The Love School
Elizabeth Knox

     It was a sick season, a December with no rain and a hard frost every night. Aunt saw it coming and took to dressing like the seeding flowers she said no one would see that summer. She would come down to breakfast in her ruffled collar and skating dress. She said you had to let nature know you’d noticed, but we surmised that she was signalling someone. Aunt was out in the world for the first time since she had come to nurse our dying mother, and then to nurse us – the sickly family. She had taken a job as a relieving teacher in the School of Life. She would set off in the morning, getting up from the breakfast table, big-hipped and knock-kneed, rubbing her palms on the backs of her thighs to iron out the crease from the edge of the dining chair. She was getting on, and her flesh – at least – was more impressionable than it had once been. Everything left its mark: the edges of chairs, sheets wrinkled by rivulets of sleep, the elastic in her panties. Things were hard for Aunt. She wasn’t ever strong – by her own confession, for, after all, none of us were. We were a family whom circumstances had bled, purged, and sweated. Our family was a fine old thing, sensitive to changes in its environment – and, Aunt said, our country had made a poisonous mess of itself.
     That summer the sun seemed to travel by a detour. At noon it appeared to be in the wrong place in the sky, so that the hilltops – usually meadows in flower – were dry, but the land was wet in all its creases, the turf macerated and prone to infection. Nothing was as it should be. And Aunt – mutton dressed as lamb – had donned her skating skirt in defiance. The skirt was far too short, and Aunt’s bottom, textured by the weave of her cushion, was pink graph paper pending a graph.
    Despite the season’s strange parched cold, I would go sometimes to the top of my favourite hill, from which I could look out on a bay of islands, expanses of rolling pasture, a forest of tree ferns, and a serpentine road. Sometimes my sister would go with me and, out of sight of our house, we would show and share things. We’d wear our sleeveless dresses and sit on the hilltop painting each other under our arms. This was something my sister had learned at the Love School – protective camouflage, like the white-rimmed eyes on a moth’s wings. My sister would draw with her calligraphy brush, on a patch of blush, asymmetrical skinny slits in each of my armpits. The dark marks looked like leaches. When I did the same to my sister the result was quite different: dark slits in silky hair, flushed at its roots. My sister said that this was the way it was supposed to look.
     I wondered though if anything around me was the way it was meant to be – pure and wholesome. The hair in my sister’s armpits seemed an overlay on natural nudity. And the dinners Aunt cooked made my stomach sour. The food felt like an armed force dispatched into my guts to chase out the anger that, in emptiness, would balloon into an angry face distorting my abdomen. Aunt didn’t think much of my grumbling guts. Her broccoli florets in white sauce couldn’t give anyone indigestion. No, Aunt said, it was purely temperament, I must have an irritable bowel.
     Hair on skin, food on emptiness, the mess of buildings on the green conical hill over there, a road like a dropped ribbon – the whole view, the links, sand dunes frozen in place by pasture – none of it seemed right.
     I wasn’t happy with the way things were changing. For instance, my sister and I could no longer bathe together. “We won’t fit,” my sister said. The bath itself had changed. I could remember a whole griffin in the hot hollow of whose wings we once floated. Now the griffin had lost its head and merely balanced, four balls in its leonine death grip, on the dank floor of the bathroom. The bathroom mirror, once an oblong of empty radiance high above my head, now took hold of my face whenever I turned its way. It took hold of me, but its scrutiny was dispassionate, and was never followed by a kiss, or a word, or a cloth to wipe away smeared jam.
     My sister was a grown-up now. She was getting married. Aunt seemed relieved. Throughout her life my sister had often been ill. For her I had endured every anxious flurry in the small hours, and long bus rides for hospital visits, and – when things were threatening – long days playing in a neighbour’s front rooms while the neighbour waited for a phone call that might mean a longer stay. My sister was sick, but uncomplaining; the fuss just happened around her, her bed an axis around which the family circled: I and my father in a tight orbit, and Aunt in her wider circle, swooping and busy and raising sparks against anything that resisted her revolutions. My sister was quiet and ill, and – said Aunt – “too polite to push thirty.”
     Yet she had found someone to kiss, someone to incline towards while blowing a bubble of her best face.
     My sister and her betrothed were both graduates of the Love School. The Love School was in the city, in a building without windows, but with gardens. When I was younger I used to ask my sister what the School was like inside. She would say, after a glance at Aunt, “Just like yours – full of blackboards.”
But, because my sister was frequently ill and the ill are frequently confiding, I had heard her describe the School. In the sticky whisper of an early evening fever she had told me that, yes, there were blackboards, and on the blackboards chalk drawings. “Like our migraines,” she said.
     Migraines. Sometimes I’d wake up, too alert to believe I’d been asleep and not out-and-about, under an enchantment, like a dancing princess. I’d wake up and find my bedroom full of soap bubbles, rainbows running on their glistening, interlocked surfaces.
     “No,” my sister interrupted me, “like my migraines.” She described wraiths in darkness, spectres in smudged chalk, that grew gradually solid, then animated. In the dark, my sister explained, she saw things she didn’t believe, like diagrams of ways to make love. It was impossible to imagine touching, let alone grappling like that. But the Love School made all of its pupils mediums, entranced by their imaginings, athletic spirits wreathing their heads, an ectoplasm of their panting breath.
     Indoors at the Love School it was dark, always dark, so that my sister’s eyes or brain had begun to have problems with perspective. Her eyes had once understood that what was over her head was generally farther off – for instance, a deer on the hilltop, up to its ankles in daisies. But the wolf-headed man she could see in the dark appeared nearer than the deer, but no bigger. My sister said that, when she looked too hard at the love-making, she began to see other things more clearly than the bodies – her own things, her old toys, cannibalised, the head of a doll she treasured on the body of the bear she’d cuddled furless. She’d see happy times like holiday snaps – daisy chains and candy floss and boat houses by the sea. Whenever the Love School required her to study a diagram or watch a demonstration my sister would see things. But she also had to learn how to be watched. She studied how her face looked from any angle and in any light. She learned what was wrong with her – what needed disguising. She learned how to sit, stared at and staring, till a more solidly promising body would come out of the cloud of her own, would slip out, in its full colour, wearing its pearls, its smirk, and its feathered mask. My sister knew how to seduce.
     She hadn’t seduced her boyfriend however. They had found each other in the Love School gardens. They were never in the dark together – he was a year behind her, and in a class of his own. It was difficult, given their different degrees of learning, to get to know each other. They were still doing it after their betrothal, when I was able to observe them, in the garden of our home, where they would sit for hours – together, but as though on distant hilltops, their ideal mirrors still before their faces, inhaling each other’s images and drinking endless cups of tea, so that the valley between them was covered in dirty cups, like the empty halves of hatched eggs in a crocodile’s nest.
     I was a little disgusted with them – shining at one another while cautiously sun-screened in their beauty and artifice and learned immodesty.
     My sister and her betrothed were to marry in late summer. It was a big show our family would put on for its neighbours. But as the drought went on we became afraid that we would have trouble finding an official to officiate.
     The Civic Authorities wouldn’t wake up. It was quite normal for them to stand for two thirds of the year in their niches in the great dome above the concourse of the Bank and Stock Exchange. But this year nothing had come to break their hibernation. No rise of temperature, nor fall of rain. The Civic Authorities looked woodenly on as, day by day, more anxious faces turned up to them. They stayed dry and immobile – hibernating like frogs beneath the bed of a dried up lake.
     One day I went with my sister and her boyfriend to stand between the marble countertops, and brass cages, and caged tellers, to call up to the mummies. “Wake up!” my sister called. Then her boyfriend cried: “Wake up and get my balls rolling!” He took my sister’s hands and swung her about – her skirt a circular saw – to clear the floor. They began to dance, as was the custom, to get the attention of those in charge. Other couples joined in, urged by elders with memories of former droughts. The dancers put paper bags on their heads. “For there can be no special pleading on behalf of beauty,” one old lady explained.
     But my sister and her boyfriend were too proud to follow this ceremony in all its details. As graduates of the Love School they couldn’t be seen even to feign a failure of confidence – to creep about with bags over their heads. The proud creatures stripped to display their lean limbs and taut torsos, and used marking pens to disguise the bags’ eyeholes among other black squares, so that the rectangular bags became apartment buildings with many windows, and they became lovers with whole neighbourhoods perched on their heads.
     The dancers stamped, the watchers clapped, and I clapped too. Dust sifted down from the forms of the Civic Authorities, and salt from the face of the oldest mummy of all – the Bishop, whom nobody could remember ever having woken.
     I had been face-to-face with the Bishop. Every year, in term, but on a bank holiday, a cherry-picker was assembled on the floor of the Stock Exchange. Parties of schoolchildren would take their turns mounting the cherry-picker as it swung around the room, under the dome and level with each niche. I had looked into all the dust-furred, waxy faces. I had seen that, whereas the other Authorities were dressed in their suits (the mayor and town councillors) or robes of office (the judges), and were only faintly frosted by dust, the Bishop wore vestments whose gilt was so rusted, and silk so leached by light, that they were like the balding hilltop meadows around our parched town.

* * *

     I went by myself to visit my father in hospital. I found him sitting up, talking and taking food. Like my sister he always improved in hospital. It was a holiday, he joked, from Aunt’s cooking.
     The ward was cool, its atmosphere dry, so that Father’s spit, on his empty plate, retained its blisters of trapped air. Of his enamelled-steel bed Father said my mother would have approved. “She would have liked its pale and innocent legs.” Father told me that Mother hadn’t liked the timber furniture Aunt had brought with her when she came to live with us: her turned-wood tables with legs like narrow ankles topped by thick calves and round thighs. Mother had dressed Aunt’s tables in frothy petticoats. Mother’s own clothes were white, her boots were like bandages – tight, clean bandages. But – my father told me – looking at my mother my Aunt had only muttered to herself that nothing could truly be refreshed by being whitened, that we were all black inside and required purging with water and good fibrous foods. The problem, Aunt said , was what will not pass through us. The things inside us all.
     But I knew I had my mother’s white boots inside me – though they were also stored in the box room. I had my mother’s boots, and her record player with its lint-tipped needle and black platters, the dizziness of three decades past. The Problem, I would tell myself, fending off a frightening thought, was the thing that was inside us all – none of us underfed, or empty, or solitary, all having the Problem, the indigestible Problem for company.
     In the hospital, in the ward enamelled with late afternoon sun, I told my father that my sister was ill again. She was weak and wasn’t eating. I told my father about my sister’s suspicions and jealousy. She had said that there was a woman inside her boyfriend, some memory or fancy he’d chosen to swallow and gestate. And I told my father about my sister’s wedding finery. My sister meant to marry in a short lilac frock – short to show off her marionette boots. This footwear was all the rage, boots with hefty platforms, sometimes half the height of their wearer, and strapped all the way up the leg so that the strain of lifting them would come on the thigh bones, on femur as well as tibia. The bride wouldn’t need to use her muscles to lift her legs, for marionette boots came with puppeteers who would stand on scaffolding above the bride and raise and lower her legs through the wedding march and the first waltz. I had watched my sister at a dance practice. She danced in her groom’s embrace, but inclined away from him, too tired to press herself against his robust stiffness.
I told my father he must get himself home.

* * *

     When I got home myself I found the house empty. But there was a sound inside, a strained whimpering, as of an unoiled rotary clothesline on a windy day. It was coming from the box room. The door to the room was unlocked, and open. I went in. There was only a narrow passage between the stacked buff-cardboard boxes. On the bare floorboards of this passage I came across a broken glass bell and what I at first thought was a smashed grave decoration. White flowers with thick petals of unglazed china were scattered from the bell to the corner of a bench, from behind which the whimpering came. I hurried forward. And as I stepped over the smashed flowers I realized that what I’d taken as porcelain was sugar frosting, and that as well as flowers the litter was made up of rucked sheets of almond paste and crumbs of fruit cake.
     I found our dog behind the bench. His head was between his paws, and his sides were heaving. He was still backing away, as though propelled, from patches of vomit.
     Any dog that helps itself to a wedding cake can expect to suffer for it – Aunt said later, over lunch. We all looked at the dog, on its side, its head by its untouched water dish. Aunt checked her watch. The rehearsal would last two hours, then she’d be baking again that afternoon, and icing again that night. The groom arrived for the wedding rehearsal wearing a deep sea diver’s suit. Perhaps he meant to live up to my sister’s marionette boots, and the fashion, for he too had a train of technicians, his groom’s men cranking the brass and teak air-pump. He struggled to his position under the rose-covered trellis – the roses the best that season offered, small and sere and smoked. The groom came to an effortful, staggering stop, and the rubber hose behind him fattened and pulsed with pumped air.
     My sister arrived, without her puppeteers, and in our mother’s tight white boots. It was she who had left the box room door open! She linked her arm around the armoured arm of her groom and looked straight ahead at the flower arrangements standing in for the celebrant – still asleep in his dusty niche. She didn’t even turn to see if it was, in fact, her boyfriend’s face looking out at her through the glass of his face plate. I looked though, and saw the groom, sweating and apparently green behind the thickness of his glass veil.
     Aunt got up before the couple to say the words. She was wearing her skating dress and stood with her legs wide, seeming to straddle the altar.
     Afterwards I helped the groom’s men to hold the groom up and unscrew his helmet. The groom gasped. “What I’m trying to say is, that I can’t enter this family unprotected. You all live at too great a depth.” Then he whispered something I didn’t quite catch. Was it “precious,” or “pressure”?
     That night Father came home from hospital and we all sat about in the luxury of our last hope – that it would rain overnight, that rain clouds would settle like a soft blanket over the city and its hinterland, that the temperatures would rise and the mummies would unthaw, that words would be spoken and a marriage made.
     Aunt cooked three cakes at different heights in her oven, the smallest on the lowest rung and the largest on the top. She left them to cool, and the sheets of almond paste to soften on the bench. She left out icing sugar and butter and a whisk. She carried our dog out onto the porch. She set her clock for two in the morning, and went to her bed by the kitchen.
     The whole house went to sleep.
     Once it was quiet I climbed out of my bedroom window and onto the roof. I sat wrapped in my coat by the kitchen skylight. I nursed my stomach-face, but every so often it pressed forward and poked out a fiery tongue at the night. I watched the groom come up the slope to the house and meet my sister. They went into Father’s Observatory, which, since it never admitted nor showed a light, quite hid their presence.
     The house was still. Frost formed slowly on the corrugated iron around where I sat. I saw frost plump and soften the iron ripples, the grass, and the leaves of the cabbage tree. The moon came up and the land gave back its cold light.
     Then a yellow radiance jumped up through the skylight beside me. I looked down, but couldn’t see a thing. I heard an extractor fan start, felt its vibrations through my seat and feet. The condensation began to clear – and there, below me, was Aunt, mixing Pyrethrum Organic Insect Spray into the wedding cake’s white icing.
     I had to wait while the cake was wrapped in its plaster of marzipan, white-washed with icing, and decorated with its lethal flowers. I had to wait because I had no choice but to fall from the roof, for when I moved my foot out from under the tent of my skirt my sole skated on the frost.
     After a long time the kitchen light went out and the house quietened. I put out both my feet and slithered and tumbled through cold twilight onto the frost-blackened vegetation of the kitchen garden. I lay for a while in the dust bath of their aroma then followed my sister into the Observatory.
     I found my sister lying beside her groom on a bench draped with white cloth – a bed like a bier. The groom was white – his face, torso, and limbs. Nose sharp and eyes dull, he stared sightlessly up into the cone of darkness above the bed. There was an incision in his stomach, a black oval, pinched at each end, like those my sister had once painted in my armpits. My sister explained that she had made the cut in order to let out the woman he had inside him. She had seen the woman emerge, a wraith, very like a plume of steam on the surface of a hot stew. “She lingered for a long time,” my sister said. “But I wouldn’t let her in again, and eventually she vanished.”

* * *

     At dawn I was all alone, on the summit of the conical hill. I sat splayed-legged, like one of my own dolls, my skirt pooled red in my lap.
     My sister had thought the Observatory was the tall tiered lecture hall at the Love School. She’d thought she was under examination. She’d thought that she had to show the class, in their high choirs and hidden by darkness, that she could make her groom forget his past and his dreams and cleave only to her.
     On the dry grass beside me was a cardboard suitcase, one of our mother’s. Its catch was unreliable, so I’d fastened it with string.
The sun came up, touched my forehead, then poured down to coat the lower slopes of the hill. I saw that a colour was coming up the near slope to meet the light. The colour and light came together, and blossomed in purple and red.
     The Bishop climbed into sight and, as he came, the meadow, with its tiny blanched flowers and blond grass, turned from the bleached cotton of a bridal broiderie into an oriental brocade, where blossom overlapped blossom, fat and oily with colour. The Bishop was as thin and dry as ever, but motion had crazed the salt on his face, which glittered like the night before’s frost.
     The Bishop stopped on the summit and spoke to me. The times were at last sufficiently troubled for him to wake, he said. His voice was small and inexorable, like sand sifting through the narrow place in an hourglass. The times – he said – a country cold and waterless, calamity in its great families, and love pitching its tent in a place of excrement.
     He had come to show me my way – the serpentine road. The Bishop told me that the road’s curves remembered what it had once swerved to avoid: landmarks, edifices, ancient boundaries – a harvested forest of thousand-year-old trees, an Abbey whose ruins were dismantled to build ornamental walls, and a river coaxed away into a canal. I must take that road and learn to turn where it turned, he said. I must learn to dance around invisible obstacles.

* * *

(for Seraphine Pick)

* * *

© Elizabeth Knox