Kitty & Virgil

by Paul Bailey

  Kitty and Virgil edged themselves into the centre of the overcrowded room.

  ‘I don’t know anyone here. They must be Laura’s recent acquisitions. They weren’t around two years ago.’

  ‘Can we stand by the window? I am already feeling suffocated.’

  There was a man on the balcony, smoking a cheroot, who said to Virgil, ‘You are not English. From where are you?’

  ‘Europe.’

  ‘Italy? Spain?’

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘Central Europe maybe? Eastern?’

  ‘Eastern.’

  ‘You are from that shit-hole Romania?

  ‘I am from Romania.’

  ‘You are Romanian?’

  ‘I am Romanian.’

  ‘Nothing to be proud of, being a Romanian.’

  ‘Not now, no.’

  ‘Not now never. I am Hungarian and proud of my country, and I tell you, you Romanian, you have nothing to be proud of.’

  ‘I hear your opinion.’

  ‘You are offensive,’ Kitty told the Hungarian, who laughed, tossed the butt of his cheroot down to the street and answered, ‘You ain’t heard nothin’ yet’ in an awkward parody of an American accent.

  ‘I think we have heard as much as we can stomach.’

  ‘Have you? I will tell him, Englishwoman, only what he knows. Romanians are thieves and peasants. That’s a fact. Their history is blood and shit. They lived in darkness for centuries. Romanian blood isn’t pure – it’s gypsy blood, and Greek, and Turk. I tell him he is from a bastard race. A race made from rapings and dirty fucks. That is how Romanians came into the world.’

  ‘I hear you.’

  ‘Then hear some more. From where did your kings and princes come? From Germany. A paid-for monarchy, like you pay for potatoes. And your Esperanto language, from where is that? From everywhere.’

  ‘Not everywhere, no.’

  ‘It is from everywhere. From Rome, from Paris, from Athens, from Ankara, from Budapest even.’

  ‘That is still short of everywhere.’

  ‘And what is your culture? Gypsy music, icons, peasant costumes, a poem about a lamb that talks. And what does that lamb say to the shepherd? He says it is better to die than fight. You kill, you stinking Romanians, but you do not fight like men.’

  ‘I am hearing you.’

  The Hungarian stepped into the room. ‘You are hearing me? I am telling you. We in Hungary, even in the Hungary you stole from us, had a culture, we had aristocrats, while you were all in the mud. We had a language. We had books. You had no language to write for hundreds and hundreds of years. For centuries you had no books.’

  ‘The monks had books, of course. But not the people.’

  ‘The people? The swine. The herd. You call them people, I call them savages. Your writers write in French, don’t they?’

  ‘Some. Yes. It is their choice.’

  ‘Our writers write in Hungarian. Yours go to France and become Frenchmen.’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘I tell you they do.’

  ‘I hear.’

  ‘You hear. All you say is you hear. Won’t you argue with me? Won’t you defend your shit-hole country?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I am who I am.’

  ‘And who’s that? A coward? Yes?’

  ‘I choose not to answer your question.’

  ‘I look at you and I don’t see a man. I see a piece of shit from Romania.’

  ‘You see what you see.’

  The Hungarian held out his glass for a languid youth to top up and Virgil, speaking to himself, muttered a few words in Romanian, only one of which – Tatã – Kitty understood. Then, almost shrieking ‘Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me’, he forced a path out of the room and into the hall and on to the landing. Then he scuttled down the stairs.

  They lay together, hand in hand, unable to sleep, for most of the night.

  ‘Were you hearing someone else?’ she dared to ask. ‘When that brute was abusing you?’

  ‘Yes, Kitty, I was. I was hearing him loud and far too clear, and I had to get away from the noise.’

  ‘It’s time for breakfast, sweetheart. What would you like?’

  He turned to her and smiled. ‘Breakfast? Ah, yes, breakfast. I think I would like tea. And some bread. And plenty of jam.’

  ‘I am pleased to be here, Mrs Crozier.’

  ‘And I’m pleased you’ve come, Mr Florescu. Kitty and I have made a habit of being together at Christmas. I’m not sure what we celebrate, since neither of us is a believer, but celebrate we do, in our quiet way. Perhaps you will encourage us to be a bit rowdier this year.'

  ‘That is a huge perhaps, Mrs Crozier.’

  ‘I am Nelly to you. And I hope you are plain Virgil.’

  ‘Yes, yes. It is kind of you to invite me to your beautiful house.’

  ‘I suppose you shouldn’t love a pile of bricks, but this particular pile captured my heart the moment I saw it. I was a girl at the time. All the books I was reading were set in country houses, usually haunted ones, with creaking staircases and hidden doors, and Alder Court, viewed from the safe distance of the road, looked as if it might have a ghost or two inside.’

  She had bought it, she said, on an impulse, securing the deal with the agent while she was in a state verging on delirium. She had just inherited her father’s bequest to her, after an eternity of legal wrangling, finding herself moderately wealthy for about a week. Her handsome husband – and he was nothing if not handsome – had deserted her for a headachy beauty with a fortune that wasn’t moderate, and there was no question as to who would have possession of the twins, Daisy and Kitty. That was Mother’s privilege. Naturally. Then she read in a magazine at the dentist’s that Alder Court was on the market at a price she could afford and she soon discovered why it was affordable. The house was in a truly terrible condition – there were holes in the roof and cracks down the walls, and several kinds of vermin in the pipes and under the floorboards.

  The previous owner had lived there for most of his very long life – in a single room, the kitchen, surrounded by heaps of rotting newspapers dating back to his childhood. It was rumoured in the village that the man, who wasn’t a monk but dressed as if he was, had once told someone who told someone else that the world had come to an end without anybody noticing.

  ‘He imagined he was dead, I assume. Anyhow, I’m grateful to him for dying when he did. If he’d lasted a few years longer Alder Court might have been beyond repair. It’s a semi-ruin, as it is.’

  ‘I do not see any alders.’

  ‘There aren’t any, that’s why. Alder Court was built by a Mr Joshua Alder in the seventeen nineties and it belonged to the Alder family until nineteen twenty, when Mr Armageddon moved in with his bundles of newsprint. There never were alder trees here. Only the solitary oak at the bottom of the garden.’

  ‘And the daturas, Nelly.’

  ‘And the daturas, Kitty, as you say. You must return in June, Virgil, when they are in flower. The back of the house will be covered in angels’ trumpets.’

  ‘Angels’ trumpets? I am ignorant of angels’ trumpets. They are flowers?’

  ‘They are, and they’re shaped like trumpets when they open. Or bells, if you prefer. Kitty once asked me if she could ring them and I think I had to tell her they weren’t really bells but funny trumpets no one else but angels can hear. Did your parents ever stuff your head with lovely nonsense, Virgil?’

  ‘My mother did, yes. But not my father. My father has always been practical. He is a pragmatic man. No, Nelly – no nonsense for Constantin Florescu.’

  (Kitty would meet omul pragmatic, would have her hand kissed by him, would hear him talk regretfully of the one son who had failed him. ‘I can translate his words for you,’ Radu Sava would observe, ‘but I leave it to you to detect the character of the man behind them. He looks sincere, doesn’t he? He is bewailing Virgil’s wasted life. He wishes you to under
stand that he loved his eldest boy, in spite of their differences.’

  She would stare at the pink-faced, corpulent survivor and he would smile faintly at her, and she would continue staring at him and he would flinch under her steady gaze.

  ‘You murderer,’ she would shout at him, having been assured by Radu Sava that her lover’s father spoke no English.)

  ‘Silent trumpets or no, I had to warn my daughters that the datura is poisonous. My warning didn’t prevent Daisy from nibbling a leaf one summer afternoon and making herself violently sick. She had to have her stomach pumped. She nearly died, Virgil. The commonsensical hausfrau played up like the very devil when she was ten and eleven.’

  After dinner that Christmas Eve, as they sat by the fire, Nelly talked of Daisy again – of the acts of devilry that affected, and changed the course of, three lives. She mentioned the Easter of Easters and described its distressing aftermath, with Daisy prey to sudden rages, shrieking and crying and pulling at her hair. It was entirely thanks to these fits of temper, which stopped as soon as Daisy had recovered from the datura poisoning, that she, Nelly, became a schoolteacher. None of the schools in the county would accept the troublesome eleven-year-old, whose bad behaviour threatened to assume the status of legend. The doctors who examined her were agreed that Daisy was quite seriously disturbed, one of them even recommending shock treatment – ‘a quick current through the brain’. They were diagnosing madness, but in relatively cosier words: words such as ‘unstable’, ‘upset’, ‘unbalanced’ and – kindest of all – ‘capricious’. Daisy was a problem child, that was certain, and likely to remain a problem unless something drastic was done. The drugs she was prescribed caused her to be lethargic, closed-in on herself. She was a breathing nothing. Realising that she preferred her daughter annoyingly alive rather than semi-dead, Nelly threw the pills out with the rubbish and came to a decision.

  ‘We were famous for a while – oh, the shortest of whiles – in nineteen fifty-eight. We had out photograph in the papers – battling mother in the middle and a twin on either side. I was the divorced woman who had asserted her right to educate her children and succeeded where others had failed. I say “succeeded”, but my success then was only temporary. I was on trial. I had to prove that I was capable of teaching Daisy and Kitty to a reasonably high standard; but more than that, I had to prove the doctors wrong. They suggested that Daisy should be put away in a special home and I opposed the suggestion. I was teacher and healer combined. What a challenge I’d set myself. I would wake in the night and sweat buckets at the thought of what I’d taken on, and what its outcome might be.’

  Yet those were enchanted years, those five years of Daisy’s and Kitty’s schooling, in retrospect. She had never studied so hard or so diligently: ‘I had to, in order to keep a class ahead of my pupils.’ As soon as the girls were in bed, she would set out the books she required on the kitchen table and labour by candle-light into the small hours. She often kept herself awake, as Balzac did, by drinking black coffee, but there were many occasions when the stimulant was unnecessary – when the excitement of rediscovery (a Shakespeare sonnet; a fable of La Fontaine; Elizabeth’s speech at Tilbury; a mathematical equation that now seemed simple, where once it had been obscure) carried her happily along. Every few months an examiner would appear, unheralded, to check up on their progress – hers as much as Daisy’s and Kitty’s. He was sceptical about Mrs Crozier’s perverse enterprise, he usually declared, but he was willing to concede that Kitty, at least, was doing passably well, despite the absence of other bright students for her to compete with. Daisy’s written work was dull, but she was better than Kitty at addition and subtraction. When another examiner, two years on, remarked that Daisy was a ‘really old-fashioned young lady’, Nelly knew that she had calmed the beast in her daughter and wooed her back to sanity.

  ‘Oh dear, yes. Daisy was an insufferable adolescent, because she was insufferable in the wrong way. She was so sensible. Kitty, I am glad to tell you, Virgil, was already showing signs of going interestingly haywire.’

  ‘What is haywire?’

  ‘Haywire is crazy. She was crazy at university, what with drugs and drink and Freddy. Daisy stayed on here with me, alas, until she whisked Cecil off his feet, or he whisked her off hers – I’m still not sure which one of them did the whisking.’

  ‘I smoked pot with Freddy. That wasn’t crazy, Nelly.’

  ‘It was crazy enough to a woman like me. The wildest thing I’d done was marrying Felix. Your education wasn’t eccentric, was it, Virgil?’

  ‘It was, in a sense. At liceu, I learned there was much I was not intended to learn. I had to believe that the history of my people was lost in continuous darkness until the light of Communism started shining. I didn’t believe it. My Uncle Mircea taught me otherwise. It was from him that I heard of Mircea the Old, Vlad epe, Alexander the Good, Stephen the Great, Peter Rare and Michael the Brave. They are some of our heroes. They were lost in that darkness when I was a schoolboy. Not now, though. In Romania nowadays it is safe to speak their names. The tide has turned. We are Nationalists as well as Communists now – Communist Nationalists or Nationalist Communists. Whatever. Both are acceptable. As for me, I am neither. I am, I think, unacceptable.’

  (He did not add that he was suspicious of heroes, wary of heroics. The heroism he wished to emulate was not that of conquerors or warriors. He was thirteen again and his father was standing over him: ‘Where is your spirit, Virgil?’ Constantin Florescu flicked through the pages of the book his son was trying to read and stopped at the poem ‘Liceu’. ‘What kind of a man is it who compares his school to a cemetery? The cemetery of his youth? The cemetery with long corridors? What kind of man, Virgil?’ He waited for Constantin Florescu to answer his own question. ‘A drunkard. A morbid drunkard. Your school isn’t a cemetery, is it?’

  ‘No, Tatã,’ he said. ‘No, Tatã, of course not.’)

  ‘On this one night of the year, Virgil, I tend to succumb to a fit of piety. Kitty does, too. Would you like to join us?’

  ‘In prayer?’ he asked hesitantly.

  ‘Not quite. We mumble the responses.’

  ‘In church, Nelly means. We’re going to St Mary’s, in the village. We can walk there in ten minutes.’

  ‘I will come with you.’

  He sat between Nelly and Kitty in the tiny Norman church. He rose when they rose and smiled as they bellowed out the unfamiliar carols. He was a silent witness, as they were, when the villagers took communion. He heard the vicar (‘My mean-spirited bridge partner,’ Nelly whispered) remind the congregation that Christ’s birth in the lowly stable signified that true goodness was come into the world. Then, as the congregation chanted the Lord’s Prayer, a memory surfaced. He and Radu were at the rear of another murmuring congregation, silent witnesses to a crude religious ceremony. The crowd had gathered seconds earlier, as it were spontaneously, to offer respects to the passing Conducãtor. The moment the presidential limousine slid into view, the young worshippers began to intone

  Du-te în pizda mãtii

  Du-te în pizda mãtii

  as though the words formed part of the Divine Liturgy.

  Du-te în pizda mãtii

  they recited in unison as the object of their devotions peered at their solemn faces through bullet-proof glass. The Conducator waved to his worshippers, who persisted in advising him to get back into his mother’s cunt.

  Kitty had taken his hand in hers, he realised. He was beside her in the English church. The chanting was over. There was one last carol to sing.

  ‘We shan’t need these,’ said Kitty, removing the two hot-water bottles Nelly had put between the sheets. ‘We’d have perished from frostbite without them those first winters we lived here. When it was really cold, when the wind came howling down the valley, the three of us slept together, huddled up like eskimos, in Nelly’s bed. But you can keep me warm tonight.’

  In the poem ‘Breaking the Glass’, which he spoke to her before
they joined Nelly for breakfast on Christmas morning, the soul of a dead man is anxious to be released from the body in which it has been confined and constricted for a lifetime. The dead man’s brother goes to the window facing the deathbed and tries to smash it with his fist. The glass doesn’t break. He tries again, with a hammer. The glass – ordinary, fragile, everyday glass – remains unbreakable. The dead man’s son runs out to the street, looks about him and finds a large stone, which he brings back and hurls at the window, confident of success. The stone bounces off the window, as if it were a rubber ball.

  The corpse is washed from head to toe and the cooling water poured on the roots of a tree. The man is buried in his finest clothes, according to ritual. The priest says the final blessing – ‘May the earth be light on him’ – and the grave-diggers begin their business of covering up the coffin. A cry of anguish, no louder than a whimper, is heard from the grave.

  The dead man’s family – his brother, his son, his son’s wife, his grandchildren, his multitude of cousins – return to the house. Wine is drunk and cakes are eaten. At dusk, the curtains are drawn. The son enters the bedroom where his father died and stands in thought at the window. He touches the stubborn glass with his fingertips. There is a cackle of laughter as the glass shatters into fragments.

  ‘Mumbo-jumbo, Kitty. “Breaking the Glass” is my mumbo-jumbo poem. I think I believe every word of it.’

  5

  The Time of Afterwards

  ‘Am I speaking to Kitty Crozier? Miss Kitty Crozier?’

  ‘You are. Is that Miss Whiteside?’

  ‘This is she. How did you recognise my voice?’