Silver by Robert Stone

Kath’s new boyfriend, Robert, brand new, a deal only recently sealed, was very keen on her, very eager to please. So much so, that this straightaway became his name, between Kath and her friends.

- Seeing old eager-to-please tonight?

- What will eager-to-please have to say about that?

It was bound to get him into trouble, this wide-eyed alacrity.

She took him home to eat with her parents. When a girl does that, it’s partly to see if they can stand him and partly to see if she can, when he meets Mum and Dad

Kath’s mother was not easily bought. She did not care to be pleased. And her father, well, he could be pleased by you, which is not really the word, if you managed to evade his notice. He wasn’t observant, so you had a chance.

If Robert had brought flowers, her mother would have thought him a creep and presumptuous. If he had brought wine it would have been the wrong sort, undrinkable, never drunk, given away as a raffle prize. If he had brought nothing he was a freeloader with no manners. He brought nothing, as instructed. He wore a thin blue polo-necked jumper because he owned only one tie.

We’ll pass quickly over the predictably awkward meal, that obstacle course of baseless conventions through which Robert stumbled gamely and with no help from Kath. Her mother asked him if he would like a bread roll with his food and he said he would because there was a plate-full on the table. No one else took one and he left his untouched at the end, not knowing how or when he should eat it. She took it from him and put it back on the plate, silently, peremptorily, as though to say she thought as much.

So they were left alone on that first evening, Kathleen and Robert, in possession of that dreadful house, full of so many things, so much stuff, while her parents attended some nameless function. Nothing for them to do then, but wash up, tidy up, be together.

Robert immediately saw this as a task, as a means to impress and Kath rebelled because she hated to see him so ready to flatter people who despised him. She put away, loaded the machine. He filled the rubbish bin with leftovers and she told him to leave the rest to soak, not because she thought that was a good idea or because it would be acceptable to her mother, but because she knew it would not. Her mother had given very precise and pointed information about the timing of her certain return. She did not want to interrupt anything self-evidently disgusting.

Kath wanted Robert to rub her back. She wanted to feel upon her the strong but gentle hands of this rough young man of whom she could still remember having once been a little afraid. He wiped those hands on the tea towel, which he hung neatly on its own fussy little rail, looking at the sink-full of cutlery almost apparently floating in the soapy water and followed Kath upstairs.

It seemed absurd to Kath to have Robert in her room, although this had always been her plan, as if there could only be space there for one adult person, as if it were the cell of a honey-bee grub and she had grown to fill it completely. She removed her blouse, not at all shyly, while Robert sat on her dressing-table chair, perched, rapt, as incongruously and as silently as a gargoyle. She lay down on her bed, on her stomach.

He sat and watched her still, writhing his hands through one another and neither of them said a word. She lay with her head on one side on her pillow. He might have been a diabolical presence gloating over a girl in despair. Decorously, he undid the catch of her bra first, moving the straps to the side before he wet his hands with the oil from the little plastic bottle on Kath’s table. She was cold already and did not shudder at his touch.

He was inexpert certainly, but considerate and persistent. And he was a very patient young man. He drew the long obvious riverine flow down her spine and traced the blunt edges of the axes of her scapulars. Many times. He rummaged clumsily over her muscles. He plunged his hands into her as though washing them in the sea. He squeezed her shoulders and kissed her neck. He never tickled. It was lovely. She fell asleep. When he noticed this, after some time, he stoppered the bottle, wiped his hands on the towel, lay down beside her and fell asleep too. Fully clothed but for his rolled up sleeves, as though they had both been buried in a blizzard of ash

They woke up later than they might have planned, though, in truth, Robert had lain awake longer, staring at the ceiling, wondering what it must be like to be her, simply being in this sweet room. Kath was anxious when she awoke. It was near the time. Robert left. So Kath walked downstairs to greet her mother as nonchalant as you like leaving her bedroom empty behind her, but still smelling of the massage oil, which had got, as it always would, into the short hair along the back of her neck and that was the smell of sex to her now.

Her mother was tight-lipped between upset and anger but almost pleased to be both of those things. She held up a fistful of dirty wet spoons and knives. The unspoken demand was,

- What were you doing while my silver was tarnishing?

- Does he know nothing about cleaning antique silver? (What she actually asked).

Just as though there might be more than one possible answer to that crazy question.

When Kath told Robert that her mother was cross with him for having spoilt the silver (cross borderline furious leavened with contempt) he was mortified. Kath had told him this with what she had to admit, to herself, was glee.

He did not ask why it was especially his fault and not Kath’s, who after all might have known and should at least have warned. He was used to being blamed. He definitely belonged in the poorest, most socially disadvantaged stratum of families that had managed to send a child to that snooty school. So when things went wrong or misdemeanours were committed it was readily assumed that it was one of those boys who was responsible and it very often was.

When Kath said that Robert was calling round again she could see that her mother was determined to have her say and Kath did nothing to prevent that. When the doorbell rang she bent further over her French homework, unmoving. Mother sighed and got up to answer the door. Robert was there, arm outstretched and undoubtedly that smile on his anxious face.

- I haven’t come empty-handed this time, Mrs O’Connor, Kath heard him say.

In his hand was a bottle of Goddard’s Quality Silver Polish, the blue of a police car’s flashing light.

She swallowed the short speech she’d had prepared.

- Well I hope you’ve got a little pot of elbow grease to go with it.

He had his easy grin for Kath and he got a cocked eyebrow in return. He was soon sat at the kitchen table with a row of spoons, knives and forks all sadly yellow, salty water-stained in the shapes of lost continents. Kath’s mother gave him a pile of paper towels.

- Paper towels are no good, said Robert. They’ll scratch. I’ll need a damp sponge or a soft cloth.

You can get silver polish gloves. I might have ordered some but I knew they wouldn’t come in time.

Kath came and sat down with him still carrying her French book. Her mother left the kitchen.

- Antique silver has to be polished by hand, he said. To restore the lustre and preserve the patina.

- Are you sure this is antique silver?

Robert squinted at the hallmark doubtfully. He gave it a rub, which did not make it clearer.

- You could look this up, he said.

Kath told him that this was not family silver. Not her family’s anyway. Robert swabbed silently at the bowl of a spoon with his thumb, occasionally holding it up so he could see how he was getting on and not being at all satisfied with what he saw.

- I’ll make this dingy thing gleam. You’ll soon see your face in it.

He held up the spoon to her like a doll’s mirror. They both peered at their dim reflections. They looked like the ghosts of tiny monsters.

- You like this stuff, don’t you?

- Everything in my house is disposable. Plastic.

- Not very environmentally friendly.

- We don’t throw it away.

Mr O’Connor ducked into the kitchen looking for his wife, possibly, and ducked out again without saying hello to Robert. He might have muttered the words try hard.

When Kath’s mother did come back she was uneasy about the look on Robert’s face as he stared intently at a heavy fork, seemingly trying to make out the hallmark again. She was almost afraid that he was thinking of stealing it.

- It’s not that valuable, she offered. More sentimental.

- And what meaningful occasion is it meant to bring flooding back? The moving moment when you bought it in the market two years ago from that man you called a dirty gypsy?

Kath did not say this out loud. She contented herself with,

- The French word for silver and for money is the same word.

- Argentina, said Robert, brightly.

Mrs O’Connor picked up a fork and a knife. She withheld any praise but allowed a silent acknowledgement that amends had been made.

- Silver. A soft sibilant word for a shiny, malleable metal, Robert thought.

Opportunities for Robert to run his hands over Kath’s naked back came infrequently but when they came they were taken. Always in Kath’s bedroom. They never went to Robert’s impossible house.

He would watch her unbutton her blouse or pull her t-shirt over her head, scuffing up her short hair into a static fright wig. Then always the same ceremony; rubbing his clean hands within one another to make them warm, then dripping that first inevitably cold puddle into the welcoming hollow at the small of her back. He slathered her, at least at first he did, floundered over her. Always the same oil with the smell of a spice but a gentle blunt-edged aroma, one without bite. Cinnamon and nutmeg. Kath’s back felt like an accordion and Robert played upon it with well-meaning wheezy insistence.

He kneaded her like dough and stirred her like cream. From that moment of making something uglier, dropping a blob on it, spoiling or staining something unsullied and working it up from that low point. It was almost good to work on something spoiled, from that initial treacly pool. Robert might even have said so once, or Kath guessed that that was what he was thinking.

He smoothed out the folds and crinkles, ironed out the blemishes, unfurled the twists and untied the knots. He fretted her back to an original state, a pristine, virginal purity without a sign of use.

- He makes me shine like a star, thought Kath

But also she felt polished, made to glitter more than she naturally should. The oil began to smell like polish to her. Robert’s sighs. What did they mean? Silver is a sigh of a sound, he had said, in the kitchen.

He carried on caressing Kath’s body even after she had fallen asleep, at least Kath thought that he probably did. His patience was almost boring, soporific certainly, but his technique was improving. She could not deny that.

The silver polishing took time. Robert began to arrive earlier and earlier so that he would have time to polish all of the silver before he and Kath went out. It looked lovely now. Better than it ever had. Robert and Mrs O’Connor had become friends over it. He looked up all of the hallmarks and they discussed them. Kath wondered what her own hallmarks were. Was he becoming an expert on her? Her history, her makers, value and authenticity, her provenance? Had he seen something in her that she did not know about herself? He had told Kath she had a tinkling laugh and she tried to stop laughing like that for fear of sounding metallic, but when Robert and her mother spoke of the bowls of spoons and the tines of forks, their pricks, the pricks of forks, she tinkled. He could tell if someone else had polished the silver since he had been there. He said nothing but perhaps considered it an infidelity.

She watched her mother watching Robert polish zestfully, bringing her silver to its proper state, to what he insisted was its true colour; from the besmirched yellow, through Cornish ice-cream, to vanilla, to cream up to spilled light, moonlight and starlight, sheen and satin, shimmer of foil, a blazon. He would draw aside a film as though it were the cloud on a blinded eye

Robert brought catalogues, which Kath knew he got for free, for her mother to look through, tempting her, while saying nothing, to buy more silver. They would read these out greedily while Kath sighed and tutted over her French; George II sterling silver pap boat by Richard Gurney & Co, London, 1746, $450. George III sterling silver sugar tongs (here Kath snorted, sugar tongs) by Joseph Cooper, London, 1795, $110. Poul Peterson, sterling silver shell-shaped dishes, four, $485, Montreal, 1960. Sterling silver meat skewer (Robert looked up at Kath) $365, George III by Duncan Urquhart & Naphtal, London, 1807.

- There’s gold too.

- No gold, said Mrs O’Connor. No one eats off gold.

- Only royalty, said Robert.

- And we’re not that, said Kath’s mother.

- No, you’re not, said Robert.

And that was the only time Kath ever saw her mother put in her place and seem happy about it.

He brought round more polishes to try and Mrs O’Connor insisted on paying him for them. They called them creams, unguents. Weimann Royal Sterling Silver Polish. Goddard’s Silver Dip for the tips of tines. For God’s sake. Needs to be used sparingly as it is very strong and for the most stubborn stains only

Kath was disappointed that Robert could not see through her family. She wanted him less for that. He had not learned that wealth can be a pose, a charade. He thought money was money.

What was the value in this skill for polishing silver? What did it mean? Was it any more than willingness, obedience?

Kath and Robert both heard her father call him Long John.

- A Portuguese name probably, said Robert. Although Stevenson never says so. Silva. A pirate’s name.

- He’s a good polisher, her mother said to Kath one evening when Robert wasn’t there. With a twinkle. A glint. Was that some kind of double entendre? Does she know what’s going on between us and doesn’t mind, is even glad?

At first he had drawn shapes on her back, or moved his fingers along these easy lines; squares, circles, even triangles which might have been the sticky marks left by the bottoms of bottles on her dusty dressing-table, or the arcane insignia of his haptic ritual. And then he drew little fish with bows for tails that dived down into her and shapes that were no shape or almost none, curls and wraiths of smoke; spirals, scrolls, arabesques and fleur delys teardrops.

But then what lines did he trace upon her while scouting this terrain? Her veins, merely, or the more secret pathways of her nerves, the native tracks, ancient and unknown to the colonists, obscure maps, treacherous gradients and mysterious tunnels leading to unfathomable whirlpools?

What did he scrawl upon her? His secrets, or hers? No words, punctuation merely and that too swiftly erased with a sweep of his zealous hand. His gestures were solemn and he made a sombre place of her.

She was turning into silver. Hard but soft. Shining but in need of a polish. Tarnishable. Caressed to a glassy transparency. Squeezed to disappearance, like soap. He ground and grooved her lacquered body like a glacier and at that pace. Scraping out the dirt and debris and sliding it away a thousand miles. He left her a snow queen, but warm. The colour of frost and ice, but melting in his heat. Her pearl-coloured skin a precious glow then wiped away as worthless as water.

He made constellations of the nonsense of her freckles and moles; heroes and monsters unknown to mythology. Momentarily scarred by the track of a meteor. He embroidered, knotted, crocheted, plaited a lace-work from her confusion of shadows, resolved it into a prismatic bow, a plate of armour as though burnished with pumice. He cherished her opulence.

He clambered like a devoted hunchback among this vaguely baroque architecture, the moulded cornices, columns with carved capitals, balconies with sculptured corbels, burrowing through narrow coils that tapered to roses and crowns of stone, the bulges of complex ironwork, the unpluckable strings of lyre-shaped constructions. Her cloud-white back criss-crossed by a tumult of squealing swifts.

He scratched a disorderly network knitted of overlapping arcs. He stippled along her ribs. Garlands of stylised ivy grew along her flank, its five-lobed palmate leaves bronzy, its honey-pungent flowers in tufty umbels, ramifying over to her spine in a fugitive twirl. He divided her into zones. Tethering himself with chevrons hatched around her hollows. He scooped out shallow cups and circled them with cloves, bulbs and lozenges. He laboured up inclines and slid down declivities. There were jagged grizzled zigzags and filiform contours, loops, haloes and curlicues. He leaped from cone to flaming cone, picked florets, diverted streams of guttering wax. No irregularity escaped the scrutiny of his explorer’s hectic fingers. Fluted cylinders suddenly flared alight. She might long for something sharper; the piercing note of a silver needle, but the air and the light would flicker and thicken, become tangible, fall in grains about her, drown her in a drift of snow, a blanket of sand. The gleaming paths of her body were walked in felt slippers.

Her torso was turned to china clay. As fragile as porcelain and as pure. He kissed the back of her neck and may have touched with his tongue, sweetly, that bulb at the base of the nape, the top of her spine. Of course none of this was really massage at all, this mapping of sunken coastlines and submarine trenches, these woven spider-work shrouds, frayed unravelling tatters, these glistening meshes.

As she slid into sleep and out of it again her sensations blurred. His hands hummed like velvet. Did he feel that too? But the lines he drew were the bars of a cage.

They stepped out into the garden for the starlight. Robert didn’t want to say they were silver, to be so obvious. They watched the full moon almost too bright for staring. She knew he wanted to rub out those craters, those valleys and mountain ranges, those volcanoes. The light from the million stars throbbed like a torrent.

Kath hated the idea that someone might know more about her than she did. From her externals. Was her real self visible there? Discernible there? They had been at the mercy of one another. He had been wiping out shadows. Not just revealing secrets but obliterating them; making the truth not true any more. Could such things be wiped away like the grease daubed on a blade? There was the question of what things are for; silver and bodies.

Kath worried about making Robert unhappy, about what permanent damage would be done to him. How could she bear to disappoint him? He had led a life made of disappointments and still managed to look as though he would be amazed to meet with another failure. The figures he had drawn had been shapes of sorrow. He would be wretched when Kath left him. But consolations are so often booby prizes, booby traps, lies. Being inconsolable may be a gift. Desolation even may be preferable. It is a state in which you can learn something real about yourself.

………………..

Robert Stone was born in Wolverhampton. Stories have appeared in 3:AM, Stand, Panurge, Eclectica, Confingo, Punt Volat, HCE, Wraparound South, Heirlock, Decadent Review, the Nightjar chapbook series and elsewhere. Micro-stories have appeared in 5x5, Palm-Sized Press, Star 82, Ocotillo Review, deathcap. A story is included in Salt’s Best British Stories 2020.

Twitter: @RobertJStone2