by Paul Bailey
‘It’s happened,’
‘What has, Daisy?’
‘What has what?’
‘What has happened?’
‘It has, silly. It has, finally.’
‘I’m none the wiser.’
‘Aren’t you? Aren’t you?’
‘No, Daisy. Calm yourself and tell me what has happened.’
‘Easy for you to be calm. Easy for you to stay calm. It isn’t easy for me.’
‘I am losing patience with you.’
‘Are you really? You’re losing patience with you? You’re a great comfort, I don’t think.’
‘I want to comfort you, Daisy. I can see how unhappy you are. Now please tell me what has happened.’
‘It has, silly. The impossible has. The unimaginable.’
‘I haven’t the imagination to imagine the unimaginable, so will you please tell me what it is.’
There was a long silence, during which Daisy bit her lower lip. ‘Him,’ she said at last. ‘It’s him. My husband.’
‘Cecil?’
‘I don’t have any other. Yes, that is his name.’
‘Oh, my poor dear Daisy, he isn’t dead?’
‘Much worse than that. I could put up with him dying. He’s left me. The boring bastard’s left me.’
Kitty could not say she was surprised, because she wasn’t. ‘For somebody else?’
‘Yes, silly, for somebody else. Some body else. She is half his age. He claims he loves her, the disgusting hypocrite. She’s juicier meat is the reason. Young and juicy. If I could get to him with a knife. I’d cut his ugly little thingamajig right off. Snip, snip. That’s what he’s thinking with. Snip, snip, I’d go.’
Kitty shuddered, hearing the phrase from childhood.
‘Snip, bloody snip,’ Daisy shouted.
‘I’m so sorry, my dear.’
‘Not more sorry than I am. Not more sickeningly bloody sorry than I am. I wonder if Gillian has noticed his varicose veins. He has a particularly horrible one bulging out of the back of his leg. I wonder if she strokes it.’
‘Shall I make you some tea, Daisy?’
‘Shall you make me some tea? No, you bloody shan’t. I’m not an invalid, silly. Open his precious drinks cabinet. Pour me a whisky, or gin, or anything.’
‘There only seems to be sherry.’
‘Sherry will do. Sherry will do me fine. Anything will do me fine.’
‘My poor Daisy.’
‘He won’t be leaving me poor, baby sister. I’ll take his money if I take nothing else. I’ll pocket his shekels at the very least.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘You bet of course. She’s six months pregnant, this Gillian creature. She’s twenty-three and pregnant by a man who will soon be fifty – that’s her happy lot. Good God, Kitty, I’ve endured his jokes for most of my life. His truly appalling jokes.’
‘Yes,’ Kitty said quietly, soothingly. ‘Yes, you have.’
‘I deserve a medal for suffering them. A long-service medal, embossed. What can she see in him? It’s as plain as day what he sees in her, but what in hell can she see in him? He’s nothing to look at, and his head’s full of stocks and shares, and not much besides. He’s not what anyone would call cultivated. Is he? Is he?’
‘No. Perhaps he isn’t.’
‘Perhaps? No perhaps about it, silly. He’s dull. He used to be dull and dependable, but now he’s just dull. He’ll bore this Gillian stupid, if she isn’t completely stupid already, which she must be. He’s in for a mighty surprise when he comes home with his tail between his veiny legs, after Gillian has chucked him over.’
‘You haven’t mentioned Andrew and Janet, Daisy.’
‘No, I haven’t. There’s my clever-as-ever baby sister. He told them face to face. They received the news before their mother did. I got a letter. He sat down with them and broke the news and said he couldn’t help himself, he was in love, Gillian had changed his life, he was a different man – all the usual drivel men of his kind come out with when a delicious bit of younger flesh is pushed in their direction. Yes, he had the courage, if that’s what it is – the courtesy, Kitty – to speak to them, face to face, but what did his wife get? A snivelling, grovelling, miserable letter – half a page of regrets and apologies with a thank you at the bottom. Thank you, indeed. No words of love for me. Only a thank you.’
‘Are they very upset?’
‘I suppose they are. A mother’s the last person to know what her children are feeling. They’re more Trappist than ever is all I can tell you. Andrew says “Oh, Ma” when I manage to catch his eye and Janet stares into space. Which means, I suppose, they’re upset. I hope that “yes” is the answer to your question.’
‘I’m sure it is.’
‘You’re the authority, are you?’ Daisy shouted. ‘When did you give birth? You’re sure, are you, silly?’
Kitty nodded.
‘It isn’t as if I’ve been like you. I’ve been loyal and faithful. I’ve been a good wife. I haven’t had infatuations like you. I’ve never allowed myself the luxury. I remember, if you don’t, what a fool you made of yourself with that kaftanned creature with the common accent. I have never, but never, been like you.’
‘No, Daisy, you haven’t.’
‘And here you are, at an age when most people are behaving with decorum – yes, that’s the correct word, decorum; when most people have attained a bit of decorum, you are behaving – you are behaving –’
‘Indecorously?’
‘And worse. If you could just see how you look at your daft Romanian park attendant you’d blush to your roots with embarrassment. I’ve never behaved the way you’re behaving. I’ve always had more sense, more dignity, more bloody self-respect. It’s not as if I’ve been like you. I could understand if I’d been the irresponsible type like you – a clever silly, flitting from man to man with no thought of the consequences – but I have always been responsible. At least I can say I haven’t been like you.’
‘Yes, dear, at least you can say that.’
‘I can and will. I’ve tried to be as different from you and Nelly as I possibly could, and this is what happens to me. I’m not some kind of Bohemian, am I? I don’t deserve this treatment. I don’t bloody deserve it.’
‘No, Daisy, you don’t.’
‘He can’t even boil an egg. I had to bully him whenever I wanted him to do what I call men’s housework. She’ll have to bully him, too, if she needs anything done to their love nest. The leopard doesn’t change his spots, does he? He is certainly one leopard who won’t. You can bet safe money on that.’
(Daisy Hopkins received Cecil’s ‘snivelling, grovelling, miserable letter’ on 26 April 1989 and Kitty visited her the following day. It was to be the first of many comforting visits. She listened with a willed patience to each of Daisy’s familiar, much repeated complaints and gave no response when reminded of the numerous infatuations she had enjoyed, including her latest with the ‘daft Romanian park attendant’. Cecil, now, was denied his name. ‘He’, ‘him’, the ‘boring bastard’, ‘my husband that was’ – it was as if the voicing of ‘Cecil’ was beyond Daisy’s powers. Daisy’s concern was entirely with Daisy, Kitty discovered. Daisy had been wronged, rejected, and he, the husband that was, had had no reason in the world to reject her, other than simple lust.)
‘I wouldn’t have him back if he came begging to me. Begging on his hands and knees. Imploring me to forgive him. Not even then would I take him back.’
He sighed when she told him that Cecil had separated from Daisy, to live, with a younger woman.
‘Cecil is a serious man. He has not done this lightly. He is not cast in the same mould as the diverting Felix. He has not been a wandering husband, of that I am certain. My father was a wanderer, Kitty. He wandered from my mother whenever he had the chance and he found himself plenty of chances. I am sure some woman is with him this very minute.’
It was a custom, in his father’s youth, if not the custom, amon
g those who had risen above the peasantry to have – how could he say? Which word should he use? – a free marriage. Constantin Florescu had been free throughout his marriage to Matilda, free as a migrating bird, just as his father Ovidiu had been free before him. It was said of Ovidiu that he was un vrai Parisien, a title reserved for only the most practised wanderers from the marital bed.
‘I have broken with the family tradition, I fear. I cannot speak for my brother Relu. He has a wife and children. Perhaps he has taken to wandering, in honour of his Tatã.’
(‘Shall we talk about our previous lovers?’ she had asked him early on. ‘Or shall we leave them in peace, in the past?’
He had answered, ‘Let’s get them over with.’
‘Who’s going first?’
‘Will you, Kitty? And try not to be too affectionate, too eloquent.’
There was Freddy, she said, and really there was no one else. He was of average height, with a cascade of blond hair, and his eyes were greenish-grey or greyish-green, depending. He wore beads and colourful clothes, and smoked pot and read Hermann Hesse and Rabindranath Tagore, and talked of universal love and understanding in an entrancing – to her ears, entrancing – Cockney accent. He was like a thousand others, then, except that he wasn’t. The sweetness of his disposition was genuine, not assumed. He stole her young heart and she hoped from this distance in time that she had once stolen his.
‘You lived with him?’
‘Oh yes. In happy disarray. In a damp basement flat with fungi sprouting up through the floorboards. Our magic mushrooms, we called them. We burned incense to cover up the musty smell.’
Their idyllic existence ended with an abruptness neither of them could have anticipated. When Freddy had his beautiful, flowing locks shorn off she failed to see the act of desecration for the portent it was. The almost-bald Freddy said nothing that day of the drastic change that had taken place inside him. The next evening, when she came home from the Italian food shop where she was working, Freddy was gone. He had pinned a note to the kitchen wall. She read that he had seen the light and that he was following it to Ethiopia. It was signed with the letter ‘F’, under which he had written a couple of ‘X’s, as kisses. Nothing more.
‘I couldn’t eat the freshly made tortellini I had brought back for us. I was devastated. I was suicidal. I was convinced I would never recover.’
Months after his departure he wrote her a letter of explanation, or perhaps justification. Yes, justification was the appropriate word. He needed to justify his hasty exit from their relationship. He began by saying that what he had done would strike most people as unjustifiable, but he wasn’t a cruel man and she wasn’t most people. He had been driven by a force, a higher power, he was unable to resist. His road to Damascus was Marsham Street in London, round the corner from Westminster Abbey. He was strolling past the Missionary Society building when his attention was caught by a photograph in the window of a starving child. Just another familiar starving child, he thought, and then his feet were leading him up the steps, through the door and into the foyer, where he asked a woman sitting by a desk what he could do for that child and others like him. He could do voluntary work, she replied, and handed him a form to fill in, and advised him to go to the recruitment office, which was in a square nearby. She suggested, politely, that he ought to consider stopping off at a barber’s on the way.
‘That’s how I lost Freddy, Virgil – to a photograph. His letter was the last contact I had with him. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead.’
The verb ‘to comfort’ and a melancholy Romanian folk song – it was impossible to forget the names of the women in Virgil’s life: Alina and Doina. She would ask Radu Sava if he had ever met Alina and Doina, and he would laugh his chesty laugh and say he certainly had, because he was married to Alina, and as for Doina – oh, she would have to meet Doina in the flesh, in order to appreciate her. ‘You have the phrase “Seeing is believing”. Perhaps you will not believe Doina.’
Virgil had described Doina as ‘spirited’, but the word seemed inadequate, Kitty would think, in the face of Doina’s exuberance.
‘I smiled, Kitty, when there was nothing to smile about. Mine was a smiling philosophy. It was very simple. I smiled in public. I dared to look pleased with life, when life was complete shit. I waited in line for bread or meat, and when they passed by, our soldiers or our adorable secret police, I flashed them a smile, as if to say, “Shopping is such a pleasure in Bucharest.” I walked with an artificial bounce in my step and smiled until my jaw ached. One day, when we have a true democracy here, I shall welcome every opportunity to parade my unhappiness, but by then I shall be old and weary and toothless, I expect.’)
‘You don’t have any plans to wander, do you, sweetheart?’
‘No, Kitty,’ he protested. ‘No, no, no.’
Daisy flinched as Kitty attempted to embrace her. ‘I can’t bear to be touched. Not by anyone.’
‘Does anyone include your children?’
‘They’ve never been what I call touchers. There’s no danger of my being touched by that department.’
‘Danger?’
‘It’s just a word, silly. Just a word. By “danger” I don’t mean “danger”. Of course I don’t.’
‘I understand.’
‘I should hope so, with your famous intelligence. What are you doing here, anyway?’
‘You asked me to come over and keep you company. You phoned me an hour ago.’
‘Did I? Perhaps I did. I suppose I did. Well, now that you’ve arrived, you can make yourself useful.’
‘Willingly, Daisy. How?’
I wish I could change you, Kitty thought during the long silence that followed. I wish I could influence you. I wish I could take away your rage. ‘How, Daisy?’
‘How what?’
‘How can I be of use?’
Daisy shook her head slowly. She snorted. She said, ‘You can’t. No one can. I’ve been cast aside. Haven’t I? By him, for Christ’s sake. By the unlikeliest man in the world. What a Lothario. What a Casanova. What an Adonis. What a Rudolph Valentino. What a heart-breaker. What a Don Juan. What a sight for sore eyes. What a pin-up. What a man in a million. What a charmer. What a Felix Crozier. Yes, what a handsome beast. What a vision. What a glorious vision. What a knight in shining armour. Yes, that’s what he is, that’s what she thinks he is. That’s what.’
Kitty sat with her sister for another hour. Neither spoke. Then she rose, blew Daisy a kiss and let herself out of the quiet house.
Of all the stories he told her in those last months, none was stranger – the stranger for being true – than the one he remembered that warm Wednesday evening. He was at the stove, frying fillets of lemon sole for their supper, when he remarked that he had met a fat man that afternoon while he was working – ‘Hoeing, to be precise’ – in the park. He wouldn’t be telling her about a fat man if the fat man hadn’t talked to him. ‘In a high-pitched voice, Kitty, a very high-pitched voice, like a castrato.’
The voice had startled him, and the man had smiled and said, ‘I’m a bit of a freak of nature, nothing more. Don’t be scared of me. When I answer the telephone at home I’m always mistaken for my wife. Dora and I have learnt to enjoy the confusion.’
The man had introduced himself as David, and he as Virgil, anglicised, and the two of them had chatted. David bred goats ‘for purposes of yoghurt’, which was produced by Dora and her team of willing ladies on their farm in the Midlands.
‘And I revealed that I am Romanian and lucky to be in London and doubly lucky to be in love with an Englishwoman. He accepted a handful of raisins and waddled away – “waddled” is a good word, isn’t it? – with three of the white roses he had stopped to admire.’
The man’s incongruous voice, the eerie sound of it, had stayed with him for the rest of the afternoon. It was reminding him of something, but he couldn’t imagine what. He had no castrati among his friends – not yet, anyway. He was perplexed.
&nbs
p; ‘It wasn’t until I reached the bottom of Exhibition Road that the penny dropped, as you say. It was the memory of a memory that was plaguing me. It was my mother who had heard a voice like the fat man’s. When she was a girl, on a visit to the capital with her father.’
(The voice she heard, in June 1932, in the baking-hot city, belonged to the driver of the carriage the young Matilda and her Tatã were driving in. They had picked up the trãsurã, the droshky, at the Gare du Nord, and Matilda had stared in wonder at the sleek and shiny horse, and the impossibly tall man who was brushing its coat with gentle strokes. He was dressed in a black velvet robe and wore a fetching white cap. And his skin, she saw, was as soft as a woman’s, as delicate as any fine lady’s.
His hips were womanly, too – the ample hips of a plump matron. He had a man’s slender shape down to his waist, but then his body expanded alarmingly. She stared at this phenomenon, who caught her stare and wished her good-day and lifted her into the cab. On hearing the driver speak she giggled, for the strange noise that came from his mouth seemed to belong to his soft skin and his big hips, rather than the manly parts of him. She gazed into his sad brown eyes and her fit of giggling subsided. She blushed with shame at her rudeness. She did not giggle again.
The droshky set off, with a horde of the station’s sooty urchins in pursuit. Matilda’s father took several small coins out of the ‘beggar bag’ he always carried in Bucharest and tossed them into the street. The children scrabbled after the money, shrieking and swearing and cursing the miser, the zgircit, who had not thrown notes.
Soon their cries died away and for a while Matilda was serenaded by the steady clip-clop of the horse’s hoofs. She wanted to ask her father why the driver’s voice was so funny, but knew that now was not the time for such a question. tefan Popescu, sensing her curiosity, patted her hand and whispered, ‘Later.’
She learned, in the evening, at the dining-table of their relatives, the Anghelescu family, that the driver of the trãsurã was of Russian origin and a member of a peculiar – some would say crazy; Victor Anghelescu would certainly say crazy – religious sect. To put it in a nutshell: they believed, these escaped Russians, that Christ had returned to the earth in the form of the Czar who never was, Peter the Third, who was supposed to have been murdered on the instructions of his wife, Catherine the Great. These Russians, who called themselves Skoptzi, maintained that Peter did not die and were convinced that he wanders from country to country, the humblest of nomads, waiting to come again in his appointed role as the Redeemer. When he is ready, he will ring the huge bell in Moscow Cathedral and the faithful will gather near him for ever.
