The Man in the Wooden Hat Read online

  So was the silent, shadowy multitude and so were all the dotted lights of houses among the trees. This house seemed less a house then an organic growth in the forest, sweet smelling, held in the arms of branches. Veneering shut the door behind them and began to take off her green dress.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The next morning Do Not Disturb was still hanging from the door handle of room 182, the beds still unmade, unslept in. There was the untouched chaos of scattered clothes and belongings, the smell of yesterday’s scent. Nobody there. And no light flashing from the bedside telephone. No messages pushed under the door.

  Perhaps no time had passed since yesterday morning. The hairdresser, the green dress, the taxi standing waiting, the strange journey, the glorious night, the dawn return with the black cab again standing waiting in the trees, perhaps all fantasy? A dream of years can take a second.

  But I’m not a virgin any more. I know that all right. And it’s about time. Oh, Edward! Saint Edward, where were you? Why wasn’t it you? Pulling off the dress, she stuffed it in the waste-paper basket. She made the dribbling shower work and stood under it until it had soaked away the hours of the sweltering, wonderful night, until her hair lay flat and brown and coarse. It’s like a donkey’s hair. I am not beautiful. Yet he thought so. Who was it? Oh! It must have been Edward! I’m marrying him. He hates—she couldn’t say the name. I’ve been bewitched. Then, thinking of the night, she moaned with pleasure. No, it was you. Not Eddie. Eddie was preparing the Case. He had no time. Yet you had time. The same Case.

  And it’s always going to be like this. She watched, through the window behind the shower, white smoke puffing up from the air conditioning into the blue sky. His work will always come first. He’ll sign and underline and ring for it to be collected by the typists, before he comes home to me. And where is he? And Lizzie? I’m alone here now. I can’t stand here all day, naked. My new, used, happy body. I suppose I should sleep now. I must need sleep, but I’ve never felt so awake. I’ll ring Amy.

  “Yes?”

  In the background to Amy’s voice was a hornet’s nest of howling and shouting.

  “I must see you, Amy. I have to see you. Please!”

  “I’ll come now. I’ll do the school run and then I’ll drive in. What’s wrong?”

  “I’ll tell you. Well, not wrong. Well, yes—wrong.”

  Amy’s tin-can car appeared in less than half an hour outside the Old Colony, stopping where last night’s cab had stopped. And this morning’s. Elisabeth saw it, put on some cotton trousers and a shirt, and ran out. The alternative had been the crumpled cotton check or the green silk in the trash basket. She fell into the clattering car and, as they drove away, said, “Oh, Amy! Thank God!” Amy had less than an inch of space between herself and the steering wheel. The coming child inside her was kicking. You could see it kicking if you knew about such things. Betty, who didn’t know, sat staring ahead.

  “Where are we going, Amy? This isn’t your way home.”

  “No, it’s my day for health visiting. New babies. Home births. I’ll say you’re my assistant. You can carry a clipboard. Now then, what’s the matter?”

  “I can’t actually tell you. Not yet. I’ve just got in. I was out all night.”

  “Sleeping with Eddie Feathers? Well, about time. That I will say.”

  “No. No. He won’t do it. He thinks if it’s serious, you don’t do it before marrying.”

  “He said this?”

  “Not actually. But he sort of indicates.”

  “Well,” she said. “It’s a point of view. Mine, as a matter of fact. And Nick’s. But we couldn’t stick to it. So who were you with on the night you became engaged? You’d better tell me. Oh, we’re here. Get out and I’ll tell you how to behave. Then tell me what’s going on.”

  They were on a cemented forecourt of what looked like an overhead parking block ten storeys high. “Take the clipboard. Walk behind me with authority. O.K.? We are weighing and measuring babies born at home. Every family will greet us with a glass of tea. If there is no tea it will be a glass of water. If there is no water then it will be an empty glass. Whichever is handed to you, you greet it as if it were champagne. O.K.?”

  Inside the rough building among the shadowy wooden joists Elisabeth was reminded of the unseen people of the wood. At doorways they were bowed to, and tightly wrapped babies were presented, unwrapped and hung up by Amy from a hook above a little leather hammock. Like meat, thought Elisabeth. The baby was examined, peered at with a torch, tapped and patted, then measured and returned. The mother or grandmother—it could have been either—bowed and offered the glass. The babies’ eyes shone black and narrow, and looked across at Elisabeth with the knowledge of Methuselah. She caught one proud young mother’s glance and smiled in congratulation. “Beautiful,” she said and the mother made a proud disclaimer.

  “That last one will die,” said Amy as they walked back to the car. “We’ll go home and I’ll get you some breakfast. Let me hear your earth-shattering experiences with your substitute future husband.”

  “He wasn’t. I told you.”

  “Then who was it?”

  “Someone else. I’d just met him.”

  “Ye gods! Here, help me.” She was unloading the back of the car of the paraphernalia of the maternity run. “Met him here? In Hong Kong?”

  “Yes. I think it was hypnosis.”

  Weights, measures, bottles were heaped in Elisabeth’s arms.

  “Rubbish, it was lust. It was natural desire. Or maybe it was only resentment,” said Amy.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know because you told me, yesterday, that your marriage frightened you, because it meant you would never know passion. You did it to have something to remember and to have known desire.”

  “No, it was love. I’m not excusing myself. Edward will never know. It is love.”

  “Elisabeth, what are you doing?”

  “Is it so wrong to want a glorious memory?”

  “It’s sentimental and obscene. You won’t like yourself for it in the end. You don’t like yourself now.”

  “I never thought you were a puritan, Amy.”

  “Well, you’ve learned something. I am.”

  “After the way you went on at school.”

  “That was ten years ago.”

  “So you have been purified by Nick?”

  Amy was rolling from side to side up the dirty stairwell, trying to support the unborn baby as it kicked to get clear of her ribcage and slide into the world. From above came the wailing of apparently inconsolable children and the voice of a roaring man.

  A saffron monk stuck his head out of his doorway as they passed, his hairless shining face determinedly blissful. He asked if he could eat with them. “No,” said Amy. “There’s too much going on,” and the monk blissfully retired.

  “Where in hell—” shouted Nick at their open door. “You’ve been hours. We’re going mad.”

  Mrs. Baxter, in a rocking chair, held an unhappy bundle. “I’m afraid she’s wet again.” An untouched bottle of formula stood near, untouched, that is, except by flies. “It’s time to get Emily back from school.”

  “Well, here’s the car keys,” said Amy, picking the baby out of Mrs. Baxter’s bony lap, dropping the nursing gear, scooping another child out of Nick’s struggling arms. “Oh, and can you give Bets a lift back to the Old Col?”

  “Bets?” Nick took a hold, looked at her and switched on the polite. “So sorry. Don’t think we’ve met. Are you new here?”

  “I’m passing through.”

  “We were at school,” said Amy.

  “Oh. Excellent. Sorry about the scenes of married bliss. Didn’t see you there, ha-ha. You’ll want to be off.”

  “No. I don’t want to go.” She looked at Nick in his plastic dog collar. “Amy, I don’t know what to do.”

  “Pray you’re not pregnant,” said Amy, also behaving as if the two of them were alone. “Try prayers. Go ahead with ear
lier plans.”

  “Someone will tell him. You know they will. You know Hong Kong.”

  “Oh, probably. If so, I suppose that’ll be it. But I wonder? He doesn’t sound the ordinary old blimp, your future husband.”

  “What is all this?”

  “It is something, Nick,” said Mrs. Baxter, “that I don’t think we should be listening to. You are making us eavesdroppers, Amy.”

  “I’ve more to do than stand here dropping eaves,” said Nick. “I’m teaching a Moral Sciences seminar in twenty minutes.”

  Amy and Elisabeth continued to stand in silence and it was (surprisingly) Amy who began to cry.

  “You’re—oh, if you knew how I envy you, Bets! You’re so innocent. You’re going to be so ghastly soon. All this will be an uneasy memory when you’re opening bazaars around the Temple church in the Strand, and organising book groups for barristers’ wives. You’ll metamorphose into a perfect specimen of twentieth-century uxorial devotion. You’ll have this one guilty secret and you’ll never forgive me for knowing.”

  “I don’t know what the hell’s going on,” said Nick.

  “You and I, Bets, will be the last generation to take seriously the concept of matrimonial fidelity. Wait until this lot gets cracking with sex and sin in the—what?—in the sixties.”

  “How do you know?” said Elisabeth.

  “I know.”

  “Are you happy about it, Amy?”

  “I am bloody, bloody unhappy about it. Have a child at your peril, Bets. It will hurt you to hell.”

  One of the children then began to cry for its dinner and slap, bang went Amy with the rice pot.

  “Nick—take Betty now. Bets, see you at the altar? Right?”

  Mrs. Baxter began to sing “When I survey the wondrous Cross” as she unwrapped the wet child, who at once spread out its wet legs and went thankfully to sleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  At last there was a message for Elisabeth Macintosh when she returned to the Old Colony Hotel. She was called over to the reception desk and an official-looking letter was put into her hands. The envelope came from Edward’s London Chambers and it chilled her. Her name was typewritten. So, it was all over.

  She took it upstairs—the bedroom still untouched, the two beds a mess, but she found a red light flashing by the telephone. Which first? Face the one you fear.

  She opened the letter and inside, in Edward’s beautiful, clear script, read, I have wonderful news. Ross will bring you to the Old Repulse Bay Hotel tonight to celebrate it. I have not had a minute—literally, I mean it—to telephone or write. You will soon see why. I love and long for you, Edward.

  She contemplated the message light for a while and then rang down to reception. While they dialled up the message, she sat with the blunt heavy block of the black receiver in her hand. At length, after much clicking, a voice, a recording from somewhere: This is Mr. Albert Ross, consulting solicitor to Mr. Edward Feathers QC. I am to call for a Miss Elisabeth Macintosh this evening to take her to dinner with Mr. Feathers and his team. The dress code will be formal. Six o’clock.

  Who is this pompous ass? The famous Loss the Demon Dwarf? So, we shall meet. I’m not going to like him. I’m being played with by all of them. I’ve half a mind . . .

  And “dress code formal’! What in hell? I’ve no money and nothing clean and Edward must—should—know it. As if he did!

  She went to the waste-paper basket and fished out the dress.

  No. I couldn’t. I can never wear it again. It feels cold and wet. I can hardly bear to touch it. (But she held it to her face.)

  I suppose I could get them to press it. Laundry service? But just touching it, looking at it, makes me want to cry. With happiness, private happiness, not with guilt. Once only. It is a sacred dress. And she pressed her face into it and remembered Veneering’s hands and skin and hair and sweat as the dress lay like a slop of spinach on the wood floor of the weird tree house. I will never wear it again.

  Time? It’s still only two o’clock. I’ve over three hours. Food? Not hungry. Perhaps try. Get room service. Get a saté from a stall.

  She turned in her cotton clothes into the poor streets again, stepping through litter and ordure. A man without legs sat, his crutches splayed, opening shellfish, the shells thrown about him. She bought a pork saté from a boy yelling “Saté” insolently in her ear. Then she bought a warm, soft prawn fritter and stood eating it all. It smelled sweet and good. Looking up above the street stalls she saw on a hoarding a huge photograph. It was a young European girl naked to the waist and smelling a rose. It was, undoubtedly, Lizzie.

  Well, of course not. How could it be? Lizzie was an intellectual. She’d been at Bletchley Park. And she was, or said she was, a lesbian. One didn’t think about it. She was always coming and going to Hong Kong. She told you nothing. There were rumours of her having something to do with the Chief of Police. She had known some terrible people, even at school. But she’d been serious, hard-working. But naked to the waist and a rose! Smelling the rose! Lizzie! Well, she does say she’s broke. No, I’m just tired.

  I am wonderfully, deeply tired and I want him again. And again. And for ever. And I don’t mean Edward.

  She wandered the street stalls, licking the prawn juice off her fingers. She peered into fragments of looking-glass, demons and cartoon toys. Wherever she went among the stalls were clusters of children eating where they stood, quietly, prodding their chopsticks into thimble dishes of fish and pork. Oh, how could I ever go West again? I’ll stay here. With anyone who wants me. One or the other. With anyone.

  She had shocked herself. She had meant it. She’d go with a man who would let her roam in the market. “I’ll go down fast,” she told the poster. The girl with the rose now did not look like Lizzie at all. It was some American film star. Hedy Lamarr. She wondered how much the girl had been paid.

  She was in the Old Col Hotel again. It was half past four in the afternoon. Make-up? Borrow Lizzie’s. (God, I look tired.) Dress? Green dress. I forgot to get them to iron it. It smells and I don’t care. I’ll never, never own such a beautiful dress again. And nobody will ever know. He won’t be there. Not at Edward’s party with its “wonderful news’—whatever that is.

  When she was dressed she looked—after a little hesitation—out of her window and saw a white Mercedes parked outside, its windows dark and its number plate so short it looked like royalty.

  “I shall certainly not hurry,” said the new Elisabeth and sauntered forth, her hair curly again, springy after the shower. I’m walking differently, she thought. They say you can always tell when a virgin is a thing of the past.

  The car with the black windows gave no sign of remarking on her non-virginal condition, her walk, or on anything about her. When she stopped beside it nothing happened and she felt snubbed. If there was a driver inside, he was invisible. This was not a car you could tap or try a door handle. It might set off some terrible alarm.

  The crowds were surging now from work. They parted around the Mercedes and then came back together again beyond it. Nobody looked at her or noticed her. As Nick had said this morning at the noisy family flat, “You get lonely here, you know. It’s not that they dislike you so much as that they aren’t interested. They just blot you out. Just occasionally they make it plain. You can be sitting on a bus with the only empty seat the one beside you, and there’ll be Chinese standing thick down the middle of the bus all down the centre aisle, and there’ll never, ever, be one of them who will sit down beside you. We are invisible.”

  Elisabeth, standing in her green dress by the car, now felt invisible. She decided to turn back. After all, I’m not just anyone. She would go back to the bedroom and wait to be properly taken to Edward’s party. I am a grown woman.

  And yet, I’m still telling myself stories. I have not had the courage to throw away childish things. You’d never take me for a linguist and a sociologist and an expert in ciphers, and all of it after being in the Camps. There is something mis
sing in me. I’m empty.

  Tears began to come. She knew that it was love that was missing. Edward was missing. She had forgotten all about him. Put him ruthlessly into memory.

  “Good afternoon,” said someone behind her and she looked down to see a very short, thickset troll of a man wearing a brown felt hat. He removed it.

  “I am Albert Loss. I cannot say my ‘ahs.’ I am the instructing solicitor and almost lifetime friend of Mr. Edward Feathers QC. I am instructed to drive you out to Repulse Bay to dine with him.”

  A white-uniformed driver now stood beside the car’s opened doors. She was put behind the driver and Ross next to her on a built-up seat that set them on a level. The air-conditioning after several minutes was cool and silent, and the car slid carefully through the crowds and away.

  “You said something—” she turned to Ross. “You said something like ‘QC.’ Edward is too young to be made a Queen’s Counsel.”

  “He has just been made one. I mentioned it in my telephone message.”

  “No! Has he? I never took it in. Oh, how wonderful! He never told me he’d applied. Oh, I see! Now I see. This is to be a celebration.”

  “Not altogether. He has other things to say. I shall leave the rest to him.”

  “Oh, and he so deserves it. Oh, I hope he’s letting himself be happy about it.”

  “He will never let on,” said Ross, “but he has been frequently smiling.” He removed his hat, turned it over, unzipped a small zip inside the crown and removed a pack of cards. He did up the zip again, dropped the hat to the floor and set up a little shelf. He began to deal himself a hand.

  “I like cards, too,” she said. “But will there be time? I thought we were almost there.”

  “There is always time for cards and reflection. They are an aide-memoire. I am a compulsive player and I have a magnificent grasp of fact. My memory has been honed into an unbreakable machine. There is half an hour more of this short journey. We have to make a diversion on the way.”