What Happen Then, Mr Bones?, page 23
On fine winter days, Valentina accompanies the medical students to the market square to watch them make their extravagant purchases of coffee and perfumes and spices and ribbons. And sometimes their cheaper but more essential supplies of cheese and claret, although usually they send a boy for anything heavier than a pouch of peppercorns or coffee grounds lest they strain their fencing arms. Charles Montague always complains that the coffee-houses make a better cup, why bother, but the others like the stroll, the power of purchase, the dimpled slatterns, the steaming pies, the opalescent oysters, the pens of hissing geese, crowing cocks and howling dogs, the pervasive yawp and yammer — who cares what the coffee’s like? Valentina always enjoys getting back to her own world, and she relishes the opportunity to needle the young men as they pick through the haberdasher’s piled merchandise.
‘It’s impossible in my opinion to imagine a soul without a mind. A bit of your mind must go to heaven with your soul, otherwise your soul could be anybody’s.’ This is the kind of thing she loves to say completely out of the blue as they rummage through the ribbons.
‘Well, did a bit of your mind go to heaven with your soul then?’ James Thomas once asks boldly. The others start looking as though they are not really listening.
‘No, my mind went completely black. If that’s the correct way to describe it — black is usually an experience, but I experienced nothing. Between the time I died and the time I came alive again, there was nothing at all. Not even time, in fact.’
‘Clearly one’s spirit goes to heaven alone then,’ Charles puts in reprovingly — he just can’t help himself — and Valentina notices he’s stopped looking at the gaudies too.
‘Yes, if it went, I didn’t go with it.’
None of them are so stupid that they can’t immediately see the blasphemy in this.
‘You’ve probably forgotten,’ William Seaton says reasonably. ‘You can’t have people remembering heaven-on-earth. They might not want to go on living.’
‘They might want to have heaven-on-earth,’ Valentina replies.
‘Just shut up,’ Charles orders fiercely. Sometimes it’s like this: the one who wants you the most is angry with wanting, is enraged at his helplessness, he sprays his venom round like an incontinent tom-cat.
‘Why, what are you scared of? Do you think a lightning bolt will strike you dead if you listen to me?’
Charles doesn’t reply but stalks on ahead, disdainfully picking up trinkets and baubles and dropping them again. The vendors smile obsequiously — no doubt they’d like to knee him in the groin, but that wouldn’t winkle the coin out of his purse. Valentina catches up to Charles, who is now walking away from the stalls and through the crowd with his purchases of ribbon and silk laid across the crook of his arm. He is looking much like a well-dressed peddler, except that no peddler is ever well dressed, and if he were we would not buy anything from him since he must surely be a cheat.
Valentina falls into step beside Charles but he walks haughtily along without speaking until they are well clear of the market-place. She feels a little worried: sometimes she forgets it’s the money of these student doctors that maintains her. She lodges in the house of their colleague. They could turn her out on the street without a penny.
‘This is so much better than watching the fencing, don’t you think?’ Charles asks, softening slightly.
‘Yes. In fact, I don’t think I’ll come and watch any more, I’ve had quite enough of it.’
‘It’s had enough of you too,’ Charles says, then pauses. ‘You’re always trying to engage that macaroni in conversation.’
‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ Valentina replies. ‘He’s from somewhere else entirely.’
‘Well, I don’t like it. I think it’s time we arranged some occasions for you to meet more appropriate suitors.’
‘Oh? Shall I help clean up the dissecting room?’
‘A doctor wouldn’t be out of the question, if …’
‘If what?’
‘If you caused less gossip. If you took a female companion into the house and engaged a cleaner. If you stayed home and had music lessons instead of standing around in the gymnasium flirting with men.’
‘I don’t flirt. And as far as I’m concerned there’s only one man there.’
Charles just about wrenches her arm off when he pulls her round to face him. ‘Enough of this! Did we save you to …’
‘You didn’t save me. You were all ready to butcher me. Two minutes more and I would have been laid open from throat to navel!’
Valentina pulls herself away from his grip and runs the last few yards to her front door. Charles saunters after her. Clearly he is pleased to have provoked her anger: it can be a lever he can work to his own advantage. ‘Do you require anything?’ Charles asks mock-solicitously when he reaches the front door. ‘Wouldn’t you like me to rub ointment on your shoulders?’
‘No thank you. My shoulders are not sore, I keep them braced.’
‘You let me do it before.’
‘Well, I’m a lot better now. In fact, you can take away that new potion you put beside the bed. I don’t know what you put in it, but I don’t think clearly when I drink it.’
‘It’s only for sipping. Have you been drinking it straight down?’
‘A single sip is sufficient to intoxicate me.’
‘A little ointment would be nice, don’t you think?’ Charles wheedles as Valentina prepares to go inside.
Nice for whom? she wonders. She has only allowed him to touch her as a doctor should, but the satyr must have been stamping its hoofs beneath the gown. ‘No thank you,’ she says firmly, ‘I’m feeling very tired.’
Later, when Valentina has calmed down, she goes upstairs to the desk to assemble the notes from which she hopes to construct her Life. She likes the darkness outside the window, the total silence in the house. Unseen by anyone, she is free — a luxury available only to the rich, who often squander it. The early snow floats through the night like a blessing. She must surely be in some kind of trance in thinking this — snowflakes are nothing but a blessed nuisance.
By morning the snow has settled for the winter. A smooth white coverlet overlays the garden, the hedges, the streets and buildings beyond. Valentina stays in bed late — what does she have to get up for? — but soon enough the chill in the house demands that she lights the fires. She is just wondering what to do with herself when there is a knock on the front door. She opens it and finds Ivo standing in the fresh snow. He has come to show her his injured leg — good as new, he says — and then they are both tongue-tied, for he has come for more and other.
The accommodation that the medical school has arranged for Valentina is a large and fine house with a large garden. When she first sees it the snow has not settled for the winter, and the oak and elm trees are bare and rimed with thick frost. She might have found them beautiful if she had not been so distracted. Every afternoon she goes to watch the medical students at their fencing lessons; every morning she must visit the physician so that he can examine her neck.
‘Much improved,’ he pronounces after several weeks, ‘no need for a poultice any more.’
‘Thank goodness,’ Valentina replies, ‘I don’t like that hot mess on my skin.’
She is still doing up her dress when a great commotion breaks out. ‘Make way, make way,’ a man shouts as a disorderly crowd bursts into the room. ‘The fencing instructor has been cut!’
Valentina’s heart immediately comes into her mouth. Her eyes seek his body amidst the phalanx who have brought him here: several have hold of one leg, several another; others grapple his arms, someone cradles his head. His blood drips onto the floor. Bright spots mark his journey from the door to the high table where now he is being laid. When the physician has cleared a pathway to his side, Valentina sees that the fencing instructor is not dying, is in fact attempting to sit up. ‘It’s only a flesh wound,’ he cries, ‘all get off me!’
The physician removes the instructor’s hand which is clenched over his injury. ‘That won’t keep the blood in for long,’ he smirks, and turns to fetch the ointments and the spatterdash. ‘What were you doing?’ he asks as he applies his paste to the linen.
‘Fencing.’
‘But not in the gymnasium,’ the doctor comments. ‘There’s leather on the points there.’
The fencing instructor stares at the ceiling as if he’s not going to answer. Valentina’s heart is thumping. If he’s been out duelling, he dare not answer. The Major-General is trying to ban all manner of entertainments, from cockfights to resisting the urge to go to church on Sundays, and duelling is one of his particular hatreds.
‘Well?’
‘A little sword-play in the fields,’ the instructor finally replies.
‘Ah.’
‘It’s not a crime, is it? How would a man get any practice if it were?’
‘Well, my advice to you, sir, is don’t leave off your protection when you practise.’
The crowd bursts out laughing but the instructor remains unsmiling and tries to get off the table. ‘Can you walk?’ the physician asks, and takes his elbow. The instructor shrugs him off and walks across the room unfalteringly. For the first time he sees Valentina, still sitting on her chair, and he turns his eyes away. Before he does there’s a fleeting look of the cornered animal in his eyes, or is it the look of a wild animal forced to become domestic. He continues out of the door, the crowd disperses, the physician tells Valentina to run along, and she is only too glad to.
She slips away and catches up with Ivo. She falls into step beside him but doesn’t say a thing — there’s anger in his walk, in the line of his chin. They walk together in silence until a fine rain begins to fall. The rain is emollient and soothes his rage. They have only gone a short way when he wipes his face and smiles sardonically. A short distance further on he laughs.
‘Where are you going?’ Valentina ventures.
‘To the market.’
‘For what? You shouldn’t catch a chill when you’ve been wounded.’
‘Do you think I’d be happy with a physician’s remedy? Who knows what he’s plastered onto me. I’m going to the herbalist.’
‘That old crone!’
‘Crone or not, I never saw a man who went to the herbalist die or need an amputation. But those doctors are for ever sawing people up. A man can’t go near a hospital without hearing another man screaming.’
‘They say amputation stops the poisons moving into the vital organs.’
‘Legs are vital organs for a man who lives by the sword.’
‘I’ve noticed legs don’t work very well when the heart’s not beating,’ Valentina murmurs.
Ivo strides ahead and doesn’t reply.
The market that day is a miserable place. The mud is churned up, the animals are bedraggled, and the merchants are bad-tempered owing to the lack of custom. The herbalist plies her trade in a small room on the ground floor of a building that borders the market square. There are shelves full of bottles and jars, and a large open book is placed conspicuously on a table, though one doubts she can read. At least the floor is clean: there are no farmyard animals, no skinny dogs, no strewn bones or ribcages, nothing to suggest there’s blood or pulverised body parts in the jars. She undoes the physician’s bandage and throws it in the fire, examines the wound, fetches and applies a stinking ointment, mutters continuously, throws up her arms, rubs her own long loose dugs in a distracted fashion — for magic, for comfort, for the memory of herself as a useable woman in the presence of a handsome man, who knows?
‘Now I have to go to church,’ Ivo announces when he comes out of the herbalist’s shop.
‘Oh? So the old crone’s remedy only works if you pray afterwards?’
Ivo doesn’t reply, merely frowns darkly and marches across the square. At least the rain has stopped.
‘Where is the church?’ Valentina asks, looking around.
‘We’ll get there all in good time. I want something to eat first. I’m very hungry.’
Valentina doesn’t insist. He might as well eat as pray; might as well pray as turn three times in a circle wearing a hat made of willow bark and waving a chicken bone. And if you’re going to pray, you might as well go for the church ceremony with the highest degree of pomp and ritual, the incense, the cloaks with real gold thread, the tallest hats — if it’s comfort the poor soul wants, better to be a sybarite than a spartan.
But here they are standing in front of a pie-man. The smell of hot meat is making them dizzy, making their mouths run — who’d swap a hot pie for a cold church anyway?
‘I don’t know what Calvin was thinking of,’ Valentina remarks mischievously as the gravy dribbles down their chins.
‘That heretic,’ Ivo hisses, if a man can be said to hiss with a mouthful of burning meat.
The pies are really delicious. A pie is as good a distraction as any from the hereafter, Valentina thinks; the whole throbbing world is as good a distraction as any. Who could be consoled for the loss of it by everlasting life elsewhere, perhaps without illness and amputation, but certainly without pies and fornication — now how did that get into her head?
When they have finished eating, Ivo licks the gravy off his fingers, takes Valentina’s arm, an innocent gesture — you learn that with foreigners eventually: they touch you easily, don’t recoil from you as if scalded. A pity this time, when Valentina wants the cunning touch. They walk together in the rain, the blissful and sad rain, and why should there be sadness together with bliss but for the knowledge that the first touch always contains the last, the final loss.
‘I fight for money,’ Ivo explains, though he needn’t. ‘For wagers. One day it will kill me.’
‘There are worse ways of dying,’ Valentina remarks as they arrive at her front door. By this time blood is seeping through Ivo’s fencing breeches. They both stare at his leg in alarm. Perhaps he is now realising that he forgot to go to the church, forgot to quicken the herbalist’s magic with a prayer. ‘Come inside,’ Valentina says. ‘The medical students have left some new bandages here.’
She opens the door and then stands aside for him to pass. Ivo hesitates. Once inside, he’s so nervous his first sentence isn’t even English. She closes the door and leads him into the sitting room as he stammers his way back to the lingua franca. Of course he has to take his breeches off.
‘There’s blood and ointment everywhere, I have to wash it,’ Valentina tells him.
‘Make sure the water’s hot. I’m frozen,’ he calls as she goes out.
With hot water and a clean cloth, Valentina washes the wound, puts the bandage on without expertise, and then they sit quietly looking at her work. Are the poisons even now going up his leg, or down? Will it have to come off at the foot or the knee, even the thigh? If so, they’ll need five men to hold him down. Valentina offers him a hot drink, then she excuses herself to make it.
‘Don’t you have a servant?’ Ivo blurts out.
‘If I had a servant you wouldn’t have come in.’
‘Do you live your life for me then?’ he asks, and laughs nervously.
‘This one I do,’ she says.
He frowns and she leaves before he can think of an answer — or a question.
On occasions of great tension between people, whatever its cause, the acts we continue to perform — the serving of hot drinks is an example — take place in a dream and automatically, as if someone else goes about these tasks while we only watch, so taken up are we by the racing thoughts in our own minds, the uncontrollable changes in our bodies. And the true story of such an event does not lie in a description of these tasks but in the speed of our heartbeat, the shallowness of our breathing, the struggle to read the heartbeat, the breathing of the other above the slightest noise that impinges upon us — the licking of flames, the falling of snow.
When Ivo leaves, it is dark. Day has turned into night in a trice, or perhaps an eternity — whatever you measure heart time by — and they are no longer strangers to each other’s touch. They have reached across the divide with their fingertips, with fingertips as tentative as tongues; half an inch of skin on every finger has caressed the same half-inch of skin on the fingers of the other. Meanwhile the thumb has slipped softly down the backs of those fingers, like a whole hand down a dress or a shirt, and lingered and suffered. After that who could say what the hands did. Who could care.
As Ivo trudges away from Valentina’s house through the light snow, he turns to wave and smile at her: it’s the least he can do. He once told her he was not interested in her. On this question mind and body were one, surface and depth a perfect match. Now suddenly he is smote, and she knows it. He’s alarmed, confused: was it something in his mind that gave way or something in his body, and which part of him is going to resist?
He’ll walk home denying his own feelings, but we all know this is something you can’t lie about to yourself, no matter how many lies you tell to others. You’ll want to see that person again, no matter what. When you do, you won’t be able to breathe properly, you’ll be amazed at the stupid words that come out of your once-clever mouth — you can no longer even speak correct English. You turn up at a woman’s door in the snow, you’re going to show her how your wound has healed, but really you are there to push beyond the fingertip.
The medical students wouldn’t like it if they knew their purses were permitting the impermissible, supporting the insupportable. William Seaton, being a little more reasonable, might murmur, What’s in a fingertip? but as everyone knows, the answer depends on where you place it. And anyway a fingertip is only a probe, something sent out to test receptivity. If it meets with a receptive response you can be sure that more penetrating forces will follow, that such forces will test other receptivities, and that these will almost certainly enlarge and moisten. So Ivo and Valentina start where they left off, with fingertips, and then move on: there’s nothing more certain in this world than that fingertips won’t be enough — the desire moves up the arms and into the chest, and you want to crush the other to your own body. Then you are face to face, and this is intolerable, you must move on or go back, there aren’t many men and women who can maintain such exacting and unflinching proximity.
