Free A Case of Knives by Candia McWilliam

which must as far as I can see be something to recommend women. She did bind books very well. ‘Like an angel,’ said Tertius, ‘the Recording Angel.’ Certainly, her work looked to me serviceable and unlaboured. She had a friend of dim dazzling beauty who had enjoyed a season’s fame with a copy of Brillat-Savarin bound in the skin of a tanned goose with inset into it a garlic-tooth of ivory and a gilded rosemary sprig. Dodo, painfully whimsical in life, did not affront the page with this chicanery.
    Hal sat opposite Cora and between Dodo and Flo. He wore a plain grey suit, a white shirt of silk, with his initials sewn upon it at the left breast, and a pair of black velvet slippers whose shield-shaped toes were each decorated with a forkful of gold thread, his initials, as though his feet were members of some club. He was without a tie.
    I was dividing my attention. All my motor activities were concerned with the meal; all my thoughts were occupied with Hal and his reaction to Cora. My eyes were drawn to Hal, as they always were; but today I had to conceal this. The means I found was to observe Cora. To see her seeing Hal for the first time had been to feel lightning conducted. I had introduced them – ‘You two know each other?’ – and left them for a moment. She stared at him as though it would pain her gaze to cease, and so it was throughout the meal, though they did not speak much.
    Dodo spoke to Hal about things ostensibly objective, their burden her own unmixed relief and sense of independence at not being obliged to spend time with men. Or even a man. None the less, her indiscriminate voracity for anything, not disqualifying a tapir, for company, was clear. When Hal responded, in, reasonably enough, objective vein to this talk, he became useless to her and Dodo began to talk over him to Flo, who lived for the company and ease of one man, and had probably never reached the tapir-state, finding quiet monogamy pure cream after the chalk and water hospital life. Their childlessness was a warmth between Daniel and Flo and went unpitied among their friends, which is rare since people will wish children upon the most wretchedly mismatched couple, perhaps to make themselves feel that their own broken nights and fractured ambitions are no more than the price of being human. Dodo invariably wore clothes covered with that small sprigging with which the wallpaper of an attic room will conceal misplaced pipes, bulging ceilings, and botched plastering. This suggested, as did her stiff motion, that her entire body was an artificial mechanism beneath the too pretty cloth. Why did she not just out with it, like Daniel with his hands like kitchen utensils?
    Dodo was a Catholic; she lodged with a Kosher family who did not like her to use the telephone. I used to think that this must be relief to her, since she would not feel obliged to pretend to have friends, ringing up no one, like a child. It was food laws, I am certain, which were the barrier to her using the telephone. Perhaps she had been eating prawns in her room? Her landlords charged her next to nothing for rent, and were not avaricious.
    We came to know Dodo because she had been at school with Anne, a fact which Anne remembered when we required in a hurry someone to bind a series of essays as a Festschrift for the Galenic scholar Gilbert Marjoribanks; blue and silver and very plain, it came. The immeasurably thin paper edge at the top of each page was lightly stained, and when the book was closed you saw why; there was a moonlit marsh with a flight of geese; pages making the soft released purr of wings above the marsh banks. Dodo could do with stamp and die and leather all she could not do with her own self.
    ‘It’s completely secluded,’ she was saying to Flo of her room at the top of a smallish and busy house in Archway. Flo lived in a quiet yellow rectory by water. ‘So there at last I can just be little me.’
    ‘How do you do that?’ asked Flo, who had no