Mr. Fox Page 6

  “Take this sword,” Miss Foxe said solemnly, “and cut off my head!”

  Fitcher and Miss Foxe both fell to thinking of their favourite fairy tale, The White Cat, and the enchanted princess, pleading with her love to strike the blow that would release her from her animal form.

  “Are you sure?” Fitcher asked. From Miss Foxe’s bedroom, the nightingale sang in its cage.

  Miss Foxe sighed. “Don’t you believe . . . ?”

  “Oh, I do,” said Fitcher. “I do.” And without further argument he unsheathed the sword and cleaved Miss Foxe’s head from her neck. He knew what was supposed to happen. He knew that this awkward, whispering creature before him should now transform into a princess—dazzlingly beautiful, free, and made wise by her hardship.

  That is not what happened.

  I walked into my study—I don’t know where from. Where had I just come from? What had I been doing? My step, at least, was sprightly—maybe I’d just come from a book launch, or an award ceremony, or a meeting with an effusive film executive. I searched my pockets for clues, but my pockets were empty. Well. Wherever I had been, Mary Foxe had been there, too. Was I certain about that, or was I guessing? I whipped open the study door and regarded the hallway with a measure of suspicion. Everything was in order. I turned back to my study and registered the condition it was in—books and crumpled paper and broken records were scattered around me as if they had rained from the sky. The windows stood wide open, and a cold wind flowed in and made the torn pages of my books whisper. One of my shelves had fallen, or been pushed, down, and I had to walk across the back of it to get to my desk, which was soaked in ink. Thorough. The rampage had been thorough. I whistled, and then I closed the windows. The sound must have alerted Daphne, because she came and knocked on the door. Which wasn’t closed, so why knock . . .

  “Come in,” I said. I picked up half of a coffee mug and half of a phonograph record and idly held them together. A domestic chimera. Daphne came in with her arms full of books, and her eyes blazing like two poisoned moons. “How’d you like the mess, St. John?” It would’ve been better if she’d screamed. The question was in monotone, and was accompanied by a hardback German edition of my first book, Stinging the Bees. More followed—books and flat statements, all aimed at my head. I was stunned and defended myself as best I could with my arms, but there was nowhere to hide. Daphne said she hadn’t finished yet. She said she ought to burn the house down, and she just might do it, while I was sleeping. She said I was a dead man walking. She said she was going to Reno. She said she should never, never have married a tarnished individual like me. Finally, at the top of her voice, she said, WHO IS SHE? THIS WOMAN YOU’RE HUMILIATING ME WITH.

  She ran out of books and stood there, crying, her hands fluttering over her face. I’d fallen into a crouch to weather the storm, and I waited a second before I straightened up. My ear was bleeding a little, and when she saw that, she sobbed even harder. We looked at the crack she’d made in one of the windows—the Japanese edition of The Butcher’s Boots is no slim tome.

  “Who is she?”

  “Who is who?”

  Daphne turned on her heel and made for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Reno. You’d better not contest the papers, either.”

  I crossed the room and caught her hand, which seemed like the coldest and most fragile little thing in the world just then. I held her hand, patted it. She looked away and just let me hold it, as if it was of no use to her anymore. My wife was pretty, I noticed. Sort of elfin but vulnerable-looking with it. All these wispy curls surrounding a heart-shaped face.

  “Don’t go to Reno,” I said. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye.

  “That’s it? That’s your best shot at making me stay? ‘Don’t go to Reno’?”

  “I hadn’t finished, D. I also wanted to tell you that you’re paranoid. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. All I’ve been doing is trying to win us some bread.” I raised her hand and kissed her wrist—she likes that. “Give me a week or two and then we’ll go someplace nice, just you and me.”

  She was melting; she made a face. “Of course just you and me . . . Who else would go with us, dummy?”

  Quite clearly she had no solid evidence. It was interesting to know that I’d married someone who could cause this much destruction on a hunch. It made me like her more.

  “D . . .” I pulled her into my arms. She buried her face in my sweater and reached up with her handkerchief, pressing it against my ear. “Greta says I shouldn’t listen to a word you say. You’re a liar.”

  I took custody of the handkerchief; it was awkward, her holding it, and she was applying more pressure than was necessary. “Greta lies more than me.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “I don’t, but I’ve got to defend myself.”

  “You’re the liar. If you hadn’t been up to anything you’d be furious that I wrecked your study. You’d have thrown a hot iron at my head or something.”

  “Is there a hot iron to hand?”

  She sniffled. “Yes. I was pressing my divorce dress.”

  Daphne had bought a divorce dress with my money. Even more interesting. I’d had her down as a starry-eyed idealist who didn’t notice my flaws. I’d have to keep an eye on her.

  “Your heart is—jerking,” she mumbled.

  “Oh, so you can hear that?” I said into her hair. “It’s saying: Da—phne, Da—phne. How embarrassing. Don’t tell anyone you heard.”

  “She keeps calling,” Daphne said. “And hanging up. While you’ve been God knows where—”

  “Who keeps calling and hanging up?”

  “That girl you’ve got on the side. Don’t deny it, St. John, I just know.”

  “You just know.”

  “Yes.” She looked up at me, so piercingly that my first instinct was to look away—but that would have been a mistake. “But I don’t want to leave you. Not really. So just drop her, and we’ll forget about it.”

  “Daphne. There is no girl on the side.”

  “Say whatever you want, just drop her. Please.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “She’s in my head.”

  I saw her expression and I talked fast. “What I mean is, she’s not real, honey. She’s only an idea. I made her up.”

  “What?”

  “I know this sounds unlikely, but you’ve got to believe me. If you don’t, I’ve got nothing else to tell you.”

  “Keep talking, St. John.”

  “Not a lot to tell. Her name’s Mary. You’d like her, I think. She’s kind of direct. No-nonsense. I made her up during the war. She started off as nothing but a stern British accent saying things like ‘Chin up, Fox,’ and ‘Where’s your pluck?’ Just a precaution for the times I came dangerously close to feeling sorry for myself. Don’t look like that, D., I don’t need a doctor. Anyhow—you see now, don’t you, that she couldn’t possibly call the house? That’s just people getting wrong numbers, or one of your brothers phoning you up to ask for money and then losing his nerve.”

  “Less of the stuff about my brothers. Back to Miss A Hundred Percent Imaginary, Miss Only an Idea. Do you take her out to the movies?”

  I couldn’t tell if she was kidding. “Absolutely not,” I said vehemently.

  “Do you tell her secrets?”

  “It isn’t like that.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “Uh . . .”

  Daphne gave me a knowing look.

  “Prettier than me?”

  “D . . .”

  “You say ‘It isn’t like that,’ so tell me what it’s like. I’m just trying to figure out whether you’re crazy or not.”

  “I’m not crazy. At all times I remain fully aware of her status as an idea.”

  “So she’s kind of like a character in one of your stories?”

  “Kind of.” I resisted the urge to pat her on the head and tell her not to worry about it.

  “
So nothing I should worry about?”

  “No, ma’am. Absolutely not.”

  Daphne kissed my cheek and backed away. “Okay, honey. Sorry about the mess.”

  I nodded and waved a hand, as if it was nothing. I was proud of myself. In the old days I would have lost my cool. But other things were happening now; I needed to focus on those, and I didn’t seem to have anything left over for rage. There’s also the fact that all the men in her family, and a few of the women, are basically thugs.

  “I think I’ll go see a movie with Greta now.”

  “Have fun.”

  She closed the door very quietly behind her. Pinching my ear through Daphne’s handkerchief, I crossed the fallen bookshelf again and sat down at my desk, watching ink drip onto the carpet. Mary Foxe was trying to ruin my life. By rights I should be on the edge of some sort of nervous breakdown. But I was happy.

  “Impressive conflict management,” Mary remarked from beneath my desk. Her arms were tucked around her knees, and her chin was resting on them.

  “Well, hello, there.” I held out a hand to her, and she came out from under the desk. She settled on my lap with her arms around my neck. Nice. Carefully, I spun the chair around, for a garden view, and we watched the rain falling on the old cedar tree.

  “Would you mind terribly if you die next time?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’d mind. To be honest, I don’t like the sound of that at all. Why do you ask?”

  “I just want to see . . .”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “But Mr. Fox,” she said. “It’s all just a lot of games. . . .”

  LIKE THIS

  . . . they will say: “The one you love, is not a woman for you, Why do you love her? I think you could find one more beautiful, more serious, more deep, more other . . .”

  NERUDA

  There was a Yoruba woman and there was an Englishman, and . . .

  That might sound like the beginning of a joke, but those two were seriously in love.

  They tried their best with each other, but it just wasn’t any good. I don’t know if you know what a Yoruba woman can be like sometimes. Any house they lived in together burnt down. They fought; their weapons were cakes of soap, suitcases, fists, and hardback encyclopaedias. There were injuries.

  The man liked to make things. He took a chisel to stone with kindness and enquiry, as if finding out what else the stone would like to be. But his woman kept him from working—that’s why they were poor. They wondered why things were like that between them when other people loved each other less and had peace. There were days when she’d open her eyes and be him for six hours in a row; she knew all his secrets and nothing he had done seemed wrong to her, she knew how it was, how things had been, she was there. There were days when he touched the tip of her nose and it was enough, a miracle of plenty.

  But who finds happiness interesting?

  One day the woman stamped her foot and wished her man dead. So he died. (And now you know what a Yoruba woman can be like sometimes.)

  She had a devil of a time getting him back after that one. Books and candles and all the tears she could cry, and yet more—she had to borrow some from friends, and some from trees at dawn. Finally she had to give up all the children she might ever have had. In the dead of night they were scraped under the knife of a witch with a steady hand and a smile. . . .

  It was the most expensive thing she had ever done. Once the woman was barren, her man returned. He wasn’t grateful. He was tired; it hadn’t been easy coming back. He said, Let’s have no more of this. She nodded slowly, saying, I don’t dare go on. She was still weak, and though he was only a little stronger he carried her to the car and sat beside her in there; he spread a map across their knees and told her to choose a place where he could leave her. She would not choose. Paris, then, he said. He remembered a visit he had made there long before he met her. He remembered how the river had charmed him, how it had seemed to talk to the sun and to the city it flowed through, bringing news from the sea rolling in under the bridges. He remembered lion heads carved above great heavy doors, and how in their old age the heads had yawned instead of roaring. He thought that she would like it there, and that she would not be lonely.

  He showed her the route that they would take, and they agreed that at any point before Paris she could say “stop” and leave him then. She hadn’t packed any of her belongings. She wore a brown dress, flat brown shoes, and a shabby coat of the same colour. The coat belonged to the man, and he had put a little money in an inside pocket. The woman’s hands spent the entire journey folded on her lap, safe and still. Sometimes she looked out of the car window at the things that passed them by. Sometimes she looked at him. They didn’t really talk. At one point he coughed and said, “Excuse me.”

  When they got to Dunkirk she didn’t feel able to say stop, nor could she say it at Lille, or Amiens. She wasn’t particularly worried about where she would go or what she would do. Those things didn’t seem important. Silently, he changed his mind again and again, but at every turn he remembered how she had told him to die.

  At Paris, on a tiny street that ran alongside a vast busy one, he let her out of the car, and she was like a moth in her drab dress as she leaned in and told him that she had never meant him harm.

  He mumbled that he hoped she would be well.

  He drove away and the buildings around her drew closer together. With her eyes she climbed their sepia stonework, the curls and flourishes. There was a ring on her finger; he had given it to her in exchange for their thousandth kiss, and she turned it around and around, trying to find a way out of her skin. I have loved a fool who counted kisses, she thought. The sky passed above like glass. She sat down on the pavement and watched people walking around. There was a café directly opposite her. Couples went in holding hands, and the dust on the windows hid what they did next, where they sat, what they had to drink. A woman came out of the café alone. She was dressed entirely in navy blue. In one perfectly manicured hand she held twelve fountain pens. In the other she held a white cup. She took a seat on the pavement, too.

  “Drink this,” said the woman in blue.

  “What is it?” asked the woman in brown.

  Blue became brisk: “It’ll buck you up. Hurry.”

  Listlessly, obediently, Brown drained the little white cup in one gulp. Bitter espresso, that’s all it was.

  “Now. Take these.” Blue handed Brown the fountain pens. “You have to go soon. You’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

  Brown did not feel particularly bucked up. If anything, she felt duller. “Go where? Catch up on what?”

  “Writing,” Blue replied. “You write things. I was never any good at it, but you will be. That’s where you’ll live and work.” And she pointed at the front door of a house a few steps away. The door was painted bright blue, so you couldn’t miss it.

  “Er . . . What?”

  Blue laughed; her laughter was delightful. “Oh . . . you’ll see.”

  “Who are you?”

  “That man who just dropped you off and drove away . . . I’m the one who was meant for him,” Blue said calmly. “There was a terrible mistake a few decades ago; there are many cases like ours, and they’re only just being sorted out. From now on, I’m in charge. I’ll take care of everything. All you have to do is go through that door and into your proper place in life. And you will forget him. You will forget today; you will forget everything.”

  Brown was astonished, and said nothing.

  “Doesn’t that please you?” Blue asked.

  “No, it doesn’t,” said Brown. “I don’t want to forget about him. I don’t want my proper place in life. I don’t want to go in at that door. I don’t want—”

  “Your heart is broken, poor little fool,” Blue interrupted. “You have no idea what you want.”

  “It isn’t broken,” Brown said stubbornly.

  Blue spread her hands: “Well . . . what do you propos
e doing instead?”

  All around them people were speaking a language Brown didn’t understand; it was like silence with sharp edges in it. Sound broke against her eardrums. It didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t pleasant. Brown looked at Blue carefully. Their skin was more or less the same shade of brown, but after that there were only differences. Blue was much better-looking than Brown was; smaller and tidier-looking, too. There was a sweetness to the corners of Blue’s mouth, and her manner was warm. She would be good to him. Speaking as quickly as she could, Brown told Blue about the man she was meant for—just small details off the top of her head, the things that years boil down to. Blue produced a small book and pencil, nodded, listened, and made notes.

  Then Brown went through her new front door with her hands full of fountain pens.

  She didn’t look back, so she didn’t see Blue throw the notebook away. She didn’t see the car, returning to the spot where it had left her, inching along as her lover stuck his head out of the window, looking for her. Blue walked over to him, and as the man spoke, Blue tilted her head and listened with an expression of great sympathy. . . .

  Brown walked into her home under a row of crystal chandeliers, their octopus arms outstretched, their hearts layered with old gold. The high ceiling was painted with a map that looked both old and new—it was faded, the paint cracked, but the fade was bright. The map showed that the world had edges you could fall off, into blank white. Here . . . be . . . dragons.

  Upstairs, on a desk by a window, there lay a fountain pen that looked identical to the ones she held. Brown picked up the fountain pen and shook it. The cartridge sounded empty. She wished she’d bought new cartridges instead of new pens; it would have been far more economical. Beside the desk was a wastepaper basket full of crumpled paper. There were more fountain pens in there, too. She didn’t really want to sit down at this desk; it seemed to be a place of nerves and wretchedness. But there was a fresh pad of paper open, and the chair was drawn out, so she sat down. She laid the new pens down one by one. She looked at them, twiddled her thumbs, picked a pen up, put it down, examined the notepad. She was clearly supposed to write something, but not a single idea made itself available to her. Was it meant to be a letter? Or a report? The fact that it was to be handwritten suggested a personal aspect. Her writing was to be addressed to someone in particular. Brown pushed a pen with her fingertip and it rolled against another pen, and all the pens fell off the table. How was she supposed to do this if she didn’t know who she was doing it for? It was ridiculous.