In the King's Arms (13 page)

“I suppose I ran like a lover,” he finally said.

“And are you still her ‘lover’?”

“What do you want, mother?” Then, in a small voice, “she’s gone, isn’t she?”

“Thank God for that.”

Secretly she thought: the girl is not gone. She’ll never be gone. She is living in this world, and she’ll be back. But Helena was thankful for the fact that Julian considered her “gone.” He was not as tenacious as the girl; he had less imagination.

He did not hold on as well. Perhaps nothing could stop
her
. But he could easily be defeated. Thank God, she thought, for that.

They were silent. Julian thought of his own part in the accident.

He said, “Mother, I came home to see her. She was upstairs in her room. And we just, we just talked about things.”

Mrs. Kendall knew he was lying. She saw what they’d done to her bed.

“Mum,” he said, talking past her dubious expression, “did you know her own brother died in Poland when he was only a baby, and ...”

“And therefore you think she had the right to harm
our
baby?”

“Oh, Christ, just stop it!”

“Don’t you ever, ever scream at me like that! I believe I’ve suffered enough from that girl not to be screamed at on her behalf by my own son!”

“I’m sorry. I’m just telling you things I know about her. Things she told me.”

“Yes, of course. A long night of nothing but talk.”

“Yes,” he said, looking away. “We did talk. She told me that her father had studied to be a lawyer, but that when he came to America, he ended up repairing old books. Couldn’t speak English, and . . .”

“I’m afraid I’m not finding this interesting, Julian.”

“And her mother,” he found himself rambling, “during the war, in the camps, you know, she, she worked in the kitchens, which was a rare privilege, under the circumstances.”

Mrs. Helena Kendall was trained by Cordon Bleu, in Paris.

“Whatever is wrong with you, Julian? You’re positively foaming at the mouth!”

He was overly impressionable.

He suddenly grew slack and exhausted. “I actually don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said, defeated.

“I do,” said Helena. “You’re infatuated. I know all about infatuation, although you probably don’t think so. I’ve seen her kind. Seductive. Like your father. He was handsome, and dashing, and had been an actor and all the rest of it, and I was simply dizzy with infatuation. Do you know what infatuation is about? Lust. Blind, black lust. Not a very pretty word, is it? No.

“That’s the sort of marriage we had. Attraction to something odd and strange and seemingly unattainable blinded me, got in the way of my good common sense. And what of your father? What of his great ‘love’? I suffered horribly. Shame. Jealousy. Humiliation. I had enough, after a point. I sent him packing. And I’m not sorry. I am not sorry. I feel I’ve purged myself of a great and awful fever.

“Thank God Archibald came along to set me straight again. Your father, you see, stole my senses. Stole them clean away. That’s what Lily’s done to you. You must never put your faith in a love like that.”

He saw how beautiful his mother really was. It was when she’d
spoken about infatuation, about his father, about not regretting her loss, that he saw her as the beauty she tried to disown. She couldn’t disown it.

Helena met her son’s blue eyes. She saw what he was thinking. How like his father he was. No. No. Her eyes cleared and hardened. She gave a little busy shake of her head. If she’d had a purse she would have snapped it shut with a loud click.

She added, “Lily’s older than you, you know. More mature. More worldly. It was easy for her to turn your head. Here you are, unable, I’m sorry to have to say, to get into Oxford, despite your very good brain, while she’s there getting her second degree. She’s been to University, in the United States. She’s got a B.A. She has quite a cheek sailing across the merry seas just to put another feather in her cap. And grab herself a handsome Englishman like you, into the bargain.

“Archibald agrees with everything I’m saying, by the way. We’d spoken about Lily from the very beginning. He saw her looking at you, darling. He saw the sort of looks she gave you. Rapacious. Archibald’s no fool. The fact that she’s a little Jewess on top of everything else did not please him, I can assure you.”

Helena stood up. “I’ll say just one thing more. When you think of your lovely Lily, so brave, so pure, experimenting with her life—although I daresay it’s ours she’s played with—why don’t you think of the life she’s left behind in New York?

“Think of her parents. Those sorry, pathetic refugees. Those are her people, Julian. I don’t happen to find it particularly picturesque. Do you? Try to be realistic. I have.

“The father: hair growing out of his nose, a greasy jacket. He repairs old books, you say? Well and good: think of the hands that repair those books. Calloused. Worn. Horny as a lizard’s. His eyes,
rheumy as an old Rabbi’s. And the mother. How fierce she sounds. A clawed ancient. I can just hear her sniveling. Wailing. Can’t you? An accuser, a Xanthippe, toiling over her boiling cauldrons. My God, Julian! The death camp cook! It would all be past hope.

“Why don’t you look at me? Aren’t you listening?”

“I am.” He turned his head back to her, slowly.

She sat down beside him again. She put her arm around him, half-expecting him to resist. His shoulders were bowed.

“Darling?” she murmured. She reached up with her hand, twisting her son’s luscious hair in her fingers.

“Oh, Mum,” he broke down, with great, wracking sobs. A touch could break his heart; Lily’s touch was so vividly remembered. Julian was vulnerable.

“There . . . there . . .” she said. He sank his face on her breast.

“Life is so ugly.” He spoke it to her heart.

His mother didn’t hear him. She kept twisting his locks in her hand, spilling his hair around and around her fingers. A miser in the counting house, grim with pride.

“I believe,” she said, “that Lily seduced you up there. I believe that she seduced you on my very bed. But it doesn’t matter now.”

“Please. I can’t listen anymore.”

“Didn’t she?”

“No. Can’t you leave it? She didn’t seduce me. No. No. No.” He began wailing dismally.

“All right, darling. It’s over. It doesn’t matter now. She’s there and you’re here. It’s done. It’s all beyond our understanding, isn’t it? Beyond our power to control.” She leaned her head down upon his and let out a huge, tired, finalizing sigh.

“Y-yes.” He felt the resting mass of his mother’s skull as an awful imposition.

L
ILY CAME BACK to Oxford, and was surprised to see that all the rooms were occupied by strangers. The College had let them out to visiting physicists. She realized, with a growing sense of dread, that there was no place for her to stay. She dropped her bags at the porter’s lodge and ran into Hall, hoping to find Mrs. Dancer there. When she saw her familiar face, she started to squall, as though she’d found her long-lost mother.

“Mrs. Dancer! Mrs. Dancer!” She was going into the kitchen, but Lily raced after her, scrambling past huge spluttering vats and urns and fryers.

“Hum?” She picked her head up high, listening. “Who is calling me?”

“It’s me, Lily!” She touched the cuff of her starched white sleeves.

Mrs. Dancer looked at the girl kindly. “Leelah, dere is no College now. Why are you here now, Leelah?”

“Something happened, and now I don’t know where I can go.”

“You sit over dere now. I finish up.”

Lily sat in the back of the gloomy, medieval Hall, at the end of a bench that must have been a mile long. It stretched right up to the High Table, where the dons sat at suppertime, decked out in their flowing black robes. Each chair at High Table was like a throne, with a high and elaborately carved back. “
Benedictus Benedicat
,” one of them would
intone at the beginning of the meal. The voice would echo through the high, hollow vaultings. And the students would rumble: amen.

Mrs. Dancer came over and asked if she’d eaten.

Lily told her that she hadn’t. Mrs. Dancer pointed to a place setting that hadn’t been used, and told Lily to sit down there. She sat, among the physicists, and had tea and buttered toast. Then she went into the Common Room to look at the newspapers until Mrs. Dancer had time to speak to her. She had to clean up before she could get out of Hall. Then there’d be about half an hour before she had to start vacuuming and making the beds.

When Lily thought about Mrs. Dancer’s work, she felt disgusting and evil and small. Here she was, traveling, studying. Wreaking disaster. Grab grab grab as though there were no one else in the world but herself and her little intensities. Mrs. Dancer’s life was tedious and backbreaking. Day in, day out, no changes. It wasn’t that she didn’t complain. She did, bitterly, daily. But she had something real to rail against, freedom to look forward to. When she’d sit down on Lily’s bed, stealing five minutes from a day of drudgery to chat (drinking coffee with three sugars), she’d glow with mischief and delight. Lily felt herself free-floating, spoiled. An agent of chaos. She made messes; Mrs. Dancer cleaned them. She filled the trash-bin, all right; and Mrs. Dancer had to empty it. Here she was with an ugly tale to tell. Mrs. Dancer could only fit her in between breakfast and bed making. She had honest work to do.

When Mrs. Dancer came to her, Lily told her all about what had happened on New Year’s Eve at the Kendall home. She told her all about Timothy, and how they’d quarreled, and how he’d fallen. Mrs. Dancer looked at her without surprise, but Lily noticed that she pressed her lips together.

“Are you angry at me?” she asked.

“No, Leelah. I was thinking about what you said. Maybe it’s better that he get hurt, Leelah. Could be he had an evil yearnin’ for your death. Could be he were your devil in a form.”

“How would you know a thing like that?”

“I don’t say I know, Leelah. Could be, that’s all. You told me he put bad eyes on you all the time. It is a sign. Was always watchin’ you, maybe even when you sleeping. And you tell me he talked with a cat.”

“But a lot of people have cats!”

“A cat can be troublin’. Could be a sign. I add it into the measure.” She paused. Lily began to believe what she was hearing. She would believe anything now.

Mrs. Dancer paused. “I sensed a danger, Leelah. It worried my mind. Now I see I quite correct.”

“I can’t stop thinking about it. It’ll haunt me for the rest of my life!” Lily began to squall again.

“Of course, Leelah. Of course he haunt you. He be in your head, knockin’ about, tryin’ to steal your peace. I make you a mixture, Leelah.”

She described a drink of berries and herbs.

“You drink it and you feel the peace in your mind again.”

“Thank you.”

“Now, Leelah, where are you going tonight?”

“Can I stay with you? I have nowhere to go.”

College would be open in a few weeks.

“I live very plain, Leelah. I’m wonderin’ if you will be happy dere. Still, you are quite welcome.”

“Oh, no, you’re wrong, Mrs. Dancer. I’d be happy anywhere you were. I don’t need anything. I can sleep on the floor, even.”

“I have a sofa in the sitting room for my daughter when she come. She’s in London at the moment. You sleep dere.”

“You have a daughter? How old is she?”

“Almost seventeen, gettin’ to be a tall girl now. It’s her daughter I be takin’ care of meself, sweet Rebekah. Smart she is like a devil.”

“Where’s the father?”

“Oh, he run away, Leelah. He full of trouble. Drinkin’ and fightin’, and scarin’ my poor girl.”

She stared at Lily with fierce, burning eyes. In her determination to protect what she loved, Mrs. Dancer was wondrous and terrifying.

“Drinkin’ and fightin’, Leelah, like the rest. Just like my girl’s Dad. I lookin’ for a church brother now, to love me in my old age. Decent and fearin’ God. Truth-tellin’. That’s what I’m lookin’ for, Leelah. Peace-lovin’. My devil-man, he burn my face with lye. But I throw de boilin’ water over his head!!” She burst out laughing, throwing her head back. Lily noticed the pink-white skin which splattered across her neck.

“You did?”

“Mm hm!” She clapped her hands gaily and rocked forward and back. “I did scaaaaald him! Mm Hm!”

“Do you think I could come over to your house soon?” said Lily. “I think I feel a little shaky.”

Mrs. Dancer handed her a key and directed her to the poorest section of Oxford, a section few students would ever know.

“Say hello to my sweet Rebekah,” she said, her face soft. “She be sleepin’ in her pram in de kitchen.”

W
HEN LILY GOT TO THE LITTLE HOUSE, she learned that Mrs. Dancer rented the downstairs flat from a Mrs. Jenkins, a blowsy, breathless, lavender-haired woman. When the baby cried, Mrs. Jenkins clambered into the kitchen to see about the commotion.

“Mrs. Dancer told me I could stay with her for a little while,” Lily said. Rebekah stopped crying at the sound of her voice, looked at her intently, and began gurgling good-naturedly. Lily struck her finger out and the baby caught it up in her little brown fist.

“Why, you’re American!” bellowed Mrs. Jenkins. She wore a tent-dress covered in mums. “I can’t say I meet too many! Like the baby? A little bastard, she is! Sharp as a tack! Expect she’ll be talking soon! Probably sound like her people! Don’t hear many English voices lately. Hear everything but, it seems like sometimes. Indian, Pakistani, West Indian! Ah, well! I won’t bore you!

A minute later, she resumed:

“So! That’s said! You’ve quite a large case there! In for a long stay, are you, dear?”

“Only about two weeks,” said Lily. Then I go back to College. I’ve got a room there, but it’s being used just now.”