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.
At ten minutes past seven a waitress came over with another glass of wine for me. “Gentleman at the bar’s taken a shine to you. Sends this with his compliments. Says his name’s Jack.”
I nodded and let her put the glass down before me. I didn’t drink from it. It sat there, buying me time to wait here alone in this place. I looked into the wine and felt myself drowning in it. Mr. Fox didn’t come, he didn’t come, he didn’t.
It was half past eight when I left the bar. The night was very stark, alternate streams of town cars and chequered taxicabs, blaring horns busily staking claims — here is the road and here is the sidewalk. But the road looked so much livelier, what if I tried the road?
I often think it would be such luxury to go mad, and not have to worry about anything. Others would have to worry for me, about me. There would be some sort of doctor there to tell me: “Don’t worry, Mary, it’s just that you are mad. Now, be quiet and take this pill.” And I would think, So that’s all it is, and I would be so glad. But aloud I would say, “What? I’m perfectly sane! You’re mad. . ” Only mildly, though; just for show, really.
November 1st, 1936
St. John Fox
177 West 77th Street, Apartment 25
New York City
Abominable Mr. Fox,
Contemptible Mr. Fox,
Nefarious Mr. Fox,
Vile Mr. Fox,
Loathsome Mr. Fox
Putrid Mr. Fox,
I closed my thesaurus and pulled the letter out of the typewriter with such haste that it tore; half of it was left in the scroll above the type bar. When I touched the two halves together they didn’t even fit anymore.
Katherine was on my bed, reading a book I hadn’t set her. She looked up when I crushed the letter to Mr. Fox in my hand — that’s Katherine for you, she’d hardly blinked while I was pounding the typewriter keys, but the moment I quietly made something smaller between my fingers, she was all interest.
I asked her what she was reading.
She shrugged. “Some book.”
“So you’ve already finished reading the books I set you, have you?”
She turned a page. “Not yet, I’m getting to it.”
“I shall tell your mother that you’re not applying yourself.”
Katherine seemed intrigued. I had never threatened her before.
“You probably should. After all, it’s my education that’s at stake. Maybe I need a new teacher or something. You missing London?”
I laughed at her indifference, the way she’d spoken without even bothering to inject a nasty insinuating tone into her words.
“Katherine, I could die horribly here in this chair, and my blood could spray all over the room and cover the pages of that fascinating book you’re reading, and I believe, I really do believe, that you’d just wipe the worst away and keep going.”
Katherine stretched her legs. “That’s a pretty gruesome thing to say, Mary.” She shook her head. “Pretty gruesome.”
She left the room, and I picked up the book she’d been reading. On the cover was an illustration of a steamboat. I glanced at the back. Vampires in the Deep South.
Katherine returned with The Woman in White and settled in the chair before my typewriter. “Happy now?” she asked. I said I was happy. I had gone from standing by my bed to lying on it. I had been quite tired the past few days: sleeping longer than usual, feeling the shock of waking throughout my body, as if I had been flung against a wall. Katherine started typing. I didn’t open my eyes (when had I closed them?), but I said, “Hands off my typewriter, Katherine.”
She didn’t stop. I hadn’t really expected her to. I like to hear the marching of typewriter keys, the shudder of the space bar, the metallic ding at the end of a line. Those sounds are encouraging, sounds made by someone who is interested in you and in what you’re saying, someone who understands exactly what you’re getting at. “Hmm,” the typewriter says. And “Mmmm. I-see-I-see-I-see.” And sometimes it chuckles. .
When I woke up my bedroom door was closed.
“Katherine,” I called.
“What?” she called back. So she had not absconded. I relaxed somewhat. She would not have to be collected from a police station at a quarter to midnight, as she had on the Coles’ London trip. Katherine had given Hester, her previous companion, the slip in Covent Garden in order to engage in a vigorous bout of shoplifting. Having deemed Hester unable to cope with Katherine, the Coles had sacked her, then advertised for an immediate replacement. They hadn’t employed an English companion before and wanted someone well spoken and unapproachable, as if these traits could cow their daughter.
I looked inside my typewriter. There’s a city in there. Black and grey columns and no inhabitants.
“I’ve done all my algebra. And I’m on page two hundred and goddamn five of this book you’re making me read,” Katherine announced.
“Don’t say ‘goddamn,’”I replied. “Walkies now!”
She barked quite realistically.
One evening I encountered Mr. Cole alone in the kitchen, bending over the toaster, using it to light his cigar. “Couldn’t find my matches,” he said when he straightened up. I said, “Ah,” and began going away again. My cup of tea could wait. But he reached out — not very far; he is built quite powerfully, and I’m like a doll beside him — and grabbed my hand. He twirled me around the room, propped me up with my back against the counter, then took a puff on his cigar (he had not troubled himself to put it out the entire time). He leant so close to me that I could very clearly see the roots of hairs that had escaped his razor. I looked at his mouth because I thought he was going to kiss me and I hoped that if I paid attention he would not kiss me. That would have been my first kiss and it would have tasted of ash.