The Big Day

by Barry Unsworth

  ‘I am not worried,’ Cuthbertson said. His lips felt stiff, as if they were not following exactly the intention of his speech.

  ‘I mean me,’ Lavina said. ‘I was worried.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

  Both of them turned, having reached this impasse, to look at the television screen. A woman with enormous eyes and skin stretched tight over the facebones was looking out at them. The camera advanced on this starving face in dream-like motion, gently, soundlessly enlarging it until its suffering filled the screen. Cuthbertson found himself listening for the faint hiss that should have accompanied this, resembling as it did to him a cunning, high-speed process of inflation.

  ‘They ought not to show such pictures,’ Lavinia said. ‘Those people have a right to privacy.’

  She turned back to the mirror and began touching up the silver on her eyelids. Cuthbertson surveyed her glinting back with a sort of cautious curiosity. The sedative was beginning to take its fullest effect now. His tongue felt heavy, and he could not tell whether his mouth was open or not, whether his lips were in contact or had fallen apart.

  After some moments his gaze returned helplessly to the television screen. In a drugged silence, like sleepwalkers, figures in whitish robes, some of them hooded, moved slowly against a sort of low wall, or stockade. In the gritless, effortless silence the figures had a less than human immediacy, were only slightly more palpable than shadows. In slow succession Cuthbertson watched forms, faces, receding, advancing ballooning from the baked earth, sinking soundlessly back again. Image followed image in a drifting dance.

  Cuthbertson listened again for the pumping, animating hiss. His right hand at his side felt heavy, resisted for some while all efforts to raise it. Succeeding finally, he touched his lower jaw, realized that his mouth was closed, and began to fiddle with the referee’s whistle which was slung round his neck on a braided white cord.

  ‘I hope you’ve remembered your mask,’ Lavinia said, turning her face from the mirror to look at him. She had added two tapering silver stripes below the broader black ones that swept from brow to temple.

  Cuthbertson nodded again. The glittering shifts in reflection that were taking place all over his wife’s body hurt his eyes and confused his mind, after that beautiful slow dance on the screen. With her strangely painted face and myriad glass gleams she did not seem human, not a natural body, but a thing contrived, assembled. There was nothing at all about her that struck him as familiar. She rustled and hissed, and the glass beads were like moving, rippling scales that flexed with light across her body.

  He fingered the whistle round his neck. ‘The mask is in my pocket,’ he heard his own remote and leaden voice enunciate. Glancing sideways he saw a row of dead people on the screen, their bodies stretched out with a sort of voluptuous ease, as if they were sleeping after some feast. The time had come, he realized suddenly, for him to ask his question. ‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘that week we spent down in Cornwall, before we were married? We had a little cottage above the bay.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, turning her painted face towards him. ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘I gave you some daffodils.’ Cuthbertson said.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Why did you cry?’

  ‘Why did I what?’

  ‘Why did you cry?’ Cuthbertson said. ‘Why did you cry when I gave you the daffodils?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Lavinia said. ’I can’t remember anything about any daffodils. It is twenty years ago.’

  ‘Twenty-two,’ he said. He stood silent, incredulous, waiting in spite of her words for the explanation. He had been so sure that she would be able to clear the matter up. ‘There must have been some reason,’ he said. ‘You must remember.’

  ‘I cried a lot in those days,’ Lavinia said. She drank some more whisky. ‘Put your mask on, let’s see the whole ensemble,’ she said.

  Obediently, still as if in the toils of some net that was subtly, persistently hampering all his moments, slowing him down, Cuthbertson took the rubber mask from the side pocket of his referee’s blazer, and put it on. It was a naturalistic mask, flesh-coloured and straight-featured, with black hair swept straight back to blend through a cunning curve of the rubber into Cuthbertson’s own hair: a severe, level-browed mask perfectly suited to the persona of a referee.

  ‘That’s marvellous,’ Lavinia said. ‘Except for your height there would be no way of knowing. Unless someone knew you by the knobbles on your knees, but that is not likely, is it?’

  ‘No, not really,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘There are not many so familiar with my knees as that.’

  The mask he was wearing did not cover his ears, but went down almost as far as his chin, being provided with a straight, rather sarcastic aperture for him to speak through with his own voice. This voice sounded heavily vibrant to him at present, and as though occurring only on his own side of the mask like some sort of interior tuning device. Putting his glasses on over the mask, he looked at himself in the mirror and saw a creature in which there was nothing to recognize. The straight-browed mask looked back at him. In spite of the blunting effect of the sedative, Cuthbertson felt an impulse of panic forming somewhere in the depths of his being. For the moment it was no more than discomfort like the first twinge of pain, but he knew it, he recognized it for his companion of the last four weeks of dawns. Now, however, a new element was contained there, intensely alarming, yet at odds with fear: a path, a potential for escape. He stood, motionless, in his mask, senses muted by the drug. It was not the terrible impulse to laughter, though something of that still remained. Deep within him was a movement of energy that warred with fear. While he was striving to apprehend this more clearly, the television screen was suddenly filled with the familiar face of the Prime Minister: the cherubic mouth; the pouches under the eyes defying all the cosmetician’s art, badge both of weariness and probity; the smooth, statesmanlike sweeps of silver hair.

  ‘They said he was going to make a statement,’ Lavinia said. ‘I want to hear something positive for a change, instead of all these people crying woe.’

  She swished over to the set with a running gleam of reflections, and turned up the sound.

  … deny it, they were in time to hear the Prime Minister say, And I do not confirm it either. It is not so simple as that. There are those on the other side who would deny it out of hand. Or confirm it. But I do not intend to insult your intelligence by simplifying the issues. The issues facing us are too complicated for that. Now you may think I am advocating political opportunism. Playing it by ear. Sitting on our backsides and playing it by ear.

  ‘Do you mean to say,’ Cuthbertson said, ‘that you remember nothing about it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  While well aware, the Prime Minister said, of the dangers and pitfalls, we take an optimistic view. A qualified view of opt— … a view of qualified optimism. Our strength, as always, is in the people of these islands. Our people are never better than when their backs are to the wall. But let us be quite clear where our backs are, where the wall is. There are people today who seem in doubt about these vital issues.

  ‘That is what we need,’ Lavinia said. ‘Some plain speaking.’

  ‘You can’t cry and remember nothing,’ Cuthbertson said.

  ‘So let me just say this to the British people,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘We are going to see this through together.’

  ‘That man,’ Lavinia said, ‘inspires me with complete – ’

  At this point the doorbell rang.

  ‘Heavens!’ Lavinia said. ‘They are starting to arrive. Will you go down and let them in? I’ll be down in a minute.’

  The first couple were a Pierrot and a Milkmaid. Cuthbertson, wearing a mask, opened the door then backed away a little. This behaviour, in reality governed by fear at seeing the strange masked figures in the vivid light of the overhead porch lamp, was taken by these first guests as a piece of play-acting. They adva
nced with outlandish gestures, Pierrot doing a sort of short, high-stepping dance sequence, the Milkmaid courtesying and twirling her pink sateen skirt to reveal comical red and white football stockings. Cuthbertson recovered his self-possession, and with a dim sense of rising to the occasion, moved one hand slowly up to his whistle and managed a short blast on it, pointing at the same time with his other hand towards the bar, which went across one corner of the room and had a barman in a maroon jacket behind it. He had no idea who these people were. They laughed, and exclaimed in feigned voices, and moved past him towards the bar.

  Lavinia came shimmering down, and music filled the room: some women singing ‘Ten Cents a Dance’. Several more people arrived together. Being masked, and not allowed to speak in their own personas, they nearly all announced themselves with some sort of exaggerated or outrageous gesture on entering. Batman stretched his black crêpe membranes and flapped. The pigtailed Chinaman bowed humbly. A mottled toad with an enormous papier mâché toad’s head actually hopped about the floor. The room became crowded very quickly. Everyone was in the grip of the conspiracy to conceal identity. Those whose masks made drinking difficult contrived to turn away and move their masks briefly in order to drink.

  Cuthbertson had retired to a corner where he sat on the floor against the wall, in numb silence, pale knees pressed together. Stray thoughts passed through his mind. Built the place up with my own hands. Saw the possibilities right from the start. No qualifications myself. Regard it as my life’s work … These customary phrases which normally gave him strength, were rendered dubious by the presence of this loud, garish throng. So difficult was it to believe that he had actually opened his doors to these people, that he began to suspect they had emerged from some sort of breeding-place within the walls. He could open the windows, break the walls … This slowly gathering dream of demolition was interrupted by the appearance before him of a hefty female tennis player with a flaxen wig, a simpering mask, and frilly white pants beneath short white pleated skirt. She was carrying a tennis racquet.

  ‘We sporting types should stick together,’ this creature said, in a high-pitched obviously falsified voice. ‘Do you mind if I sit beside you? If I get out of line you can point to the penalty area, can’t you?’ She sat down beside Cuthbertson with ostentatious adjustments of her skirt. Her legs were covered with pale hair.

  ‘Who are you?’ Cuthbertson said, but the Tennis Player appeared not to hear this. Her mask had a round red patch on each cheek. ‘The toad is very good, isn’t he?’ she said, nodding across the room. The toad was standing near the bar talking to a sheikh, whose face was concealed by the folds of his headdress and by dark glasses. ‘Or is it a she, do you think?’ the Tennis Player said. ‘Difficult to tell, isn’t it? I find that very exciting, don’t you? Not knowing what sex people are. Awfully good idea, people keeping their masks on till midnight. By the way, have you seen our host?’

  With difficulty, with a sense that words were forming like drops, like some sort of condensation, on the inside of his mask, but were not perceptible on the other side, Cuthbertson repeated the word ‘host’ and leaned forward interrogatively.

  ‘Cuthbertson,’ the Tennis Player said. ‘Donald Cuthbertson. Do you know what he came as? No, probably not. It was a well-guarded secret.’

  Cuthbertson’s lips laboured again behind the aperture cut in the mask. ‘Referee,’ he said.

  ‘I can see that,’ the Tennis Player said. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m a bit worried about him.’

  ‘It’s me,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘Cuthbertson.’ More people entered the room, headed by a tall person in a tin helmet, his face covered by a primitive gas-mask with a respirator like an abbreviated trunk. Behind him was a man with a three-cornered hat, a mask with an eye patch, and a hook at the end of his arm.

  ‘That’s right,’ the Tennis Player said. ‘I take it you don’t know what he came as? Noisy in here, isn’t it? I’d no idea she’d asked so many.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Cuthbertson said, advancing his mask towards the astonishing, unchanging, simpering mask of the other.

  ‘Gorgeous Gussie,’ the Tennis Player said. ‘Couldn’t you tell?’

  Before there could be any reply to this, the music, a saxophone rendering of ‘Moonlight and Roses’, increased suddenly in volume, and several people began to dance.

  A shimmering form detached itself from the crowd and stood before them, the mask of silver and black paint giving her face a cruel fixity and authority. Standing very close to them she raised her arms and swayed slightly, and her whole body glittered and hissed.

  ‘I say,’ Gorgeous Gussie said. ‘What a marvellous costume. She is not wearing anything but beads.’

  ‘People have got to dance,’ the Goddess of Love said. ‘It is absolutely compulsory.’

  ‘I have reason to think this is a man,’ Cuthbertson said.

  ‘What does that matter?’ the Goddess said. ‘You two must dance together.’

  ‘Mustn’t disappoint our hostess.’ Gorgeous Gussie got up, laying her tennis racquet against the wall behind her. ‘It is Lavinia, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘Not Lavinia, no,’ the goddess said, turning away, sharply, with a swish of beads.

  Cuthbertson and Gorgeous Gussie moved towards the middle of the floor where a number of couples were dancing. The music had changed to an old-fashioned waltz. Cuthbertson took the large, slightly moist paw of his partner and put an arm round her waist. They began to circle clumsily. The noise in the room was now very loud. A globe-shaped lamp on a stand near the wall began to swivel slowly, flashing alternate rays of red and blue and white across the room. The blare of the saxophone, the noise of voices and laughter, the revolving light, the close proximity of Gorgeous Gussie’s thick satiny body and simpering mask – all combined to confuse and distress Cuthbertson, in whom the drug had effected a temporary impairment of the power of judging distances, so that he was continually being startled by the fact that his feet returned to the floor sooner than expected. In addition to this, he was bewildered by the constant flushing and paling of masks and costumes around him, and by the variegated expressions of the masks themselves. At one point he tried to break free, get off the floor, but laughing masks and sad masks and coldly formal masks bobbed around him, blocking every way. The music changed suddenly, quickened. Gorgeous Gussie wiggled her hips and clapped her hands. Her mask kept up a fixed simper at Cuthbertson.

  *

  At the far end of the bar, facing towards the dancers, slightly apart from everyone else, the Toad and the Sheikh continued their conversation.

  ‘I’m afraid it was rather a contretemps,’ the Toad said. ‘Well, perhaps that is overstating it.’ His toad’s head, made of papier mâché, fitted right over his own head, like a helmet, and his voice emerged through the wide but narrow toad’s mouth with a curiously muffled effect. ‘It was a chapter of accidents, really,’ he said, feeling hot and guilty inside his helmet.

  Briefly, presenting things in a light as favourable to himself as possible, he gave the Sheikh an outline of the afternoon’s events, leading up to his unfortunate failure to consummate things with Lavinia. ‘It was the appearance of the ambulance,’ he said, raising his mournful toad’s face, ‘that finally defeated me. It arrived just at the wrong moment.’

  The Sheikh regarded him in silence. Dark glasses concealed the upper part of his face, the folds of his headdress the lower. ‘For the true man of action,’ he said at last, ‘there is no such thing as the wrong moment. You appear to me to have bungled the whole business.’

  The Toad lowered his head.

  ‘She will be offended, of course,’ the Sheikh said. ‘However, I do not think the situation is beyond repair. That wounded self-esteem may work in my favour, as a late-comer in the field. Balm to her ego, you know.’ The Sheikh smiled, looking across the room at the dancers. ‘You have to be a bit of a psychologist, in our business,’ he said. ‘You have to know what you are doing. For example, which do you thi
nk is she, our hostess?’

  ‘I don’t know who anyone is,’ the Toad said. ‘Except you, of course.’

  ‘You haven’t been using your eyes. It is Cleopatra, without a doubt. There she is, over there, dancing with the pirate. I’ve been watching her for some time now. I’ll go over in a little while and ask her if she’d like to try my asp for size.’ He laughed, and Toad made hollow sounds of laughter too, through his aperture.

  ‘Home-grown,’ the Sheikh said. He laughed again, and pushed back the sleeve of his robe to glance at his watch. It was ten forty-five. He felt exhilarated at the thought that he would be striking a blow for the Party, if he were successful with Mrs Cuthbertson, at more or less the same time as Kirby would be planting his bomb. Very fitting, indeed poetic, he thought, if her conquest could coincide exactly with the explosion: diplomacy and terror going hand in hand…

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can’t make any favourable recommendations about you in my report, I’m afraid, not on this afternoon’s showing. In fact, it would be better not to go into any detail. In that way the people up at Headquarters will not enter it as a black mark against you. You will not emerge with either credit or blame. It is the best I can do for you, I’m afraid. And if I succeed with the lady I will mention you as the introducing agent and go-between.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Toad said, with gratitude and humility.

  ‘Well, here’s to Cleopatra.’ The Sheikh raised his glass. ‘The serpent of Old Nile, to quote the bard.’

  ‘And here’s to a rent-free office on the premises,’ Toad said. He had to raise his mask a little in order to drink.