A Whistling Woman (22 page)

She strode into the Non-Maths Group with, as Vincent Hodgkiss put it to himself, “a few cautious flags flying.” More careful make-up. A new jacket, in a chocolate-coloured suede, and a new golden jumper. Hodgkiss had been secretly amused for some time by the dynamics of attraction and repulsion between Marcus, Luk, and Jacqueline. If Jacqueline moved closer to Marcus, he shrank into himself. If she looked away, Marcus addressed his remarks to her as though she was the obvious person to understand them. The ease of childhood friends, and beyond that, unease. He watched Luk, too, watching Jacqueline with a proprietary look which was also discouraged and vulnerable. He was interested to see that the faintly flaming new Jacqueline looked at Marcus, almost shrugged, and went to sit near Luk. To whom she spoke animatedly, about her research, about aversion-training in slugs and snails. And the Dane lit up, as though he was a house with lamps in the windows. So simple, thought Vincent Hodgkiss. So simple, so far. I wonder why? He did not expect to know why and his wondering was, in a sense, mild and academic. Lord what fools these mortals be! he liked to think, aligning himself with the soulless immortal watchers.

But he had troubles of his own, and knew it. He watched, to distract himself. Jacob Scrope was talking that evening about a new programme for mapping random stimuli, new safeguards to ensure that the “randomness” his computer recorded was truly random. Hodgkiss watched Jacqueline bend her head over Luk's notebook so that Luk's nose was in her hair. Nothing random about that. He looked at Marcus, who was frowning. He had never been able to make Marcus out. That was, he liked the way Marcus's mind worked, the clarity, the questioning, the separateness. He did not know what Marcus
wanted
. He prided himself on knowing what people wanted. Marcus's thin face had finally taken on some definition, a bony beakiness on which his large glasses balanced like windows, only in very few lights revealing the mildly alarmed eyes behind them.

Luk Lysgaard-Peacock, much more immediately than the observant Hodgkiss, noticed Jacqueline's perturbation and her deliberate move towards himself. Someone, he thought, had upset her, and he glanced briefly at Marcus, whose unawareness could not have been more marked. He let his hand touch hers, under the desk. Hers moved, not away, but closer. He sensed a rigidity of will in this gesture. He could refuse to dance. He put his hand briefly over hers. Which trembled, and then took hold of him.

Afterwards, he drove her back to the house where she lodged. They sat in the car and Luk thought of saying “I love you” and thought of taking her in his arms, and said

“Something's upset you.”

“Is it so obvious?”

“I'm not
stupid,
Jacqueline. And I love you. As you know.”

“I don't know where I'm going.” She shook her head wildly. She took hold of his hand—again, he sensed the effort of will—and a few tears ran down her face. “I've always gone on so carefully, one step after another, doing my work, doing what I felt was right, and now—and now—I feel suddenly old, without ever having looked at myself.”

“You're not old.”

“I'm not a girl.”

“No, I know that very well.”

“Luk, I must be mad, I should have listened to you, I don't know how I got myself so cocooned in my
self,
I want to be able to do the things—people do—I want to live, not just to think.”

“It's all a bit abstract.”

“I know, I know, that's the problem. I've always had a nice abstract
plan
—”

“I thought you were following some sense of things that was far from abstract—”

“No, no, it was an idea. Now I want to live. I want to be—I want—”

She began to cry furiously, and flung her arms about his neck.

“I've messed you about so,” she said to him.

“That's OK,” he said. He was not sure it was. He held her to him, burying her face in his clothes, stroking her body, like a man calming a nervous animal, until she stopped weeping and flailing, and sat, quietly, pressed against him, her body relaxing into his.

“We could
try
—” she said.

“You sound unsure.”

“I'm not. I'm just a bit—muddled by myself, by my muddle. I'm not unsure. I want to try.”
Luk Lysgaard-Peacock had recently bought himself a small stone house, halfway up Gash Fell, in the shoulder of a hill looking down on the village of Fengbeck. Its name was Loderby. Above him were the moors, and in the next valley was Gungingap where the Dun Vale Hall snail populations had tucked themselves away for the winter in clusters between the stones in the walls. Gunner Nighby was recovering elsewhere from his wounds, and Lucy Nighby was still in Cedar Mount, as far as Luk knew. The Hall, like the snails, was shuttered and cold. The children were staying with a schoolteacher friend.

Luk had planned his house as a solitary retreat, a field station, an outpost. He had, like various other lecturers, rooms in Long Royston itself, a small bedroom, a study, a bathroom, based on Oxbridge colleges. There he was comfortable with a bright Finnish bedspread, a poster of the Matisse snail on the wall and a television. On Gash Fell he lived austerely, with scrubbed pine-topped tables, an old stone sink, a narrow bed, and no curtains. He liked the sun and the moon to shine in on him. He was not visible to neighbours or passers-by.

He had a large living-room, a low-ceilinged kitchen, two small bedrooms, a primitive bathroom, and a terrace that jutted out over the fell, with a thick stone ledge round it, and great flagstones underfoot. The walls were thick and the windows small, deeply embedded in stony cavities within and without. Everywhere was simply white-washed. He had also various dressers and benches where he had piled boxes and tanks of specimens.

Fengbeck was a tiny village, a few grey houses clustered around the bridge over the rapid beck that poured down from the moorside. There were also stepping-stones, liable to inundation. There was a little shop—no Post Office—which sold sliced bread, and milk, hunks of Wensleydale cheese, and fresh vegetables from the farms around. Also Kendal Mint Cake, and thick oiled socks, and leather polish. Between Luk and the village was a wood, giving way to stony fields before his house was reached. He decided to invite Jacqueline to the house for a weekend. Both of them were intelligent, forthright people, and both were rather awkwardly aware that Jacqueline had made a rational decision to re-open the question of their relations, rather than suffering an emotional
volte-face
. They knew each other too well, Luk thought, too well for the “right” kind of tension and exploration to be there. They were old friends, which was a bad thing for new lovers.

He thought of ways of making a surprise. He drove up to his house, and thought it seemed sparse, unwelcoming. So, like a bower-bird—an analogy that amused him—he began to decorate. He started conventionally with the idea of flowers and went into a florist in Calverley where he contemplated some nasty begonias, some pre-Christmas poinsettias and an exotic camellia, which he decided against. He was rather taken by some Chinese silk artificial anemones, which in the end he bought, brilliant crimson and deep purple and white, thinking he need not deploy them, he could keep them in reserve. He also bought some blue glass plates and dishes, and some green glass mugs. He filled the back of his car with odd bits of his own collection of feathers and shells and stones, telling himself that he'd always meant to take them up there anyway. He bought plain white dishes, and satin-steel ones, to show them off in. He bought more oil-lamps, and, after much consideration, some flame-coloured sheets, two bottle-green blankets, and a flame-coloured quilt patterned with paisleys. A few bottles—old medicine bottles—blue, green, brown—out of a local junk shop, which he washed, and polished with a tea towel. Some bottles of wine, a leg of lamb, some good wholemeal bread, beans, baking potatoes. In the junk shop with the medicine bottles, at the very back, very dusty, was a tall black lacquer vase—probably Chinese—full of peacock feathers.

He liked his odd name, which had come about because an intransigent English ancestress—a great-grandmother—a Yorkshirewoman—had made it a condition of moving to Copenhagen that her name be joined to her husband's. They had been intensely religious people, the Lysgaard-Peacocks, followers of Grundtvig, Protestants and educational reformers. He remembered his childhood excitement when he discovered that “peacock” meant
påfogl,
the brilliant, unearthly bird.

Luk, when he thought of the name now, thought mostly of the image of the eye, the exotic, non-seeing, brilliant eye that stared from the wing of the peacock butterfly. He thought less often of the bird, slowly raising the ludicrous, brilliant, glittering, shot-silk eyes of its heavy train into a quivering, creaking fan. But he did not, suddenly, want to leave the moulted feathers to wilt in the dusty shop. So he bought them, too, and carried them up the fell, and spent some time preening them with his careful fingers, catching the tiny hooks back together into the textured surface along the plumes, so that the eyes glittered again in their green and blue and gold, bedizened and extraordinary.

He was amused by his own activities, and at the same time more and more anxiously obsessed. He arranged his trophies in carefully casual drifts and heaps, inside the window alcoves, along the benches. A group of shells,
Cepaea hortensis, Cepaea nemoralis,
some tiny flat ramshorns, a few giant white
Helix pomatia
. An interesting collection of
Vertigo
. A scalariform monstrosity. The silk anemones on the dresser in a plain jamjar. The empty medicine bottles on a carefully washed shelf in the bathroom, where he had put up a new mirror, framed in pale wood. Heaps of seaside pebbles, rows of ancient stones side by side, like families of strange lumpen creatures, or those rows of elephants brought back from the ex-colonies. Some dried fern leaves. Three skulls—fox, badger, shrew.

He put his oil-lamps—big ones with chimneys and mantles, little ones, Kelly lamps, with their glass spouts and heavy bases, so that their thick gold light fell and shone on what caught it—wrinkled silk and sheen of feather, gleam of stone and lacquer of shell, ribbed glass and white bone. In his garden—in a small patch behind the house, sheltered from the weather by a high wall, containing an apple-tree, a gooseberry patch, a herb-garden, some loganberries and one flowerbed, he found a whole clump of the plant he knew in Danish as
Judaspenge
and in English as Honesty. Perennial honesty,
Lunaria rediviva
, was fragrant; this was the biennial, L. biennis, a garden fugitive. The membrane inside the seed-cases, polished and exposed, was like transparent oculi of parchment, or abalone shell. He spent some time rubbing off the seeds, and creating wands of fragile, translucent windows. The French called them
monnaie des papes
. He mixed them with the peacock feathers in the black lacquer vase. The eyes and the monocle-windows looked, he thought, strikingly beautiful together. He stood his vase on the turn of the stair going up to the bedroom, and stood a Kelly lamp above it, on a stone shelf.
Jacqueline did not drive. He met her off the bus, on the Friday evening. In the car, she was tense. She was wearing the new brown jacket, had her hands crossed in her lap, and stared out at the mounting road, the dark woods, the night sky above the long edge of the moorland. There was a cold wind; the trees rustled. An owl hooted. A conversation about owls sparked brightly, and sputtered out. The lighted windows of the cottage, darkly golden, came into view.

He said “I won't carry you over the threshold.” But he took her hand, as they went in, and held it, as she looked round, admiring the lamp-light. He sat her down in a high-backed chair at the end of the table, whilst he saw to the last stages of the cooking. She sat quietly and watched him. He had the sense he always had, that she looked
right
. She wore browns. A golden-brown turtleneck sweater, under the chocolate-brown suede jacket. A straight donkey-brown skirt—she never wore skirts on their field-work, always trousers—and warm dark brown tights, knitted with a cable twist. She had very long legs, very visible. Her hair shone in the soft light, black treacle, molasses, horse-chestnuts. Quietly shining. He put on an apron and hummed to himself. Her dark eyes followed him; her head was on one side, like a watchful bird.

The table was laid with woven Finnish mats, blue and green, and new tumblers, in seagreen glass full of bubbles. There were candles in dishes, and a bottle of claret. His apron was a butcher's apron, blue and white striped. He brandished prongs, spikes and ladles—the baked potatoes were impaled on metal tripods, the leg of lamb was spitting and hissing in its dish. He lifted it on to its warm serving-plate. Gravy ran in crimson runnels down the sweating fat, where his fork had pierced. He poured off the rest, and busied himself scraping the burned fragments into a whirl of wine, boiling, stirring. There was a warm, powerful smell of cooked meat, laced with garlic and rosemary. He strained his brussels sprouts—cooked to perfection—and put his dishes on the table with a flourish. Jacqueline, closed in by the arms of her throne, saw a neat bearded Viking, red-gold and bristling, wearing a garment somewhere between housewife and slaughterhouse, brandishing slicing knife and steel. He swished the blade through the air, across the magnet and across.

“You have to align the molecules,” he said. “You must always stroke steel one way—”

“I didn't know,” said Jacqueline, “that you did all this cooking. So well.”

“I thought I'd show you something you didn't know.”

He carved.

“I thought I'd show you I had many domestic virtues. I don't need a housekeeper. I am housetrained—”

“Ah, Luk—”

“A joke, a joke.”

The blade hit the flesh. The mutton fell away in pink-brown, perfect slices, the pale blood matting the surface of the fibres with liquid.