Mr. Fox (3 page)

Katherine opened her ice-blue eyes to intone: “And you’ll find the music.”

Mitzi poked my wrist with her spoon. “Anything of note?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Just a letter from my father.” I hadn’t exactly lied—beside my plate there was an envelope addressed in my father’s handwriting but unopened.

The Coles have a musical clock hung on a bracket in their living room; it is lantern-shaped with a circular opening for the clock face. It chimes the hour every hour from seven in the morning to ten at night, and it also plays a snatch of “Für Elise.” It makes me laugh now to think that “Für Elise” ever used to send a chill down my spine. Katherine has said several times that the clock offends her sensibilities, but Mr. Cole likes it, so it stays. When the family interviewed me in London, the second or third thing Mr. Cole told me after shaking my hand was that he had no culture, none at all. Mitzi, tiny, white-blonde, and warmly rounded, like a soft diamond, had immediately interjected: “God bless our Papa Bear; he doesn’t need any culture.”

The clock chimed nine just as Katherine turned to her mother and said, “You know, your elocution is really terrible.”

Mitzi smoothed Katherine’s hair and said, “Why, thank you, my sweet.”

Katherine replied, “You had grapefruit juice on your hands and now it’s in my hair.” She left the table immediately—with purpose more than petulance. Mitzi and I heard the bathroom taps go on and we looked at each other.

“I find it slightly ridiculous that Katy is my child,” Mitzi remarked, and resumed with her grapefruit. She was simultaneously reading the dictionary (I saw she had just begun the letter
K
) and looking through a Bergdorf Goodman catalogue, choosing clothes for Katherine.

Katherine returned to the table damp-haired. Mitzi tapped a page of the catalogue with her pen and asked, “Honey, what do you think of this little skirt suit here?”

“It’s great, I’ll take it,” Katherine said without looking. Katherine is Mitzi miniaturised, brunette, and wiped entirely clean of conscience. I have the strong feeling that unless Katherine is closely watched she will one day do something terrible to another person, or perhaps even to a large group of people. The key is not to aggravate her, I think.

Mitzi placed a large tick on the catalogue page.

I looked at the walls as I ate my toast—everything was butter and marmalade. The blondest wood that Mitzi had been able to find, yellow countertops, yellow tablecloth, linoleum of the same colour but in such a shocking hue that I can never quite believe in it and constantly find myself walking or sitting with only my toes on the ground, never my full weight.

Katherine’s white silk blouse was wet from her washing, possibly ruined. I would take it to the dry cleaner’s before our morning walk. Her pine-green skirt was cut so simply that I knew it cost the equivalent of at least three months of my wages.

“Better change your blouse, Katherine,” I said. If she heard me, she gave no sign. I took Mr. Fox’s letter (
If you’d still like me to read your pages I’d be glad to. . . .
Glad to, he’d be glad to. . . .) and the letter from home, took them to my bedroom, and tucked them in alongside the others, between the covers of my copy of
Foxe’s Martyrs,
a book to which Katherine had shown an aversion, so I knew they’d be safe from her eyes.

Mitzi had switched on the wireless set; a band was swinging Gershwin, trombones loudest. I returned to the kitchen to clear the plates and cups.

“I’ve been reading some of your poems,” Katherine told her mother. Mitzi went wide-eyed with alarm and said, “And?”

“They don’t make any sense,” Katherine said. “You know that? I have some questions.” She pulled a square of paper out of her skirt pocket and unfolded it. Mitzi looked to all four corners of the room for help. I turned quickly and ran water over the dishes.

“Oh, it’s blank,” Mitzi whispered, hoarse with relief. “Honey, it’s blank. What a dirty trick to play on your old ma.”

“April Fools’,” Katherine explained.

“It’s October,” Mitzi told her.

Katherine didn’t say anything for some time; she seemed to be brooding. No one else said anything, either. The band on the radio heaved into another song, and I began to dry the dishes. I would give Mr. Fox just three stories—I already knew which ones. The previous weekend I’d looked at the stories I’d typed, reading them over and over.
If Mr. Fox doesn’t think you’re any good,
I asked myself,
what will you do?

The dishcloth was yellow, too—as I dried each cup I checked my hands for jaundice. Katherine appeared at my side. She had changed into a grey dress. “Come on, Mary,” she said, handing me my coat. “Let’s go for our walk.”

It had rained overnight, and in the trees it was still raining. Every branch along 65th Street shed leaves on us. The leaves were dark, and their moisture made noise. There was a sense that at any time they might bite—they were like bats. The Mercier Hotel was down the block on our way to Central Park. Pigeons stumbled across the white portico that jutted over the doors, and I could distantly hear the bustle, see people moving behind the smoky glass.

We stopped at the dry cleaner’s with Katherine’s blouse and a couple of Mr. Cole’s suits. Then I told Katherine about the literature assignment I was setting her: read
The Woman in White
and
The Count of Monte Cristo,
then answer the question “What is a villain?” I had two copies of each book in my satchel for when she settled down to read at the park. I meant to read along with her, to see if it was possible to catch her thinking. It wasn’t the reading itself that would throw Katherine—she read everything. The problem was eliciting a response from her afterwards. If asked for a review, she impersonally rehashed every detail of the story. “Oh, everyone’s got a view, haven’t they? . . . Everyone’s got something to say,” she’d tell me, when all I wanted to know was whether she’d liked the book.

As I’d expected, Katherine wasn’t listening to what I was telling her. She picked leaves off her black beret. “Say, do you think Ma’ll let me bob my hair like yours?”

We crossed at the light, hand in hand.

“Your hair suits you as it is.”

“But I want a bob. Ma says it’s quaint because it’s so out of style.”

I blushed hard. No point asking whether Mitzi had really said that.

Katherine looked sideways at me. “Why
do
you bob your hair? Waiting on a flapper revival?”

“I bob my hair because I don’t care about trends, only about what suits me, thank you very much for asking,” I said severely.

Really I bob my hair because I’ve given up on it. It’s so palely coloured that if I pull it back from my face I look bald. My mother used to kiss my cheeks and run her fingers through my hair. She’d hold locks of it up to the light and say, “Look at that colour, spun gold. You’ll be such a beautiful woman. . . .”

I always understood that it was a story, like all her other ones, the fairy tales she told. I’ve taken no harm from its not coming true. I don’t expect it to come true.

 

 

I spent Sunday morning typing fresh copies of the three stories I meant to give to Mr. Fox. Usually I make plenty of mistakes, and I waste quite a lot of paper that way. But this time mistakes were minimal—adrenaline lent me precision. I played “Mama Loves Papa” over and over on Katherine’s gramophone, which she’d placed in my room before leaving for Long Island with her parents. All three had left wearing starched tennis whites; they planned to take turns playing doubles on their tennis court, to help Mr. Cole forget the hassle of his working week. I haven’t been to the Long Island house, but I’ve seen photographs, and I hope the Coles never think to ask me along. Besides the tennis court they have a swimming pool and a topiary maze. Also a cook. What would I do in such a place? Die, I expect. Some Depression the Coles are having.

Mitzi occasionally asks me how I spend my weekends, and I tell her I volunteer at a soup kitchen on Times Square.

When I’d finished typing, I slid the pages into a black folder and put the folder in my satchel. My stomach sprang up my throat and I tried to be sick in the bathroom but had no such luck. I lay on my bed with
The Count of Monte Cristo,
rereading his astounding escape from the Château d’If.
Good for you, Count of Monte Cristo. Your escape is one in the eye for jailers everywhere.
I’ve given up trying to position my bed in such a way that the sky can be seen from the bedroom window—there just isn’t any sky in this part of Manhattan. On sunny days clouds are reflected in the plate glass halfway up the tallest buildings, but that’s the best this place can do.

It’s odd the way I keep to my bedroom even when the apartment is empty; more so when it is empty, actually. I can’t explain it—it’s not an attachment to the room itself, not anything to do with a sense of security or ownership. Not timidity, not disorientation. Maybe the Coles chose me for this very reason; they looked at me and thought,
This girl is no threat to our home, to our cut crystal and heirloom silver, our framed landscapes and lace, oh, our lace. She’s English, but she’s not hoity-toity. She knows her place, she sure does know her place. There’s something ghostlike about this girl . . . she will appear at certain times and in certain places, and at other times she will recede into a disinterested dark. Mary “Ghost” Foxe.

 

 

I would be at the bar before he arrived, I decided. To spy him before he spied me. I would sit close to the door with a glass of wine, drinking it slowly with my eyes half closed. Then, at seven p.m., I would look up and examine all those gathered around me. It would be like the ending of an Agatha Christie mystery, all possible culprits together in a locked room.

At three minutes after seven I would stride over to the man whose appearance was the least remarkable and say, “Mind if I join you, Mr. Fox,” without a question mark. We would talk for one hour; I would hand over the stories and be back by eight-ten, eight-thirty at the latest. The Coles would be home at nine.

I chose to make my entrance at half past six. His inviting me for seven made it unlikely he would arrive before six-thirty himself. Unless seven represented the latter half of the “hour or two” he passed at the bar, in which case he would be already seated, ice cubes melting into his whisky. None of the characters in any of his stories drink whisky—they drink everything under the sun but that, I’ve noticed—so whisky is probably a drink Mr. Fox reserves for himself. He’d wait until ice and alcohol had merged completely before taking his first sip. Whilst waiting he’d . . . what? Did he really go to the bar of the Mercier Hotel alone most Sundays, or did he have a drinking buddy named something like Sal, flat-headed sleepy-blinking Sal, a sports journalist whose lethargy concealed an encyclopaedic knowledge of every professional boxing statistic since the sport began? Good old Sal, uncomplicated company. Or perhaps Mr. Fox liked to drink with admirers of his books, young newspapermen with rolled-up shirtsleeves, smartly dressed girls who typed rejection letters on behalf of various publishers and literary agencies. He probably liked actresses. He hadn’t yet been married to or linked to an actress, only writers, but maybe a Broadway starlet was in the cards, an antidote to his run of bad luck. If I found Mr. Fox sitting at the bar with a simpering actress, I wouldn’t bother speaking to him, I’d leave immediately.

At ten minutes to six I walked into Katherine’s room and opened her wardrobe, which was so tidy it looked empty. I took her green skirt off a hanger and put it on; it fitted well. Next I went into Mitzi’s room. The clock chimed six and hammered out “Für Elise.” I sat at the dressing table in Katherine’s skirt and my own black brassiere (twenty minutes left—it would take me ten minutes to walk down to the Mercier) and used everything in sight. I powdered my face, rouged my cheeks, painted my eyelashes, combed my eyebrows. When I finished, I washed my face clean, because the results were exactly as I had expected and I looked ghastly. With three minutes remaining, I buttoned up Katherine’s silk blouse, turned the gramophone off, and left.

The lift attendant asked if I was going on a date. I ignored him. It’s quite an experience, ignoring the speech of someone you’re sharing a lift with. I suppose it should be done only when one has absolutely nothing to say. He tugged his cap and said, “Well, la-di-da and good evening to you, too,” when I got out at the ground floor.

Inside, the Mercier was all brass and mahogany and polished rosewood. Red velvet, too, and perfume soaked so deep in tar that it smelt dirty, a nice sort of dirty. I took a cramped corner table that a couple had just vacated. They looked happy together, walked out with their coat collars turned up and their fingertips just touching. I put my wineglass down between their empty glasses and asked the waitress not to clear them away. From the bar’s vast marble crest to the bank of tables and chairs that surrounded it, hardly anyone sat alone. There were a few more couples but mainly mixed groups of five, six, seven, the women sipping at cocktails with prettily wrinkled noses, the men using their cigars and whisky tumblers to emphasise the points they were making.

At twenty minutes to seven someone said, “Hi, there.”

I looked up at a man with a beer glass in his hand. His hair was slicked across his head with each strand distinct, like the markings on a leaf. He grinned.

“All on your lonesome?”

“Are you Mr. Fox?”

He winked and drew out the chair opposite me. “Sure, I’m him. I’ve been looking at you, and—”

I dropped my satchel onto the chair before he could sit down. “I’m waiting for someone.”

The man moved on without argument, took a seat at the bar, swivelled his stool to face my table, and smiled at me whenever I looked his way. I couldn’t help looking every now and again, for comparison’s sake. I began to feel certain that the man at the bar was Mr. Fox after all. His eyes were quite beady, there was too much white to them and they sat too close together, but his smile was pleasant, soothing, despite them.