Free A Case of Knives by Candia McWilliam Page A

poetry and had not considered being anyone else but big her.
    ‘I mean I can relax at last.’ The implication was that Dodo could take a recuperative bath in peacock-egg albumen before being whirled off again, if, of course, she wished to be.
    ‘The great thing about those snatched moments is the freedom to read,’ she continued, as though books were forbidden to bookbinders, as Tertius tells me love of great pictures is to art dealers. ‘And how I love to read. At the moment I am on one which tells you how to . . .’
    I rescued her, coming to take her plate.
    Daniel, being kind, said to her, ‘Do go on, Dorothy, or may I call you Dodo?’ He had turned from Cora to whom he had spoken through the first half of dinner. He had not asked her about her work, either with perfect instinct or with the understandable egoism of a happily married man who has all he wants and finds himself being asked all about that self by a pretty, younger, woman. He put people at their ease, so they talked well. His hands and his fine head discouraged do-good flirtation to make up for the hands. He was funny. Yet Cora’s eyes often lifted over the table to Hal, whose mouth was just mauve with the soup, so that his eyes were heightened to the bright blue of stones. In fact, he looked, so vivid was his clothing, as though he could, like Dodo’s paper, have been touched with paint. Cora, like a mother, had managed to keep her attention on him, while seeming to give it all to Daniel, who was now listening to Dodo. Dodo’s gestures and near tearful cheeriness suggested to me a thyroid condition. What would Daniel be seeing there? Not a cancer, certainly. Nothing so faithful. She was made for transitory relations, even with illness.
    I returned to my place when I had made sure that everyone had their cheese and dry biscuits. I had put a bowl of preserved green almonds on the table, with a silver fork, and a bowl of shaggy peonies was flanked by a flat glass bowl of lime jelly, whose smell, as it melted slowly among the candles, was like a woman’s perfume. To go with the jelly, made with a calf’s foot and twelve sour green fruit, was yellow cream in a silver jug. Tertius and Anne had been talking together in a way which, to my irritation, I could see titillated Hal. They spoke of people and of places which were public knowledge, but which were, at any rate to Anne, private fact. Very many of the people they discussed were related to her. She did not see Tertius’s over-enthusiasm, being innocent in that way. He was watching her as some men will a car which they have been allowed to drive for an afternoon. He even began to show off on his own account.
    ‘My new friend,’ he was saying, ‘Angelica Coney, she does so much for charity.’
    ‘If you admit she is your “new” friend you must have met her an hour ago. I’ve never known a nine days’ queen like you,’ said Anne. She was not angry with Tertius. She did not like charity as practised by her class, and was irked by his borrowing of it. ‘Dressing up to feel better about people who can’t dress up.’ ‘Do it, but don’t say,’ she would state. I suspected she did it, but I did not know what form it took.
    I watched these people, two of whom I could say I loved. I sat at my end of the table and saw to my right Anne and Tertius, he red with wine and she by now white with smoke, laughing. Were they happy? He was satisfied and greedy, his personal life was regulated as library membership. She was almost certainly not happy but had world enough to make others so.
    Opposite me, Daniel was flirting with Dodo. Happiness made him free with charm. I could see her assembling, from this crippled handsome married man, a romance, which she, selflessly, for Flo’s sake really, since Flo would never really get another chance, not really, would turn from, to bury herself once more in her books on Tarot, chick peas, tantra and the old lie, something for everyone. I turned my head to talk to