A Case of Knives by Candia McWilliam

Author:Candia McWilliam
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-06-29T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

After our first night together, Hal appeared to calm down, as though he had made the first connection on his journey, wherever it was taking him, but the checking-in telephone calls became more frequent. I had to leave the job where I packed jokes into matchboxes because he telephoned so often that the nuisance was no longer offset by the cheapness of my labour. So I was working more at Angel’s shop, and, of course, I was still going to Tertius’s chambers. Sometimes Angel appeared when I was cleaning there. Tertius would then look at me as though he could no longer recollect who I was, and I would know that it was time to go. He did not like to share Angel, at whom he poked no fun, whom he always called Angelica, ‘So oddly vegetable a name, Cora, no?’ I felt that, while he liked my cleverness, it did not to him, a clever man and a self-made one, have the integrity of what is born, the pure abstract contemplable beauty of immemorial money. I felt no bitterness about this. As long as you are yourself eating something fairly nutritious, the feudal food chain is quite ornamental and not desperately restrictive. ‘Class,’ Tertius would say, cutting off a section of Arctic Roll and eating it over the Burlington Magazine. ‘Class, does it start in school or does school start in class? Or does class start,’ here he would purse his lips like a monkey de-pipping a grape, ‘does class start, as you might say, in class?’ He needed class and was entertained by it; he was like a banana grower with the keys to the monkey house.

I began to hear an accent in Tertius’s voice. He had always spoken in tones, astoundingly, unashamedly, camp-posh, which suggested he was entertaining after dinner, to the accompaniment of a desultory piano, a home-service audience. But, just occasionally, when he eased up, as he put it, in my presence, there was a fruitiness in his vowels, and he seemed about to swing quite the other way, to speak in a Northern accent unheard but in pantomime. The gusto of his pretentiousness was endearing; it was like his gung-ho queerness, so caricatured that it protected itself. Tertius was offended by the naturalist school of homosexuality, he liked it colourful and mannered and full of sickly tints and hectic colour. I think he was offended, aesthetically, by its current, fashionable ubiquity and barefacedness. Not that he objected to coveys of boys dressed to kill. ‘Ooh look at those private partridges,’ he would say when we went to deliver frames. He loved to see a kept boy. ‘Real poule de luxe,’ he would say, without jealousy of either keeper or kept. But I think that he liked the beauty of the cat in the bag, and now it was out of the bag he felt a certain thrill was lost. This may have been his age, a lament in him equivalent to a more conventional man of his age having regrets about the second post or proper cake at railway stations.

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