Read Online A Case of Knives by Candia McWilliam - Free Book Online Page B

his campness and his explicitness. He was what I was not, for certain. And then, he was what I was.
    My mother would refer to people who were kind all through as ‘fat souls’. Tertius, I thought, was a fat soul. He was certainly a fat body.
    We began with a cold soup of red fruits. Using sour cream, I had written the initial of each person in their soup. With those same perfectly steady hands I had that morning reinforced the interventricular septum in the heart of a small brown baby. His mother had lost two boys already from the same cause, after the same operation. She had three daughters, cursed, I thought, with perfect health, looking at their flashing-eyed father as he visited his wife and son that evening. The little girls, in pastel trousers and long tunics, had come the night before and laid their heads against the side of their mountainous mother as she watched the baby boy. Perhaps some of their life penetrated her pyramidal form. The whole family wore woolly cardigans. The father, with his astrakhan hat, moustache and blue eyes, looked particularly compromised by his cardigan. The sternum of his little son, like a bird’s, would soon, I knew, be safely enfolded in canary cable stitch. God send it keep him warm. The small girls were so respectful of their parents that not even their hair was disobedient; it just receded, at the end of each silken pigtail, to a point where it was no longer visible, at the tunic’s hem.
    I had chosen with care the balance of guests to make our dinner party up to eight. I wanted no one to outshine or to show up Cora. It was as though I loved her myself, with such care did I consider her and exactly how she was. I had selected a couple who had married late and who loved each other, an advertisement for the married state. He was a rich man whose hobby was cancer, his main luxury giving money to conferences on the subject in countries like India, which had their own special cancers, dictated by climate and way of life, cancers related to the carrying of braziers or the consumption of fish. She had been a nurse. She was pretty and tired and since her marriage had become a garden historian. He would help her file plants by colour, on the floor of their music room. He had index cards made for her in every colour there is, including sixteen different greys. They were called Daniel and Flo Bayley and he was her dream come true; I doubt whether he had dared to dream, since he had no hands. He wore false hands, ungloved, so unhorrific, and his metal fingers were eerily deliberate in movement. On account of Daniel’s hands, I had avoided cooking anything too fibrous, but I will not make those tone poems on a gout of sauce either. It was a stew with dumplings, each dumpling filled either with an apricot or an almond, and flecked green like mossed eggs. After that, a salad and small potatoes, to absorb the gravy. I find it hard to talk and eat salad, but, as I had anticipated, this did not inhibit my eighth guest. Her name was Dodo, for Dorothy, and I had chosen her for her swift smallness, calculated to show up Cora’s grand scale and her latent wit. Dodo bound books. Nerves and the passing years had made her preen and namedrop and assume. Tertius, Anne and I all knew her and knew she meant no harm, but I wanted her to be at or near her worst that night and she did not disappoint. Her face looked like those eighteenth-century caricatures which you turn upside down to discover what they could be. One might imagine poor Dodo as ‘the week preceding Matrimonie and its aftermath’. Dainty at first glance, her face was coarse; it was not easy to look her in the eye, the nakedness of her desperation was such, and her scrub of unshining curls was not the texture of the hair of the head. Dodo seemed never to close her mouth. She had bracelets of flesh at wrist and ankle, and was very thin in between; she moved as though her waist were a single ball and socket joint, with none of the dip and swoop