‘I always know if I’m getting a pimple,’ Cecil said.
‘Do you dance in front of them naked with the lights out?’
‘Only if they are most certainly out.’
‘And don’t you hate them all staring back?’
‘Not at all. I can make speeches now with hardly a tremor.’
‘So you have your audience?’
‘I never knew whether I was one or more,’ Cecil replied, and spun round once, hugging himself, so that all the mirrors lurched, and winked as he filled and vacated them.
‘Well I most certainly could only cope with one of myself,’ Persia said.
‘It’s not oneself. It’s others,’ Cecil answered, and began tipping rum balls into a stoneware dish. They showered. It was a room of chocolate pellets, which luckily all went downwards in one direction.
Persia sat on his leather-padded, chrome-legged chair and saw herself everywhere sitting equally in the same time. She was ashamed of her own personal self, of the triangle of thigh which was of flesh and lines, of the twitches and chin which still reeked of childhood and familiar old photographs, and which might still have been filled with baby powder and fluff in the cracks.
‘I don’t think Adrian likes me,’ Persia said after a while, and hoped that Cecil, having occupied Adrian’s area of living for more time, might yield some information, to solve her own problems which were of course, paramount.
Cecil, who was toasting himself in the mirror with a smile as he straightened his cravat, did not seem to mind his own eyes staring at himself, although they were bursting from too much juice and stuffing.
‘Some people you can talk with, and some you can’t,’ he answered. He made a rubbery kiss which he directed at himself. Everywhere wet red lips took the kiss while performing their own equal motion.
‘Can you talk to him?’
‘In a way. Because we are at ends.’
‘Can you talk to people who are far away?’
‘It’s easiest. Because there is a middle in between.’
‘I had thought it was more a matter of empathy.’
‘I rather imagined it was timing.’
The mirrors, which had mastered timing, began more patterns and orders as Persia changed herself over. The door knocked, and Cecil opened it. Then Adrian walked in, still in his shirt and suit trousers, his collar open, showing the hole between two bones where something beat in his throat.
Then all the mirrors burst into applause, because they were filled with such rich beauty and pride, and he turned, and they turned, and the room was full of his turning and his strength, and how he was a man.
He shook hands with Cecil. Persia could see him fighting his eyes, and although they did not stray in her direction, it was more of a compliment that they should make a united effort to remain on any object rather than herself. But the mirrors all around made it difficult not to meet on some plane.
‘How do you do,’ Adrian said to Persia, and bowed, and bowed and bowed again in a multiple listing all over the walls. All the time he was watching Cecil who had begun to pour the coffee into thick hand made pottery cups. You could tell they were hand made because they were not a smooth shape, and were proud of it.
‘I can’t stay for long Cecil,’ Adrian said. ‘I have some work to do.’
‘He always has work to do,’ Cecil answered.
The phone rang, and he went to its call.
‘Yes, Mrs Arnold,’ he said, ‘We do have group concessions . . . Tomorrow would be fine . . . yes . . . I have three new tutors who promise to be very innovative . . . yes . . . come round and I’ll show you the photographs.’
He did some nodding at himself in the mirrors, smiled into the phone, and then hung off.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said.
‘What was it all about?’ Persia asked.
Adrian, who was standing in the centre of the room and ignoring his images as much as he could ignore his own body, interrupted before Cecil could make words from his open mouth.
‘He does some work from home,’ he said firmly, and glowered. Cecil shut his mouth like pig-face when shadows come over.
‘But do you have tutors?’
‘Yes,’ Adrian replied. ‘He’s running a course.’
‘What sort of a course?’
‘Advertising.’
‘I’ll give him a free complimentary lesson one of these days,’ Cecil said, and winked at Adrian, who shuffled himself many times over into eternity.
Cecil involved himself with the rum balls until he was as much a part of them as the chocolate chips they were rolled in. Then he put the cups and coffee into great importance, and made much of bending and bowing and stooping and passing them round, and he was whole ballets which might have been on vast stages.
‘I can see through that door you have a steel cabinet and desk looking place,’ Persia said, ‘of pomposity and companies and business.’
‘He’s full of ideas,’ Adrian remarked. He sat down next to Persia, and his sitting was like hot winds which dry flowers.
‘And what are the photos all about?’ Persia asked.
‘Do you know, I once had a brilliant idea,’ Cecil said.
‘Did you indeed,’ Adrian replied.
‘Yes, it was most brilliant.’
‘I would like to hear what it was.’
Cecil coughed, turned round once lightly, shook himself by the hand, and gasped like goldfish in bowls.
‘Permanent sores,’ he shouted in triumph, as though the idea was not in fact stored, but perfectly fresh.
‘Permanent sores?’ Persia asked. Adrian had screwed himself up so much that he was thrown away.
‘Yes. I would have a clinic with thick carpet and beautiful attendants, and a notice on the door, buy your permanent sores here.’
‘And what were they? The permanent sores?’
‘Like hairdressers. You would come each week and have it maintained, by service contract. And you could wear it on your arm like a bracelet or on your throat like necklaces, except that it would be the product of your own skin and blood, nurtured carefully to our design.’
Cecil winked. Persia laughed, but Adrian just tucked himself further in.
‘See my permanent sore,’ Cecil laughed. He squeezed his arm. ‘I’ve got plenty more pus and juice than you.’
‘I think it would be unhygienic.’
‘Yes, but cheaper than diamonds.’
‘It might leave a scar.’
‘Then you could say, that’s where I had my permanent sore.’
‘Oh,’ Persia said. There was a small pause and they both looked at Adrian, who stood up again as though he might walk out of the room. But instead he turned this gesture to use, and passed round the bowl of rum balls.
‘Once I took him to a symphony concert,’ Cecil said, amazed.
‘Symphony concerts can be most beautiful,’ Persia said.
‘Only if you’ve had plenty of early nights beforehand,’ Adrian said.
Cecil had a large glossy stack of stiff new records. He put on some music which came by chance from a turning disc, but was nothing to do with the machinery which fabricated it. The notes separately and in unison were minds which had met each from their own direction before they went apart again. They said there was something else, which they had glimpsed, but could only mediate.
*
A lady at a bus stop was unwrapping a tube of sweets and she dropped some paper into the gutter. The city was very brittle. It was cut out and propped up. Only the outlines were believable for there were no dimensions.
Once Persia did look at Adrian. She could see how his profile pitted itself against the traffic. There was nothing about him to find attractive. She could not remember what magic of him had first interested her. He was just a plain man with a certain strength, and a belief in himself. Words were simply words with him.
When they came to the hospital Persia tried to remember where to go.
‘She fell over and
broke her hip,’ she said to Adrian.
The man at the gate nodded at them.
‘It was in a high wind, at the shops.’
Adrian paced, and you had to hurry to keep up.
‘In the weekend I try to come and see her.’
Adrian did not say anything. They went in a door and up steps. He seemed to know everywhere to go, because it was his nature to have commanded facts. He sat down on a chair in the corridor outside the ward, opposite a glass door inside which nurses were sterilizing needles in steel kidney-shaped dishes.
‘I’ll wait here,’ he said, and waved his hand at Persia, dismissing her, as kings on thrones with carpet strips. The matron who had come from twin doors which banged, beamed at him and led Persia into the ward, stopping in front of the bed.
‘Aunt?’ Persia said. She could not say anything more. There was no word which was useful. She touched the hand. The hand made the face twitch.
Persia sat down on a chair, beside the bed which was very high. For a long time she did not speak, because to speak would have been to cry, and the great aunt did not want tears.
Behind a screen some nurses were laughing as they washed a woman, and two women in pink bed-jackets were discussing lamb chops.
The great aunt did not belong to her body anymore. There was nothing left in it that she could use. Sometimes she tried to draw up the bed spread to hide her paper breast behind some remnant of Victorian modesty but her hands would not work for her although they were the only part of her body that had not changed. They lay with their long fingers, disconnected.
There was a brown photograph of her once at a wedding. She had on a big hat and held a posy. She stood so straight and down her back you could almost see how the wall of muscles held together the beating of her organs under lace and flowers and fairness. But now her stomach was just a loose balloon under the blanket. It had rolled away from her and lay separately, full of used parts.
She had been straight and tall once with her hair in a bun. But now they had pulled it back in a rubber band. It was not white anymore, but yellow. And they had taken out her teeth so that she had lost her mouth and could not speak anymore. But her hand did move once, in depreciation, and Persia could tell the words would have demanded going away; she was ashamed of her own ungainliness. So she lay and waited her escape in the great grand last struggle of death.
Above her head there were two signs. One said, ‘Measure and Chart Intake and Output,’ and the other, ‘Extra Fluids’. She had bruises on her arms which had not healed. But for all the dreariness, even though the cleaner was making a noise with a machine on the parquet floor, her face was soft and smiled. And it could not have been said that death was disillusionment, being already prepared for the worst.
Sometimes Persia thought her aunt might have been trying to speak with her, because of the way she grunted, but when she looked at the eyes, they were closed, and Persia knew it was just the way the breath gurgled in her throat. But still, there was about her the knowledge which had not gone, and although the struggle was low, and degrading and of bodies and rot and forced medicine, it said that it was not an end because of the smile which lifted and settled with every breath, complete and full.
‘I wonder . . . let me see now. Tomorrow will be fish again. But they didn’t give me that, they gave me that awul mince.’
‘Are you complaining again, Mrs Roth?’ The nurse looked up from changing sheets.
‘Little pigs have big ears.’
‘Be careful now. I can walk and you can’t.’
They talked, and the aunt struggled in the last going of life, while the collection of her living from the first egg was being pushed away from her void body. Her life had known poverty and simplicity, with no achievement except the build of her resources. She did not have beautiful clothes or great parties. She did not travel on rich voyages. She created nothing, not even a child. The last part of her would go.
Once there had been a fruit man who would knock on her door. He used to buy a case of apples at the markets every time he needed easy money. Then progressing straight to her house he would sell it to the aunt for twice the price. She called it her charity, half believing his stories of ten children and a dying wife. He did it whenever he needed quick money although she told him every time to go away and never come back. But he always did, although the laundry was full of rotting fruit which she did not know how to preserve. But now the man would come to an empty door.
A nurse came in and tried to push some pink fluid in a plastic cup between the great aunt’s lips, but although withered and loose, they remained pressed closed.
‘It’s her vitamins,’ the nurse said. ‘She won’t take them. Come on dearie.’
‘She would not have liked to have been called dearie,’ Persia said, and found that she was crying with terrible grief. So she went out of the room, and left the nurse to continue forcing, and wished there was a sensible death without plastic attachments and intravenous salines.
In the corridor Adrian was sitting with folded legs reading a newspaper. He looked up when Persia came through the doors and saw how there were tears on her face. Then he stood up and went over to her, and put his arm round her so that she could bury her face in the wool and prickle of his shoulder, and hide. And he did not ask, or dramatize, or rejoice, or mourn, but was simply a comforter in case of need.
At the funeral Persia stood next to her mother and her sister. They were of weeping women and peasant hysteria, of handkerchiefs, veils and gossip. The box which was nothing to do with anything, and certainly not related to the aunt, rolled through somewhere, perhaps on wheels, precisely three months after the body had first been admitted to the hospital.
Later when Adrian, who had been waiting in the car throughout the service, drove Persia home, they could see smoke coming out of the chimney which was trying to be Spanish.
It became apparent that he did know feeling, that he could explore personalities and even interpret, but he did not wish it to be known. He was new now. Perhaps his caution arose because one giving of himself would bring a complete surrender from any recipient. Therefore he was reluctant to hand out how he was. Perhaps if he had been dumb or blind or marred and entirely dependent, and less beautiful, he could have been more easily reached.
*
He came into Persia’s flat one night and was most perfect and total. He moved and held the room within himself, and had control of all the air, and the space, and governed it. He was high king with crown, and pomp, and red carpets, and pageant of trumpets and pages marching before. It was hard not to stoop and kiss his ground. It was enough just to sit at his feet and look up at him and see how he was, although this particular moment might pass. But Persia knew that the old couch glowed from his honour, and would forever be especially revered, and would reach a higher price at a junk sale in ten years time because once the magic of the man Adrian had rested against it, and made it most holy. And if Persia was to sit in his imprint after he had gone, she knew she would hold also some of him against her surface pores.
‘How are you settling in?’ he asked.
‘Well,’ Persia answered.
He looked around. ‘It appears you still haven’t finished unpacking,’ he said.
‘The room is a bit of a mess,’ Persia answered.
He was so good at rebuking and making everything foolish that was outside himself. Because nothing could be as sure as he, then nothing could be as remarkable either. He was the only person who was safely perfect, and the rest, which moved outside, was foolish and given to whims and impertinence.
He had a way of making you feel like a stupid puppy which had run onto a road without looking, and almost been hit, and yowled, and floundered and flopped with its tail between its legs, and tripped over in the gutter, watched all the time by some grand and omnipotent master, who understood and did not judge, because of the greater weakness.
Persia poured two sherries.
‘Nice weather,’ he said, w
hen she caught him watching.
‘Yes, good for this time of year,’ she answered.
She passed him the sherry and he sipped some.
‘The sherry’s good,’ he said.
‘There wasn’t any beer.’
‘Girls never have beer.’
‘What girls?’
‘I’m over forty you know.’
‘Were you ever married?’
‘It didn’t happen that way.’
‘But surely, being so conventional . . .’
‘You don’t know me yet.’
‘I don’t suppose many people do.’
‘I have many friends.’
‘That’s not the point.’
He was smug and black again, smirking his fat smirk of self-satisfied consolidation, with all his virtues and sanctities listed inside him and ticked and approved and marked one hundred per cent. Persia did up the button on her blouse. Adrian watched coldly. He could put his eyes so still that they did not even exist. He quaffed down the rest of his sherry, set it down on the side table, and stood up, all in one gesture.
‘Well, I’ll take you out to dinner tonight,’ he said, ‘about seven thirty.’
Which he did, as though trying to make it understood that it was simply an arrangement, or perhaps even an examination, that Persia was to keep distant, and not begin explorations beyond ordinary dinner chat.
Chapter 3
He wore a suit and his hair was slicked. He was tall and precise and positive so that Persia was flimsy like lace on washing lines.
They drove to the restaurant which had a brick front painted white, with ferns stuck in notches. They went through a courtyard to the bar where people leant and whispered in candle light. Furnished with drinks, and settled onto a sofa against the wall of exposed sandstock bricks, they began polite preliminaries. Persia deliberately did not smile once, and tried to be prim and grave, with good manners as he might have expected.
But as soon as she embarked upon this approach he seemed to think it was necessary to work on her and warm her and bring her out to some self-assurance. He puts on the marks of a good host entertaining a nervous child, and compelled her to be swept along in his friendliness.
The Beginning of Everything and the End of Everything Else Page 2
