Love (15 page)

She rinsed out her cup and put it upside down on the draining board. She went into the bedroom, walking extremely carefully, for she was about to play her last hand and must concentrate very hard on repressing her panic; she had decided to seduce him.

Avoiding his eyes, she took off her clothes, hurried and quickly hid herself on the far side of the bed so that he would suspect nothing. He thought she was unconsciously instructing him that now her body was out of bounds and, as he undressed more slowly, he said to himself: ‘It’s probably all over between her and me, she’ll probably never let
me screw her again.’ And this was a great relief for the notion he might by chance encounter even so much as a stray limb of hers under the covers that night filled him with disgust. He stretched out bitterly in the dark beside her, resigned to emptiness, only to discover she had been cunningly lying in wait for him all the time.

She flung herself upon him in a startling rush. She glued herself to his mouth, breast and belly, moaning and sobbing. He thrashed this way and that to shake her off but she clung too desperately to be shifted and the dark splintered in Lee’s head as, apparently beside herself, she twisted against him in a sinister frenzy, speaking his name relentlessly in a hot, dry voice he had never heard from her before. In the folklore of Haiti, there exist female demons named
diablesses
who are so avid for pleasure they seduce the living only to abandon them at the end of the lascivious night among the white graves of a cemetery. So, in the dark, a changeling Annabel attacked Lee with gross, morbid passion and such a barrage of teeth and nails he struck her on the side of the head to stop her inflicting any more damage. She howled with surprise and affront and, continuing to howl, tumbled down on him in a stinging shower of disordered hair.

‘I wish you were dead,’ said Lee. She stopped howling and murmured indistinguishable sounds as she lavished kisses on his throat and shoulders, until soon he caught her fever, turned her on to her back and penetrated her. First, she twitched a little, and muttered; and then she wound her arms around him with bizarre, conciliatory tenderness, pressing her small breasts against the green name she had inscribed upon his bosom and begging him to stop, for now she was afraid he might take her too far, would take her to a place where she might lose herself.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Don’t go on, I don’t think I can bear it, not now. Not tonight, I was mistaken when I wanted it.’

‘Oh no, my love,’ said Lee, intent on the unforgivable. ‘This time you’ll get what’s coming to you, you will.’

Nevertheless, it proved a mutual rape. She expelled her breath in a wavering sigh and seemed to fall limply away
from him but, as soon as he began to move inside her, her response was immediate and, it seemed, out of her control. She cried out in a lonely voice and bit and tore at him so savagely he wondered if he would survive the night for he had never known a more tempestuous performance from anyone and, in the dark, she could have been a stranger. He had never been superstitious in his life before but, after it was over, he turned on the light to look at her, for her behaviour had no place in the order of things.

It was his Annabel, still, although she was as bruised and bleeding as himself. She was his Annabel, compounded of memory, so he stroked her hair remorsefully and pressed his burning eyes against her cool skin; yet he had truly wished her dead, for then he would no longer have to care about her.

‘I’m afraid I’ve invested all my emotional capital in you,’ he said. ‘And that’s all I can say, though God help the small investor when the revolution comes. Though I wouldn’t say I was a small investor. So I suppose it would be even worse.’

She did not hear one word and when his eyes met hers, he was struck by their curious expression, one of perplexity mingled with assessment. He knew she must be thinking of his brother and guessed she had been deceiving him all the time although he did not know why.

In his late adolescence, at a party, on a pile of coats on somebody else’s bed, he held a girl in his arms and kissed her while Buzz copulated with her, glancing up at him from time to time as if for approval. When Buzz wandered off afterwards he and the girl made love with the enthusiasm of transgressors. He had forgotten her face and never knew her name; he remembered only that something like that had taken place and the circumstances and the residual traces of his brother on the nameless girl’s body had given him a peculiar satisfaction. It was an adventure similar to many others at that time when nothing he had done was unnatural, and it had never entered his head for years, not until now, when it seemed he would never again sleep with his wife without his brother’s invisible company.

‘Once,’ said Annabel, ‘I came home and found you and
Buzz together on the floor, curled up in each other’s arms like happy puppies.’

‘We’ve always been like cowboys and Indians to each other, we must have been fighting.’ But Lee was discomfited to find she could reflect and enlarge upon his thoughts. She paid no attention to him. She invented her own connections between the past and the present.

‘He didn’t even take his clothes off,’ said Annabel who had no sense of the ridiculous.

‘He’s got few, if any, refinements. Don’t blame me for his incapacities. He’s always been funny with girls, I told you.’

‘Then how did he get gonorrhoea in North Africa, that time?’

‘I hate to think,’ said Lee. ‘Though there aren’t too many ways of getting the clap that I know of. But he couldn’t even put his finger inside a sea anemone at one time, for fear of engulfment.’

‘Whyever should he want to put his finger in a sea anemone?’ she marvelled and lay beside him in a miserable silence for a long while, till he thought she might be sleeping and reached out to turn off the light. At that, she threw her arm over him and pinned him down again.

‘Lee . . . tell me . . .’

‘What is it now?’ he asked uneasily.

‘Is that what it’s supposed to be like?’

‘No,’ said Lee in order to hurt her if he could. ‘That’s what it’s usually like, with normal women.’

Her smile faded, her eyes dilated with woe and she drew back.

‘Then Buzz could have made it properly with me if you had been there,’ she said with exquisite dismay and took her pale web of flesh away from him to the farthest edge of the bed. His eyes became so painful he could not see her any more but could make out only an indistinct mass of brown hair which could have been shaved from an unknown head and dumped on the pillow. The hair began to shudder like a nest of incipient snakes.

‘It’s no good!’ exclaimed Lee and fell from the bed. Though the distance to the floor was no more than two or three feet,
he seemed to fall into a bottomless pit and was surprised to hit the floorboards so soon. He dragged down the bedside lamp with him by the flex and left everything behind him plunged in darkness.

Stirred by the odorous breezes of the night, the undergrowth in the park rustled a little as if each bush contained a pair of somnolent lovers and the air smelled sweetly of crushed grass. The summer moon distilled almost too honeyed a light for moonlight and Lee, who would have preferred a storm with thunderbolts, stumbled angrily into this sweet quiescence and, on the crest of a hill, lost all impetus for renewed flight although, when he was a child, he got as far as Southampton in the pursuit of liberty. He collapsed on a bench in the white shadow of the Gothic tower and buried his head in his hands. He felt nothing but the absence of feeling which is despair.

After a while, he heard a faint, shifting patter of footsteps on gravel and then, behind him, the sound of moist, noisy, loud and intimate breathing like the shameless breathing of a bad-mannered child. The breathing was interspersed with small giggles. Lee ignored whatever hovered behind him until, smitten with the urge to perform an infant’s trick, it clapped its hands over Lee’s eyes. Lee grasped the bony wrist and wrenched it until the sinews cracked. The intruder yelped and Lee, turning to look at him, saw a young boy with wild eyes and floating hair, clearly another mad person who might have been the crazed inhabitant of the Gothic pinnacle which, appropriately enough, served as the backdrop for their balked encounter. Lee let the boy go and he tenderly rubbed his bruises, casting reproachful glances at Lee from time to time although his giggling changed to a soft, wordless whine as he edged coyly round the bench and gingerly sat himself down. The sight of his thin face reminded Lee how, when he collected Annabel, a boy on the hospital porch questioned him about the tarot pack.

‘I see you fled the Fool’s Tower, then,’ said Lee who guessed the boy was adding to his troubles by the use of some sort of hallucinogen. The boy nodded vigorously and tried to
reply but an incoherent babble of sounds came out of his mouth and he made no sense at all. A sharp spasm of distress shook him from head to toe and he shielded his working face with an arm in a ripped shirtsleeve.

‘Do you want a cigarette?’

The boy blindly stretched out his hand. Lee gave him the remainder of the packet and also a box of matches. The boy pocketed them without looking at them.

‘Do you need any money?’

The boy nodded. Lee found he had two pound notes and about fifteen shillings in change. The boy accepted the money without thanks or enthusiasm. Lee wondered what he could give him and remembered his wedding ring. This time, the boy displayed a brief flicker of curiosity when he saw the gold band on his palm. Lee spoke in a leaden, didactic, schoolteacher’s voice.

‘Me and my wife have fallen into the habit of performing symbolic actions with our wedding rings. She ate hers.’

The boy raised his shaggy head and stared at him. By the light of the moon, he must have seen the huge, scarlet-pricked, purplish, diabolical bite on Lee’s neck for he raised his eyebrows, leaned forward and touched it delicately and enquiringly with his fingertips. He giggled again, this time with a faint note of interrogation. He smelled horribly of mud and excrement.

‘She carried on the metaphor by trying to eat me alive,’ said Lee. ‘I got away just in time.’

Dear God, he thought, I’m starting to dramatize myself. The boy shrugged. He made several thwarted attempts to speak but could produce no sensible sounds of any kind and at last wept unrestrainedly until his scratched, scabbed face was blubbered with tears and snot. Lee thought he must somehow have hired the boy to act out his ugly grief for him, like a professional mourner, now he himself had grown so cold and mechanical, lulled by the strange narcotic of a steady, quiet anguish. He had nothing with which to dry the boy’s eyes, either, and so he must wait until the mysterious spring of tears dried up. The boy bobbed about on the bench in an uncoordinated fashion until he let out a wind-bell tinkle
of pitiful since joyless laughter, sprang up and darted off the way he had come.

In the sequence of events which now drew the two brothers and the girl down, in ever-decreasing spirals, to the empty place at the centre of the labyrinth they had built between them, this nameless boy performed the function of the fool in the Elizabethan drama, a reference point outside events but inside another kind of logic, the remorseless logic of unreason where all vision is deranged, all action uncoordinated and all responses beyond prediction. Such logic now dominated Annabel.

She searched through her rooms with the sightless hands of a somnambulist until she found the tablets Lee gave to Buzz to make him sleep and discovered only four remained in the bottle. Though they would grant her only limited relief, she swallowed them and chose to lie down on the sofa rather than return to the bed where she had so recently been confounded. In spite of the barbiturates, she slept lightly and fitfully, visited by dreams she always took for memories so that, when she woke in the morning, she recalled how she had been married in church and the dress of black crepe her parents bought her, an ensemble completed by a thick veil of the kind worn by widowed queens. They pressed a bunch of dead roses into her hands while the organ played ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’ and Lee grew in size until his golden body filled the vaulted building and was soon transformed into the building itself.

The morning was as beautiful as the night which preceded it and she prepared a small breakfast in the sunny kitchen. She set out two places and decided that, if Lee came home by eight o’clock, she would not kill herself. At five past eight, she heard his footstep on the stairs but she had already hung his cup back on the dresser and put plate and saucer on the shelf.

When Lee saw her unexpected serenity, he wondered if she had forgotten the night entirely or had subjected it to the force of her imagination and turned it to her own benefit so she could go on. All might continue as it had done before or shift so imperceptibly from bad to worse he might
barely notice it. He asked her for money for his day’s expenses and she could find none in her bag so she sent him to her money box. It was stuffed so full of notes the lid scarcely fitted any more and after Lee went off to work she shook out all the money on the bedroom floor and sat cross-legged to count it all out by the light that came through the cracks in the boards across the window. There was more than forty pounds in the tin.

Because her wedding dress was black, she chose a long, plain, white dress of cotton with a square-cut neck and long, tight sleeves. In the mirror of the changing room in the shop, she glimpsed the possibility of another perfect stranger, one as indifferent to the obscene flowers of the flesh as drowned Ophelia, so she had her hair dyed to dissociate her new body from the old one even more and then she got her face painted in a beauty shop. She was surprised to see how cold, hard and impersonal this new face was. What notes remained from her shopping spree she tore up into little pieces. It was now the mellow time of late afternoon.