Kitty & Virgil

by Paul Bailey

  As you can see from the Address I have written above, your terrible absent Papa is back in his Mother Country. And what is more, Kitty, he intends to stay. FOR EVER, which probably will not be very long. I do not want to die in America and I most certainly do not want to be buried there either. Now you know what I do NOT want, I must tell you what I DO. I want you to pay me a Visit soon. The Person who is caring for me is an excellent Cook and suggests you come for Lunch, preferably on a Sunday, as Dinner is too much of a Strain on the Pair of us.

  So my dearest darling Kitty, would the last Sunday in the Month be suitable? Please write and say Yea or Nay. We are only an Hour from London by Car. I can trust you (CAN’T I?) not to let your frightful Sister know where I am living. Of course I can. Unnecessary Request. If she found out I was back in England, she would bombard me all over again with her awful Accusations. She has not exhausted her Supply of Insults yet and never will.

  I have Lots and Lots of Monkey’s Bums to give you and I hope you have saved up a Few for me as well.

  Your ever loving Daddy.

  She had monkey’s bums and to spare for him – she wrote back immediately – and when they had finished exchanging them, his Baby Cordelia would listen while her terrible daddy brought her up to date with his terrible news. Why, she wondered, was he being coy, since coyness wasn’t in his nature, about the person caring for him? Who was this ministering angel? Was she a mature woman, or someone younger? A pretty nurse who had fallen for his charms?

  And yes, perchance – why was he using that antiquated word? – there was some ‘love interest’ in her otherwise dull life. She had met a Romanian. She would say no more than that.

  Would he and the caring person mind very much if she brought the Romanian with her that suitable Sunday?

  Needless to add that she sent her love.

  He was in a field on the other side, the earth lit only by the morning star, when he remembered that the stretch of the Danube he had just swum across had once been spanned by Trajan’s bridge – the greatest, his history teacher had said, in the vast Roman Empire. The Emperor’s cavalry had clattered over that mass of intricate woodwork on its way to besiege Decebalus.

  ‘You are Roman Romanians,’ their father had instructed him and his brother Aureliu when they were boys. ‘You must always be conscious that you have Roman blood in your veins.’

  For Constantin Florescu that precious blood might have belonged to Trajan himself – or if not Trajan, then a soldier near to him, an officer in the Imperial Legion. Their father had them imagine a noble warrior, a man of learning as well as strength, fighting for five arduous years against the superstitious, ignorant Dacians, who had the courage of beasts. They were to think of themselves as that warrior’s descendants: proud, strong, fearless. It was more than probable that the Florescus’ share of Barbarian blood had been refined down the centuries to the point of vanishing.

  ‘How does blood vanish, Papa? Where does it go?’

  ‘Ah, Virgil, when you and Aureliu are older, and know of men and women, and love and marriage, and blood joining blood, what I have said will not be a mystery.’

  He heard a shot in the near distance and shouting, and then the squawking and shrieking of panicking birds. A red-legged falcon flew low above him, low enough to be captured in his upraised hands. But his hands were clasped about him, because he was wet and cold and naked, impatient for the still unrisen sun to dry and warm his shivering flesh. He had used up all his strength and fearlessness, and craved only the light and heat of the coming day.

  He rose, now, from the London grass, his short rest over, and picked up his spike and pretended for a ridiculous moment that it was a javelin and he was Don Quixote, and then he saw a keeper approaching and decided not to charge.

  She lifted his head from her breasts and told him she had a twin sister. ‘Her name is Daisy, Virgil.’

  ‘She looks like you? She is – what is the word – identical?

  ‘Not exactly. It’s easy to tell us apart.’

  ‘I am relieved.’

  ‘What do you mean? Why relieved?’

  ‘I am not happy to see you in another. Please assure me that Daisy cannot be mistaken for Kitty.’

  ‘I do assure you, sweetheart.’

  (She would remember, when he was gone from her, calling him sweetheart for the first time and the strange pleasure she had felt on hearing him say: ‘I am not happy to see you in another.’)

  ‘Daisy is older than me by four hours. She has always, and I do mean always, behaved as if those four hours were four years. From when we were very little she treated me as her junior. I was the helpless younger sister who needed protecting.’

  ‘Four hours? How painful for your mother.’

  ‘Yes, Virgil. Daisy rushed into the world. Even then she was anxious to set it to rights and as quickly as possible. I’m not unkind. That’s her character. I was different. I was reluctant to leave the safety and security of Nelly’s womb. I had to be coaxed out. Enforced.’

  ‘You call your mother Nelly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not Mother? Not Mama?’

  ‘Oh, no. The three of us had to be friends, so it seemed natural to call ourselves Daisy and Kitty and Nelly.’

  ‘Had to be? Why had to be?’

  ‘Why? Because our daddy, Eleanor’s husband, left us, abandoned us. Daisy and I were five years old and Nelly was still young. We had to be friends and we were.’

  ‘Your father fell in love with someone else? Was that the reason he left you?’

  ‘That’s the reason he gave Nelly. That’s the reason he gave Muriel, I should imagine, and Joan, and Linda, and Carol, and – well, all of them.’

  ‘He is a Casanova, a Don Juan?’

  ‘Not quite, Virgil. He usually marries the women he loves. Do you want to meet him?’

  ‘Do you want me to meet him?’

  ‘I think I do.’

  Her father was back in England, she said, after spending most of his life in America, where he had worked – thanks to his excessive good looks – as a model. He had a new companion, who was caring for him, so he might be frail at last – though it was hard for her to associate him with frailty.

  ‘We have talked enough, Kitty Crozier, and I have asked too many questions.’

  ‘I am a wanderer, Mr Razelos. I do not care to remain long in one place.’

  ‘It upsets me that you are going. What is your next destination? Port of call?’

  ‘I am staying in London.’

  ‘Well, well, well, then – you do not have to leave the Aphrodite. There is no necessity. There is no problem. Why move from here if you don’t need to?’

  ‘I am a peculiar man, Mr Razelos –’

  ‘None more peculiar than myself and don’t I know it. You cannot excuse yourself on grounds of peculiarness. You are the least peculiar of all the peculiar persons who have come to the Aphrodite. That is the solemn truth.’

  ‘Thank you. You are kind. Mr Razelos, I wish to move because –’

  ‘You have found somewhere better? More luxurious?’

  ‘No, I have not.’

  ‘I am confused, Mr Florescu. If there is nowhere better, then why are you trying to tell me you wish to move?’

  Virgil Florescu, unable to answer, began to laugh. Nicos Razelos patted him on the shoulder and laughed too.

  ‘I am trying to tell you –’

  (That I cannot, will not, tell you of sadness and anguish and melancholy; that I cannot mention a carpet from Oltenia and an icon of St Peter and a mother reading the story of Harap Alb to her two alternately incredulous and frightened sons; that I cannot talk of not wanting to be attached, however tenuously, to any room in any building in any country – and that all these things are mine not to reveal, dear Mr Razelos.)

  ‘I am prepared to lower the rent a fraction, Mr Florescu. I hate to see the back of a clean-as-a-whistle tenant who makes no noise and brings no drugs on to the premises. I have not met too
many of your kind, believe me. Think again. Reconsider. I shall have an unhappy Miss Eunice on my hands otherwise.’

  ‘Miss Eunice? Unhappy?’

  ‘Certainly. She hasn’t stopped speaking about you – in glowing terms – since you had your conversation.’

  (Miss Eunice had opened her door one evening to introduce herself to the Romanian gentleman her friend Mr Razelos had told her about. She was elegantly dressed in dark-blue silk and wore a pearl choker like the one Virgil Florescu’s mother had kept in her ‘box of treasures’. ‘I am pleased to meet you, Madame,’ he said, to which she responded with ‘Are you wondering why Nicky calls me Miss Eunice rather than plain Eunice?’ and before he could say ‘Yes’, she was providing him with the answer.

  ‘When Nicky was first courting me – and it was courting, despite his being married, as he still is, bless him, to a lovely woman, Irene, who understands – when he was first courting me – Mr Florescu, isn’t it?’ He nodded. ‘When he was first courting me, Mr Florescu, he used to take me wining and dining, no expense spared, restaurants and night-clubs, smart places filled with the famous people of the day, and once a week, a Wednesday, we caught the latest big film at a very clean cinema where one of Nicky’s friends – a Greek, of course – was manager. This particular Wednesday I’m concerned with, they were showing a picture – I can’t remember the title, always have been hopeless with titles – set right down in the Deep South, in America, in a huge house with verandas and whirring fans overhead in every room, and there was this lady of the house played by that tall actress with blonde hair and greeny eyes whose name escapes me, and she was having this affair – “torrid” was the word they put on the posters – with a man who’d come to do some work for her, manual work, which meant he never had his shirt on, and naturally she looked at his rippling muscles from behind her shutters and that’s when the idea of being torrid came into her head. What I do recall is the name they gave her in the film. She was Miss Geraldine. Not Geraldine, as with Geraldine here in England, but Miss Geraldine. Everyone addressed her as “Miss Geraldine” – her servants, the sheriff and even the man with the muscles who broke her heart, but he said it with a sneer. Anyway, Mr Florescu, when we were coming out of the cinema, Nicky said to me “You’re going to be Miss Eunice from now on” and I said “Come off it, Nicky, don’t be a fool” and he said he was serious, I deserved the respect of Miss and he wouldn’t listen to me telling him it was daft – I wasn’t a Southern belle – and he was that insistent, the Miss Eunice stuck, he calls me nothing else, except for very personal endearments, and I have to tell you, Mr Florescu, it does embarrass me a bit. Does that answer your question?’

  ‘Yes, yes, it does,’ he replied, adding his thanks for the explanation.

  ‘I can’t leave this house any more, Mr Florescu,’ she continued in a quieter voice. ‘I’m frightened of the outside world. I can’t even stand on the front steps. The traffic terrifies me. A man came at me once with a knife and I’ve had no courage since. Still, Nicky’s nice to me, bringing me that delicious baklava, which ought to make me fat but doesn’t, due to my phobia. Nicky’s promised me that if Irene dies first, which I shouldn’t hope for, he’ll sell all his London properties and buy a country mansion in the middle of fields, way away from cars and strangers. One fine day, perhaps.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, pitying her. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must excuse me for not inviting you over my threshold, but if Nicky turned up earlier than usual he’d go mad if he found you sitting in my flat, especially with me dressed the way I am, in his favourite wining-and-dining outfit. He’s very possessive of me and I’m grateful; it’s wonderful to be loved, but I wouldn’t want to encourage his jealousy, because it’s not worth the awful trouble. I mustn’t keep you, you look tired, it’s been a real pleasure talking with you.’

  ‘Yes, it has. Good evening.’

  ‘Good evening to you, Mr Florescu.’)

  ‘Ah yes, our conversation in the hall.’

  ‘There aren’t many people she gets to talk to, apart from yours truly.’

  ‘I do understand.’

  ‘She’s given the other residents the cold shoulder. Their faces aren’t sympathetic to her, like yours is.’

  ‘Mr Razelos, I will leave eventually, but not as soon as I intended.’

  ‘Weeks are you considering? Months?’

  Days, Virgil Florescu thought. It has to be days. ‘Weeks or months, months or weeks, whichever, whichever.’

  She was in his arms when she learnt her first Romanian word.

  ‘Suflet means “soul”, beautiful Kitty Crozier.’

  (How apt, how appropriate, she would think afterwards, that it was suflet.)

  ‘I am going to speak a poem for you.’

  ‘Is it one of yours?’

  ‘No. It is not. It is by Lucian Blaga.’

  ‘I’m disappointed, Virgil,’ she teased him. ‘I was beginning to enjoy the fact that I might become your Muse. It isn’t every middle-aged wreck who gets to be a poet’s source of inspiration.’

  ‘Muse, inspiration – oh, Kitty, if you can be my Muse, if you can be my inspiration, you will be, I promise. I shall hire you for the job. What salary does a Muse command? Is there an agent for Muses, who will barter and barter until a price is fixed? “Mr Florescu, I am prepared to sell you the services of our Crozier Muse, but I have to warn you that she is not cheap. Her speciality is the wistful lyric – a song of love that opens joyfully but soon invokes the shadows. She is adept with irony, too, though if it’s satire you are after I would recommend our lesser Muses – they are guaranteed to bring a snarl to your verses in double-quick time. Clever girls! You are not a satirist, Mr Florescu? That’s very useful information. That really narrows the field. Our Crozier Muse would seem to match you perfectly, but again I must warn you that she does have ambitions. She wants to broaden her scope. She is seeking epic status. Before you know it, she will be commanding you to write a latter-day Odyssey, a modern Aeneid. She will lure you into waters too deep to fathom, if you aren’t watchful and wary. Now, Mr Florescu, are you absolutely certain you wish to sign the contract? You are? Then expect the Crozier Muse to be at your disposal tout de suite, or just as soon as all the formalities have been agreed to our mutual satisfaction. I guarantee that you will not be disappointed, Mr Florescu. You have chosen wisely.”’

  ‘Fool, Virgil. Heavenly fool that you are. What am I supposed to be worth? My agent didn’t come clean.’

  ‘That’s my business and his. You are worth what you are worth. Listen now, Kitty. Listen to Blaga’s little poem.’

  He spoke the poem quietly, as it should be spoken, in his own language, and then he translated the untranslatable for her.

  ‘The opening line is easy enough – Spune-o-ncet, n-o-spune tare is “Say it softly, do not say it loudly”. The poet is saying to his lover, softly, that when we are not together, our souls are separated from us, isolated. But when we are next to each other, when we are two, our souls are there in our bodies. That is it, more or less. I thought you might like the sweet Romanian sound of it.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I am sleepy, Kitty Crozier, my Muse-to-be.’

  ‘You won’t be here in the morning, will you?’

  ‘For the present, no. For a while longer. Have patience with me. For the present, Kitty, I have no home to go to and I must see if it’s still there.’

  Perhaps she should begin by saying: Daisy, your irresponsible, flighty younger sister is excelling herself. It was necessary to make Daisy aware from the outset that no one appreciated the absurdity of the situation better than she, Kitty, the twin with the brains who never stopped to think.

  Yes, Daisy would delight in the flattery; the reminder that she was neither flighty nor irresponsible. She welcomed such reminders.

  The facts, the facts: Daisy would want the facts, the nitty-gritty, the details. These were the details. Her affair, her romance, could be said to have started ten whole mont
hs ago, when she was in hospital. She had been under heavy sedation following her hysterectomy, but when the drugs wore off and she awoke in an ordinary ward the first person she saw was a man with dark eyes smiling down on her. She would not describe his smile, with the glint of silver that wasn’t silver. She would omit that detail.

  The most important detail, the single fact that would cause Daisy concerned discomfort, was that she, Kitty, had met the stranger again by accident in Green Park. It was the ideal afternoon for leisurely walking and she was on her way to have tea with the latest biographer of Warren Hastings when the man from the hospital called out to her. They had exchanged names almost instantly, and she had written her address and phone number on a piece of chocolate wrapping he removed from his spike.

  His spike?

  Yes, Daisy, his spike.

  ‘The rehearsal’s abandoned,’ she said and laughed, and poured herself a second cup of strong black coffee.

  This was the sixth of the London rooms he had passed hours in and the only one not to have contained even the traces of an icon: a torn and faded poster of Marilyn Monroe in a billowing skirt; a yellowing photograph of James Dean, seated on the edge of a bed, playing a flute; Jim Morrison, posed Christ-like, a lipsticked kiss still vividly red on his throat, and Che Guevara, bedecked with flowers, prepared for burial – in Clapham and Fulham, in Hackney and in Chelsea, these were the sacred images their worshippers had left behind.

  He opened the small leather suitcase his friend Dinu Psatta had given him and started to pack his few possessions. The next room awaited him: the next wardrobe, the next bed, the next table, the next chair, and – decorative addition in Clapham and at the Aphrodite – the next Chianti bottle with a nearly spent candle stuck in it.

  It was the idea of an icon that had brought him trouble – serious trouble, Radu Sava warned him; deadly trouble. He wished, now, that he hadn’t written the poem – not because of the danger it had meant for him, but because it was banal. He had composed it with suspicious ease, the words running ahead of his pen. He had not revised it, honed it, put it aside for later and closer inspection, as was his custom.