I approach and lean over her solicitously, folding my invisible wings about her sad, sloped shoulders. You see how, despite our callous ways, we keep you all in our care? She does not feel my presence, only its soothing effect.
She has finished trimming her husband’s nails and holds his right hand now at rest on her left palm. Closer to the lamplight his skin loses its softness and takes on the look of marble, pale and moistly agleam. She hears voices outside on the stairs. Her son is showing Roddy Wagstaff to his room. She supposes Petra will be trailing behind them, going along by the wall, hunched and hangdog, as always.
Before Adam, she had thought herself content. Early on in her life, when she was still quite young, a child still, really, she had decided that the world was not for her. She had even thought of joining an order, entering a convent, but she stayed at home instead. She was the bird who builds its nest behind the waterfall and perches there quite placid, amid the constant crashing, the spume, the flashing iridescence. Adam was the one who drew her, briefly, into the heart of the cataract.
Water: it was always his element, his emblem, for her. The first time she saw him was on a bridge above a torrential river one
winter day, under a scudding sky. She had come to witness the famous tidal bore, and someone had brought him to see it, too. She was anxious, for she was afraid of heights. She had a sensation of constantly falling forward, and kept feeling she was about to topple irresistibly over the rail and plummet down into the moiling river far below. He was standing a little way from her. He too was holding on to the rail, as if he too were afraid. The wind was blowing in his hair and his beard and to her he seemed to have a stricken, desperate look. Before they saw it they heard the sound of the bore, a low rumble that seemed to make the grey light around them shake and the metal of the bridge vibrate under their feet. Then it came surging round the river bend, a smooth, high, almost stately wall of water crumbling in slow-motion against the banks on either side. She was thinking how cold she was, despite her heavy coat and woollen hat. When the huge wave was about to pass under the bridge, for some reason she looked upwards instead of down, and the mass of low-slung, lead-coloured clouds sweeping overhead, like a confused reflection of the river raging below, made her feel dizzier still and for a moment it seemed, thrillingly, that she was going to faint. But she did not faint, and when she lowered her head, blinking, she saw that he was looking at her, and did not stop looking when she looked back at him. He smiled, though it seemed as if he were wincing in pain. She was nineteen.
They went to a pub set among trees on a grassy rise at the far end of the bridge. They sat in a tobacco-brown snug where the noise from below of the endless traffic rounding a broad bend in the road seemed an echo of her own blood sizzling in her veins. She could see the bridge through the trees, a pale-blue spectral
web. When he asked her what she would like to drink the only thing she could think to say was gin, though she had never drunk gin before. And indeed it was like nothing she had ever tasted, cold and insidious and subtly discomposing. She liked the look of it, too, shinily metallic with the faintest tinct of paraffin-blue in its depths. He did not take off his overcoat but sat with one hand moving about inside the lapel, as if he were feeling for the source of an ache; he was always cold, he told her, could never warm up. With his plume of smooth black hair and great bony gleaming nose he looked like a bird of prey, sharp-eyed, distracted, brooding on some other place, some other solitary height. She sat opposite him very straight on the stool and sipped her drink. The mist from the river advanced up the hillside and pressed its flanks shyly against the bottle-glass windows behind them. The gin went straight to her head.
She cannot remember what they talked about. He was very cool and playful, teasing her a little and watching her with his head held to one side, smiling. She was not fooled. Despite the gin she saw through him straight away, saw through the hairline crack running athwart the carefully fashioned mask that he was holding up to her, saw right down to all the things that were coiled and curled inside him like those unimaginably tiny strings he told her people used to think the world was ultimately made of. She asked for another drink but he said he thought that two were enough. Then he started to tell her about his wife, about Dorothy, who had died. He stared before him intently as he spoke, frowning, as if it were all printed on the air and he had only to read it out to her. His tone was one of dull amazement; grief had amazed him.
He was older than her father. She did not care. When he asked her to marry him it seemed to her that she had already said yes, a long time ago.
She places her husband’s hand back at his side on the blanket and watches it intently for the slightest twitch. She believes he would give her a sign if he could. Although she is convinced he is still there in his mind, present and conscious, it occurs to her that maybe it is not she that he is conscious of. Maybe it is not she that he is with, in there, as he was not quite with her that first day, in the pub, for all his teasing smiles and all his talk. Has he ever been a complete presence, for her? She feels a slow heave in the region of her diaphragm, as if some slothful and horribly distressed thing is trying to turn itself over on its back. What if he is with Dorothy? Who is to say he is not nearer to the dead wife than he is to the living one? There is a world of the living and a world of the dead and he is suspended in a place between the two. In that place, is it not likely the dead have more power than the living, are more distinctly present to the one who is already half-way along the way to join them? Maybe even now his lost wife is reaching out a hand to him, over the dark water, and calling to him softly to come to her.
She stands up quickly. When she switches off the reading lamp the darkness spreads itself instantly, and she imagines she can feel it against her face, on the backs of her hands, a softly clinging stuff. She moves away from the bedside, pressing a hand to the base of her spine, and softly groans.
From below she hears faintly the chiming of the clock in the drawing room, calling her back to the world and its wants.
The things that to Petra seem perfectly ordered are for others all jumbled and strewn. It is as if she were written in a primitive script of straight lines and diagonals, a form of Ogham that no scholar has yet learned how to decipher. Not even her father was able to crack that code. The others do not realise that this is what so tires and vexes her, the endless effort of interpreting herself for their benefit. Everything she thinks and intends must be translated into an approximation of their language before they can understand anything of what she is saying. She knows the world is not as she conceives it; she has known this for a long time, for as long as she can remember. Some parts of it are missing and some that are there are there only because she has put them there. This does not mean the parts that are missing are real and the ones that are present are not. It is a matter of fact. It is, in fact, a matter of matter, as her father would tell her. For what is spirit in this world may be flesh in another. In an infinity of worlds all possibilities are fulfilled; that is one of the things that have been proved by what her father disparagingly calls his sums. Not that he would say it was proved, since all proofs, according to him, are provisional.
Time too is a difficulty. For her it has two modes. Either it drags itself painfully along like something dragging itself in its own slime over bits of twigs and dead leaves on a forest floor, or it speeds past, in jumps and flickers, like the scenes on a spool of film clattering madly through a broken projector. She is always either lagging behind or hopelessly far in front of everyone else, calling plaintively after them through cupped hands or gabbling back at them breathlessly over her shoulder. When she confessed this to her father, confessed how she never seemed to be in step with anyone else, he showed no surprise, and said she was quite
right, that time is not uniform and only dull people imagine it is so. It was a summer evening, and they were in the wood behind the house, sitting beside the holy well in the little hollow of brambles and holly that has been here, her father says, since the Druids. She recalls the dampish light, the smells of moss and musty water, the sunlight a spiked glare of white gold and a swarm of tiny, translucent flies busily weaving an invisible design above the water of the well. They were sitting one at either end of the old school bench that someone long ago brought up there so that pilgrims to the place would have a seat to rest on—there is a right of way through the fields to here and anyone is free to enter, and some still do, on holy days especially. She had her feet up on the seat and her arms around her legs and her chin resting on her knees. Time, her father was saying, looking upwards and scratching his chin through his beard, time has tiny flaws in it, tiny slippages, that in the very beginning hindered the flow of formlessness and created form. In the same way, he said, that your nails catch on something made of silk, with little hooks you did not know were there until they snagged. “Do you see?” he asked. Flaws in the matrix, temporal discrepancies. So at the start, when there was still nothing, the world was, you could say, hindered into existence. The whole enormous thing—here he gestured towards all outside the dimness of the grotto where they sat—a vast grid of tiny accidents, infinitely tiny mishaps. He looked at her, smiling helplessly. “Do you see?”
What would Roddy Wagstaff not have given to be there, listening to her father talking about time and its origins. She knows very well that Roddy only pretends to care about her so he can come down to Arden and see her father. Everyone, her brother,
for instance, thinks she is hurt by this but it is not so—the contrary, in fact. It was Roddy’s absorbed and single-minded sense of himself that so impressed her the first time he came to stay at the house. She had never known anyone like him before, except for her father, of course. Roddy seemed to her an entirely free spirit, weightless and airy and, unlike her father, unencumbered by labours, achievements, lavish renown. Roddy seemed to spend his life diligently and happily doing nothing. How she wished she could be even a little like that. All her life she had lived under the vast crag of her father’s looming presence. When Roddy scrambled in and sat down beside her in the shadow of that rock, dusting off the knees of his slacks and nonchalantly lighting up a cigarette, he invited her to look, whether he meant to or not, at the grand vista that had been there before her all along, beyond the confines where for so long she had been crouching.
The word she thought of for Roddy, that first weekend when he came down to Arden, was
debonair
. It was not a word she had ever had occasion to use before, about anyone, even her father. She watched Roddy, in the conservatory after lunch, sitting on a straight chair with one slim ankle crossed on a knee and an elbow resting on the back of his chair and a hand tensely holding aloft his cigarette, vigilant, missing nothing, and all the while smiling tirelessly in her father’s direction. She had never encountered anyone so smooth, so poised and yet so concentrated and determined, too. She even found the tiny rapid tremor in his hand a mark of distinction, the result no doubt of being watchful always of everything, himself in particular. He had fitted himself into the household like a knife into a sheath. It is his very lack of substance that she considers his most becoming
quality. He is not earnest and dependable like her brother; he is not good, or nice; he is not anything, much, except ambitious, and acquisitive—he has a magpie’s glittering alertness for small bright advantageous things, the useful trifles that others overlook. He has, besides, a fastidious sheen. She finds most people disconcertingly repellent, men especially. One of them will be standing in front of her, suited and belted, tie neatly knotted and a flower in his buttonhole, talking away and grandly gesturing as they all do, and suddenly she will picture him squatting on the lavatory, with his elbows on his knees and his drawers around his ankles, and underneath him all his awful puddingy things dangling over the steaming bowl. She thinks of puckered anuses, oniony armpits, disgusting tufts of curled-up, glistening hair—she cannot stop herself—of stuff under the flaps of their prepuces, up their nostrils, between their toes. Roddy, however, comes to her as bland and unblemished as a shop-window dummy. His skin has the dulled, waxen gleam of the slightly tarnished plaster of paris that manikins are made out of. She imagines him under his clothes all rounded and seamless save for the intricate joints at elbows, knees and ankles, and nothing between his thighs but a smooth, featureless bump. Unsleeping in her bed in these twilit nights she has fantasies of him being there with her, a beautiful plaster man lying motionless beside her, one knee flexed and one hand extended with an index finger raised as if to signal a waiter or flag a taxi, his perfect rosy lips curved in a pleasingly inane half-smile, his wide-eyed empty stare fixed on nothing, and she with her arms around him, feeling against her the soothing coolness of his shins, his flanks, his navel-less belly.
Duffy the cowman is the opposite of Roddy. Only last night she thought of getting up and slipping out of the house just
as she was, in Pa’s oversized pyjamas, and running all the way down to Duffy’s house behind the hill and throwing a handful of gravel at his window as people do in books, so that he would let her in and take her upstairs to his room and—and what? The thought of Duffy’s rancid bachelor bed makes her tremble with revulsion, but with something else, too, something to which she cannot, will not, put a name. There is dirt embedded in the seams of the cowman’s hands; the skin of his palms would be hard and rough and burning hot as all men’s hands are hot, except her father’s. She imagines that skin on her skin, the rasp of it, like a cow’s tongue licking her.
Poor Petra, poor mooncalf, she is the one of all the household who is dearest to us. And because we love her so we shall soon take her to us, but not yet, not yet.