Love (10 page)

‘One plus one equals two but first we must define the nature of “plus”. They have a world which they have made so they can understand it and it includes me at the centre; somehow I am essential to it, so that it can go on. But I don’t know anything about it or what I’m supposed to do except be bland and indefinable, like the Holy Spirit, and see the rent gets paid and the bloody gas bill and so forth.’

‘It’s a hermetic world, the three of you. Will it really admit nobody else?’

‘I tried, didn’t I. And look what happened then.’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’m not concerned with your brother, he isn’t a patient of mine. My, but you really are crying.’

‘I am the Spartan boy but no fox under my jacket, only my heart, eating itself out.’

‘How self-indulgent you are!’

‘It’s not so much that. It’s more that I’ve lost my capacity for detachment. I lost it on that memorable night. And I used to be so proud of it, as well, joking about her nightmares and so on.’

With that, he gave her the evil, twisted grin he had always kept only for his own amusement in the past and saw how it offended her so much she immediately ceased to be his friend. Whatever sexual or sympathetic undercurrent in this parody of an interview that had contrived to maintain it for so long now vanished. She became brisk and officious. She was clearly about to send him away with an implicit reprimand.

‘Think of it this way. There is a sick girl who needs care and can turn only to you. Dry your eyes and look out of the window.’

He saw a green park where lay a lake surrounded by weeping willows whose leafless branches trailed in the motionless water. Dusk was falling but slow figures well muffled against the cold still interminably walked these melancholy grounds and Lee thought he had never seen so many people all together who seemed, each one, so entirely alone. Annabel sat on a bench beside the lake, gazing at its surface which was as black as if of some impermeable substance and not liquid at all. Around her, the silent crowd came and went, absorbed in a multitude of reflections. Since Annabel wore the skull ring on her finger, she could see but not be seen. No flicker of the nerves of her face indicated she watched him approach but suddenly she drew the ring off and threw it away. The waters closed over it and concentric ripples spread out without a sound over the place where it sank. Never before had she felt the extent of her powers until that moment, when she resolved to be visible all the time and was rewarded by seeing him drawn towards her whether he willed it or not, as if she were a magnetic stone.

‘I love you,’ she said.

She spoke in sweet, fallacious music like the song of a mechanical nightingale and now she seemed to him a ghostly woman, white as a winding-sheet and shrouded in hair. The darkening light seemed to pass straight through her almost dissolving edges and when she stretched out her hands towards him they looked like dried flowers, nothing but veins and transparency, and he could see the bones of her fingers through them. The sky was serene and no wind nor flight of any bird moved in the leafless branches of the trees or stirred the still air of winter.

Lee took Annabel in his arms and she buried her face in his breast but he could not forbear to look behind him, towards the hospital buildings. Silhouetted against a bright window, the psychiatrist watched them through her dark glasses. The light behind her illuminated her flamboyant hair so she seemed all of a piece with the brightness itself and as
she raised her arm either in a kind of blessing or, more likely, to draw the blinds as if dismissing all her patients for the night, she seemed to Lee like some kind of inexorable angel, directing him to where his duty lay.

‘Do right because it is right,’ said Lee.

Lazzaro Spallanzani observed division in bacteria; his bladder is preserved in the museum at Pavia, in Italy. Pursuing his biological studies, Spallanzani cut off the legs of a male toad in the midst of its copulation but the dying animal did not relax the blind grasp to which nature drove it. Spallanzani therefore concluded: ‘The persistence of the toad is due less to his obtuseness of feeling than to the vehemence of his passion.’

Like Spallanzani’s toad, Lee was not insensitive to his situation but the stern puritanical fervour of his childhood condemned him, now, to abandon himself to the proliferating fantasies of the pale girl whose arms clasped as tight around his neck as if she were drowning. He might have guessed her history would be brief and tragic for she had always worn the blind face of those who will die young and so do not need to see much of life; but the moral imperative, to love her, proved stronger than his perceptions and his natural desire for happiness persuaded him, at first, that his intuitive forebodings were unjustified.

Besides, he was full of guilt.

NOW
LEE KNEW
they would not let Annabel come home until his brother was expelled from the household, he saw Buzz as if he had never known him. He watched the variously obsessed figure intently. It continued to go busily about the absurd tasks it set itself as if they were perfectly natural. It sharpened its knives; it splashed in its acids; it snipped, stitched and dyed its commedia dell’arte rags; it rolled its joints with a pompous ritual worthy of a sacrament; it squatted for hours on the floor in those hollow, interminable silences with which it passed its excess wastes of useless time, and Lee saw all this as the motions of an unfamiliar object. He marvelled that he could have endured its aberrations so long and began to harden against the thing he saw. Until this time, he had scarcely differentiated between his brother and himself; Buzz was a necessary attribute, an inevitable condition of life. But now the circumstances were altered. Annabel freshly defined Lee as having no life beyond that of a necessary attribute of herself alone, and, in this new arrangement, Lee knew his brother for an interloper who might do harm. So now a cancer lodged at the core of his heart, where Buzz had been. Besides, he found the pictures which Buzz had taken of Annabel in the bathroom, before he called the ambulance.

Once the process of dissociation began, it quickly gathered impetus. He felt a sharp distaste at the close physical contact which had been bred of their extreme intimacy. If, at first, he believed he felt a new distaste rather than a positive revulsion, he could no longer drink from a cup Buzz had used unless he rinsed it out and the casual embraces they had always exchanged so thoughtlessly became intolerable
for him. Their affection dissipated with extraordinary speed for, had they not been brothers, they would have had little in common and they could not maintain between them an uncommitted state of mutual forbearance without the sustenance of love. Buzz was helpless, incredulous and a little fearful as he perceived the growth of Lee’s aversion and strove to protect himself from pain by jeers, by coldness and by the pretence of disdain. He schooled himself in dislike and waited for the blow to fall.

Lee expected a display of panic and violence when he told Buzz he would have to leave the flat but Buzz, well prepared, showed no anger or surprise. He continued to sit before the fire in perfect silence, drumming his fingers on his knee, while Lee wondered nervously what the unguessable response might be. But, when it came, it was scrupulously cool.

‘Going straight?’ asked Buzz in a normal voice, though with a touch of contempt.

Lee shrugged. They did not look at one another. Time passed. Coals fell in the grate. It was night-time.

‘Where shall I live?’ said Buzz.

‘We’ll find somewhere for you easily,’ said Lee with false cheerfulness.

‘When shall I move out?’

‘As soon as you can find a place.’

‘And will you let me come to see you, now and then?’

‘Sure,’ said Lee, touched and embarrassed. ‘Of course.’

‘Sure,’ repeated Buzz equivocally. He recommenced drumming his fingers and Lee’s embarrassment and distress grew with every moment that passed for, if he could brave out his brother’s wildest passions, this unaccountable quiet nonplussed him and he feared it might be the prelude to some absolutely unexpected act against which he had no defence. Downstairs, another occupant of the house began to run a bath and the sound of running water drifted upstairs.

‘Lee . . . who shall I talk to?’

‘It’s not that you talk to me, much.’

‘But you’re always there. And she, there’s always Annabel to talk to.’

‘I’m not divorcing you, for God’s sake. We’ll still be here, both of us.’

‘You’ll ask me to dinner once a month, perhaps, will you?’

Lee realized his brother’s attack was cunningly directed at his sentimentality and began to lose his temper. The fantastic room became abhorrent and the dark figure who sat on the carpet took on the aspect of a giant, hairy toad squatting upon his life and choking him, since this obscure being was a more fitting inhabitant of the room than himself. Yet the room belonged to Annabel; she had painted her ambivalent garden on the walls and installed Lee in the midst of it whether he matched her colours or not. Lee broke out in confused fury.

‘She’s mine.’

‘Is she?’ said Buzz in sardonic enquiry, turning his hard, brown gaze upon his brother. At this precise moment in time, Lee ceased to love him. The few remaining bonds snapped altogether and at once as they knelt before the fire and bickered about the girl who, like a Victorian heroine, had come between them. Yet Lee still had not the faintest idea what he could do with her once he got her to himself or how he might make some reparation to her, in order to relieve his guilt. He might, perhaps, clean out her room and throw her things away for he half believed her some malleable substance on whom the one who rescued her from her phantoms could impose whatever form he pleased.

Since he was racked with pity for her, he chose to try to rescue her for fear of what she might become if she were left to herself or to the unscrupulous mercies of another, for he did not know she had plans of her own and would finally choose to attempt to save herself.

‘Mine,’ repeated Lee and, rising, swept the mantelpiece clear of all its assorted rubbish with a sweep of his arm. The rubbish fell down around the fireplace; the skull of the horse shattered in shards of bone and the pottery Prince Albert snapped in two at the waist. Buzz continued to look at him with those opaque eyes which were, in no sense, the mirrors of his soul. He offensively took out and lit a cigarette.

‘Turning me out of our home,’ he said. ‘What would our auntie think?’

Lee’s heart contracted and he would have lashed out if Buzz had not been his brother.

‘No point in consulting the dead,’ he said with an attempt at calm.

Buzz threw his cigarette into the fire and kicked the coals with his booted foot. As he rose, he towered above Lee. His coat of long-haired fur took on the appearance of scalps, his hair shook out like that of a brave and his endless, emaciated shadow flickered across the ceiling as if the shadow of his influence dominated the room. His appearance was so fearful that Lee braced himself for the shock of impact or even the cut of a knife but he received only a mouthful of empty threats, as he would have expected in the old days before he lost his detachment.

‘Do anything to her like you did last time and I’ll get you, I really will.’

‘You’re too bloody inefficient,’ snarled Lee, freshly infuriated at this dramatic flourish, but Buzz was out through the door before the shaft struck home and when Lee came back from work next day, he found not one of his brother’s possessions remained in the flat. Every last rag and scrap of paper was gone and he had not left a note of acrimonious farewell or the gift of his new address which might have hinted at the possibility of a reconciliation. Only a few blotches on the floor showed he had ever lived there. His dark room echoed to Lee’s footsteps with a hollow sound.

He took a suitcase for her things to the psychiatric hospital and, now he was in full possession of his faculties, the building struck him by the witty irrelevance of its grandeur to its purpose. One approached it through wrought-iron gates; a double drive swept round on each side of a defunct fountain in the form of a triton who raised up a scallop shell to spill no water any more, only a stain of rust into the marble basin below. On either side of the building stretched pleasant lawns and formal beds of standard rose trees on which a few withered blooms still languished. He saw the lake where he had found Annabel was not a lake at all, only a lily pond in the shape of a tear. All served as a decorative
prelude to a harmonious Palladian mansion whose present use was indicated only by a discreet notice board, half hidden in a privet hedge. A young boy in a long dressing gown and several mufflers who lurked on the porch glared mutinously at Lee as he ascended the wide, gleaming, marble steps to the front door.

‘This house was built in the Age of Reason but now it has become a Fool’s Tower,’ said the boy. ‘Are you familiar with the tarot pack?’

Lee with his suitcase was so intimidated by the mansion that he felt like a travelling salesman and could only smile and nod ingratiatingly for he was eloping with the duke’s daughter; but when she saw him, she grasped his hand with a strangely passionate pressure and suddenly kissed him. He scanned her face for signs of change but her pale, haunted composure was that of the morning he first woke to see her. He glanced down at her bare hands.

‘I’ll buy you a new ring,’ he said.

‘One with a moonstone?’