Authors: Tanith Lee
Sibbi said: “Yes, the garden, I think I
shall come with you—”
Laura smiled at her. “I have a much
better idea. I heard you playing earlier. You have such a delicate touch and
yet, I believe, that latest piece would benefit from practice—why not practice
now, Sibbi? It’s a little cooler, I think.”
Sibbi narrowed her cat’s eyes as Laura
and Ashburn strolled into the garden. She stalked to the piano and began to
play very loudly and brilliantly. “How do you stand that woman, Albertine?” she
demanded. “Does she suppose she owns everything?”
Albertine sat in the wicker chair by the
veranda doors. Her dress spilled about her feet like a pool of milk. “Never
mind,” she said soothingly, as if to a child. She watched Ashburn and Laura go
up and down the walks among the burning green with its little filigree flickers
of shade. The brazen clangour of heat was mulling, darkening, lying down like
lions under the trees. Albertine could imagine Laura saying to Ashburn:
“Yes, I know what I am to you. Albertine
is your heart, and this silly little Sibbi your appetite. And I am your brain.
Do you think you can relinquish me?”
Albertine imagined she saw how the poet
became animated, speaking of what he wrote to Laura. She sat very still in the
wicker chair, watching them. A whole procession with its banners travelled
through her mind, the first meeting, the first dream, the first embrace, the
green graves, the seascapes, the hot gipsy summers with, superimposed upon it
all, Laura, with her sharp dark gown slashing at the grass.
Suddenly Sibbi jumped up. “Why didn’t I
think of it before? We must hold a séance. There is an ideal little table, and
I recall there is something one does with a wineglass—” She ran to the veranda
doors and called out. Ashburn turned at once. Sibbi stood, like a slender
flower stalk, holding out her hand to him across the lawn.
And shortly they all sat round a table,
like figures inscribed on a clock.
They held hands, the obdurate glass
discarded. Nothing had happened, but it was too hot to move. Merton, seated between
Sibbi and Laura, fell suddenly asleep and woke as suddenly with a wild grunt.
As it had mummified the flowers, the earth, the island, the heat mummified the
two men and three women at the table.
Only the eyes of the women sometimes
darted, like needles stabbing between their lashes, observing the poet. Sibbi
held one of his hands, Albertine the other. Ashburn, blinded by the heat, shut
his eyes and experienced the sensation of two leeches, one on either palm,
sucking his blood from him. He thought he had fallen asleep for a moment as
Merton had done; he could not resist looking down at his hands. Albertine’s
hand was cold as ice, Sibbi’s warm and dry. A peculiar stasis had fallen over
them all. The poet glanced up and saw the clock had fittingly stopped on the
mantelshelf. The eyes of the three women and of the man, as always, were on
him.
“This is very irksome,” Laura said. “Really,
Sibbi, can’t you use some blandishment to persuade your ghostie to appear? I
have three letters to write—”
“I could sing,” Sibbi said; her hand
moved in his. “If Robert thinks I should.”
“That should charm any ghost, I’m sure,”
stung Laura. They had drawn the blinds; the room was drowned in a bloody
shadow. The poet stared at the silent clock.
“What would you like me to sing?” Sibbi
murmured, offering the sting so that he could draw the poison from it.
“Anything,” he said.
What does it
matter
, he thought,
what she sings?
Desire ran through her hand into
his body, yet he scarcely felt it, sex, like an absent limb lost in some war,
castrated by some mental battle... His eyes unfocused on the face of the clock.
He did not want to go back to the room in the tower, to the unfinished work,
the spell which evaded him, urgent once, now meaningless. He had put it off.
The girl began softly to sing; she sang as if far away over some hill of the
mind, words he had written to an old tune of the island:
“Stream, from
the black cold sun of night,
Phantoms in
robes of darkest light,
To muddy the
clear waters of our lives
With dreams.”
And
after this dream, what? The room began to breathe about him, or else it was the
sea. Nothing achieved or to come, and if achieved what did it signify? Ants
crawling in ant cities... He felt the floor tilt a little beneath his chair and
thought distantly:
Now, an earthquake
.
But it was the sea, the sea cool and
green, washing in across the floor.
“By George, we’re flooded,” Merton
observed jovially, without rancour or alarm. “And the roof’s come down.”
The house was gone. In a paper boat they
rocked gently over an ocean glaucous and slippery as the backs of seals.
“Look at this,” Merton said, prodding
the paper. “Soon sink. Dear chap, I said the shipwright should look at her. Not
sea-worthy, you know.”
The ship was composed of manuscripts.
The ink ran and darkened the water.
“You have had my wife, of course,”
Merton said, “but it’s all for the best. Ballast, you-know. Jettison extra
cargo.”
The poet looked down and saw that Laura
and Sibbi floated under the glass-green runnels of waves with wide eyes and
fish swimming in their hair and in and out of their open mouths. With his right
hand he was holding Albertine beneath the water, while her garments floated out
like Ophelia’s, and she smiled at him sadly, encouraging him to do whatever was
necessary to save himself.
Ashburn leapt to his feet and the bottom
gave way in the paper boat and, as the water closed over his head like salty
fire, he saw Merton knock the dottle from his pipe—
Albertine still lay against his arm, he
was trying to lift her above the sea and she was calling to him and struggling
with him and suddenly he found himself in the blood-red room with fragments of
glass on the table, Sibbi cowering in her chair, and no hands visible except
Albertine’s, both holding on to him, as if he and she were drowning indeed.
But it was night which drowned
everything, all confusion and outcry.
It swooped on the island. The sea turned
red then black, the sky opened itself to an ochre moon. A serpent of lights
wound out of the village at sunset and settled upon the beach below the house
with the hoarse screeches of predatory bats.
“Our favourite pagan-Christians are
restive again,” Laura said. “Dear God, who would believe such ceremonies could
still exist. Are they sacrificing maidens to the sea?”
“Praying for rain,” Merton said. “Poor
beggars. They get little enough from the land in a good year, but this drought—well,
there’s no telling.”
“Their hovels are empty of food,
clothing and furniture,” Laura said, “and in the church are three gold
candlesticks. How can such fools hope to survive?”
Merton lit his pipe and relapsed in his
shadowy chair. Sibbi sat slapping down cards before the lamp; Laura, her wormwood
letters written, stood at the window gazing out at the firefly glare on the
foreshore. And above? From time to time each of the three looked up at the
ceiling. The poet and his pale woman were locked in some curious, stilted, yet
private and unsharing communion.
My satisfaction lies only in observing
my fellow exiles
,
Laura thought, and glanced at Sibbi with a dark little smile. “Really, dear
Sibbi, you did get such a scare, didn’t you?”
Sibbi slapped down the coloured cards, commonly,
as Laura had seen the market women do with fish. “I don’t know what you mean.
Anyone might be taken ill in this weather.”
“Yes, of course,” Laura smiled, “and
scream at the top of his lungs, and frighten little Miss Muffet into a flawless
fit. Did you imagine only women are permitted to have hysterics? You will have
to get accustomed to such things in this house.”
“Some sort of—of nightmare,” Merton
ventured. “Dropped off myself.”
Laura showed her teeth, as sharp,
predatory and feline as Sibbi’s and with no pretence. “What does Sibbi see in
the cards? Good fortune, health and happiness? Or is it a soupçon of undying
love?”
She leaned back against the window
frame. The torches were guttering out, the howling voices blown to cindery
shreds on the wind. A melancholy hollowness yawned inside her, a disembowelling
ache, She suffered it, waiting, as if for a spasm of pain, until it passed.
Does
nothing die?
she thought, her heart squeezing its bitterness like a lemon
into her veins.
The shore was all darkness now. The foxy
moon meanly described only the edges of the sand, the ribs of the water. Above
on the tower, the awning gave a single despotic flap like the wing of a huge
bird. Laura looked upward, then down, and made out a figure walking along
beneath the garden wall, towards the beach and the sea. For a moment she did
not question it, saw only some fragment of the night, a metaphysical shape
without reference. Then, from the turn of the head, the manner of moving, she
recognised Ashburn.
“Merton—look—” Merton came rumbling to
the window. His pipe smoke enveloped Laura; she thrust it from her eyes. “Do
you see? What can he be doing?”
“Good lord,” Merton muttered, “Good
lord.”
“For heaven’s sake, go after him,” Laura
cried. “In this state, he’ll walk into the sea and never realise it.”
They ran together towards the front of
the house and burst out wildly onto the beach, Merton stumbling, Sibbi erupting
in a frenzy of curiosity, demand and fright after them. The dreadful, enormous
intimacy of the darkness swept over them, the hot dim essence of the night,
which still faintly carried the arcane noises of the islanders and the smell of
torch smoke.
“Oh, where is he?” Laura cried. She
could not reason why she was so afraid, yet all three had caught the fear, like
sickness.
“There, I see him. You stay here—”
Merton set off across the sand, a blundering, great, bear-like form, shouting
now: “Ashburn! Robert!”
“Oh, the unsubtle fool,” Laura moaned.
Sibbi half lay against the door biting
her wedding ring, hissing over and over: “I can’t bear it, I simply won’t bear
it.”
Merton plunged towards the sea, waving
his arms, yelling; then abruptly stopped. Simultaneously, the seaward window of
the tower opened, and the wind snatched pale handfuls of hair out upon itself as
if unravelling silver wool from the head of Albertine.
“What’s wrong?” she called down, in a
soft, panic-stricken voice.
“Don’t you know?” Laura screamed at her.
“Oh, please be quiet,” Albertine
implored. “Don’t wake him, for God’s sake.”
Laura ran out onto the shore, stared up
at the window, then towards the bone-yellow breakers of the sea smashing at
Merton’s feet.
“I saw Robert walking towards the water,”
Laura said. “So did Arthur.”
“But he’s sleeping,” Albertine
protested. She glanced over her shoulder into the tower room. Her normally calm
face betrayed itself when she looked again downwards at Laura. It was convulsed
in horrified accusation and loathing and white as the face of a clock. She
shrank back and closed the window after her with violent noiselessness.
Merton came up the beach, sweat ran down
his cheeks. He looked at Laura silently and passed on. Sibbi giggled wildly in
the doorway. “I didn’t see,” she cried. The breakers clashed on the shore and
raked the sand with their black fingers.
They had expressions suitable for
everything.
They breathed closely, at midnight, like
a woman on the poet’s pillow, her ocean voice sounding in the seashell of his
ear. He woke and searched for her, a woman with any number of faces. But no
woman lay on the narrow bed in the tower, only a girl sat asleep in a chair
near the window.
He got up quietly and went to look at
her, yet somehow had no fear that she would wake. Her profile, her defenceless
hands and alabaster torrent of hair, all these touched him with a listless
tenderness. He wanted to stroke the tired lines away from her mouth which, even
in sleep, had a touch of the hungry recalcitrant childishness that generally
moulds only the mouths of old women. He wanted to soothe her, go back with her
to the green shades of the past. Yet he had no energy, no true impulse. He
stood penitently before her, as if she were dead. He desired nothing from her,
really desired nothing from any of them, and they clamoured to load him with
their gifts, to fetter him with their kindness.
What do you want, then? Undying fame,
the glory of the king whose monument is made of steel and lasts forever? Or
does any monument last, or any hope? And does any wish of a man matter?
He left her slumped there and went down
the stair from the tower. In her wasp-cell Laura would be sleeping, curled like
a foetus around her hate and pain. And pretty Sibbi, probably quite content in
the arms of her bear. He crossed the room where the piano stood like a beast of
black mirror. He opened the veranda doors yet the garden seemed more enclosed
even than the house, full of heat and shadows like lace, and the huddled leper
colony of statues. He went out on to the terrace nevertheless and stood there,
and the noise of the sea poured around him and on the beaches inside his brain.