Mr. Fox (6 page)

One evening Mary went for her after-dinner walk as usual. She went through town, passing the tidy shop fronts, their signs beautifully lettered in glossy paint and print, striding over the mushy bank of sawdust outside the butcher’s. The entire neighbourhood was at home; wireless sets buzzed gently at her as she passed. Each house stood in its own square of garden, each garden with its own picket fence and its own garden gate. Not a curtain twitched. Mary climbed Murder Hill. It was a funny old hill. It started off as easily as walking on flat ground, and continued to seem flat, even after she had begun to feel short of breath. She looked down at all the chimney tops and picked lavender.

When she returned from her walk she found the house suspiciously quiet.

There was no rustling or giggling, no chiming of glassware to be heard anywhere in the house, she noticed. No party this evening. Mr. Pizarsky appeared, carrying a cake. It prickled with lit candles; at first glance there appeared to be hundreds of them. “Happy birthday, Miss Foxe,” he said, smiling warily.

He was right. It was her birthday. Dream-Mary thought she might be sick. “Mr. Pizarsky,” she said. “You shouldn’t have.” It was meant to sound light-hearted, but it didn’t.

He looked crestfallen. “You don’t like cake.”

“No, I do. How did you know it was my birthday?”

In the kitchen, Mr. Pizarsky carefully dropped his burden onto the table. He stared at the candle flames. They both did. It seemed rude to look at each other just then.

“I gave my room a good spring cleaning last week,” he said. “I found a birthday card. Dated.”

So he slept in her old room. She hadn’t known that, hadn’t checked to see whether or not he’d been keeping the lower half of the house in order, whether he had changed any aspect of the furnishing. The hallway and main stairs were tidy enough, and as long as the house didn’t fall down she didn’t care. In the last few weeks of her mother’s illness they’d spent whole afternoons in that room. Afterwards she’d moved out of that part of the house in a hurry. And she hadn’t gone back for anything since, had waited in the parlour while prospective tenants looked the property over. She must have left a great many things in there.

“I’ve taken a liberty, haven’t I?” Mr. Pizarsky gestured towards the birthday cake. “Even as I bought it, I wasn’t sure. You like to have secret birthdays? You English . . . I am forever offending you.”

“No, no—” Mary searched for her manners and caught hold of them again. “It’s a lovely surprise.”

She pretended to make a wish and blew out the candles—only thirty of them, she counted. Such flattery. She found two small plates and put a slice of the cake on each, then remained standing, holding her slice away from her. He stood, too—he couldn’t very well sit down and eat while she stood there, not eating. As they exchanged remarks she was aware of treating him shabbily.

“I hope you didn’t cancel a gathering on my account, Mr. Pizarsky.”

“No, I’ve been abandoned tonight.”

Mr. Pizarsky was unkempt for a man of the law—his hair wanted combing, and the elbows of his jacket could have done with a thorough darning.

“I’m sure they’ll come back,” Mary soothed.

“I hope she will. That is to say—to tell you the truth, Miss Foxe, there is only one of them I particularly care for. The others are just her friends.”

She hadn’t taken a proper look at any of the girls that crowded the downstairs rooms most evenings; they all looked exactly the same to her.

“Well—best of luck, Mr. Pizarsky. Is your name Russian?”

“I’m a Pole, Miss F. . . . though I have met Russians who bear the name. Have you ever been to my country?”

“Poland? No—no. I haven’t been anywhere. Brighton. The Lake District and the Cotswolds, a few times. London sometimes.”

“A pity. Mine is a lovely country, in parts—simple and honest and strong. The landscapes, the buildings, the mead.”

“Oh—I must go there one day.”

He smiled sadly, with his mouth closed.

“One day. Not now. The rioting. And more to come.”

“Really . . . ?”

Her question was feeble, but he considered it with a quizzical twist of his mouth.

“Why, yes, of course! ‘Really,’ you say. You don’t think riots are so bad. Are you thinking of them as you do the weather here? A nuisance, but it’s not so difficult to get on with things despite them?” He described the three riots he had witnessed firsthand, in three different cities. He made the anger of the poor and put-upon sound like a storm on the ground; it scorched buildings when it woke, its first touch killed. “That is why I am here,” he finished. “Otherwise, pork pies and jellied eels be damned; give me my country.”

Mary suspected her father would have especially liked this man.

“Are you—forgive me, I know nothing about solicitors—but is it quite usual to find solicitors like you, Mr. Pizarsky?”

She had delighted him. “Let me see . . . Perhaps not. I was a poet.”

“Oh, a poet . . . but what’s that?” Wishy-washy, that was how she found most poetry—it just missed the point over and over again.

“What’s that,” he agreed, laughing. “What’s that. . . .”

He took her plate from her hand. “And now I will release you, even though you are unfair and have told me nothing in exchange.”

She assured him that there was nothing to tell. “Perhaps you could sing a song, then,” he suggested. “Or turn a cartwheel—or you could laugh, yes, laugh wonderfully, just as you are doing at the moment.”

She left him with the cake and went up to her attic. She put on her nightgown, did her stretching exercises, applied cold cream to her face, and arranged herself on her bed with a stack of pillows supporting her head and neck. She looked up through her attic windows, up into the cloudy night. So Mr. Pizarsky had been a poet? That was how he’d said it: “I was a poet.” As if the poet had died. He was in hiding, perhaps. He might have written something that someone powerful hadn’t liked. . . .

. . . There she lay, casting him as a character in one of her own romances. He didn’t cut anything like a dashing figure. And he’d need to be four inches taller before he could even make an appearance in her prose.
No more nonsense. At the count of three I shall go straight to sleep,
she informed herself.
One. Two. Thr—

Mary Foxe woke up feeling refreshed. And a little regretful. What if she were to abandon the task at hand? Mr. Fox was a hard nut to crack. It was good that he didn’t know how Mary tried to take care of him, alphabetizing his reference books and checking and correcting his spelling and grammar while he lay asleep with his wife in his arms. If he knew how Mary loved him he would turn it against her somehow; he would play with it. Because that was what Mr. Fox did—he played. And there was something appealing about this Mr. Pizarsky. . . . Perhaps she could find him, or someone like him, out in the world. She imagined their courtship—quiet, restrained, but full of tenderness. She would learn more about Poland and he would learn more about England and they would clear up many funny little misunderstandings. They would pore over maps together—
I was born here, I went to school here. . . .
They’d go to the seaside, and sit on the pier under umbrellas, in the rain. He would take her to the pictures and bring her violet creams. He would declare himself without words, bring her a daisy and retire with haste. And just thinking of how much he desired her but dared not presume, she would swoon over the tiny flower, dragging its petals across her lips and the backs of her hands, then shyly, languorously, along her inner thighs. . . . And in time, and by being a good woman, and a patient woman, she would have won a good and patient man.

Mary turned onto her side. The pillow she was lying on was covered in spidery words: tiny but legible. She rubbed her nose against one of the words and smudged it. The words were carefully spaced so that the pale green of the pillowcase haloed them. “What . . .” Whole paragraphs. And they were numbered: 7, 8, 9. She turned again. Her head was surrounded with more writing. There was yet more under her hands; long lines of words meandered all along the duvet, some running horizontally, some diagonally, some fitting into one another like puzzles. And numbered, all numbered. Laughing in an appalled sort of way, Mary Foxe pulled the pillow out from under her head and read:

Mary sat bolt upright. Was Mr. Pizarsky a dream, or not? She studied her surroundings. She had no idea where she was. There was a vase full of foxgloves on her bedside table, their petals the pale, shocking blue of the veins in a wrist. She moved on to the next pillow.

Round and round. Blissfully, Mary rolled in the words, propped her head up on some and her heels on others. She liked this man.