‘You can have the shoes,’ he said, and Catherine and I responded enthusiastically. We had passed the test and been found worthy: a slightly absurd test it seemed, but at least we could now pay, take the shoes and go.
‘How much?’ I asked.
‘They’re my present to you,’ Harold said. ‘My gift.’
I said, hold on, I couldn’t possibly accept them for free. That was partly because I didn’t want to take advantage of the old man, but more importantly because I didn’t want to feel beholden to him. But he wasn’t having any of it.
He said, ‘I put those shoes in the window hoping that they’d attract the right sort of customer. And they have. You’re here. They’re yours. I’m delighted. But there’s one condition.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No conditions. Let’s keep this businesslike. Let me give you some money.’
Ignoring me he turned to Catherine and said, ‘The condition is that you let me continue to make shoes for you.’
‘What kind of shoes?’ she asked.
‘Any shoes I like. Anything and everything I want. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. And I wouldn’t charge you for those shoes either.’
I looked at Catherine. Given her reluctance to come to the shop in the first place, I assumed she’d find the idea of ‘conditions’ as objectionable as I did. But she was now strutting around the place, modelling the shoes, looking and behaving like a sex queen, a smile of utter, indecent pleasure plastered across her face. There was no doubt that she’d agree.
‘Harold,’ she said. ‘This could be the start of something big.’
When we got back to Catherine’s flat, we took the shoes out of their tissue-lined box and set them on a glass table in the middle of the living room. Normally I would have had the immediate desire to christen a pair of newly acquired shoes, to use them as an essential part of some sexual act or performance. But these shoes from Harold Wilmer produced a curious sort of inaction, a stasis. You had to pause, stop dead, and admire them.
‘They’re some shoes,’ said Catherine.
‘They are,’ I agreed.
‘It’s a pity Harold’s so creepy.’
‘Yes, he is a bit creepy, isn’t he?’ I said.
‘I wonder who he made the shoes for. Who she was. What happened to her? How did she die?’
‘I wonder what happened to the rest of her shoes.’
‘It’s a pity you’re so creepy too,’ she said.
She was making a joke, but a part of her obviously meant it.
‘I thought my creepiness was what attracted you to me,’ I said.
She didn’t have a ready answer for that.
‘I guess we needn’t ever go back to Harold’s shop,’ she said after a while. ‘I mean we have the shoes, right?’
‘That wouldn’t be fair,’ I said.
‘I guess not,’ she said. ‘A deal’s a deal. Besides, he does make amazing shoes. Where else are we going to get more shoes like this? For free.’
I frowned. That part of the bargain was still worrying me.
‘I don’t like to get something for nothing,’ I said. ‘There’s no such thing. We’ll have to find a way of paying him. If he won’t take money we’ll have to give him something else. Food hampers or sweaters or whatever else he does for kicks.’
‘Are you sure he does anything for kicks?’
‘Everybody does something,’ I replied.
Catherine seemed to be considering this proposition but then a new thought struck her.
‘Hey,’ she said, ‘when we stop seeing each other, who gets custody of the shoes? You or me?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe we could not stop seeing each other.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I suspect that isn’t an option.’
Ten
And so our relationship with Harold began in earnest. A few days later we returned to the shop and he began the process of fitting. He measured Catherine’s feet, made drawings and diagrams, jotted pages of notes to himself. That much was as expected, but then he said, ‘Now I need to make a cast.’
‘A cast?’
‘Yes, a sort of life mask of the young lady’s feet.’
‘You mean like a plaster cast?’ Catherine asked.
‘Yes. It’s not absolutely essential to the shoemaking process, but a cast reveals all sorts of details about the foot that are invisible to the naked eye. It enables me to create a more perfect fit.’
There’s a famous photograph of Ferragamo surrounded by his lasts. They represent the feet of his famous clients and are marked with their names: Claudette Colbert, Greta Garbo, Sophia Loren. The lasts are made of wood and although they obviously depict the size and the shape of the foot very accurately, they don’t show any detail, no bone structure or veins, not even the toes. I could see that a ‘life mask’ would be a much more faithful replica, even though I wasn’t sure how necessary that detail would be when it came to making shoes.
Harold continued, ‘I’ll need to make a mould using the sort of bandage they use to set broken limbs. Once I’ve got the mould I can use it to make perfect models of the feet. I tend to use plaster but you could use lots of different things. I could just as easily make models in wax or plasticine, even jelly.’
The prospect of having Catherine’s feet cast in jelly was a bizarre one. What flavour would I choose? Strawberry? Lime? Calves-foot? Incidentally, there are a couple of Aboriginal tribes in south-eastern Australia who used to eat the feet of their slain enemies; but I’m rambling.
Harold began to make the cast. I thought it would be a difficult and painstaking process, but Harold went about it in a perfectly matter of fact way. He began by coating Catherine’s feet in Vaseline, which he described as ‘the releasing agent’. I watched his hands smearing the stuff all over Catherine’s bare feet, his short, dark fingers swirling over every part of them, smoothing them down, burrowing in between the toes. Harold retained an entirely formal air while completing his task, but for me there was something utterly profane about it.
Then he asked Catherine to arch her feet as though she was on tiptoe or, I suppose, as though she was wearing high heels. He then wrapped the feet in the medical bandages he’d spoken of and slapped white liquid plaster over them. We had to wait for them to set, and Catherine was commanded not to move, but the whole business was brief and painless. Harold was soon cutting the set bandage and releasing Catherine’s feet. It took less time and was far less intimidating than the pedicure had been.
Harold said he didn’t need us any more. He said that now he had the moulds he could make the actual casts in our absence. In fact, as Catherine pointed out after we’d left the shop, he could make any number of them, in a wide variety of media, and who knows to what uses he might put them. She giggled. The thought didn’t displease her.
Before long a pair of plaster casts duly arrived for me in the post. They were meticulously packed and I undid the parcel with a kind of awe. Harold had been perfectly correct. I thought I knew every nook and crevice of Catherine’s feet, and yet seeing them this way, inert and perfectly white, revealed new features, small indentations and elevations that I had not noticed so clearly before. I was looking at a new map, a new geography. The effect was strangely hyper-real, as though the replicas contained more information, more detail than the feet themselves.
I handled them for a long time, held them up to the light, placed them in various locations in my living room and bedroom to discover where they could be seen to their best advantage. They weren’t, of course, as appealing as the real thing, as Catherine’s real flesh, but as fetish objects they were more exciting than the majority of feet I had ever encountered.