Kitty & Virgil

by Paul Bailey

  The man’s outburst provoked further derisive laughter. ‘Temper, temper. You’ll be trying to fight us in a minute.’

  Virgil Florescu thought of the unsteady trio later as he rested on his bed in the slowly gathering darkness. He’d wanted to speak to the enraged pacifist, to ask him why he had elected not to serve in the army (or navy, or air force), but the man had shouted ‘You bloody sneering bloody bastards’ at his friends and stomped out.

  He lay there, in the London attic, willing his mind away from Constantin Florescu’s proud revelations – ‘We were young and impetuous, and obeying the will of our Christian God’ – and his mother’s descent into numbness. It was better not to think, either, of his own brief and ignominious military training or of Aureliu’s progress through the ranks of the army. ‘I have just one spirited son, Virgil, and he is not you.’

  He began to mutter familiar lines from Book Twelve of the Aeneid –

  ‘…et iuuenum exosum nequiquam bella Menoeten, Arcada, piscosae cui circum flumina Lernae …’

  – and was momentarily perplexed that he was doing so. Then he heard a voice from the past telling him that he, young Florescu, was an unusual student and it was suddenly clear why the frustrated Menoetës of Arcadia was in his thoughts. The unusual young Florescu had written an essay for his classics tutor, Teodor Costea, in which he’d reflected on ‘the names in the dark’ – ‘multi praeterea, quos fama recondit’ – in the great epic poem he and his classmates had been reading, and translating, and pondering over for several months. Costea – whose beard was stained by, and smelt of, tobacco – had praised him for his obtuse originality in concentrating on those anonymous hordes the mightier Virgil assigns to the periphery of the story and seldom describes. ‘Your fellow students have chosen less original, but more pertinent, subjects, young Florescu: the torment of Dido, for instance, and the rescue of Anchises from the flaming ruins of Troy, and Aeneas’s journey down to the nether world – but you, you have devoted page upon intriguing page to nonentities. To “the unremembered dead”, as you rather elegantly put it. The only character you discuss in detail is the poor Arcadian fisherman, Menoetes; one of the hundreds of soldiers slain by King Turnus. You have contrived, clever young Florescu, to make a hero of him. He appears to be as heroic, in your eyes, as the heroes themselves.’

  And still is, the middle-aged Florescu would have said to the yellow-bearded Costea twenty years on. He remembered writing of the unremembered – the sailors, soldiers, slaves; the maidens, mothers, wives, widows – and how he had singled out Menoetës, the hater of war whom circumstances deprived of a quiet life, for his considered attention. As, indeed, the poet had done, in five lines that preserve the fisherman’s humble, thwarted ambition – to leave the scenes of battle and return to the brooks at Lerna – for ever. Menoetes was no warrior and held no public office, and might have been nothing but a minor impediment in Turnus’s path – except that his name is recorded, his very ordinariness honoured. ‘Oh yes, Professor Costea, I have not forgotten him.’

  The phone rang at the bottom of the house and soon Freda Whiteside was singing up the stairs: ‘Mis-ter Flores-cu, tel-e-phone.’ He waited, in ordered to ensure a repeat performance. ‘Dom-nul Flo-res-cu,’ she sang the second time. ‘Tel-e-phone. A Miss Cro-zi-er for you.’ He called out that he was coming and went down to the hall, where his beaming landlady passed him the receiver.

  ‘Kitty –’

  ‘I think I recognised the tune, Virgil. The words didn’t quite fit, though. It was “Casta Diva”, wasn’t it? From Bellini’s Norma?’

  ‘If you say so. I am ignorant about opera, as Mrs Whiteside has discovered.’

  ‘I’ve almost finished my work on the book, sweetheart. Will you come to supper on Tuesday?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

  ‘I’m missing you.’

  ‘It’s been four days, a mere four days. That’s all.’

  ‘That’s all, I know. It seems longer. Virgil, my sister has invited us to lunch next Sunday. She needs to inspect you. Could you suffer another family gathering?’

  ‘The first one was diverting.’

  ‘I can’t promise that Daisy and Cecil and the children will entertain you as much as my terrible father and Mephistopheles did. There certainly won’t be any badinage.’

  ‘I don’t expect badinage, Kitty. The badinage between Derek and Felix was a rare surprise. A bonus.’

  Back in his room, he wondered which fish Menoetës might have caught in the brooks at Lerna. Then he recalled that one of the translators of the Aeneid – was he French? was he English? was he American? – had suggested perch. ‘The brooks of Lerna, crowded with perch’ was his phrase. He would steal that convincing suggestion. His own Menoetes would be a fisher of perch.

  ‘What a treasure trove this store is,’ Muriel Crozier exclaimed as she led her stepdaughters through the toy department at Harrods. ‘Is there anything here that takes your fancy?’

  ‘We’re too old for toys. I keep telling you we’re ten. There’s nothing here for us.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true, Daisy. My grandpa just adores jigsaw puzzles and he’s older than most folks alive. You can never be too old for toys.’

  ‘Well, we are.’

  ‘Is that so, Kitty?’

  ‘Yes, that is so.’

  ‘I asked Kitty the question, not you, Daisy. I should like to hear Kitty’s answer. For once.’

  ‘Kitty hasn’t been listening. She’s got her miles-away face on.’

  ‘Would you like a jigsaw puzzle, Kitty?’

  ‘Yes, please. Thank you.’

  ‘Choose the one you want then, dear. The really complicated, difficult ones are the best, I find. They take longer to fit together.’

  Kitty chose a puzzle with a windmill, which Muriel said was a famous painting by a Dutch master.

  ‘Delft is in Holland, Kitty. These water pieces will drive you crazy, I can guarantee. Happily crazy, of course. That’s the joy of jigsaws.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And you, Daisy? Which puzzle for you?’

  ‘None of them.’

  ‘Oh, come on. Don’t be such a curmudgeon. I shall pick one for you. How about this? Look, Daisy, it’s a grand lady in period clothes. Why, she’s Madame de Pompadour, no less. Those jewels alone will occupy you for hours.’ She smiled down on the glowering Daisy. ‘And hours. You will have hours and hours of quiet amusement.’

  Muriel Crozier handed the boxes to a shop assistant with the instruction to wrap them and charge them.

  ‘What’s “charge”? What do you mean by “charge”?’

  ‘Are you talking to me, Daisy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I do have a name. I told the polite young man to charge them because I have an account. The store sends me a bill and that’s when I pay it. Does that satisfy you, Daisy?’

  ‘Doesn’t he pay? Our father?’

  ‘Sometimes. When he has to. Oftentimes.’

  Daisy must understand, Muriel Crozier said, that it was rude, it was the height of vulgarity, to talk about money, otherpeople’s money, in a public place. Enough was enough. Now they had dresses to look at. Finding pretty dresses for Daisy and Kitty was the real purpose of their little trip.

  ‘We’ve got dresses.’

  ‘I know you have, Daisy. But these will be different. These will be beautiful.’

  ‘We don’t need them.’

  ‘We’ll see what Magda has to say about that.’

  ‘Who’s Magda?’

  ‘Come and meet her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Magda is an expert – the expert – on clothes for girls. She rules over her department like an absolute queen.’

  (For Daisy and Kitty Crozier, Magda more resembled a witch than a queen, such was the trepidation they felt in her presence. Her charm had them cringing; reaching for the security of each other’s hands. Her mouth seemed to contain as many empty spaces as it did teeth, and in those spaces tin
y bubbles of spittle formed and burst as she talked enthusiastically of the latest heavenly designs she had bought for the daughters of her clients. ‘Or stepdaughters, should I say,’ she remarked to the Mrs Crozier she had once had the privilege of dressing as an enchanting teenager. ‘Nine years ago, wasn’t it? How time does fly.’

  The classroom at Alder Court would be decorated with Daisy’s paintings and drawings of gap-toothed witches stirring nasty stews in cauldrons and riding aloft on broomsticks. These near likenesses of Magda would one day join the garden refuse for burning when Nelly decided that Daisy, at the age of fourteen, ought to be painting and drawing from life rather than fantasy. ‘Open your eyes, Daisy. You can turn out those awful midnight hags in your sleep. Draw a plant or a flower for me. Why not start with the datura?’)

  ‘Who is who?’

  ‘Tell Magda – is it all right for them to call you Magda?’

  ‘I don’t think their tongues will take easily to Mrs Esterhazy-Williams.’

  ‘Tell Magda your names, girls.’

  Daisy and Kitty stood in silence.

  ‘They’re very shy, aren’t they, Mrs Crozier.’

  ‘Kitty is,’ Muriel Crozier responded, patting Kitty’s head. ‘But not Daisy.’

  ‘They have quite ruddy complexions. Do they live in the country?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Rosy cheeks do not go well with rosy shades. I have a motto, Mrs Crozier: the ruddier the skin, the colder the colour to offset it. I look at Kitty and Daisy, and pale green speaks to me. Or a really icy blue.’

  ‘Anything would be better than the table-cloths they’re wearing.’

  Magda snorted and said, ‘Yes, yes – so very bistro, aren’t they, those dresses. And obviously run up.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  (They thought and felt as one that Easter Saturday, Kitty Crozier was to remember. It was as if they were possessed of the same distaste for Magda, the same loathing of their father’s new wife, the same protectiveness towards Nelly, whose ‘run-up’ dresses were being mocked. They disliked the ‘lovely, lovely’, ‘professionally finished’ dresses Magda made them get into and then out of, but they hated most of all the pale-green and Arctic-blue ‘creations’ that Magda Esterhazy-Williams and Muriel Crozier finally chose for them. They heard themselves described as ‘sweet little pieces of Dresden’ and were sickened by ‘sweet little’ and confused by ‘pieces of Dresden’. They watched as Magda’s nervy assistant folded the four dresses and wrapped them in fine paper, and still they said nothing. Theirs was a united silence. ‘They must be overawed, dear Mrs Crozier. Or overcome. It’s their country upbringing, I assume. They need their rough edges softening. What a pity they can’t spend more time in your care. But you are a woman of the world and your husband is such a busy man.’

  They mouthed a joint ‘Thank you’ at Muriel Crozier’s insistence, and Magda Esterhazy-Williams kissed them both and told them they were now the two most elegant girls – ‘Très, très chic’ – in London.

  Once they were out of the store, Daisy released her hand from Kitty’s and ended their state of unity. She spoke as only she dared to. ‘Do we have to go back in the big silly car?’ she asked Muriel Crozier, as Jackson opened the door of the waiting Rolls-Royce.)

  The following day Felix Crozier took his daughters to the zoo in Regent’s Park. Since the zoo was ‘nowhere special’ and ‘open to everybody’, and Muriel was ‘laid low’ with a migraine, Daisy and Kitty were allowed to wear the ‘tablecloths’.

  Whenever Kitty glanced at her sister that afternoon Daisy seemed distracted, deep in thought. ‘What’s the matter, Daisy?’

  ‘You’ll see. You’ll find out. You’ll see, Kitty.’

  Of all the animals and birds they gawped at in wonder or terror – it was the stillness of the coiled cobra that had Daisy flinching – only the monkeys, leaping from branch to branch and scampering up and down the trees in the large monkey house, looked glad to be in London. Kitty began to laugh at the sheer happy sight of them. ‘Their bums, Daddy,’ she cried out and her father said, ‘What about their bums, dearest darling? Is it the pinkness of them?’

  ‘Yes, Daddy. And some of them are red as well.’

  ‘I can shape my lips into a monkey’s bum, if you’d like me to, Kitty.’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Felix Crozier put his lips together and stuck them out, and Kitty laughed until she was in stitches.

  ‘Now you do a monkey’s bum for me, Kitty darling. When you’ve recovered.’

  So Kitty put her lips together and made them stick out, and her father said she’d done a perfect monkey’s bum at her first try. Then he lifted her up and rubbed noses with her. ‘Let’s share a monkey’s bum kiss, my dearest darling,’ he whispered. They kissed and laughed again.

  When he lowered her to the ground, Kitty noticed that Daisy had disappeared. ‘Where’s Daisy, Daddy?’

  ‘Up to her tricks, I don’t doubt. She can’t have gone far.’

  She had gone as far, they discovered, as an ice-cream kiosk, where she was buying a vanilla cornet with one of the two half-crowns Nelly had given each of them as pocket money.

  ‘Shall I buy you an ice-cream, Daddy? I have enough in my purse.’

  ‘That’s very thoughtful of you, dearest. I have to consider the size of my tummy, but I’ll be greedy just this once. I’ll have strawberry, if the man has it.’

  Kitty bought her father a strawberry-flavoured lolly and chose a raspberry ripple for herself because it sounded funny.

  That evening was to be the last Daisy and Kitty spent in the Mayfair mansion.

  It was Muriel Crozier’s wish that the twins dress for dinner. ‘But not identically. Let me see Daisy in the pale green and Kitty in the Arctic blue.’

  To everyone’s surprise, Daisy did not protest. ‘All right, if that’s what you want. I’ll put on the green frock, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘Don’t say “frock”, Daisy. “Frock” is common. “Frock” is a word people like us try not to use.’

  (In the summer of 1978, when she was working on the index for a scholarly book on English etymology, Kitty Crozier – locating the entry for the word ‘frock’ on page 105 – would recollect Muriel Crozier’s advice to Daisy. She would smile on learning that ‘frock’ had been in use since the fourteenth century. Who had been using it, preserving it, in all that time? A few ‘people like us’, surely. A few million dead people like us.)

  ‘Go and bathe, girls. Beryl will wash and brush your hair.’

  Daisy made no complaints while her hair was being washed and brushed, and she did not scream when some drops of shampoo ran down into her eyes, causing them to smart.

  ‘What have you done with the devil inside of you, Miss Daisy? Giving it a day off, are you? You’re almost as good as gold tonight.’

  ‘Am I, Miss Beryl?’

  ‘Yes, you are. I say almost because you’re still calling me Miss Beryl, which you shouldn’t be.’

  ‘I like calling you Miss Beryl, Miss Beryl,’ said Daisy, giggling.

  ‘Are you planning to be sick again this evening?’

  ‘No, I’m not. It was that horrible chocolate’s fault.’

  ‘That chocolate, young lady, is the best money can buy. It didn’t make Miss Kitty sick.’

  ‘Kitty only nibbled hers. She’s still got plenty left.’

  ‘I’m puzzled, Miss Daisy.’

  ‘Why’s that, Miss Beryl?’

  ‘I’m puzzled why, if the chocolate Easter egg was so horrible, you gobbled the whole thing up.’

  ‘It was a present, Miss Beryl. From them. That’s why I ate it up. I was being polite.’

  Beryl sniggered. ‘You were, were you? “Polite” wasn’t the word Madam used when she caught sight of the state of your bed this morning.’

  ‘I couldn’t help myself. Honestly, Miss Beryl.’

  ‘I’ll try to believe you, you scamp.’

  ‘What’s a scamp, Miss Beryl?’

/>   ‘It’s what you are and it’s what Miss Kitty isn’t, and that’s my way of telling you what a scamp is.’

  When they were dressed – Daisy with a matching green ribbon in her hair; Kitty with a matching blue – Beryl told them they looked like miniature mannequins from Paris. ‘Let me show you off to Mr and Mrs Crozier.’

  But Mrs Crozier was suffering with her head again and would be lying in the dark for at least another hour. They would have to be content with their father’s approval.

  ‘Let’s give him a lovely surprise, shall we? Come along, mannequins.’

  ‘What’s mannequins, Miss Beryl?’

  ‘Mannequins are models. Models who model clothes.’

  They found Felix Crozier peering at his reflection in a mirror. He was trimming his moustache with a small pair of scissors. The woman on the record was singing the song Muriel Crozier knew by heart.

  ‘He loves himself, Kitty. He loves himself more than anyone else in the world.’

  ‘Mr Crozier, sir. Miss Daisy and Miss Kitty are here to see you.’

  ‘So they are, Beryl, so they are. What beautiful, beautiful daughters I’ve been blessed with.’

  ‘Madam has such refined taste, Mr Crozier, sir.’

  ‘She certainly has, Beryl.’

  ‘I hate him,’ Daisy muttered. ‘Listen to the stuff he speaks. I hate him.’

  ‘No, Daisy.’

  ‘Yes, Kitty.’

  They were beautiful, beautiful; they were his dearest, most precious darlings and the dresses simply enhanced Nature’s perfect achievement.

  ‘Listen to him.’

  ‘Tomorrow evening,’ Muriel Crozier announced when dinner was over, ‘Daisy will be in blue and Kitty in green. What do you think, Felix?’

  ‘Felix thinks that’s a wonderful idea.’

  ‘You may leave the table, girls.’

  ‘Felix also thinks that his darlings ought to give us both a grateful good-night kiss.’