The Beast (4 page)

She argued with herself, telling herself to be on her
guard, and that to be intoxicated wasn’t at all what she had come for. She told herself that if she did feel intoxicated it was merely the result of having, for the first time in so long, got completely away from her usual daily life, and that Paris or Vienna or a beach in the South of France would have had the same effect on her. She told herself that she saw beauty here because she herself was, after so many years of being a kind of monster, beautiful again. She told herself that she didn’t want splendour, and space, and air; she had had them, she had seen them do their worst, and she had renounced them. She told herself everything she could think of to bring herself down to earth again; but it was all no use, for not only was she flying, but she was glad, exhilarated, ecstatically happy to be flying. She was so happy that she could feel her cheeks burning and her eyes shining; and she was so happy that when a tall, elderly man with a round face, rimless glasses and thin swept-back black hair came into the room, and she turned to face him, she knew she had never, not even in her youth, not even in South America when she had worn silks and jewels, been so spectacularly beautiful.

They stared at each other for some time before either spoke; yet she saw, from the instant he looked at her, that there wasn’t the slightest possibility he didn’t recognize her. And when he finally stopped staring and came towards her, took one of her hands and lifted it to his lips, and said, coolly, ‘Elisabeth, how nice to see you,’ she also saw that, barring unforeseen circumstances, she would succeed in her mission.

And she didn’t think there were any unforeseen
circumstances
. Another of her friends from her South American days lived in Florence now, and had always, in the occasional letters she sent (it was she who sent a
photograph
and description of the house), kept her fairly closely informed of what Kurt Hillinger—‘whom I sometimes see at parties; he has hardly changed, and always asks me about you when we meet, and tells me that you were the most beautiful woman he ever knew and that the only regret of his life is that you turned down his proposal after the divorce’—was up to.

‘It’s nice to see you, Kurt,’ she said. ‘I was in Siena and I thought I’d come and see your house—and you, if you were in.’

‘How did you come?’

‘By taxi. It’s waiting outside.’

‘I’ll send it away. I’ll give you a ride back into town myself, later.’

He did; but only to pick up her bags from the hotel, and to drive her back to ‘the Castle,’ as he called it …

*

Elisabeth—she thought of herself as Elisabeth again now, after all the years as the fat Mrs Vidozza—remained in a state of intoxication for the next two weeks; two weeks which were spent in taking trips round the countryside, in walking, in eating and drinking, in listening to music and playing the piano and meeting some of Kurt’s
neighbours
and friends. Everything she did, from her getting up in the morning to her going to bed at night, seemed enchanted; it was as if an ointment were being rubbed soothingly onto a wound that had been open and aching for years. She was happy, she told Kurt; she was delirious. She had never been so high in her life.

But finally, as it had to, the intoxication left her; the spell was lifted. She fell from her heights, and the wound ached more than it had ever done.

It ended, this period of bliss, one evening over dinner,
when Kurt asked her to marry him; or perhaps two seconds later, when she accepted. And once it had ended it was gone, she knew, forever.

*

At least, however, she thought as she sat in her room that night, writing a letter to Mirko, she had had two weeks of it. And even if it never would come back to her, and she would be left, from now on, with only beauty on her hands—a beautiful house, beautiful paintings, beautiful views, a cold frightening beauty that would weigh far more heavily on her than all her fat, and her shabby little flat, and her fights with Mirko—she was glad she had had it. For if she hadn’t—hadn’t had that wildness about her, that glittering, dazzling air—Kurt, though he would
certainly
have been glad to see her, and would have wished her to stay for a week or two, possibly wouldn’t have asked her to marry him. Which—since getting him to propose to her again had been her principal, her only motive in losing weight and coming here—would have finished her.

The reason why it ended when she accepted Kurt—and why it would never come back, and why she knew her future would be so utterly, so beautifully bleak—she explained in her letter.

After she had finished writing this Mrs Vidozza re-read
it. And when she had, she nearly tore it up. Because, she realized, it sounded so contrived and far-fetched that she doubted whether Mirko would believe a word of it—apart from the actual fact of her getting married. But then, after another couple of minutes, she decided she would send it anyway. Because whether Mirko believed it or not—and if he didn’t she would
make
him believe it when she saw him—this letter had, right from the moment the idea had come to her eight months ago, been the culmination of all her plans; and not to send it would defeat the object of the whole operation. She wanted him to paint—right, from now on he’d be able to. She also wanted him to paint something more than just beauty. And now, knowing what he did about the origins of the money that supported him, he could hardly fail to do otherwise. Could he? Well, that was a doubt she’d have to live with for a while, she thought, as she addressed the envelope. If, after a few months, he still painted in the same way—it would just mean that he wasn’t, and couldn’t be, a great painter, and that would be another disappointment she’d have to learn to live with; other ashes she’d have to taste. But if he did, at last, as she was so dreadfully giving him the means to do, paint the beast itself—paint it and capture it and
transform
it—then her marriage, this marriage that was so alien to her, would not have been in vain.

*

So she thought all that night, and so she thought next morning as she mailed the letter in Siena, where Kurt had taken her in order to buy her a ring, and to see his lawyer and change his will in her favour. But then, as they were driving home, a doubt came to her; a doubt so terrible in its implications that for a moment she thought she would faint; and would, if she had thought it any use, have made
her ask Kurt to drive her back into town so she could retrieve the letter from the post-office, and destroy it. Because it suddenly occurred to her that Mirko might, if he did believe what she had told him, show her just how triumphantly he could face the beast she was presenting him with; just how courageous he could be. He might, in fact, simply write and tell her that he wanted not a penny of Kurt’s money; and that he was so shocked and
disgusted
by her behaviour that he was going to disappear from her life forever—even if it meant never painting again.

And if he did that, she told herself, as she lay back in her seat and stared ahead of her, her marriage—or her mere acceptance of Kurt’s proposal—would have been more than in vain. It would have been the ultimate mockery. It would have been a condemnation to hell. It would have been her self-delivery into the very jaws of the beast …

But then, as the car rounded a bend, and she saw on a hill above her, golden in the October sun, the castle that from now on was to be her home, she managed to get a hold on herself, and tell herself that her fears and doubts were groundless. They were completely groundless, she told herself. They were, she insisted. They
were
…

For by imagining such a reaction, wasn’t she expecting Mirko to be altogether too great?

He watched her as she went, cigarette in mouth, from the filthy kitchen to the dining room. She was carrying a bowl of greens, and a stew. He watched her as she said
something
to her three small filthy children, who were sitting round the dining table, grizzling. He watched her as she put the bowls down, as the ash from her cigarette fell into the greens, as she scooped it out with her hand, and wiped that hand on the side of her skirt. He watched her as she served the children, then sat down at the head of the table and stared at them. And then, as she leaned slowly across the table, slapped, slowly and hard, the smallest child, he could watch no more; and lowering his binoculars, he closed his eyes and coughed, quietly.

Oh, it was horrible. She was young, she wasn’t—or didn’t have to be—unattractive, and she almost certainly wasn’t hard up; she was paying at least four hundred dollars a month for that apartment, and her children’s filthy clothes were good. Yet she had let herself go like the most wretched, foul old crone; she was slowly, in front of his eyes, killing herself … Of course, if it had only been herself she had been hurting, he wouldn’t have minded so much. But to sit, evening after evening, watching her as she destroyed her children; as she fed them on ashes and disappointment, on dirt and hopelessness—no, that was
too much. He couldn’t stand it. He had to stop her—or at least try to; try to pull her up, thrust a hook into her heart; place a mirror in front of her eyes that she couldn’t avoid looking into. It might do no good, but it could
certainly
do no harm; and he
had
to make his protest. Otherwise he would become an accomplice to her crimes; and an accomplice to all the crimes in the world.

What was more, he told himself as he opened his eyes and looked down at that day’s edition of the
Daily
News,
now was the time to do it. First because he had been watching her—
her
, Colleen Lane, aged thirty-one, from Minneapolis, living in New York for twelve years, ex-wife of some movie-agent—for nine months now, and nine months was normally his limit; the period within which he liked to settle the case in hand, so he could start looking for a new apartment, with a new view, and a new victim. And secondly because there was a very suitable murder reported in the paper; the sort of murder that would do ideally for Colleen Lane …

He re-read the article he had circled, earlier, in red.

Taking a pair of scissors, he cut the report out, pasted it onto a sheet of white paper, slipped the sheet into his typewriter, and tapped out with one small, dark finger:

It was hardly inspired, he realized; for one case, a few years ago, he had worked on his prosecuting poem for ten days, giving not only the name and address, but also inventing evidence and providing a motive. But then there had been more than ashes and disappointment; there had been horror, and hot irons, and blood. Still, short and to the point, it would do.

*

An hour later, a small neat man with sallow skin and a neat off-black moustache, a small and fine-boned man with an insistent cough, he was making his way back from Queens—where he had mailed his letter, addressed to a local precinct station—feeling relieved and at ease for the first time in … well, for the first time in nine months. Now, at last—until he moved—he could relax; could spend his evenings at the theatre, or at the movies, or simply sitting at home reading poetry, without feeling guilty. Without feeling that he should be sitting in a dark room, staring out at the lighted window of an apartment across the street, doing, so he thought, his duty as a citizen. Or as more than a citizen perhaps. As a man. As a human being. He had paid, as it were, this year’s taxes. Now he could do his duty to himself. To, even, love. For he did love, he swore to himself. He loved life. And it was because he loved it so passionately that he had to denounce, in the only way he knew how, all that he considered to be against life; the vast, ever encroaching, eternally eroding tides of greyness, of bleakness; of deceit and misery and cruelty. And while he knew that the little or not so little poems that he sent anonymously to the police once a year—and had been sending for the last eighteen years—accusing people of crimes they hadn’t committed, were obviously dismissed by the police as the work of a crank, if not a
madman, he didn’t in the least feel that he was a crank, let alone a madman. For the people he accused, while certainly not guilty of the crimes for which he denounced them, nor indeed probably of any crimes for which they could have been prosecuted under the law,
were,
nevertheless, guilty; guilty of standing unrelentingly, unrepentantly, on the side of death. And as such they were often, he was convinced, not only guiltier than those who killed in actual fact (for didn’t these ‘real’ murderers frequently kill at least in the name of love?) but were, ultimately, responsible for the acts of those real murderers. They created a climate with their hatred, their envy, their loathing of life, that caused, inevitably, storms—which in turn produced, somewhere or other, a fatal flash of lightning. They put stresses on the earth, that could only, in the end, be relieved by a
devastating
quake. Of which they themselves were rarely, if ever, the victims …

So how could anyone, he thought, as he came up out of the subway at 86th Street and went towards a telephone booth, call him a crank or a madman? Oh no; the cranks and the madmen were those who ignored the creators of dark clouds; who ignored the strainers of the fragile earth; and who shrieked for revenge when disaster struck. Of course he wasn’t so idealistic, or foolish, as to hold that murderers shouldn’t be held responsible for their deeds; only he wished that more action be taken against those who prepared the air for the flash, and the ground for its sudden fault. Action such as he took; which at worst was merely symbolic, and at best something which would cause embarrassment, difficulties, and even—or was it too much to hope for?—soul-searching and a change of heart.

However, as he went into the phone booth, and took a dime from the pocket of his neat sober suit, he finally put
the forces of darkness in general, and Colleen Lane in particular, out of his mind, and turned his thoughts to more positive things. In other words, he dialled the number of the only close friend he had in the world; the friend whom he normally saw once a week, on Sundays, but whom he saw more frequently in those periods of the year when he was, as it were, between engagements. His friend’s name was Lucy Minute, pronounced Minit, and she had wanted to marry him for as long as she had known him; which was eighteen years. One day perhaps, he thought, when—and if—he felt that he had done his duty forever, he might settle down and want to marry her himself. For he was very fond of her. Only—how could he settle down, and how could he, as long as he lived, ever dare say that his duty was done? For surely, the second he made such a claim, his life itself would be done.

‘Lucy? Charles.’

It was late, of course, and he apologized, in his quiet gentle voice. Still, if she wasn’t doing anything, or didn’t have any guests, or wasn’t planning on having an early night, or—might he come up for a drink?

Sure he could; he must. He knew that he could always come, whenever he wanted; and she wasn’t doing a thing. Only some boring old accounts for one of the relief organizations she helped out with, and she could do those any time. Oh, she was happy that he’d called …

As if she hadn’t seen him for months.

In spite of this tone, however, there was nothing pathetic about Lucy, even if she liked to affect pathos at times; liked to play, a little too consciously, the part of the lonely single woman who worked as a secretary in the day, whose free time was devoted to the less visible and obviously noble aspects of ‘good works,’ who loved the theatre but
never went unless Charles went with her, and who had been brought up by a strict father to believe that a woman’s role in life was not only that of—exclusively—wife and mother; but if possible a wife and mother as
self-denying
and totally unselfish as her own had been, who had died soon after giving birth to her only daughter. But there was something a little too earnest about her
role-playing
; something that tipped the scales a little too far on the side of mortal seriousness, so that the final result, the final impression she made, was of being if not comical, at least ironical. She was
too
self-deprecating; too altogether aware of how very far she was from fulfilling anyone’s fantasies—even the fantasies of the compassionate, who would have liked to see her as the lonely single woman who worked as a secretary in the day and whose free time was devoted to the less visible and obviously noble aspects of good works …

She lived in a small, impeccably clean apartment in the East 70’s, and when she opened the door to Charles at nine-fifteen, was dressed and made up as if she expected him to take her out to some reasonably fancy restaurant. But Charles had never seen her when she wasn’t dressed and made up like this, so he simply kissed her on the cheek, smiled, said quietly ‘How are you?’, and made no comment on her appearance. (Not only because he was used to seeing her look smart, but also because the results of her dressing up were so somehow wrong that he wouldn’t have known what comment to make if he had wanted to. Lucy was slim, with a good body, and a face that could once have been beautiful—though it never had been. The trouble was she worked for some high-powered businesswoman whom she adored; and always adopted—or tried to—this woman’s style of dressing and wearing her
hair. Only what suited the one—though she wasn’t unlike Lucy physically—emphatically did not suit the other; and the hair pulled severely back into a knot at the back of her neck, the extremely simple but beautifully cut grey silk dress, and the fashionable, high-heeled black French shoes, while looking elegant or chic or whatever on the employer, looked merely unfortunate on the employee. Charles had a theory that the business woman, whom he had met a couple of times, and who seemed to adore Lucy as much as Lucy adored her—she was breathtakingly patronizing—encouraged her secretary, whom she paid extremely well, to dress as she did just to show up her own style; just to make it clear to all who saw the two of them together, exactly who, or what, was the real thing.
However
, this was only a theory, and maybe he was being unfair; maybe it was all entirely Lucy’s fault.)

She asked him, now, what he would like; a coffee, a drink, something to eat—she could easily fix him
something
in a second if he hadn’t eaten and even if he had, if he wanted something else she could—

‘A coffee, really. That’s all.’

It was already made, and two minutes later they were sitting in the green and yellow living room (what colour was Lucy’s boss’s living room? Green and yellow did not help Lucy, whose skin was slightly yellowish anyway) picking up the conversation at the precise point—as if they were knitting it—at which they had left it when they had seen each other last, on Sunday. And when they had come, as it were, to the end of that particular row of stitches, Lucy asked, as she did every year towards the end of September, if Charles had finally managed to get his sleeping habits together for the fall.

‘Well, I seem to have done,’ he said with a small hopeful
smile; and a cough. ‘Maybe we could go to a show together next week if you’re free sometime?’

Years ago, when he had first met Lucy—and when, almost simultaneously, he had discovered the nature of the obsession that was to occupy him for so long thereafter—not wanting to share his secret, his own private duty, with anyone, he had had to think of some excuse to justify his almost never going out in the evening for nine months of the year. And not being able to think of anything more convincing, he had simply told her that through some whim of his body—some hyper-sensitivity to the seasons?—he was almost unable to sleep except in the fall. Which meant that if he didn’t go to bed around eight every
evening
, turning off the phone and answering no—rare—rings on his doorbell, and snatching every disturbed minute of rest that he was able to get before seven-thirty the next morning, he would never have managed more than three, or at the most four hours’ sleep a night. Which just wasn’t enough. Though quite why, in the dying months of the year, he suddenly found it possible to sleep uninterruptedly from midnight onwards—who could tell? He couldn’t, certainly. Could Lucy?

No, she couldn’t; and one of the reasons why he was so fond of her was that she accepted his story with hardly a comment, and had never suggested he might go to a psychiatrist to find out. She believed in the variety and richness of human nature; and if Charles had to go to bed at eight in winter, spring and summer, or said he did—well, she would just be glad that they could see more of each other in the autumn. (In fact they always took a vacation together—generally in Europe—for two weeks in July, and stayed up late every evening; but somehow, Charles explained—and Lucy, again, accepted—foreign
seasons did not affect his sleeping habits; did not, as native seasons did, enter so disturbingly into his blood.)

Almost the only comment she had ever really made in fact had been once, years ago, when she had said: ‘It’s strange though, isn’t it, that it should be fall that affects you this way, and not winter.’

‘“If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”’ Charles had murmured with a little smile; and Lucy, who was a great believer in poetry, as well as in the richness of human nature, had nodded thoughtfully, and accepted that, too.

She even accepted his reasons for moving every year, though these were even more tenuous, and he could hardly explain his constant shiftings to himself. Was it because he was afraid that if he did stay put in one place the police might have been able to pin down—if they were remotely interested—the crank or madman who wrote them
anonymous
poems once a year? Or was it because he was afraid that even with the strongest pair of binoculars, and a choice, sometimes, of a hundred lighted windows to gaze into at night, his view of life might be restricted if he didn’t move continually? (Though, God knows, often he had to select his year’s victim out of as many as ten candidates, and could thus, presumably, have worked from that one apartment for ten years). Or was it simply that, having done his duty in one place, he felt he had exhausted that particular street or block—and couldn’t rest with the thought that the even more unspeakable might be waiting for him just around the corner, or in some other part of town; waiting for him, calling for him, crying out for his prying eyes, and his condemnation?