police antagonised by an officerial male, but they are flummoxed by a woman treating them as upper servants.

‘No, but thank you.’ Since our new relation, bestowed by the crime, he had not used my name. Before it had been a fender, protecting us from each other. ‘But will you help me tidy up?’ he asked.

‘Did the police say you could?’

‘And you too see too much television. I am tidying up. I am not sitting here, thinking. As a matter of fact, they did say I could tidy up. They have done the notes and the prints as they put it.’

‘They wore gloves?’ I asked.

‘Gloves,’ he replied, ‘though I do not somehow think leather. Rubber gloves.’ Could he honestly be so consistently interested in his profession?

‘Oh, what do you mean?’ I didn’t intend him to reply. I was thinking of the next thing. The thought of Lucas was never away; it was like being pregnant, a state of vicarious being. The next thing for Mr Virtue was clearly a cup of tea. ‘I shall go over and get you some tea. Can you drink on duty?’ Mr Virtue ignored my pleasantry; he did not shrug off his grief as English people can, with a joke and a cuppa. He reassumed it as though it were an illness from which he had had remission but which now repossessed him. He had been for years without external persecution, with only the private concern for Tomas, but its reappearance did not surprise him.

As I waited for the tea in the steamy shop opposite, I looked at the star of breakage in Mr Virtue’s window. The policeman outside had probably only heard of the war from his father, who probably himself recollected it in terms of rationed chocolates and
his
father’s flimsy demob hat.

‘Plenty sugar for Stan,’ said the Italian woman behind the counter. She had gold hoops in her ears and had resigned her beauty with grace. ‘It’s wicked what these boys will do to get a bob for their next fix.’ She would not let me pay. I was not clear how relieving one very rich woman of paying forty pence was to help Mr Virtue – ‘Stan’ – but there was a restorative feeling of warm, curious, concern, and I was sorry to leave the sandwich bar for the awful disorder of Mr Virtue’s shop. The policeman looked most unofficially at my two plastic cups of tea. I gave to him the one I had intended for myself.

‘You’re a pal,’ he said, contradicting his previous conclusion.

Mr Virtue had swept the glass into a corner where it lay in a heap of blades. He had collected as many of the pieces of fur as possible and lain them on the dainty infinity seat with its gold feet. He turned off the Hoover which had been leading him over and over the carpet in grey lanes.

‘The Hoover is not used to swallowing whole animals,’ said Mr Virtue. ‘I have emptied it twice. It makes me sick. I am right about the gloves. Not leather.’

‘Get this down you,’ I said. I was not sure of how to deal with him. He had pulled himself together considerably. He looked less haunted, as though he had identified the source of his nightmare, and this knowledge had reduced his enemy. I turned to look out of the broken window while he drank. I was in time to see the boy policeman throw away my milkless tea; of course. I am kind, but inconsiderate, as Oppie says, and that’s worse than no use. Kindness requires imagination. Imagination alone is not kindness.

‘Look, Lady Cowdenbeath,’ said Mr Virtue. With the tidying of his shop, he had recovered his respectability. Or had he laid some ghost? He certainly appeared calmer. He took off his white coat, and hung it from a hook on the door which led to the back room. He was dressed as always for a decent funeral. He moved the furs aside, turning out his left arm to bid me sit. His unbelievableness was returning, the stagey little man who had made a solid living of fleeting beauty in creatures and in women. I liked him more when he was sad.