by Tobias Hill
I am in love
And that is my shame.
What hurts my soul
My soul adores,
No better than a beast
Upon all fours.
Old Street makes things no simpler. The cats follow Dora around, in and out and up and down, like inscrutable informants, and their mistress loiters on the stairs, leaves her door ajar, and barters her half-imagined rumours with the railwaymen’s wives downstairs. The walls might as well have ears. And then the shop is close, so near that Solly can be home when Dora least expects him, looking for a kiss or company, a working for a watch, mustard for a sandwich.
On the City Road, by Moorgate, there are four telephones, the boxes all lined up like soldiers. On Friday afternoons – that being when Solly works late, hoping for the weekend crowds – Dora dials, pays, gives a name that is not hers, and waits to be put through. ‘How are you?’ she asks, and if Michael says, ‘very well,’ or ‘never better,’ her chest tightens, because it means he’ll come; but if he says, ‘Busy today,’ she hangs up and walks homewards with her lying heart in tatters.
Christmas, he buys her pearls. Learn from my weaknesses, her father told her once, in Danzig, near the end; Don’t put your faith in things. But her father is long gone, him and his treasured possessions, and it seems to Dora now that her lover’s gift is more than just an object. As she lifts the rope against herself its lustre takes her breath away; then, ‘Michael!’ she exclaims, and he laughs and settles back to watch her.
She wears them only that winter, with him. For years, afterwards, she takes them from their hiding place, wherever it is she lives, whenever she is missing Michael and sure to be alone. Not to put them on again – because there is no one to share them – but to recall that Michael once gave her such things. They are dark, the pearls, and their hues alter, ashen in one light, burnt umber in another; and Dora, when she looks at them, sees what she suspects Michael did not, at least in any way he might have admitted to himself: that their colours recollect those of Bernadette Malcolm.
It is sex with them, or argument. There is no middle ground, nor are the two things so far apart. Each is heartfelt, gut-felt. Fighting with Michael is nothing like arguing with Solly. They never quibble, she and Michael; they never bicker.
‘You don’t make love to me.’
‘What do I do, then?’ And when she turns her head away, ‘If you can do it, you can say it.’
‘What would you do with her?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he says, but he does, he knows all too well that she means Bernadette. That she means, Do you care for me because you never cared for her?
‘You can tell me. Tell me. What would you do?’
He laughs. It is a cruel laugh, but the pitilessness is all for himself. He sits up, lights a cigarette. ‘You’re mad,’ he says. ‘You must be mad, to be jealous of the dead.’
In January he stops taking her calls. The first time it happens she understands that Mary must be with him, or someone else so proximate that he doesn’t trust himself to speak. He is busy with family, she knows – he has been moving himself, from Holloway to a bigger place on Highbury Fields – but the next Friday it’s the same, and the week after.
‘Mr Lockhart is in a meeting,’ the secretaries tell her, ‘perhaps you might call back tomorrow?’ They are prim and tart, or so it seems to Dora, as if they’ve come to their own conclusions.
On the first Saturday in February she goes with Solly to Columbia Road. The new estate is going up, and whatever their misgivings or allegiances there is a thrill to the scale of the ascension. They buy kippers at Lee’s and tobacco at Shaw’s, and a dozen freckled market eggs, because they look so pretty and they can afford them, now. It is crisp and bright, and Solly too is sunny, full of plans, prodding his pipe at the dreams that lie mid-air before them. They’re almost home when Dora sees Michael’s car, its muzzle jutting from the narrow shadows of Boot Street.
‘Oh, milk!’ she says, once they’re in, ‘Solly, we’ll need a pint for the kippers, I don’t want the stink of them frying. I’ll just run out for it,’ and she does run: flees, almost, before Solly can offer himself.
The car still lurks in Boot Street. Michael sees her coming, leans to get the door. Already her eyes are tearing. Before he can speak, before she can think to stop herself, Dora has slapped him.
There is silence in the blow’s wake. The slap is her question and she waits for his answer. He could hit her back, there are men that would. Part of her hopes he will, but she isn’t surprised when he doesn’t. He doesn’t have that in him, despite Bernadette or because of her: Dora knows him, now, and is sure of it.
He raises his hand to check his face. One side still bears her fingers’ imprints, with a deeper bloom where her rings have caught his cheekbone.
‘Are you done?’
‘No. Yes. Do you hate me?’
‘I wish I did, it would make things easier.’
‘You don’t want to see me again. That’s it, isn’t it? Why don’t you?’
‘Your husband knows.’
For a while she says nothing. She is lost for words: she gapes like the fish he keeps in their ornamented tank. She sags back, holds onto his gaze. Later she wonders if she faints: certainly, when she comes back to herself, she has lost the sense of what he has been telling her.
‘. . . Last week, too,’ he is saying. ‘You never looked my way. I wanted to tell you to your face. He came by the office three weeks back. Might have been out there all day waiting, he looked cold enough. He saw my face and I saw his. He knows, I saw it in his eyes, he made sure of it. You never mentioned me?’
‘No,’ she whispers, ‘no, of course not, never.’
‘Your man’s no fool, though. He twigged to something. He can put two and two together.’
‘But he never told me. Why wouldn’t he?’
‘That’s between you and him.’
‘Because he wants me,’ she says as it comes to her, ‘and he won’t let me have you.’ Michael broods on that, nods. ‘Don’t you?’ she asks, ‘want me?’
‘Dora –’
She raises her chin. ‘I don’t care. Let him know. Michael?’ she asks, but what she is asking she hardly knows, and besides, his expression has drawn in.
‘I won’t have Mary finding out.’
‘What if she does? What does it matter?’ She laughs. ‘Oh, Michael, don’t tell me I’d be the first.’
‘It would be hard on her,’ Michael says, ‘it being you. You’re part and parcel of the worst of it for her.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she says, and he scowls. He would rather speak of anything than this. ‘The Buildings, the Malcolms. The dead, Dora. Mary would take you badly. I won’t have that.’
‘But she won’t find out. We’ll be more careful, and Solly would never –’
‘Are you sure of that?’ Michael asks, and she knows he’s right. What does she know of Solly, who has gone on all these weeks as if nothing has changed between them?
‘Dora,’ he says then, as gently as he is able, ‘we were never built to last. We both knew it from the start.’
‘I didn’t. Don’t you tell me what I know.’
‘I’m telling you we’re done. I’m sorry. Look, I’ve fixed the other place for you, up at the estate. It won’t be much of a garden, community spaces are what they’re all about now. You’ll hear from them – Dora!’
She is out by then. She is running again and doesn’t stop till she’s home. She forgets the milk, of course, though it hardly matters. Solly doesn’t mention it. They have the kippers fried, the curtains reek of them for weeks, and nothing is said between them, not then, not once, not ever.
It ends then. It doesn’t end when she finds out where he lives. She doesn’t go to Highbury Fields, one chill March evening, to ask for the Lockhart house. She never waits under the plane trees, watching the lights of his windows for hours until she sees his form: nor does she edge closer, lurking on the
green, until he comes out to her. What if she had? What would he have said? But she would have stopped him, she would have stopped him with a kiss, and when he told her no she would have bitten him, fastened onto him with her teeth. When he shoved her away she would have wiped the blood from her mouth, her eyes shining with the taste of him.
You stay away from me, he would have hissed, you stay away from me and mine. Then – had she done these things – she would have gone. And after all, would it have been worth it? To be sure of the end of it? But it can’t have happened that way. Only a woman with no pride would go so far. Only a madwoman would do those things, and afterwards go home to her husband with the taste of her lover still on her tongue.
What kind of husband would let that pass? Hers would look up from his pages, his eyes still wanting. He’d kiss her a welcome. How are you, dear? he would ask her, and she would answer, It’s so cold outside. Never mind, he’d have said, never mind. It’s warm in here.
*
Besides, it never ends. Days might pass at a time, but then something will bring him back. A woman will laugh like Bernadette, and she will pity Michael all over again. Or it will be the back of a man’s head in a crowd, or Solly’s touch as she’s sleeping: or Iris, when she used to come; Iris’s eyes, and the remnant of his accent in hers. How frightened she was, the first time Iris rang! She thought that she had been found out, that Michael’s daughter had come to bring her to book.
She’ll always love him now. It is 1968, the end of autumn. The days are shortening. The nights are lit with harvest moons, even here, where nothing waits for harvesting. Dora rises from Solly’s lap and goes in. She hears the radio start up again, her man humming along. She goes into the bedroom, opens her dresser, draws out a box. From it she takes the black pearls. She lifts them against her neck. She looks up into her eyes.
*
1988
(The Fisher King)
1. Dawn
London, dark and early. No light yet except the moon, that and what the city gives. Clouds the size of motherships, their bellies urbilucent rose.
In the Hotel Ibis, Euston, Michael Lockhart lies alone, half dressed in evening clothes. His breath is rank, from age and from the drink he failed to hold last night. He sweats soured vintages. His breath comes haltingly, apnoeic: a watcher or intruder might think him dying in his sleep. Only his pulse still moves, and his eyes, under their lids.
One arm lies thrown out, like that of a suicide or singer. Gold gleams dully at his wrist. How far Michael has come from the Columbia Road Buildings, from his days of cutthroats and carnations! Still, there’s a hunger to him, a needful severity. Even asleep, he has a look which says, Don’t touch my plate, I’m not yet done with that.
In his dreams he shrugs off years: they come away so easily. What does a man like Michael dream about? The same as anyone. Michael dreams of Michael, every night, in one skin or another. Asleep, he’s selfish as a child, as rooted in himself. Of others he dreams only of cobbled forms he fears or craves. Sometimes it might be Dora, and then he’ll groan at the clench of her teeth in his cheek, but most nights he dreams of family; more nights than not, of Mary.
This morning it isn’t her. Instead it is the Lockhart men, the company of his childhood. Michael’s stroke is still to come – the war itself is still to come, and the years of punishment – and he is a boy again, cocksure, fifteen, without impediment.
‘How about a song, Dad?’
‘No, I’m not in the mood.’
‘Oh, aye? Look out, lads, the old man’s got the hump.’
‘You’d have one yourself, Mickey, if you ever bothered with the news. It don’t turn a fellow on to singing. Who’s took my apron?’
‘Jerry, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘You can laugh now.’
‘So I can and so I do. How about a story, then? Christy, you’ll have one.’
‘Nothing mild enough for your tender ears. Besides, a song’s better for shop.’
‘Graeme?’
‘I’ll work to either.’
‘To neither, more like. Go on, Dad.’
‘I’m thinking.’
‘Hold the front page!’
‘Will you not prattle on? Alright, now. There was a man like the three of you, by which I mean still half boy where it mattered most, up here –’
‘– So says you!’
‘– Strong of arm and thick of wit, and his mother called him Percival. Percy aimed to be a knight, so off he went to make his name. One evening he was riding and he came into a barren land. In its hills no tree put on its green, in its valleys no flower bloomed, and its fields lay unsown, because no seed would flourish in them.
Now Percy came to a river. An old man was fishing there, from a pinchbeck little boat moored up on the other side, and he had with him two boatmen. One was busy gutting fish while the other held a lamp, and this one saw the rider and tugged at his master’s sleeve.
Who’s that, the fisher calls, trespassing in my lands?
Lord, Percy calls back – thinking himself very civil – I am Percival, and I seek to cross your river.
Your luck’s out, lad, says the fisher. My little boat won’t do, nor will you find bridge nor ford, not here nor elsewhere in my kingdom.
Now, Percy knew little of the world, and of its kingdoms only Arthur’s – that being the isle of Britain – and he didn’t think he could have strayed so far as to have left that behind. Still, not wanting to offend, he knelt before the fisher, as a knight would to a king. Sire, he says, if there’s no way across, I’ll beg a night’s boarding.
The fisher gave him a hungry look and pointed with his rod. My hall lies on your bank, says he. You’ll have shelter of me there. Ride upstream and I’ll follow.
So Percy went upriver, into the woods where the trees put on no green, and the day was between the dog and the wolf, the sun was almost set, he was picking his way and losing it along the dusky bridle paths, grumbling all the time that the old codger had played him false, when up ahead he saw a light, and there was the hall of the fisher king.
A big place it was, but a sorry one, too, just like the lands around it. The walls were overgrown, and what had grown no longer grew, but lay dead as if struck off at the roots. There was no banter in the yard, no hounds to start up barking. Percy banged at the door. Out came men for his horse and arms and in they led him. Gloomy, they were, and inside stood a lily-white girl as maudlin as her men, who washed Percy’s hands and feet and showed him to his place at table.
Now in at the door came the fisher king, hollering for his supper. The boatmen were at his sides, and by the firelight Percy saw their liege was lame. He weren’t that old when it came to it, he still had all his hair on him, but he was houghed, which means hamstrung, and his legs couldn’t bear him.
Up to his throne limped the fisher king, and at his word the meal was brought. First came soup, in a gilt tureen that made the trestle groan. Fish soup, it was, and the fisher king drank it up through his moustaches, but Percy only played with his, because it hardly hit the spot, a soup, after a long day’s riding.’
‘You can’t get your teeth into soup.’
‘So Percy thought himself. Still, he held his tongue, as he felt a knight would in company.
Next came gruel, in a fine cauldron it took two men to bear. Fish gruel, it was, and the fisher king wolfed it down and mopped his beard, but Percy couldn’t help but think, fine crockery’s all well and good if you’ve something worth putting in it. What kind of king eats gruel? I could murder a pie, he thought – but he kept his mouth shut, because his mother always said to mind his manners.
After that three men came in, carrying an iron spear. Blade to butt the weapon was as long as the three men were tall, and in the hearthlight Percy saw blood shining down its haft, and the men themselves were downcast. What’s happened now? thought Percy. He saw the king was eyeing him, as if eager to tell his tale, but still the young man held his tongue, as he thought only proper.
Percy jumped up from his place. There sat the king beside him, head on neck, neck on trunk, though his gaze was keen and waiting; but Percy asked nothing of him. He didn’t know what to ask, or how to ask, or where to start, the supper having turned so strange and inhospitable. He was a callow boy, one who’d been raised gently and who aimed at being a gentleman. So the girl passed on and the king arose, and off they all went to their rest. Come morning Percy thanked the girl for his bed and board (such as it was, what with the fish), and took his leave of her.
He came to the woods and he came to the river and what did he find in the light but a ford. So the old man tricked me after all, Percy says to himself, but there being no harm done he spurred his horse across. Soon enough he found a road. By it grew ripe orchards and down it was a city that looked British as Birmingham. Percy rode up to the gates where a beggar sat, whistling birdsongs, and Percy threw him down a coin, because a knight shows charity.
Thanks for a kindness, the beggar says, and safe journey, Percival, flower of warriors, candle of knights, though you’re a callow boy and leave troubles like weeds behind you.
How do you know me? asks Percy, and what have I left behind?
A wounded land, says the beggar, a wounded king, and you who might have healed him.
Me? says Percy. What do I know of wounds or healing, bleeding heads or bloody spears? What was I meant to do?
