Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories Page 19

  Crash of a dropped stick.

  His silver-headed cane! What else! Sly, cunning, he had returned; he was waiting for me outside the door!

  I rose to my feet; fear gave me strength. I flung back my head defiantly.

  ‘Come in!’ My voice astonished me by its firmness, its clarity.

  The door slowly, nervously opened and I saw, not the massive irredeemable bulk of my husband but the slight, stooping figure of the piano-tuner, and he looked far more terrified of me than my mother’s daughter would have been of the Devil himself. In the torture chamber, it seemed to me that I would never laugh again; now, helplessly, laugh I did, with relief, and, after a moment’s hesitation, the boy’s face softened and he smiled a little almost in shame. Though they were blind, his eyes were singularly sweet.

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Jean-Yves. ‘I know I’ve given you grounds for dismissing me, that I should be crouching outside your door at midnight . . . but I heard you walking about, up and down – I sleep in a room at the foot of the west tower – and some intuition told me you could not sleep and might, perhaps, pass the insomniac hours at your piano. And I could not resist that. Besides, I stumbled over these – ’

  And he displayed the ring of keys I’d dropped outside my husband’s office door, the ring from which one key was missing. I took them from him, looked round for a place to stow them, fixed on the piano stool as if to hide them would protect me. Still he stood smiling at me. How hard it was to make everyday conversation.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ I said. ‘The piano. Perfectly in tune.’

  But he was full of the loquacity of embarrassment, as though I would only forgive him for his impudence if he explained the cause of it thoroughly.

  ‘When I heard you play this afternoon, I thought I’d never heard such a touch. Such technique. A treat for me, to hear a virtuoso! So I crept up to your door now, humbly as a little dog might, madame, and put my ear to the keyhole and listened, and listened – until my stick fell to the floor through a momentary clumsiness of mine, and I was discovered.’

  He had the most touching ingenuous smile.

  ‘Perfectly in tune,’ I repeated. To my surprise, now I had said it, I found I could not say anything else. I could only repeat: ‘In tune . . . perfect . . . in tune,’ over and over again. I saw a dawning surprise in his face. My head throbbed. To see him, in his lovely, blind humanity, seemed to hurt me very piercingly, somewhere inside my breast; his figure blurred, the room swayed about me. After the dreadful revelation of that bloody chamber, it was his tender look that made me faint.

  When I recovered consciousness, I found I was lying in the piano-tuner’s arms and he was tucking the satin cushion from the piano-stool under my head.

  ‘You are in some great distress,’ he said. ‘No bride should suffer so much, so early in her marriage.’

  His speech had the rhythms of the countryside, the rhythms of the tides.

  ‘Any bride brought to this castle should come ready dressed in mourning, should bring a priest and a coffin with her,’ I said.

  ‘What’s this?’

  It was too late to keep silent; and if he, too, were one of my husband’s creatures, then at least he had been kind to me. So I told him everything, the keys, the interdiction, my disobedience, the room, the rack, the skull, the corpses, the blood.

  ‘I can scarcely believe it,’ he said, wondering. ‘That man . . . so rich; so well-born.’

  ‘Here’s proof,’ I said and tumbled the fatal key out of my handkerchief on to the silken rug.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘I can smell the blood.’

  He took my hand; he pressed his arms about me. Although he was scarcely more than a boy, I felt a great strength flow into me from his touch.

  ‘We whisper all manner of strange tales up and down the coast,’ he said. ‘There was a Marquis, once, who used to hunt young girls on the mainland; he hunted them with dogs, as though they were foxes. My grandfather had it from his grandfather, how the Marquis pulled a head out of his saddle bag and showed it to the blacksmith while the man was shoeing his horse. “A fine specimen of the genus, brunette, eh, Guillaume?” And it was the head of the blacksmith’s wife.’

  But, in these more democratic times, my husband must travel as far as Paris to do his hunting in the salons. Jean-Yves knew the moment I shuddered.

  ‘Oh, madame! I thought all these were old wives’ tales, chattering of fools, spooks to scare bad children into good behaviour! Yet how could you know, a stranger, that the old name for this place is the Castle of Murder?’

  How could I know, indeed? Except that, in my heart, I’d always known its lord would be the death of me.

  ‘Hark!’ said my friend suddenly. ‘The sea has changed key; it must be near morning. The tide is going down.’

  He helped me up. I looked from the window, towards the mainland, along the causeway where the stones gleamed wetly in the thin light of the end of the night and, with an almost unimaginable horror, a horror the intensity of which I cannot transmit to you, I saw, in the distance, still far away yet drawing moment by moment inexorably nearer, the twin headlamps of his great black car, gouging tunnels through the shifting mist.

  My husband had indeed returned; this time, it was no fancy.

  ‘The key!’ said Jean-Yves. ‘It must go back on the ring, with the others. As though nothing had happened.’

  But the key was still caked with wet blood and I ran to my bathroom and held it under the hot tap. Crimson water swirled down the basin but, as if the key itself were hurt, the bloody token stuck. The turquoise eyes of the dolphin taps winked at me derisively; they knew my husband had been too clever for me! I scrubbed the stain with my nail brush but still it would not budge. I thought how the car would be rolling silently towards the closed courtyard gate; the more I scrubbed the key, the more vivid grew the stain.

  The bell in the gatehouse would jangle. The porter’s drowsy son would push back the patchwork quilt, yawning, pull the shirt over his head, thrust his feet into his sabots . . . slowly, slowly; open the door for your master as slowly as you can . . .

  And still the bloodstain mocked the fresh water that spilled from the mouth of the leering dolphin.

  ‘You have no more time,’ said Jean-Yves. ‘He is here. I know it. I must stay with you.’

  ‘You shall not!’ I said. ‘Go back to your room, now. Please.’

  He hesitated. I put the edge of steel in my voice, for I knew I must meet my lord alone.

  ‘Leave me!’

  As soon as he was gone, I dealt with the keys and went to my bedroom. The causeway was empty; Jean-Yves was correct, my husband had already entered the castle. I pulled the curtains close, stripped off my clothes and pulled the bedcurtains around me as a pungent aroma of Russian leather assured me my husband was once again beside me.

  ‘Dearest!’

  With the most treacherous, lascivious tenderness, he kissed my eyes, and, mimicking the new bride newly awakened, I flung my arms around him, for on my seeming acquiescence depended my salvation.

  ‘Da Silva of Rio outwitted me,’ he said wryly. ‘My New York agent telegraphed Le Havre and saved me a wasted journey. So we may resume our interrupted pleasures, my love.’

  I did not believe one word of it. I knew I had behaved exactly according to his desires; had he not bought me so that I should do so? I had been tricked into my own betrayal to that illimitable darkness whose source I had been compelled to seek in his absence and, now that I had met that shadowed reality of his that came to life only in the presence of its own atrocities, I must pay the price of my new knowledge. The secret of Pandora’s box; but he had given me the box, himself, knowing I must learn the secret. I had played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself, since that destiny was himself; and I had lost. Lost at the charade of innocence and vice in which he had engaged me. Lost as the victim loses to the executioner.

  His hand brushed my breast, beneath
the sheet. I strained my nerves yet could not help but flinch at the intimate touch, for it made me think of the piercing embrace of the Iron Maiden and of his lost lovers in the vault. When he saw my reluctance his eyes veiled over and yet his appetite did not diminish. His tongue ran over red lips already wet. Silent, mysterious, he moved away from me to draw off his jacket. He took the gold watch from his waistcoat and laid it on the dressing table, like a good bourgeois; scooped out his rattling loose change and now – oh God! – makes a great play of patting his pockets officiously, puzzled lips pursed, searching for something that he had mislaid. Then turns to me with a ghastly, a triumphant smile.

  ‘But of course! I gave the keys to you!’

  ‘Your keys? Why, of course. Here, they’re under the pillow; wait a moment – what – Ah! No . . . now, where can I have left them? I was whiling away the evening without you at the piano, I remember. Of course! The music room!’

  Brusquely he flung my negligee of antique lace on the bed.

  ‘Go and get them.’

  ‘Now? This moment? Can’t it wait until morning, my darling?’

  I forced myself to be seductive, I saw myself, pale, pliant as a plant that begs to be trampled underfoot, a dozen vulnerable appealing girls reflected in as many mirrors, and I saw how he almost failed to resist me. If he had come to me in bed, I would have strangled him, then.

  But he half-snarled: ‘No. It won’t wait. Now.’

  The unearthly light of dawn filled the room; had only one previous dawn broken upon me in that vile place? And there was nothing for it but to go and fetch the keys from the music stool and pray he would not examine them too closely, pray to God his eyes would fail him, that he might be struck blind.

  When I came back into the bedroom carrying the bunch of keys that jangled at every step like a curious musical instrument, he was sitting on the bed in his immaculate shirtsleeves, his head sunk in his hands.

  And it seemed to me he was in despair.

  Strange. In spite of my fear of him, that made me whiter than my wrap, I felt there emanate from him, at that moment, a stench of absolute despair, rank and ghastly, as if the lilies that surrounded him had all at once begun to fester, or the Russian leather of his scent were reverting to the elements of flayed hide and excrement of which it was composed. The chthonic gravity of his presence exerted a tremendous pressure on the room, so that the blood pounded in my ears as if we had been precipitated to the bottom of the sea, beneath the waves that pounded against the shore.

  I held my life in my hands amongst those keys and, in a moment, would place it between his well-manicured fingers. The evidence of that bloody chamber had showed me I could expect no mercy. Yet, when he raised his head and stared at me with his blind, shuttered eyes as though he did not recognise me, I felt a terrified pity for him, for this man who lived in such strange, secret places that, if I loved him enough to follow him, I should have to die.

  The atrocious loneliness of that monster!

  The monocle had fallen from his face. His curling mane was disordered, as if he had run his hands through it in his distraction. I saw how he had lost his impassivity and was now filled with suppressed excitement. The hand he stretched out for those counters in his game of love and death shook a little; the face that turned towards me contained a sombre delirium that seemed to me compounded of a ghastly, yes, shame but also of a terrible, guilty joy as he slowly ascertained how I had sinned.

  That tell-tale stain had resolved itself into a mark the shape and brilliance of the heart on a playing card. He disengaged the key from the ring and looked at it for a while, solitary, brooding.

  ‘It is the key that leads to the kingdom of the unimaginable,’ he said. His voice was low and had in it the timbre of certain great cathedral organs that seem, when they are played, to be conversing with God.

  I could not restrain a sob.

  ‘Oh, my love, my little love who brought me a white gift of music,’ he said, almost as if grieving. ‘My little love, you’ll never know how much I hate daylight!’

  Then he sharply ordered: ‘Kneel!’

  I knelt before him and he pressed the key lightly to my forehead, held it there for a moment. I felt a faint tingling of the skin and, when I involuntarily glanced at myself in the mirror, I saw the heart-shaped stain had transferred itself to my forehead, to the space between the eyebrows, like the caste mark of a Brahmin woman. Or the mark of Cain. And now the key gleamed as freshly as if it had just been cut. He clipped it back on the ring, emitting that same, heavy sigh as he had done when I said I would marry him.

  ‘My virgin of the arpeggios, prepare yourself for martyrdom.’

  ‘What form shall it take?’ I said.

  ‘Decapitation,’ he whispered, almost voluptuously. ‘Go and bathe yourself; put on that white dress you wore to hear Tristan and the necklace that prefigures your end. And I shall take myself off to the armoury, my dear, to sharpen my great-grandfather’s ceremonial sword.’

  ‘The servants?’

  ‘We shall have absolute privacy for our last rites; I have already dismissed them. If you look out of the window you can see them going to the mainland.’

  It was now the full, pale light of morning; the weather was grey, indeterminate, the sea had an oily, sinister look, a gloomy day on which to die. Along the causeway I could see trouping every maid and scullion, every potboy and pan-scourer, valet, laundress and vassal who worked in the great house, most on foot, a few on bicycles. The faceless housekeeper trudged along with a great basket in which, I guessed, she’d stowed as much as she could ransack from the larder. The Marquis must have given the chauffeur leave to borrow the motor for the day, for it went last of all, at a stately pace, as though the procession were a cortège and the car already bore my coffin to the mainland for burial.

  But I knew no good Breton earth would cover me, like a last, faithful lover; I had another fate.

  ‘I have given them all a day’s holiday, to celebrate our wedding,’ he said. And smiled.

  However hard I stared at the receding company, I could see no sign of Jean-Yves, our latest servant hired but the preceding morning.

  ‘Go, now. Bathe yourself; dress yourself. The lustratory ritual and the ceremonial robing; after that, the sacrifice. Wait in the music room until I telephone for you. No, my dear!’ And he smiled, as I started, recalling the line was dead. ‘One may call inside the castle just as much as one pleases; but outside – never.’

  I scrubbed my forehead with the nail brush as I had scrubbed the key but this red mark would not go away, either, no matter what I did, and I knew I would wear it until I died, though that would not be long. Then I went to my dressing room and put on the white muslin shift, costume of a victim of an auto-da-fé, he had bought me to listen to the Liebestod in. Twelve young women combed out twelve listless sheaves of brown hair in the mirrors; soon, there would be none. The mass of lilies that surrounded me exhaled, now, the odour of their withering. They looked like the trumpets of the angels of death.

  On the dressing table, coiled like a snake about to strike, lay the ruby choker.

  Already almost lifeless, cold at heart, I descended the spiral staircase to the music room but there I found I had not been abandoned.

  ‘I can be of some comfort to you,’ the boy said. ‘Though not of much use.’

  We pushed the piano stool in front of the open window so that, for as long as I could, I would be able to smell the ancient, reconciling smell of the sea that, in time, will cleanse everything, scour the old bones white, wash away all the stains. The last little chambermaid had trotted along the causeway long ago and now the tide, fated as I, came tumbling in, the crisp wavelets splashing on the old stones.

  ‘You do not deserve this,’ he said.

  ‘Who can say what I deserve or no?’ I said. ‘I’ve done nothing; but that may be sufficient reason for condemning me.’

  ‘You disobeyed him,’ he said. ‘That is sufficient reason for him to punish you.�
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  ‘I only did what he knew I would.’

  ‘Like Eve,’ he said.

  The telephone rang a shrill imperative. Let it ring. But my lover lifted me up and set me on my feet; I must answer it. The receiver felt heavy as earth.

  ‘The courtyard. Immediately.’

  My lover kissed me, he took my hand. He would come with me if I would lead him. Courage. When I thought of courage, I thought of my mother. Then I saw a muscle in my lover’s face quiver.

  ‘Hoofbeats!’ he said.

  I cast one last, desperate glance from the window and, like a miracle, I saw a horse and rider galloping at a vertiginous speed along the causeway, though the waves crashed, now, high as the horse’s fetlocks. A rider, her black skirts tucked up around her waist so she could ride hard and fast, a crazy, magnificent horsewoman in widow’s weeds.

  As the telephone rang again.

  ‘Am I to wait all morning?’

  Every moment, my mother drew nearer.

  ‘She will be too late,’ Jean-Yves said and yet he could not restrain a note of hope that, though it must be so, yet it might not be so.

  The third, intransigent call.

  ‘Shall I come up to heaven to fetch you down, Saint Cecilia? You wicked woman, do you wish me to compound my crimes by desecrating the marriage bed?’

  So I must go to the courtyard where my husband waited in his London-tailored trousers and the shirt from Turnbull and Asser, beside the mounting block, with, in his hand, the sword which his great-grandfather had presented to the little corporal, in token of surrender to the Republic, before he shot himself. The heavy sword, unsheathed, grey as that November morning, sharp as childbirth, mortal.

  When my husband saw my companion, he observed: ‘Let the blind lead the blind, eh? But does even a youth as besotted as you think she was truly blind to her own desires when she took my ring? Give it me back, whore.’

  The fires in the opal had all died down. I gladly slipped it from my finger and, even in that dolorous place, my heart was lighter for the lack of it. My husband took it lovingly and lodged it on the tip of his finger; it would go no further.