Blood and Water and Other Tales (22 page)

Sir Norman, in deep psychotic territory at this point, becomes fascinated by the eyes of his enemy and, forgetting his wife, seats himself before the bloody head set between the mirrors on the dresser and there gazes into its infinite deadness. He is not aware of the water running in the bathroom; indeed he does not emerge from his gruesome reverie until he notices the bathwater which has come slithering, reddish and steaming, under the door and across the bedroom carpet like a serpent. His own snake is now quiet, and with a cry of anguish he dashes to the bathroom door and, finding it secured, batters open the lock with his spanner. When he finally bursts into the steam-filled bathroom, it is as he feared; his wife lies in an overflowing bath, her head lolling on the edge of the tub and her left wrist slit wide open with one of his own well-honed safety razors. Her blood drifts in misty swirls within the moving water, and Sir Norman, dropping his spanner, darts to the taps and turns them off with both hands. And then he lifts the pale dead hermaphrodite dripping from the water, and with a heavy step carries her into the chamber, and lays her on the bed. Gently he closes the eyes and, with the tears now rolling down his face, places her right arm by her side. The other he lets fall over the side of the bed and, careless of the blood still pumping softly from the wrist, presses the wound to his lips. It is then that some delicate atmospheric shift occurs in the air outside, and Sir Norman raises his head and sees, framed by the rainbow, a vast shimmering figure of light who slowly opens her arms and fills the sky with her radiance; and for a moment he is transfigured, and himself appears vividly aflame within her dazzling splendor. But only for a moment; and then the image dissolves, and darkness returns, and Sir Norman drops his head and presses his lips to the wound on the wrist of the corpse. And thus we leave him, as the gloom of twilight steals upon the chamber and the flies begin to gather on the doctor’s eyes.

Some time later, two village policemen found Sir Norman Percy kneeling at the bedside of his dead wife. They had been summoned by a chambermaid who’d come upon the headless corpse of Dr. Cadwallader floating in its own gore over in the east wing. Sir Norman offered no resistance, and the following day was arraigned at the county assizes at Newbury on a charge of capital murder. In a celebrated trial at the Old Bailey in the autumn of 1936 he was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and committed to Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum, as it was then called. After that first tragic blaze of psychosis had burned itself out, he resumed the role he had played so well all his life, that of the bucolic squire, and spent the rest of his mortal span, in Broadmoor, in a state of happy and imperious insanity. He died in 1957, and was buried beside his wife in the churchyard at Phlange. Upon his tombstone, curiously, is carved a verse of Melville, which runs:

What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder

The human integral clove asunder

And shied the fractions through life’s gate?