On Beauty (11 page)

Turning the corner of Redwood, Kiki was already busy reading the signs. The size of the moving van, the style of the house, the colours of the garden. The light was fading and the streetlamps were not yet lit. It bugged her that she was unable to see more clearly the hanging baskets suspended like censers from the four storeys of balconies. Kiki was quite close to the front gate before she saw the outline of a tall woman sitting in a high-backed chair. Kiki put the letter she held in her hand back into her pocket. The woman was asleep. Kiki understood at once that she would never wish to be seen like this, with her thinning hair fanned out across her cheek, her mouth wide open and half of one fluttering, unseeing eyeball revealed to the world. It seemed rude to walk past her and continue to the doorbell, as if she were nothing more significant than a cat or an ornament. Equally, it didn't seem right to wake her. On the porch now and hesitating, Kiki had the momentary fancy of placing the note in the woman's lap and running away. She took another step towards the door; the woman woke.

‘Hi,
hi
– I'm sorry, I didn't mean to alarm you – I'm a neighbour here . . . are you . . . Mrs Kipps or . . .'

The woman smiled lazily and looked at Kiki, around Kiki, apparently assessing her bulk, where it began and where it ended. Kiki pulled her cardigan around herself.

‘I'm Kiki Belsey.'

Now Mrs Kipps made a jubilant sound of realization, beginning on a reed-thin high note and slowly making its way down
the scale. She brought her long hands together slowly like a pair of cymbals.

‘Yes, I'm
Jerome's
mother – I think you bumped into my youngest today, Levi? I hope he wasn't rude at all . . . he can be a little brash sometimes – '

‘I
knew
I was right. I
knew
it, you see.'

Kiki laughed in an unhinged way, still concentrating on taking in all the visual information about this much discussed, never before glimpsed entity, Mrs Kipps.

‘Isn't it crazy? The coincidence of Jerome, and then you and Levi bumping – '

‘No coincidence at all – I knew him by his face the moment I saw him. They're so alive to look at, your sons, so handsome.'

Kiki was vulnerable to compliments concerning her children, but she was also familiar with them. Three brown children of a certain height will attract attention wherever they go. Kiki was used to the glory of it and also the necessity of humility.

‘Do you think so? I guess they are – I always think of them still as babies, really, without any –' began Kiki happily, but Mrs Kipps continued over her, unheeding.

‘And now this is you,' she said, whistling and reaching out to grab Kiki's hand by the wrist. ‘Come here, come down.'

‘Oh . . . OK,' said Kiki. She crouched beside Mrs Kipps's chair.

‘But I didn't imagine you like this at all. You are not a
little
woman, are you?'

Going over it later, Kiki could not completely account for her own response to this question. Her gut had its own way of going about things, and she was used to its executive decisions; the feeling of immediate safety some people gave her, and, conversely, the nausea others induced. Maybe something in the shock of the question, as well as the natural warmth of it, and the apparently guileless nature of the intention behind it, impelled her to respond in kind – with the first thought she had.

‘Uh-uh. Ain't nothing small on me. Not a thing. Got bosoms, got back.'

‘I see. And you don't mind it at all?'

‘It's just me – I'm used to it.'

‘It looks very well on you. You carry it well.'

‘Thank you!'

It was as if a sudden gust of wind had lifted and propelled this odd little conversation and now, just as suddenly, let it go. Mrs Kipps looked straight ahead, into her garden. Her breathing was shallow and audible in her throat.

‘I . . .' began Kiki, and waited again for some kind of recognition and received none. ‘I guess I wanted to say how sorry I was about all that unnecessary fuss last year – it all got so out of proportion . . . I hope we can all just put it . . .' said Kiki, and trailed off as she felt Mrs Kipps's thumb pressing down in the centre of Kiki's own palm.

‘I hope you won't offend me,' said Mrs Kipps, her head shaking, ‘by apologizing for things that were no fault of yours.'

‘No,' said Kiki. She meant to continue, but, once again, everything fell away. She just knew she could no longer crouch. She took her feet out from under her and sat down on the wood.

‘Yes, you sit down and we can talk properly. Whatever problems our husbands may have, it's no quarrel of ours.'

Nothing followed. Kiki felt and saw herself in this unlikely position, sitting on the floor beneath a woman she did not know. She looked out over the garden and sighed stupidly, as if the charm of the scene had only this moment struck her.

‘Now, what do you think,' Mrs Kipps said slowly, ‘of my house?'

This question, implicit in Kiki's social dealings with the women of Wellington, was another she had never been asked outright before.

‘Well, I think it's absolutely lovely.'

This answer seemed to surprise the occupant. She moved forward, lifting her chin from where it rested on her chest.

‘
Really
. I cannot say that I like it so much. It's so
new
. There's nothing in this house except money, jangling. My house in London, Mrs Belsey –'

‘Kiki, please.'

‘
Carlene
,' she replied, pressing a long hand to her own, exposed
throat. ‘It's so full of humanity – I could hear petticoats in the hallway. I
miss
it so much, already. American houses . . .' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. ‘They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has ever lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?'

Kiki instinctively bristled – after a lifetime of bad-mouthing her own country, these past few years she had grown into a new sensitivity. She had to leave the room when Howard's English friends settled into their armchairs after dinner and began the assault.

‘American houses? How do you mean? You mean, you'd rather a house with, like, a history?'

‘Oh . . . well, it can be put this way, yes.'

Kiki was further wounded by the sense she had said something to disappoint, or, worse, something so dull it was not worth replying to.

‘But you know, actually this house does have a kind of history, Mrs – Carlene – it's not a very pretty one, though.'

‘Mmm.'

Now this was simply impolite. Mrs Kipps had closed her eyes. The woman was rude. Wasn't she? Maybe it was a cultural diff erence. Kiki pressed on.

‘Yes – there was an older gentleman here, Mr Weingarten – he was a dialysis patient at the hospital where I work, so he got picked up by an ambulance, you know, three or four times a week, and one day they arrived and they found him in the garden – it's terrible, actually – he was burned to death – apparently he had a lighter in his pocket, in his bathrobe – he was probably trying to light a cigarette – which he should
not
have been doing – anyway, he went and set fire to himself, and I guess he just couldn't put it out. It's pretty awful – I don't know why I told you that. I'm sorry.'

This last was untrue – she was not sorry she had told the story. She had wanted to kick-start this woman somehow.

‘Oh, no, my dear,' said Mrs Kipps, rather impatiently, dismissive of so obvious a ploy to unbalance her. Kiki noticed for the first time the shake in her head also extended to her left hand. ‘I already knew that – the lady next door told my husband.'

‘Oh, OK. It's just so
sad
. Living alone and all.'

To this, Mrs Kipps's face responded at once – it crumpled and distorted like a child's when given caviar or wine. Her front teeth came forward as the skin on her jaw pulled back. She looked ghastly. Kiki thought for a moment it was a kind of seizure, but then her face healed over. ‘It is so
awful
to me, that idea,' Mrs Kipps said passionately.

Once again she gripped Kiki's hand, this time with both of her own. The deeply lined black palms reminded Kiki of her own mother's. The fragility of the grasp – the feeling that one need only release one's own five fingers from it and this other person's hand would smash into pieces. Kiki was shamed out of her pique.

‘Oh, God, I'd
hate
to live alone,' she said, before considering whether this was still true. ‘But you'll like it here in Wellington – generally, we all take care of each other pretty well. It's a community-minded kind of a place. Reminds me a lot of parts of Florida that way.'

‘But when we drove through town I saw so many poor souls living on the street!'

Kiki had lived in Wellington long enough not to be able to quite trust people who spoke of injustice in this faux naive manner, as if no one had ever noticed the injustice before.

‘Well,' she said evenly, ‘we've certainly got a situation down there – there's a lot of very recent immigrants too, lot of Haitians, lot of Mexicans, a lot of folk just out there with no place to go. It's not so bad in the winter when the shelters open up. But, no . . . absolutely, and you know, we really need to thank you for helping Jerome with a place to stay in London – it was so generous of you. His hour of need and everything. I was so sad that everything got polluted by –'

‘I love a line from a poem:
There is such a shelter in each other
. I think it is so
fine
. Don't you think it's a wonderful thing?'

Kiki was left with her mouth open at being interrupted thus.

‘Is it – which poet is it?'

‘Oh, I would not actually know that for myself . . . Monty is the intellectual in our family. I have no talent for ideas or memory
for names. I read it in a newspaper, that's all. You're an intellectual too?'

And this was possibly the most important question Wellington had never honestly asked Kiki.

‘No, actually . . . No, I'm not. I'm really not.'

‘Neither am I. But I do
love
poetry. Everything I cannot say and I never hear said. The bit I cannot touch?'

Kiki could not tell at first what kind of question this was or whether she was meant to answer it, but a moment's pause proved it rhetorical.

‘I find that bit in poems,' said Mrs Kipps. ‘I did not read a poem for years and years – I preferred biographies. And then I read one last year. Now I can't stop!'

‘God, that's great. I just never get a chance to read any more. I used to read a lot of Angelou – do you read her? That's autobiography, isn't it? I always found her very . . .'

Kiki stopped. The same thing that had distracted Mrs Kipps distracted her. Just passing by the gate five white teenage girls, barely dressed, were going by. They had rolled-up towels under their arms and wet hair, stuck together in long sopping ropes, like the Medusa. They were all speaking at once.

‘
There is such a shelter in each other
,' repeated Mrs Kipps, as the noise grew fainter, ‘Montague says poetry is the first mark of the truly civilized. He is always saying wonderful things like that.'

Kiki, who did not think this especially wonderful, stayed quiet.

‘And when I told him this line, from the poem –'

‘Yes, the poem line.'

‘Yes. When I spoke it to him, he said that that was all very well but I should place it on a scale – a scale of judgement – and on the other side of the scale I should place
L'enfer, c'est les autres
. And then see which had more weight in the world!' She laughed for some time at this, a sprightly laugh, more youthful than her speaking voice. Kiki smiled helplessly. She did not speak French.

‘I'm so
glad
we've met properly,' said Mrs Kipps, with real fondness.

Kiki was touched. ‘Oh, that's very sweet.'

‘
Really
glad. We've just met – and look how cosy we are.'

‘We're so happy to have you in Wellington, really,' said Kiki, abashed. ‘Actually, I came to invite you to a party we're having tonight. I think my son mentioned it.'

‘A party! How
lovely
. And how kind of you to invite an old lady who you don't even know from Adam.'

‘Honey, if you're old,
I'm
old. Jerome's only two years older than your daughter, isn't he? Is it Victoria?'

‘But you're not old,' she admonished. ‘It hasn't even touched you yet. It will, but it hasn't yet.'

‘I'm fifty-three. I sure
feel
old.'

‘I was forty-five when I had my last child. Praise the Lord for his miracles. No, anybody can see it – you're a child in your face.'

Kiki had inclined her head to avoid having to come up with any face with which to meet the praising of the Lord. Now she raised it again.

‘Well, come to a children's party, then.'

‘I will, thank you. I will come with my family.'

‘That would be wonderful, Mrs Kipps.'

‘Oh,
please . . . Carlene
, please call me Carlene. I feel the pull of an office and paperclips whenever anybody calls me Mrs Kipps. Years ago I used to help Montague in his office – there I was Mrs Kipps. In England, if you will believe me,' she said, smiling mischievously, ‘they even call me
Lady
Kipps because of Montague's achievements . . . proud as I am of Montague, I have to tell you – being called
Lady Kipps
feels like being dead already. I don't recommend it.'

‘Carlene, I got to be honest with you, honey,' said Kiki, laughing, ‘I don't think Howard's in any danger of a knighthood any time soon. Thanks for the warning, though.'