The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [72]
Later, as we were leaving, she brought me over to what had preoccupied me, and moved the almost transparent piece of clothing that had been covering the cut in the flesh.
“See this? You get over such things in time. You learn to alter your life.”
The sentence meant nothing to me, but I still remember her words. And I saw the realistic wound up close for a moment before the fabric fell back over it. Everything was in plain sight.
Miss Lasqueti had an authority I had not suspected. Looking back, I believe she must have persuaded the Baron to leave the ship at Port Said, warning him that he would be exposed if he remained on board. Then there was a moment so hallucinatory that it could actually have been remembered from a dream, when either Cassius or I had been walking towards her, one night. It was dusk, and whichever one of us it was thought he saw her cleaning, with the edge of her blouse, what looked like a small pistol. This was not a fully believed piece of grit in our portrait of her. As children we were imagining and accepting all kinds of things. We did know she was fond of us. She spent a few afternoons with Cassius, who had become interested in her sketch book. She was easy to talk to.
There was one further episode that connected in our minds with that possible pistol. On one of the afternoons Cassius spent with Miss Lasqueti, she lent him a fountain pen. He forgot about it completely until he felt it in his trouser pocket after dinner. He came upon her at a table deep in conversation with someone, her handbag on the chair beside her. He leaned over to drop the pen into it without disturbing them, but her bare arm snaked out quickly and she caught his hand that held the pen and took it from him. She had not even turned her head to look at him. “Thank you, Cassius. I’ve got it,” she said, and carried on her conversation.
This to us was further evidence.
In spite of all of her opinions, she never appeared judgemental. I think the only person who continually annoyed her was Mr. Giggs, and it was because she found him boastful. She said he always spoke of his skill as a marksman, being a good shot. The revelation that Miss Lasqueti was also “a good shot” was to come much later, with our discovery of a photograph of a young Perinetta Lasqueti, striding away from a perfect target score at the Bisley Trials, laughing with the Polish war hero Juliusz Grusza, who would later represent England in the 50 Metre rapid-fire pistol category at the Empire Games. It was in the article on Grusza that Miss Lasqueti’s prowess was mentioned, although more space was given to the possible romance between the couple in the picture. She wore a hounds-tooth jacket and the sunlight shone on her blond hair, so we now had an alternative vision of the pale spinster who did sketches on the Oronsay and now and then threw books over the rail.
It was Ramadhin who had come across the article and picture when we were both living in England. He discovered it in an old copy of The Illustrated London News. The two of us had been loafing through the Croydon Public Library, and we would not have recognized Miss Lasqueti without her name in the cutline. By the time we read it, in the late 1950s, her companion in the photograph, Juliusz Grusza, had become a national celebrity as an Olympic medallist, as well as a force in Whitehall, where Miss Lasqueti supposedly had affiliations. If Ramadhin and I had known how to contact Cassius we would have made a copy of this pre-Olympic profile and sent