Wait Till I Tell You (12 page)

Benedetta Montanari was looking at the new, garish china, as it emerged from the box, with eyes that could no longer look with disdain upon anything.

People had said that she was a woman with taste, that what she had was ‘good taste’. There was a short gamut of things that she found acceptable, a boundless flux of things that she did not. All shades of grey and beige suited, and all the many whites, more than in the vocabulary of any Eskimo. Black came into it, but must not be allowed to engulf a room or a body. Black was a white flag of surrender, Miss Montanari had said recently, and no one laughed, any more than they understood.

One morning seven weeks before, on her way to China through the old department store, Miss Montanari had lingered in Hardware. Her hair was a nutmeg red with two wings of pinkish grey, one at either corner of her white, high, forehead. Her skin was thin, her nose proud, and she was held in awe of an old-fashioned sort, meaning that most of the shop’s employees recognised her and none had seen where she lived. She dined with the store’s directors at Christmas, for it was feared she might put the celebrants off their stride if she were to attend the staff party everyone came to and to which she never alluded. The directors of the store were three cousins and their spouses, none of the six that far above seventy. The cousins would offer a catered meal, usually, in deference to Miss Montanari’s supposed foreignness, rather greasy. Once or twice, a visit had been paid to a restaurant where the cost had proved a matter of concern, amid brave play for the bill among the old cousins.

On hooks under a bright display of unbreakable picnic beakers in the hardware department there hung a row of hot-water bottles, some of them already equipped with hot-water-bottle covers. These covers were made of differing materials – plush, fur fabric, a napless velvet like a shaved Angora cat, or a shiny fabric that glistened like cretonne. The covers were made to resemble animals. They were a puppydog, a furry tortoise, a hippo in specs and a russet orang-utan that held a banana you could unpeel and re-enclose, thanks to the miracle of Velcro.

Miss Montanari looked at the outpushed sad lips in the felty face of the ape. She picked up one of its small hairy arms and folded it with the other arm, arranging the banana towards the lips. She gave the raised shaggy knee of the little false animal an encouraging tap and said to the morose face, ‘Aren’t you a case, just?’

The monkey continued to hang by its neck tab, a security docket clipped through the warnings printed on the clearly printed label about not using unnecessarily hot water when filling a hot-water bottle. Miss Montanari smoothed the stiff whiskers of an adjoining ginger cat bottle-cover, and walked on towards China. Her seniority stayed behind her momentarily as she passed, chilling conversations, interrupting them, turning them over to speculation about her.

Her fault and her interest, in the general opinion of the other buyers and assistants in the store, lay in her quietness. She uttered those sighs, she gave intelligent replies to the questions of customers, but she never told a thing. No one had asked her either, for Miss Montanari was one of those people for whom others invent a story. Her face, which was startling, poised, somewhere off beautiful, equipped her with a character that might not have been the one she possessed. She was polite, or perhaps she did not know the person whom others had made of her.

Benedetta Montanari had come to the department store in order to fold silk scarves and earn enough to feed herself as a young person of twenty in 1954. So she was still young now, four years off the millennium, she thought, hardly sixty at all. No one had dared bring up the question of retirement since no one liked to admit they knew what age she was, or that she had an age.

The day after she’d been amused by the monkey hot-water-bottle cover, Miss Montanari dawdled in Hardware again. She made a purchase; a pink copper jelly mould, brittle with lightness and casting pink shadows. It was large, fluted, domed, with a twist to the fluting that gave it a smart look of near-movement, like the contortions in a cartoon.

‘What’s its capacity?’ asked Miss Montanari.

‘It’s a jelly mould; for jelly and that,’ said Joan, who was a new mother. She was marking down a gross of jam-label sets and already fit to weep, she was that tired.

‘It holds three pints,’ said Mr Gilbert, who ran Hardware as a tight ship, but had a soft spot for babies and had known Joan since she had been one.

‘Very nice,’ said Miss Montanari, ticking her nails inside the glowing copper mould. ‘I’ll take it. And has it any little ones?’

Joan was sent off by this into thoughts of the needy baby at night. She just looked, calm as a cow, at the older woman, and said, ‘Four ninety with your discount.’

Miss Montanari paid.

‘Three pints jelly is a rare amount for a woman lives alone,’ said Carol Beveridge, who got by alone on sardines and gin and Lactulose.

Mr Gilbert did not react to this, but said to Joan, ‘It’s good, isn’t it, when there’s still blossom about and you get a bit of sun? Not that we see much of it down here, but it’ll be great out in the old pram, I expect.’

Joan returned to the jam-labelling sets.

‘Take a seat,’ said Mr Gilbert, and he fetched the kitchen stool they used for reaching the top shelves where were kept the things no one but the aged and country dwellers wanted – peg-mending kits and trivets and onion-bracers and sink tidies.

The next day, Miss Montanari appeared again in Hardware. Joan had stuck up a picture of her baby, Carl, just below the counter, so she could look at it while she counted out change. Carol Beveridge was thinking what she might bring a picture of, tomorrow. She had no photograph, but perhaps you might buy them. She didn’t want a poster-type thing. She wanted a photograph that had the messy look as if a moment had been cut with nifty scissors out of a full and busy day. In the photograph of Carl you could see all sorts of things, a shawl, a toy rabbit, a small wool boot, the side of what must be a three-seater sofa. There was a lot of pattern, and the signs of other lives than Carl’s, too, a mug with playful animals on it, a scarf, some keys, an elderly hand with a wedding ring. There was even a plant in a pot, with flowers growing out of the plant.

‘May I have the family?’ asked Miss Montanari.

Mr Gilbert knew what she meant, before either Joan or Carol Beveridge had to fill the silence with the particular response each might have made to how she had heard the words.

‘All the other moulds of that particular pattern? Yes indeed, if we hold them. I may need to fill any gaps by a rummage down in stock. The copper dessert dome, Carol, in the Sandringham pattern; all sizes down from the three-pinter, please.’

The clattering, shiny moulds came one by one out of their tissue to make a procession of pink metal turtles across the counter.

‘The lot, please,’ said Miss Montanari.

She made the Hardware department nervous, with her air of transforming things into other things, her unliteral deportment – as though she were someone in disguise – and amused look of being disappointed. It wasn’t easy to think of her making sequences of milk puddings with her new family of empty moulds.

It was not long after her purchase of all the degrees of jelly dome in the Sandringham style that Miss Montanari began her daily morning visits to other departments of the shop.

She had never before been a person to venture very far out of China, unless it had been to visit her acquaintance the pharmacist, who had a short lunch hour because of the responsibility that went with her calling. The two ladies would meet for an infrequent but pleasant meal. They shook hands at Christmas and exchanged gifts of good soap. Their hands were cool.

In Linens, Miss Montanari’s browsing went on for several mornings. Jessie, whose gypsy hair and leaning bust frothed and toppled over the linens counter with its inlaid brass rule for measuring sheets, thought Miss Montanari wanted something, over and above just bedlinens, and said so to Karen, who said through prim cold lips, ‘Don’t I know what?’ and felt the pulse of the love bites under her rollneck blouse.

‘It wasn’t that I meant,’ Jessie said, shaking her dripping pendant golden earrings. Her hair was so thick it caught their chimes and held them so they stayed silent. ‘I mean she’s hanging about. Like she wanted to talk. Like the ditherers.’

The ditherers were old ladies who came in, like drinkers visiting far-flung off-licences, infrequently but regularly, and discussed for hours very fine points of pillowcase size or duvet pattern or handkerchief-adornment for some much younger relative, usually rarely met or even, Jessie feared, invented. Infant bedlinen attracted the most.

‘She’s never a ditherer,’ said Karen, eyeing Miss Montanari’s careful waist and ankles. ‘She’s got a secret, more like.’

Miss Montanari, though, had wanted to talk, and went, with Jessie, into some detail about the items she eventually did buy, two dense, light, creamy blankets bound with slipper-satin around all four edges and several pillowcases embroidered with strong wild flowers as if off someone’s national costume. As an afterthought, Miss Montanari also bought six bags of cedarwood chippings – ‘to keep linens wholesome in the old country way’ were the words screen-printed on to the sisal bag – and a bright green sleeping bag sewn into segments, screen-printed with the cheerful, if optimistic, features of a holidaying caterpillar at the head end, and all down the segments with a double run of merry caterpillar feet. Jessie tied up these bulky items and asked if they should be delivered.

Miss Montanari said, ‘What a blissful idea.’ It was what she had heard said.

‘Not natural, that woman,’ said Karen. ‘She behaves like a customer.’

Miss Montanari arrived later at work than usual the following Thursday, delivery day for the department store. She took delivery of the parcel from the place where she worked.

‘Come in and have some coffee, Arthur,’ she said to the delivery man for the firm. Although she had known his name for over twenty years, she had never used it before. ‘I am grateful to you for bringing my parcel. It was rather heavy for me.’

Miss Montanari made some coffee and stood while Arthur drank his, since he seemed not to want to sit down. He saw the line of twisty pink metal helmets all sizes, just cluttered about in the sitting-room. His wife would never do that. The whole flat was dead bare, modern you’d call it, apart from that procession of the things that looked like nothing better than pudding moulds though he’d swear she paid an artistic price for them – and now the parcel. She could hardly wait until he had gone to open her big parcel, invitingly taped and bound with twine.

She thanked Arthur fulsomely. He had left most of his coffee and the almond biscuit she had put on a plate beside it. Miss Montanari realised that she had given him what she would have prepared for herself. She had not adjusted. She felt this slippage of good manners in herself as acutely as a symptom.

Miss Montanari began to open her parcel of purchases from the shop where she had worked since 1954. She enjoyed punching a knife through the brown tape over the joins in the box and drawing it fast along the crevice, feeling the blade tickling tissue within. She flapped open the cardboard lugs of the box, unpeeled the stickers that held the tissue paper furled around their secret innards, and lifted out each weighty, cool folio of pillowcase with its vehement floral edge. She smelt the cedarwood although it was still wrapped, and could almost feel the warmth of the blankets buried within the box. She would leave the giant caterpillar until later. Maybe she would still get to take it on a great trek through the north, or maybe it would just rest until one day it would solidify, harden and crack and a great fabric butterfly emerge.

She sat among her shopping for a time, enjoying the feeling she supposed was no longer noticeable to those who regularly received deliveries, or, indeed, post.

She dressed carefully, rinsed the delivery man’s cup, ate his almond biscuit and poured a few of the cedarwood chippings into a handkerchief, which she knotted and slipped into her handbag.

Miss Montanari was losing her touch. She was beginning to cease to know how to define what things it was right or wrong to like. She would have known before to give the delivery man from the store the coffee he would have liked, the biscuit he might have liked. She would have known unerringly, by gauging her own depth of distaste, by asking herself what she would not have liked, to what degree and how, and offering whatever, according to this negative and unerring canon, proved apposite.

But her distaste had fled. She was prey to an uncritical enthusiasm and curiosity. The possible cause struck her, and she dismissed it from her mind. She had not the time.

On the day when the parcel arrived, Miss Montanari was not able until her tea-break – she forwent lunch since she had arrived late that morning – to make her trip to a department of the store. She found herself in Toiletries. She conducted a long and quite friendly conversation with an assistant who did not seem to know who she was and treated her with the indulgence bestowed on customers, even when she asked the girl what soap she recommended for dry knees and elbows, even when she decided not perhaps to go for the soap but instead to buy a petalled bathing hat and some nail extensions for a daughter Miss Montanari was moved to pull out of the air by the sudden materialising at her eye’s far corner of her acquaintance and occasional luncheon companion, the pharmacist.

‘She’s quite like you,’ Miss Montanari said to the assistant, who had dark hair on her arms, white skin and strongly apricot black-rooted hair on her head. ‘The same colouring.’