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Overview
Kitty Crozier first laid eyes on Virgil Florescu, a dissident poet who swam across the Danube to escape Ceausescu’s Romania, in the hospital. She woke up after surgery to find a stranger sitting beside her bed gazing at her. He just smiled, then stood and left the room.
She next sees him in London’s Green Park picking up litter from the grass with a long spike. So begins the most important, most demanding, most exhilarating relationship of Kitty’s life. As their love for each other deepens, their previous lives, and very different families, reveal themselves to be oddly connected, in this novel from a recipient of literary honors including a Somerset Maugham Award, an E. M. Forster Award, and a George Orwell Prize, as well as two Man Booker Prize nominations.
“At once a wistful and tender love story and a harrowing account of how people from two utterly different cultures and ways of looking at the world can find, then lose, each other . . . Virgil is a superb creation.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781468305555 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 636 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Stainless Steel
Early one summer evening, nine months after the operation she had begun to fear would leave her permanently listless, Kitty Crozier was overcome by the sweet scent of angels' trumpets. She looked about her to find the source of the smell, so familiar from childhood, before she came to understand it was of her own imagining. There were no flowers in the room. There were no datura plants in the garden, or in any of the other gardens along the street. Memory, and memory alone, had brought the loved and hated perfume to her.
She had been thinking of her mother. The dark-haired Eleanor Crozier was taking her two small daughters, Daisy and Kitty, to their new home, their stately home, in the country. 'You have to thank your dear dead grandfather for this,' she told them as they stared in wonder at the grand house. 'I bought it with the money he put in trust for me. The money he made in India.'
(Daisy and Kitty were to believe for years what their mother and grandmother would have them believe – that Kenneth McGregor had died, as many settlers did, of malaria. Daisy Hopkins, visiting Darjeeling in middle age, learned from an elderly missionary how the dedicated tea planter had occupied his last hours on Christmas Day 1938. He had eaten porridge, prepared by his Nepalese cook, for breakfast. He had bathed – the bath drawn by a servant – and dressed. The morning being fine, he had walked to St Andrew's, the Presbyterian church where he and his fellow Scots regularly worshipped. He had joined in the singing of carols and heard the rector warn from the pulpit of the terrible trouble fermenting in Europe. The service over, Kenneth McGregor was given lunch by Gavin and Elsie Anderson, friends of his parents. No meal of Mrs Anderson's was complete without broth, and the broth that day – the missionary remembered, for he had tasted it – was one of her rarities. Mrs Anderson, God rest her, had stored the smoked fish that was its glory in her larder, beneath a muslin food cover that debarred even the smallest insect. When she lifted the lid of the tureen and revealed the precious flakes of haddock, it was as if the four of them – they each remarked on it – were near the faraway North Sea again. The next moment they were laughing at their foolish fancy.
'I do meander,' confessed the missionary. Then, sensing her impatience, he said: 'Your grandfather took his life, Mrs Hopkins. We used to say there were two things that sent white people to their deaths – mosquitoes and misery. Poor Kenneth was afflicted by the latter. He wanted to be with his wife and child, and they weren't here. He wasn't always at his ease on the McGregor plantation. That much I saw in his grey-blue eyes, but never learned from his lips. He was a man of discreet feeling. On that worst of Christmases he drank whisky and sang with us around the piano, and some time that night he went up to a spot on what we used to call Suicide Hill and put a pistol to his head. It was, if I may be flippant, a popular place with the seriously depressed. Indeed no, Mrs Hopkins, he did not die of malaria.')
Kitty Crozier asked her mother why she had bought them a palace to live in, and Eleanor replied that she had always dreamt of living somewhere with great big rooms and with a great big garden, and now her dream had come true. 'You can share it with me, Kitty. And you, Daisy. The three of us are going to have wonderful fun at Alder Court.'
They were standing together, hand in hand, on the back terrace. Kitty, breaking free, saw flowers that looked like bells. She wondered if you could ring them and whether they made a noise.
'They're angels' trumpets, Kitty. They're silent angels' trumpets. I should imagine nobody hears them except angels.'
'I can smell them,' Daisy said. 'Can't you smell them, Kitty?'
'Yes,' she answered, and began to cry. She was suddenly aware that her father was missing, and as the strange smell became more powerful so did her sense of the loss of him increase.
'What's the matter, Kitty? What's wrong?'
'It's him's the matter. I bet it's him,' Daisy ventured.
'It isn't, it isn't.' Kitty glowered at her sister. 'There's no matter. Nothing's wrong.'
Eleanor Crozier praised her lying child for being brave: 'You are my brave girl.' Those five words, lightly and tenderly spoken, caused Kitty's tears to stop, her anger to vanish. Hearing them in London, in her mind, on another July evening, she was struck once more by her own childish percipience, for she had recognised her mother's praise, bestowed upon her at the age of five, as the surest evidence of love.
'It is you.'
The man who called out to Kitty Crozier as she walked distractedly in Green Park was picking up litter from the grass with a long spike.
'It is you,' he repeated, approaching her.
'Yes, it's me,' she responded. 'Whoever you suppose I am.'
'You are the beautiful woman in the bed. I watched you sleeping.'
'I'm not, and you didn't. You've been watching in someone else's bedroom, not mine.'
'It was a bed in the hospital. I was working there as a porter. I stopped doing my work to look at you. I thought you were beautiful. I still think you are beautiful.'
She remembered him now – as the stranger who had taken his glinting smile out of the ward.
'It pleases me to see you again. I call myself Virgil Florescu.'
He pronounced his first name in a way she hadn't heard before, and she knew at once that she would be using his way of saying it in the weeks, months and, perhaps, years to come. 'Virgil,' she said. 'I'm Kitty. I'm Kitty Crozier.'
'Now I must tell you, Kitty Crozier, what I have to tell you. I wish to be with you. I am sincere. I wish to be with you, if you will allow me, if you will please grant me the honour.'
His words came in a rush. When she was sure they had ceased, she said she couldn't stay and talk to him as she had an appointment to keep. 'Let me give you my address and number. I have a pen, Virgil, but no paper to write on.'
'I have plenty of paper, Kitty Crozier.' He lifted up the spike and picked off the wrapping for a bar of Swiss chocolate. 'Take this. It is large enough.'
(She would see the Lindt wrapper again, after he was gone from her life. It would fall out of his copy of Miorita, the little book of songs and ballads that once belonged to his mother. She would resist the urge to tear it into pieces.)
'Please, Kitty Crozier, make my back your desk.'
A moment passed before she did so; before she pressed the scrap of paper against his bumpy spine and wrote on it. In that moment, she wondered if she ought to be cautious, sensible, reserved. She decided, instead, on recklessness.
'I will telephone you, Kitty Crozier.'
'Yes,' she replied and added, 'You really must. I'll be at home tomorrow evening, Virgil.'
She imagined her sister admonishing her as she headed towards the gate near the Ritz. She made Daisy remind her that she had been foolish, worse than foolish, all those years ago with that kaftanned creature, Freddy, and now here she was, losing her senses over a stranger from a foreign country, from Romania by the sound of it; a man with no prospects, no future, who was working in the lowliest of jobs. He's a labourer, Kitty, she could hear Daisy insist; a picker-up of other people's rubbish: whatever is possessing you?
'I hope I'll discover,' she answered aloud.
Virgil Florescu phoned Kitty Crozier shortly after six that Tuesday evening and arrived at her house less than an hour later. 'I have seen a man with rings in his ears and rings through his nostrils and a ring on his lip,' he told her excitedly, as she opened the front door. 'On his lip, Kitty Crozier. On his upper lip, on his top one, he wears a ring. Think of him eating, think of him drinking, think of him kissing –' He paused. 'I think, and I am confused. I am in total darkness thinking of a ring in such a spot. I invited him to enlighten me. I asked him why he has the ring on his lip, and he shrugged his shoulders and said "Because". Then he stopped. I repeated my question and got the same response: "Because, because, because." I shall never know his reason, Kitty Crozier – the because he is hiding behind his "because". It was a delightful encounter, though – especially delightful.'
'Come in, Virgil.'
'You could have given me a false address and a false number. But you didn't.'
'No, I didn't. Of course I didn't.'
'I am glad. I was happy to hear it was you when I telephoned. I almost expected to hear the voice of someone else. I almost expected to hear no one at all.'
(He had wholly expected that the numerals would end for him in nothing. Why should he have expected otherwise? He had embarrassed her, and from that embarrassment had come the mythical house in a mythical street with a phantom telephone and, probably, a made-up name for its owner as well. He had doubted that the beautiful woman he had first seen sleeping in the hospital was even called Kitty Crozier. The 'Kitty' and the 'Crozier' had rushed into her head while the madman with the spike was staring at her – of that he had convinced himself as he watched her walk briskly away. It was too much to expect that she had been completely honest with him.)
'You are Kitty?' he asked when he was in the hallway.
'Yes, I am Kitty. I was definitely Kitty when I last looked in the mirror.'
'Kitty Crozier?'
'Yes, yes, yes. Yes, and yes, and yes. A thousand times yes, Virgil – if it really is Virgil Florescu I'm trying to convince.'
'I am he.'
'I don't think it actually worries me what your name is. But I do like the sound of Virgil.'
He took her hands and kissed them, and then they embraced. 'I assume we have sorted out our identities,' she said, leading him upstairs. 'Some sad people never seem to.'
She wiped the tears from his face with the edge of a sheet when they had finished making love. He assured her, again and again, that they were tears of gratitude. He was not unhappy. He was thankful.
'Are you hungry, Virgil? Have you eaten today?'
'Some fruit. Some biscuits.'
'That's not enough. I shall cook us supper. Do you like steak? Beef steak?'
There was a silence before he answered. 'I cannot.' He shook his head slowly. 'Not beef. Not lamb. Not pork. I cannot eat such meat. I have a reason, Kitty. Perhaps, one day, I will tell it to you. Please do not ask me to do so now, not now that I am happy.'
'I can make you an omelette, Virgil. I can make you a delicious Spanish omelette.'
'That I should prefer. Fish I can eat, and any bird that has flown free. But not those others.'
In the kitchen, she gave him a bottle of Saint Amour to open. She drew his attention to the label and laughed. 'I bought it this afternoon. In anticipation, I suppose.'
He watched her prepare the meal. 'You are serious with food, as my mother was.'
'Was? Is she dead?'
'She is.'
(If he had stated, as he nearly stated, that she had died in life, Kitty would have stopped doing her delicate work with onions, peppers and potatoes, and asked him what he meant. It was best, at present, to say, simply, that yes, she is dead.)
'Will it upset you, Virgil, if I have steak? I'm eating it once a week, on my doctor's instructions.'
'You must do as your doctor commands. You must understand, beautiful Kitty Crozier, it is my problem only.'
'An allergy, is it? An aversion?'
'An aversion. Precisely.'
'When you come here again there won't be any meat. I promise.'
'You wish me to come here again?'
'I do.'
'You are kind to me.'
'I'm being kind to myself, I hope, Virgil. I haven't been so kind to myself in ages.'
(Not, she might have said, since the days with Freddy – the days that came to an abrupt end when he decided, against everything she thought she knew of his character, to become a responsible person. He'd left her a note with the message that he'd seen the light and for the good of his soul he had to follow it to north-east Africa.)
'Where are you living in London?'
'In rooms. In lots of rooms. At the moment I am in a room in Hammersmith. The property is owned by Mr Nicos Razelos, an Athenian Greek with a magnificent belly. He calls it his promontory, Kitty, and he laughs when the buttons on his silk shirts give up the struggle of containing it. Last Saturday morning he lost three all at once – pop, pop, pop, they went, like three tiny bullets being fired. He has this vast stomach, this promontory which he strokes and caresses, and yet he moves on his dainty feet with the grace of a ballet dancer. He is a diverting individual.'
'Why rooms, Virgil? Why lots of them?'
'I do not care to grow attached to a place. I fear becoming, as you say, settled. I fear most the sadness of leaving. That is why I leave each room without anguish, without melancholy. I go on to the next one in a spirit of discovery, though what I discover is not always – which English word shall I use? – inspiring. Inspiring, yes. I am not always inspired when I open the door on the latest room. I am often greeted with nothing to inspire inspiration.' He smiled his full, glinting smile. 'I shall be gone from Hotel Aphrodite very soon.'
'Is it made of silver, Virgil?'
'Silver? Is what made of silver? The hotel?'
'Your tooth. The one that glints when you smile.'
'Silver,' he shouted. 'Silver! Silver, Kitty? You think the dentist worked with silver? You think I have precious silver in my mouth?'
'I wondered if –'
'If it was silver. I'm sorry, Kitty, but I must laugh.'
He sniggered to start with, then he began to splutter, then he said 'Silver' to himself and this released the promised laughter. It started deep in his throat, but in an extraordinary moment became almost falsetto. It was the noise of a boy soprano, his voice not yet broken, his laughter high-pitched and pure. Then the noise was a man's noise once more, followed by a man's loud, satisfied sigh.
'I assume that the tooth is not made of silver,' she remarked when he was finally silent.
'You are correct in your assumption, Kitty Crozier. My shining tooth, my Communist tooth, my tooth that is the gift of the kind and merciful state, which is now led by the kind and merciful Conducãtor, is made of a more lasting metal than silver.'
(The Conducãtor, whose name Virgil Florescu refused to speak, was to become a presence in her life for two whole years – a familiar, absent presence. He would be the subject of stories, of cautionary tales, of fantasies Virgil insisted were true in every detail. 'I am a truth-teller, Kitty,' her lover would remind her, 'even when I am allowing myself the luxury of a little invention.' The Conducãtor's lady, the renowned scientist, would be there at her husband's side, offering him on all occasions, public or private, the approving look, the encouraging gesture. The Conducãtor's consort had also sacrificed her right to a merely human name – a name such as Virgil Florescu, or Kitty Crozier, or that of any person who wasn't the Conducãtor or the Conducãtor's wife.)
'A much, much humbler metal than silver. My tooth is composed of steel, Kitty, of stainless steel. Silver stains, but not stainless steel. My other teeth will decay in time, but not this one. It is impregnable. It is stronger than nature. It is resilient, as the dentist told my parents. I shall take it to my grave, and if that grave is opened in a thousand years nothing of me will be visible except my eternal Communist tooth. Let me predict that it will shine forth from the earth.'
'Drink your wine, Virgil.'
'Yes, yes. I have been talking, haven't I? I have been rhapsodising about my tooth.'
'You have. What kind of artist are you?'
'I am an artist at whatever I do. I am an artist when I sweep floors, when I push trolleys in hospitals, when I pick up litter on a spike. I try to be artistic in each of my endeavours, Kitty.'
'Say.'
'I have written poems. I am writing poems. Now I am hungry.'
She awoke in the night to find herself alone. Virgil's clothes were no longer where he had left them, slung across the chair. His socks and shoes weren't on the bedroom floor. There was no sound of him anywhere in the house.
He had written her a note. It was propped up against the empty Saint Amour bottle on the kitchen table.
Beautiful Kitty Crozier [she read]. I have to return to the Aphrodite. I rise early most days in order to begin my artistic activities in the park as promptly as I can.
Kitty Crozier, you have far too many books.
I will be in touch with you.
Your Virgil.
It was already that terrible hour, she noticed as she slid back into bed, when certain discontented people find themselves denied of sleep; when their minds are alert to nothing but the inadequacies, the failings, of the past. She was one of those people as a rule, but not on this Wednesday morning. The usual crop of nagging memories was in abeyance, was out of mind, and she felt radiant.
She ought to have felt irresponsible, but was unconcerned about it. She had twice made love – and it seemed like love, not just that other matter, sex – with a man whose looks, whose awkward bearing, had immediately attracted her and whose genuineness she had as immediately taken on trust. She felt she knew she was right to have faith in him.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Kitty and Virgil"
by .
Copyright © 1998 Paul Bailey.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Other titles by Paul Bailey,
Copyright,
Prologue: A Comical Hero,
Chapter 1 Stainless Steel,
Chapter 2 Cerberus,
Chapter 3 The Fisher of Perch,
Chapter 4 Breaking the Glass,
Chapter 5 The Time of Afterwards,
Epilogue: The Names in the Dark,
The Poems: Stainless Steel,
Cerberus,
The Fisher of Perch,
Breaking the Glass,
The Time of Afterwards,
What People are Saying About This
A charming and improbable love story between an American and a Romanian in London that is witty, dark, and politically and psychologically astute.
— Lilla Weinberger, Reader's Book, Sonoma, CA