What Happen Then, Mr Bones?, page 25
Valentina is startled by a knock on the door. Charles Montague is standing in the gathering dark, red with beer. Her heart sinks. ‘You shouldn’t come in here alone,’ she scolds him. No miracles-can-do-anything talk with him.
‘Nonsense,’ he replies, pushing his way past into the sitting room. ‘You’ve tidied up,’ he observes approvingly.
Not for you, Valentina thinks.
He sits down and gestures for Valentina to do the same. ‘I hope you haven’t got any ideas,’ he begins straight away.
‘No ideas at all.’
‘Don’t give me the cutting side of your tongue, Missy. Ideas about marrying that foreigner.’
‘No, I don’t want to marry him.’
‘And don’t think we’ll tolerate anything else either,’ he adds. Charles is not so stupid after all. ‘Just because you’ve had an unusual experience …’
‘Yes, dying and getting a second go at life is unusual,’ Valentina agrees.
‘Anyway, it doesn’t give you the right to do what you like.’
There is a brief silence while she contemplates a suitable reply to this statement.
‘Well?’
‘Would you like a hot drink?’ she asks.
‘Don’t change the subject.’
‘I’m sure he’s not interested in a woman like me,’ Valentina says carefully.
‘I don’t care whether he’s interested in you or not. It’s your interest in him that worries me. You’re the sort who’ll try to … persuade him.’
‘Sort?’
‘I don’t want to get into an argument about that now, I don’t know who saw me coming in. I shouldn’t stay long.’
Valentina stands up to indicate that in that case it’s been long enough.
‘But you can come over for dinner later, when the others are home,’ Charles says.
Herself nude on a dissecting table suddenly looms in her mind’s eye. She doesn’t know what this knowledge is, where it comes from, the certain knowledge that behind a man’s solicitousness and politeness you’ve somehow lost all your clothing. ‘Not tonight,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a small headache. I’m sure it will be monstrous by dinner-time.’
Charles grunts, perhaps in disbelief, and rises. She shows him out and discovers as he disappears down the street that she does indeed have a headache: it is currently walking away from her but doubtless will soon be back. She climbs the stairs and takes a large spoonful of the medicine on her night table. She can’t help but wonder about this stuff. It calms her down so fast and effectively that life which was only moments ago becoming dark and mountainous is now a flat plain at dawn. It is nothing but an easy walk in increasing sunshine.
The fencing instructor is doing his usual circles of the gymnasium, shouting at the students on their pistes. ‘Parry the foible with your forte,’ he shouts in his incomparable voice.
‘Fight weakness with strength,’ Valentina murmurs as he goes past, to show she understands.
‘What’s your foible?’ she asks when he passes by again.
‘I don’t have one,’ he replies.
‘You’re unbearably arrogant,’ Valentina informs him.
‘Well, you’re plain.’
The point, though blunt, hurts. He carries on and she feels burning hot. Her skin registers the shame of this truth. ‘Passion is just the same for plain people as it is for the beautiful. It’s only the observer who’s fooled,’ she comments on his return.
‘Passion!’ he exclaims.
‘My plainness is my forte, anyway. It taught me to offer a handsome man other virtues.’
‘Does a handsome man wish for virtue?’
‘Well, does he?’
‘Why don’t you ask one of these clumsy creatures here with their two left feet? Are they not handsome with their light eyes and blotchy skin?’
‘Your own eyes are blue,’ she points out.
‘Dark blue,’ he corrects. And Valentina enjoys a little private laugh at his pride in this difference — and why not, the sea is more splendid than the pallid sky. At that moment Charles falls over himself again. His opponent places his foot on the back of his neck and another fencer directs his weapon between the victim’s buttocks. Uproar. The instructor must restore order, must silence the laughing and jeering and the shouts of Take it like a man, Charlie and suchlike.
‘You did that on purpose,’ Valentina accuses Charles when he is walking home with her afterwards.
Charles frowns. ‘I don’t care for the way that man looks at you.’
‘Oh,’ Valentina replies airily, ‘you’re mistaken if you see anything in that.’
‘Am I indeed.’
‘Certainly. You can’t trust your eyes, you know. René Descartes, the infamous anatomist who died last year, writer of that book I’ve seen in the medical students’ library, well, he was for ever cutting up eyes to see if our senses can give us the truth. Of course they can’t. Can you see the earth spinning around the sun?’
‘Very amusing. But tell me, how does an ignorant young girl like yourself know so many irrelevant things?’
‘My cousin Valentine discussed many topics with me when he taught me to read. But don’t worry. If knowing irrelevant things is the definition of ignorance, rest assured I am more ignorant than most.’
When Valentina arrives at her front door, she sheds Charles with a flimsy excuse. His company is worse than no company, his conversation worse than boredom. And bored she certainly is. She wanders about the house aimlessly and runs a finger along the odd piece of furniture to measure the depth of the collecting dust. She never did this in her former life: people don’t care about dust when they don’t get enough to eat. She feels restless. It’s the dissatisfaction bred of the life lived in big silent houses encircled by critical eyes and wagging tongues. She’d pack a bag and disappear if it weren’t for the foreigner and if she had any means of support.
Eventually she climbs the stairs to the table and her note-paper. She has placed a bowl of dried flower petals beside her work. When she can’t think what to write, she dips her fingers in and stirs the mixture round. The fragrance makes her almost remember something, something long ago. They say the sense of smell is the most potent link to the faculty of memory, but what is it she is always on the verge of remembering? Perhaps happiness, but when did she ever have it? René Descartes should have dissected noses as well.
René Descartes wasn’t doing anything original, of course. He came at the end of a long line of sixteenth-century physicians and artists who spent most of their lives studying the flayed and quartered bodies of criminals. Leonardo da Vinci frequently spent the night in the company of corpses in order to complete his seven hundred and fifty anatomical drawings, which quite a number of people say are better than those of the medical men, even the renowned Vesalius. It’s hard for Valentina to understand why the Popes didn’t put a stop to it — of course they were certain that the soul would survive the dissection and so they didn’t give any further thought to how the soul might be attached to the body.
But why should they? They believed God himself breathed the soul into the lungs of every human being; after that, the soul was carried in the arterial blood. The soul inhabited the body like the Holy Spirit inhabits the church. You wouldn’t tell a man to not cut up the rafters in case he cut off the Holy Spirit’s nose. You wouldn’t tell Michelangelo to stop painting the chapel ceiling because he’s putting paint on the Holy Spirit’s face.
The foreigner says, ‘I laugh when I’m happy, cry when I’m sad, and when I love someone, I really love them.’
Valentina could laugh at such naïveté but instead murmurs, ‘And when they autopsy you, you really should be dead.’
Then they blink at each other’s strangeness and say no more. The foreigner is from a republic where they say poets have ruled for a thousand years, and perhaps it’s the rule of poets that accounts for such wanton honesty — not that Valentina wants it. A heart on a sleeve is a very tempting thing to smash. But now she is walking home twitching with rage because she knows what he is really saying to her: I’m not a dissimulator, don’t think I’m just pretending not to like you. How good it must make him feel to declare himself so superior and transparent!
At home the dust and dirt are waiting for her but she goes straight upstairs and lies on her bed. She hopes to fall into a peaceful slumber, for such an occurrence would reveal her cured of her disease of dread. Instead she lies rigid with her eyes wide open, and her heart beats so alarmingly she has to sit up and sip from the herbal infusion that the student doctors have left on her night table. She feels calmer immediately and then gets up again — that’s enough practise for one day.
She goes downstairs and turns herself to the cleaning — cleans till dark with her mind blank as a slate. Only once does she straighten up with a jolt at the thought of the foreigner’s simplicity. But probably he has already made plans to leave, tired of our English doubleness, our laughing with breaking hearts, our crying with laughter, our love you and leave you. At dark, after a light supper, Valentina is so tired she goes straight upstairs to sleep. Since she cannot sleep lying down on the bed, she always sleeps upright in an armchair beside it.
In the morning it is very cold, the fire in the kitchen stove has gone out, and she is irritated with foreign authenticity: if any man thinks things are always — or ever — as they seem, then more fool him. Probably they have no use for deceit in the land of poets, but in England deceit and duplicity are the order of the day.
After she lights the fire, Valentina has some toasted bread and scalded milk, then takes a basket to the market where the market gossip tells her, ‘Oh no, the foreigner’s not leaving. He has some kind of contract here.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Instructing fencing.’
‘He’s teaching medical students to maim each other with swords?’
‘There’s leather on the tips, so they say.’
‘He should have leather on his own tip,’ Valentina retorts.
The gossip raises her eyebrows and opens her mouth but Valentina sails off before she can pounce. When Valentina was a girl, her music teacher spent a lot of her time proclaiming the wisdom of her life, which was: Just remember, the tigers are chained. Valentina didn’t learn the truth of this till she was thoroughly grown up (somewhat recently), but a market gossip is not a tiger, she’s only a tied-up house-cat, a waste of restraint in anyone’s terms. So her leap did not make the distance — or if it did, it strangled her.
Valentina moves on to inspect a barrow of acned turnips, and though her inspection appears thorough her mind is miles away. Of course she knows the foreigner is a fencing instructor — it was at his fencing class that he made his remark about laughter and tears and love. She’d been at the gymnasium watching the sport of the young medical doctors under whose protection, of purse and treatment, she now is, and the foreigner walked up to her and said it, just like that, as if she might care a fig how he sees fit to act. In fact, now that she thinks about it, what he actually said was: When you’re happy you laugh, when you’re sad you cry, and when you love someone you really love them. But that’s the same, isn’t it?
Valentina decides against the turnips and goes over to a long trestle of cheeses. She now has an uneasy feeling that it’s not quite the same, because he’s no longer talking about himself, but about another. A you. And is the you him? She is about to decide against the cheeses as well when it occurs to her that she will end up with nothing to eat, that she will then have to go and eat at the grace and favour of the young doctors — a situation to be strenuously avoided. Already they are too familiar, look at her as if they’ve seen her stark naked. Which they have, but she was unconscious at the time so it’s cruel for their eyes to remind her of it.
She quickly buys a cheese, a fish and a loaf, and walks slowly home. All the way the foreigner makes his little speech with his hand over his heart, except she has lost her sense of his simplicity and now she wants it back, as if this is the thing she can truly cherish, a man who can say: Look at me, you can see how I am. To think she’d been going to laugh! At home she practises lying down again, and if her own heart beats as violently as ever, it is at least in part because the foreigner lies with her, his hand still covering his honest heart.
Valentina has a right to go to the fencing classes, of course. The medical students, for that is what they still are, despite all their airs and pretensions, expect to see her out and about, admiring their lunges and thrusts — how good they are with their weapons. She knows they clubbed together to give her a portion only so that she could attract a supportive husband, but young men like to be admired for their physical skills and not just their fiscal concern. She doesn’t know much about fencing, but she’s learning quite fast. She’s learnt the names for the different weapons and quite a few of the moves, many in French of course, although the foreigner names them in his own language, the language of poets that sounds more like a mouthful of gravel.
None of the young doctors looks as elegant as the foreigner does when he’s demonstrating. No doubt they’re trying to do it the right way, but their postures are strained — there’s something infelicitous about the angles of their arms, and their footwork looks fit to trip them up. In contrast, their instructor moves with great fluidity and his feet work like a dancer’s. He stops and laughs when he has his students where he wants them, when the point of his blade could run them through or his sabre chop off a limb.
Valentina doesn’t think any of his students will ever be as excellent as he is. He looks as if he was born to it, and who else but a natural would be good enough to instruct the sons of the rich at Oxford? The young doctors — really, they should have some names and they do, they are Charles, William and James, only three of them today — are sweaty after their exercise, and boisterous. They pile out of the gymnasium door and talk loudly about ale. If they go for ale they will start talking politics, about the restoration of the King to the throne, and so Valentina wouldn’t go with them even if an alehouse were a suitable place for a woman, which it isn’t. Really she’s only listening to their silly opinions now because the foreigner might step outside for a breath of cool air before his next class.
But he remains firmly within and Valentina goes home alone, reflecting that no matter what the foreigner declares about himself, he’s not the kind of man you can look right through. That if he does believe himself transparent he’s quite mistaken. Indeed, if any of us considers ourselves transparent to ourselves — and many wisely don’t — it’s easy to observe that we’re not often transparent to each other. If the foreigner thinks he’s transparent, like a window say, it’s a window onto a dark and turbulent night where everything might be anything, and not onto a fine day where everything is sharp and clear. But probably she is only complicating him to make him worthy of her fascination, for who wants to believe they have fallen for a man of a single facet?
When Valentina arrives home, she goes upstairs to practise lying down. Lying flat fills her with panic. And how can she get a husband if she can’t go to bed with him? Oh, she can do the necessary, the thing that makes a wife a wife, but in the end he’ll expect someone to warm the sheets for him, smooth his brow after a nightmare. A fat lot of good she’ll be in the armchair. True, she can rush over to the bed, but eventually, when love is no longer blind, when it’s acute and critical, he’ll think she’s peculiar. Would the foreigner think her peculiar sleeping upright in an armchair?
He wouldn’t if he knew the truth. He’d suck his breath in and show her the proper respect. The young doctors who witnessed her revival touch her with special wonder in their fingertips. They touch her flesh as if she is not made of the same stuff as they are. She is made of it — at least her body is, if not her mind. But the rest of her life is dreary amidst all their rectitude. She lives for the day when the foreigner says, Astonish me. And she will.
Valentina sighs and gets up again. She fills her spare time with cooking and cleaning — or thinking about it. The portion she has been allotted by the medical students amply allows for a cleaner, but she prefers her own company, is learning to tolerate her own dirt. She goes to the market to buy food but mostly to keep up with the news. It’s exciting times they live in, everyone says so, as if every present weren’t full to bursting with intrigue, betrayal, reversals of fortune.
But she goes along with the excitement because who wants to discuss developments with someone who acts as if they’ve heard it all before? And she comes out onto the street with everyone else when the newspaper goes on sale, and she exclaims and rants as loudly as anybody. They hear more now than they used to since the new King Charles relaxed the censorship rules and licensing laws. Mr Cromwell was as bad as the former King in that way, no doubt about it.
Nevertheless, she is often alone, has a lot of time for thinking — and for writing. This last is her secret vice. She uses up hours scribbling notes at the table in her bedroom. She is going to write her Life. Life started well for her: music lessons and a music teacher saying, Just remember the tigers are chained. But at some point the tigers got away. Life became a jungle. It’s a miracle she survived, more than a miracle, and so she feels compelled to write her story down, lest her miraculous self is forgotten by succeeding generations — if indeed there are any.
The next day at fencing the foreigner walks past Valentina and says, ‘You surprise me.’
‘Not yet I don’t,’ she replies, anticipating the heights of surprise to come.
He carries on walking, with that look of his. It’s a kind of sneer really, but a sneer at a disadvantage since he doesn’t properly know the language, or the rules that govern the nuances. Still in the end the nuances together emit a kind of paralysing vapour, and it’s this she hopes to get beyond — no doubt only to the layer of foreign nuances, but a change is as good as a rest as they always say. This rather contradicts his laugh-happy, cry-sad, love-love transparencies, but Valentina now ignores the outward signs and goes to the heart of things. The heart will always be different from the outside: it’s worth any number of parochial or exotic layers to get to.
