Authors: Tanith Lee
And all the while the astounding change
want on, insidious now, barely explicable, yet continuing, mounting, like a
series of waves running in through his blood, dazzling behind his eyes. He was
alive—and with something. Yes, I think I do mean atavism. The gods of the sea
were rising up in the void and empty spaces of Daniel, as maybe such gods are
capable of rising in all of us, if terrified intellect didn’t slam the door.
I knelt in the sand, growing silent,
sharing it merely by being there beside him.
Then slowly, like a cinematic camera
shot, my gaze detected something in the corner of vision. Automatically, I
adjusted the magical camera lens of the eye, the foreground blurring, the
distant object springing into its dimensions. Mrs. Besmouth stood several yards
off, at the limit of the beach. She seemed to be watching us, engrossed, yet
not moving. Her hands were pressed together, rigidly—it resembled that exercise
one can perform to tighten the pectoral muscles.
I got to my feet a second time. This
time I ran towards her, floundering in the sand, deserting the wheelchair and
its occupant, their backs to the shore, facing out to sea.
I panted as I ran, from more than the exertion.
Her eyes also readjusted themselves as I blundered towards her, following me, but
she gave no corresponding movement: a spectator only. As I came right up to her,
I lost my footing and grabbed out to steady myself, and it was her arm I almost
inadvertently caught. The frantic gesture—the same one I might have used to
detain her if she had been running forward—triggered in me a whole series of
responses suited to an act of aggression that had not in fact materialised.
“No!” I shouted. “Leave him alone! Don’t
you dare take him away. I won’t let you—” and I raised my other hand, slapping
at her shoulder ineffectually. I’m no fighter; I respect—or fear—the human body
too much. To strike her breast or face would have appalled me. If we had really
tussled I think she could have killed me long before my survival reflexes
dispensed with my inhibitions.
But she didn’t kill me. She shook me
off; I stumbled and I fell on the thick cold cushion of the sand.
“I don’t care what he does,” she said. “Let
him do what he wants.” She smiled at me, a knowing scornful smile. “You adopt him.
You take care of him. I’ll let you.”
I felt panic, even though I disbelieved
her. To this pass we had come, I had brought us, that she could threaten me
with such things. Before I could find any words—they would have been inane
violent ones—her face lifted, and her eyes went over my head, over the beach, back
to the place where I’d left the chair.
She said: “I think I always expected it’d
come. I think I always waited for it to happen. I’m sick and tired of it. I get
no thanks. All the rest of them. They don’t know when they’re well off. When
did I ever have anything? Go on, then. Go on.”
I sat on the ground, for she’d knocked the
strength from me. She didn’t care, and I didn’t care.
Someone ought to be with Daniel. Oh God,
how were we going to get the wheelchair back across the sand? Perhaps we’d have
to abandon it, carry him back between us. I’d have to pay for a new chair. I
couldn’t afford it, I—
I had been turning, just my head, and now
I could see the wheelchair poised, an incongruous black cut-out against the
retreating breakers which still swam in and splintered on the lengthening
beach. It was like a Surrealist painting, I remember thinking that, the lost artefact,
sigil of stasis, set by the wild night ocean, sigil of all things metamorphic. If
the chair had been on fire, it could have been a Magritte.
Initially the movement didn’t register.
It seemed part of the insurge and retraction of the waves. A sort of pale
glimmer, a gliding. Then the
weirdness
of it registered with me, and I
realised it was Daniel. Somehow he had slipped from the chair, collapsed
forward into the water, and, incredibly, the water was pulling him away with
itself, away into the darkness.
I lurched up. I screamed something, a
curse or a prayer or his name or nothing at all. I took two riotous running steps
before she grasped me. It was a fierce hold, undeniable, made of iron. Oh she was
so strong. I should have guessed. She had been lifting and carrying a near
grown man for several years. But I tried to go on rushing to the ocean, like
those cartoon characters you see, held back by some article of elastic. And
like them, when she wouldn’t let me go, I think I ran on the spot a moment, the
sand cascading from under me.
“Daniel—” I cried, “he’s fallen in the
water—the tide’s dragging him out—can’t you see—?”
“I can see,” she said. “You look, and
you’ll see, too.”
And her voice stopped me from moving,
just as her grip had stopped my progression. All I could do then was look, so I
looked.
We remained there, breathing, our bodies
slotted together, like lovers, speechless, watching. We watched until the last
pastel glimmer was extinguished. We watched until the sea had run far away into
the throat of night. And after that we watched the ribbed sands, the plaster cast
the waves forever leave behind them. A few things had been stranded there,
pebbles, weed, a broken battle. But Daniel was gone, gone with the sea. Gone
away into the throat of night and water.
“Best move the chair,” she said at last,
and let me go.
We walked together and hoisted the
vacant wheelchair from the sand. We took it back across the beach, and at the
foot of the alley we rested.
“I always knew,” she said then. “I tried
to stop it, but then I thought: Why try? What good is it?” Finally she said to me:
“Frightened, are you?”
“Yes,” I said, but it was a reflex.
“I’m glad,” she said. “You silly little
cow.”
After that we hoisted the chair up the
alley, to the gate of Number 19. She took it to the house, and inside, and shut
the door without another word.
I walked to the bus stop, and when the
lighted golden bus flew like a spaceship from the shadows, I got on it. I went
home, or to the place where I lived. I recall I looked at everything with vague
astonishment, but that was all. I didn’t feel what had occurred, didn’t
recognise or accept it. That came days later, and when it did I put my fist
through one of my nominative aunt’s windows. The impulse came and was gone in a
second. It was quite extraordinary. I didn’t know I was going to, I simply did.
My right hand, my painter’s hand. I managed to say I’d tripped and fallen, and
everything was a mistake. After the stitches came out, I packed my bags and
went inland for a year. It was so physically painful for a while to manipulate
a brush or palette knife, it became a discipline, a penance to do it. So I
learned. So I became what now I am.
I never saw Mrs. Besmouth again. And no
one, of course, ever again saw Daniel.
You
see, a secret agent is one who masquerades, one who pretends to be what he or
she is not. And, if successful, is indistinguishable from the society or group
or affiliation into which he or she has been infiltrated. In the Magritte
painting, you’re shown the disguise, which is that of a human girl, but the
actuality also, the creature within. And oddly, while she’s more like a
chess-piece horse than any human girl, her essence is of a girl, sheer girl, or
rather, the sheer feminine principle, don’t you think? Maybe I imagine it.
I heard some rumour or other at the
time, just before the window incident. The atrocious Ray was supposed to have
laced my drink. With what I don’t know, nor do I truly credit it. It’s too
neat. It accounts for everything too well. But my own explanations then were
exotic, to say the least. I became convinced at one point that Daniel had
communicated with me telepathically, pleaded, coerced, engineered everything. I’d
merely been a tool of his escape, like a file hidden in a cake. His mother had
wanted it too. Afraid to let go, trying to let go. Letting go.
Obviously, you think we murdered him,
she and I. A helpless, retarded, crippled young man, drowned in Ship Bay one
late autumn night, two women standing by in a horrific complicity, watching his
satin head go under the black waters, not stirring to save him.
Now I ask myself, I often ask myself, if
that’s what took place. Maybe it did. Shall I tell you what I saw? I kept it
till the end—coup de grâce, or cherry, whichever you prefer.
It was a dark clear night, with not much
illumination, that slender moon, those pulsing stars, a glint of phosphorous,
perhaps, gilding the sea. But naked, and so pale, so flawless, his body glowed
with its own incandescence, and his hair was water-fire, colourless, and
brilliant.
I don’t know how he got free of his
clothes. They
were
in the chair with the rug—jeans, trunks, pullover,
shirt—no socks, I remember, and no shoes. I truly don’t think he could walk,
but somehow, as he slid forward those three or four yards into the sea, the
sight of the waves must have aided him, their hypnotism drawing off his
garments, sloughing them like a dead skin.
I saw him, just for a moment. His Apollo’s
head, modelled sleek with brine, shone from the breakers. He made a strong
swimmer’s movement. Naturally, many victims of paralysis find sudden
coordination of their limbs in the weightless medium of fluid.... Certainly
Daniel was swimming, and certainly his movements were both spontaneous and
voluntary.
And now I have the choice as to whether
I tell you this or not. It’s not that I’m afraid, or nervous of telling you. I’m
not even anxious as to whether or not you believe me. Perhaps I should be. But
I shan’t try to convince you. I’ll state it, once. Recollect, the story about
Ray and the drinks may be true, or possibly the quirk was only in me, the desire
for miracles in my world of Then, where nothing happened, nothing was rich, or
strange.
For half a minute I saw the shape of a man,
spearing fishlike through the water. And then came one of those deep lacunas, when
the outgoing tide abruptly collects itself, seems to swallow, pauses. And there
in the trough, the beautiful leaping of something, white as salt crystal, smoky
green as glass. The hair rose on my head, just as they say it does. Not terror,
but a feeling so close to it as it be untranslatable—a terror, yet without
fear. I saw a shining horse, a stallion, with a mane like opals and unravelling
foam, his forefeet raised, heraldic, his belly a carven bow, the curve of the
moon, the rest a silken fish, a great greenish sheen of fish, like the tail of
a dolphin, but scaled over in a waterfall of liquid armour, like a shower of
silver coins. I saw it, and I knew it. And then it was gone.
The woman with me said nothing. She had
barricaded her windows, built up her wall against such an advent. And I said
nothing because it is a dream we have, haven’t we, the grossest of us,
something that with childhood begins to perish. To tear the veil, to see. Just
for a moment, a split second in all of life. And the split second was all I
had, and it was enough. How could one bear more?
But I sometimes wonder if Magritte,
whose pictures are so full of those clear moments of terror, but not fear,
moment on moment on moment—I sometimes wonder—
Then again, when you look at the sea, or
when I look at it, especially at night, anything at all seems possible.
Paper Boat
The
summer heat had come. It burned the hills to blocks of standing smoke. It
filled the bowl of the shore and the spoon of the bay with its opium, it
painted the terracotta of the house in progressively darkening washes of red
and umber. The sea, a throbbing indigo, pulled itself to the beach and tumbled
there as if drugged. The island lay dumb, half conscious, scarcely breathing,
vanquished.
It seemed to the poet he was made of
some form of clockwork and the clock had stopped. He stood by the narrow
window, looking at the blue-black sea, the distant shadow of a dreamlike
mainland chalked in haze. Perhaps this was how the island itself felt, the sea;
the rock... this lifeless, numb, internal silence, devoid of anything, even
questioning or fear.
This was where they had planned to spend
the summer. This island and this house. This house, like a doll’s house. If you
opened the side of it you would see all the pretty dolls in their doll-like
attitudes of occupation. Laura, scribbling bitter witty prose, with the yellow
blind shielding her window from the sun, turning her to amber, a fierce amber
hand, the scorched ember-coloured pages. Farther down, Sibbi bending like an Egyptian
over a bowl of osiers and sun-mummified flowers, Sibbi with her magical face
and her bright shallow brain, and her husband, Arthur, a bear, at the eternal
business of his pipe, knocking out dottle, refilling it, that rank black
tobacco odour woven by now into the scalding incense of every room. And
somewhere, Albertine, like a tall, white goddess from a frieze, moving silently
and gently about, being careful to tread on the paws of none of them, this
moody tribe of cats who inhabited her domestic landscape.
And he, the black cat at the top of the
house, the black cat in the symbolic tower with a door up to the roof where,
under the golden awning, the metallic telescope was pointing like a tongue at
the sea. The black cat was a poet and scholar. So, if you had opened the doll’s
house you should see him seated in the brown shadow at the desk, lost in some
elegy or epic, among the open paper mouths of Plato, Virgil and Homer. And
instead you saw him at the narrow window, the doll poet with the clockwork stopped
inside him.
Below, the silver hammers of the piano
began to strike each other, and a girl’s lovely singing winged up, yet the
sounds had an undersea quality, stifled by the leaden air. Sibbi, her flowers
meticulously imprisoned in their bowl, singing her siren’s song to the poet in
the tower. She sang to disturb him as he worked, to get her image between the
pen and the paper. If he should say to her as they ate dinner: “I heard you
sing”, she would answer: “Oh, I am so sorry. Did I disturb you? I never thought
you could hear me.” Her eyes were the colour of blue irises; they gave an
impression of great depth simply because a world of vacuity opened behind them.
She was a claw delicately scratching at him. All three women, the priestesses
presumably of his shrine, were claws in his body—Sibbi clawed at his loins,
very softly and with her own curious art, promising and never quite giving,
giving, and promising more, like all empty vessels offering an illusion of
hidden things. Laura clawed at his conscience; sharp-tongued and clever Laura,
reminding him of her rights to him by means of a past neither wished to
recapture.
Only Albertine clawed at his heart.
Albertine, who was sad and travailed not to show it, who was brave and good and
adored him, Albertine the best of women, whom he no longer loved. They had
metamorphosed into different people from the two impassioned children who met
in a graveyard in order to be secret, embraced on graves, and finally, hero and
heroine of their own romance, had fled security with a wild hymn of abandon.
Now they had grown up, security had gathered on them after all, like barnacles.
The dismal shadow of reality overlay them both. They had found out they were
not gods and they were not suited.
The light from the sea, so darkly
bright, made him shut his eyes. Sibbi sang below. No one else responded to the
heat as he had done with this anaesthetic languor. There was a timelessness
around him now. No past, no present, nothing to come. He could sense the
mechanism stilled, the unheard drone of the sun. A perpetual, well-known
knowledge of loneliness gnawed somewhere inside him, yet he scarcely felt it.
Only the sullen noise of the sea ran up the beaches of his mind and swooned
like an indigo woman against him, and slipped away through his fingers, sighing
when he tried to hold her, while down below Arthur Merton knocked the dottle
from his pipe, refilled it, lit it, and leaned back in his chair, and
considered it was very hot.
“Damned hot,” he said.
Through
the smoke of the pipe, and through the embalmed-looking stalks and scarlet
rose-heads in the Indian bowl, Merton could see Sibbi at the piano in the next
room, playing and singing prettily, sometimes glancing towards the open veranda
doors with the sly, half-excited, half-evaluating look she reserved for
Ashburn. Inadvertently Merton’s eyes slid up towards the weary stucco of the
ceiling. Above them all, Robert Ashburn would be writing in the tower room,
working in this infernal heat. If he was. Too hot to do much now. Even the
boat, Ashburn’s love, lay neglected by the quay. The sailing days had been
good. When it was cooler...
Merton sensed, as if through the steam
or fog of his thoughts, the glamour of the girl at the piano, the witchery of
that curious straying glance, once turned to advantage on himself. He felt no
resentment. He also, in an improbable, asexual way, stirred at the thought of
the dark young man above, the anguished poet—anguished by everything or
nothing. The moods of the poet lit up dim glares of unrealised fire in Merton
himself. Sonnets he did not properly understand, written perfectly obviously
to his wife Sibbi, nevertheless pierced Merton’s wooden soul like splinters of
glass with a painful, inexplicable delight.
Sibbi finished her song. Notes and voice
ebbed from the room, and the heat seemed to flood into the empty spaces.
Presently she came to the doorway and stood looking at him, like a cat with a
canary dead in its mouth, contemptuous, cruel and affectionate, knowing it will
be forgiven simply because it is as it is.
“That was very nice,” Merton observed.
Sibbi smiled.
“How would you know? You don’t care for
music.”
“Well, I care for yours, you know.”
“Actually, I was playing for Robert, but
I’m glad you enjoyed it, Arthur dear.” She leaned her hand with its wedding
ring on the upright of the door, admiring it, her eyes a little glazed with
heat and excitement. “How bad of him to be in the garden at this hour, when he
should be working. Laura will scold him, I expect. He hasn’t completed anything
this summer.”
Merton laughed.
“We shall have to visit the eye
specialist after all,” he remarked. A year ago she had been threatened with the
nemesis of spectacles, now some little spark of intransigent animosity made him
refer to the terror whenever possible, in the form of a joke. “Robert was never
in the garden.”
“Don’t be absurd. I saw him quite
clearly. I see better than you do.”
“But you don’t hear better, Sibbi. I
heard him upstairs, walking about while you were at the piano. You know how he
walks, like an animal in a cage, up and down.”
“I think you must have sunstroke. You
had better lie down. I saw Robert absolutely distinctly, by the stone urn at
the end of the walk, listening while I played.”
Merton got up with a reluctant
irritating air of investigation and went slowly across the room, past Sibbi, to
the veranda doors. The garden, stripped of shadow by the two o’clock sun,
offered a vista of lank and blistered green with clumps of statuary, like
unhealthy fungus or sores, pushed up at intervals. The local gardener was
trudging complainingly beside Albertine along the walk. The old sunburned
islander and the tall, fair girl advanced in a desultory slow motion; nothing
else stirred except for an inflammatory scatter of crickets, crackling as if trying
to set the grass on fire.
“I spy with my short-sighted eye
Albertine and that old devil from the village.”
Sibbi came to his side.
“Well, no doubt Robert’s come indoors.
He was just there a moment ago.”
“Then he’d come through these doors
here, wouldn’t he? The only other way is to jump off the wall and, since the
tide’s in, swim round to the front, which seems”, he knocked dottle from his
pipe to stress the point, “unnecessary.”
“Then he’s still in the garden. What a
fuss you’re making.”
“You, my dear, are the one making the
fuss.”
Merton went out on to the terrace and
waved to Albertine. The girl lifted her head; the gardener picked his fangs,
disdaining the mad people of the house, recounting whose debaucheries and
insanities kept him in free liquor at the village.
“Did you pass Robert on the walk?”
“Why, no, he’s upstairs in the tower
room.”
“You see,” Merton exulted.
Sibbi shook her head. Her teeth snapped
on canary bones. “I distinctly saw him, I tell you.”
Albertine crossed the lawn, glancing up
anxiously at the shuttered landward window of the little tower and at the
yellow awning above.
“Now you’ve made Albertine uneasy,”
Sibbi said crossly. She glanced at the girl with the same mixture of contempt
and liking she had displayed for her husband. She had enchanted the poet, and
could afford to be generous to his dull, pleasant handmaiden. Laura, the
serpent-tongued, was the one she feared. Albertine called in a high light
voice:
“Robert,” and then again: “Robert!”
They all stared up as if mesmerised at
the closed shutters, even the mahogany gardener, his thumbnail worrying at his
canines, added an oil-black stare to theirs.
“Robert,” Sibbi suddenly sang out, as if
certain her magic would conjure him where Albertine’s could not. The heat
swirled sulkily and reformed. The gardener muttered ominously:
“He write. He deaf to you.”
Abruptly, for no particular reason, each
one of them shouted at the masked window.
“Here I am,” Ashburn said.
They looked down and saw him coming
between the veranda doors.
Albertine and Sibbi exclaimed; the
gardener turned and spat disgustedly.
Merton said, “Well, well. Just down from
the tower.”
“That’s right.”
“But you were in the garden,” Sibbi
asserted almost angrily. “I saw you standing on the walk while I played.”
The poet looked at her and seemed not
quite to see her. His eyes, also glazed by the heat, and very dark, appeared to
gaze inwards, backwards into the shadows of his brain. He gave one of his
absent, charming, half-apologetic smiles. “Yes, I heard you singing upstairs.”
Sibbi failed to take up her cue. She
looked feverish, annoyed; she went to him and touched his hand and gave a
little hard silver laugh like piano notes.
They went in arm in arm to dinner.
Merton trailed after. “Perhaps, you know, we have a ghost.”
The food was served and partly eaten. It
was too hot for food. Merton, watching Albertine’s gentle cameo face, the
barley-coloured hair, visualised all the paraphernalia of a saint, fashioned
for crucifixion. She ate little. If Ashburn looked at her she might eat
something, pathetically attempting to deceive him. Merton passed her rolls
reverently and helped her to wine. She was a fine woman, a sweet girl. Her
devotion to the poet moved Merton, for perhaps, in some obscure way, it
justified his own devotion to his blue-eyed cat wife.
Now, striving to cheer everyone up after
the labour of eating, he revived his little piece and filled his pipe.
“Do you think we might have a ghost?”
“Such fun,” Laura observed acidly.
Albertine lowered her eyes and played
with a piece of bread. “I’d far rather we hadn’t.”
Sibbi, quickened, seated next to
Ashburn, caught his eye. “But how romantic—to think I supposed it was you, and
all the time it was a spirit. How edifying!” The wine had gone to her head, and
her appetite was unimpaired.
“These old houses, you know,” Merton
went on, “though I don’t really believe in such stuff myself. Rather wish I
did, you know.”
“Of course,” Sibbi said, “you’d frighten
any ghost to death.”
Laura said; “Does it also write poetry,
I wonder? Though, of course, Robert doesn’t write anything at present.”
“Don’t chide me, dear Laura,” he said.
“I shall always chide you,” Laura said. “No
one else dares to do it, and without chiding you would perish.”
Albertine rose. “I wish it weren’t so
hot,” she said.
She drifted towards the windows. Merton
stared at his plate. Albertine’s eyes were full of tears, a nakedness which
thrilled and embarrassed him.
“Just think,” Laura said, also rising, “if
there were a ghost, we should have to call one of those village priests to
exorcise it.” She crossed to stand behind Ashburn’s chair, and set one hand
very lightly on his shoulder. “Do you know,” she said, “they are praying for
rain—actually praying. And never in my life did I hear such pagan screaming as
emanates from the Catholic church. Come now, Robert, we will take a walk in the
garden, you and I, and you shall tell me what you are writing.”