Love (16 page)

She took out her old sketchbooks and fingered wistfully through them for every stroke of crayon or pencil had once been alive to her; her pictures had never referred to the objects they might have seemed to represent but, to her, had been palpable things themselves. But she could not draw anything any more and so was forced to make these imaginative experiments with her own body which were now about to culminate, finally, in erasure, for she had failed in the attempt to make herself the living portrait of a girl who had never existed. From time to time she started when she heard voices in the flat above or the noises of the street outside seeped thinly through the opaque windows. She was troubled by an over-acuteness of the senses and wondered why they shouted so loudly upstairs or the cars outside made, today, such tigerish roarings. She was irritated rather than disturbed to sense occasionally the almost inarticulate breathings and the infinitely subtle movements of the figures on the walls and her sudden excess of sensibility made the paper between her fingers coarser than sandpaper. She saw pits and bristles where
the pores and hairs were on the skin of her forearm. Before she had finished looking through her books, Lee came home again.

‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded angrily.

He would have said the same himself if she had given him time to speak for at first glance he did not recognize her. By some extraordinary chance, she had chosen to colour her hair the same shade of polished brass the woman doctor in the hospital used but her black-rimmed eyes, sweeping lashes, arched brows, carmined lips and dark red fingernails were those of the earliest memories of his mother, before she took up a more flamboyant style of make-up; she wore a white dress cut like the nightdress in which his aunt had been buried; but she sat among a pile of drawings in a manner which recalled only Annabel and so he finally identified this composite figure with his wife, though he was so dazed with sleeplessness he could have been hallucinating her. While he was out in the plain air of school, it seemed hardly possible she could wholly have transformed herself so that nothing remained familiar about her except for certain spiky gestures of her hands.

He was so struck by the newly adamantine brilliance of her eyes he did not see they no longer reflected anything. With her glittering hair and unfathomable face, streaked with synthetic red, white and black, she looked like nothing so much as one of those strange and splendid figures with which the connoisseurs of the baroque period loved to decorate their artificial caves, those
atlantes composés
fabricated from rare marbles and semiprecious stones. She had become a marvellous crystallization retaining nothing of the remembered woman but her form, for all the elements of which this new structure were composed had suffered a change, the eyes put out by zircons or spinels, the hair respun from threads of gold and the mouth enamelled scarlet. No longer vulnerable flesh and blood, she was altered to inflexible material. She could have stepped up into the jungle on the walls and not looked out of place beside the tree with breasts or the carnivorous flowers for now she was her own, omnipotent white queen and could move to any position on the board.

‘Go away,’ she said to Lee. ‘Leave me alone.’

‘Dear God,’ said Lee. ‘
Le jour de gloire est arrivé
.’

Inevitably, he began to laugh at such a reversal for the revolution which he both feared and longed for had arrived at last and he was reduced to bankruptcy for there was nothing left for him to love in this magnificent creature. All would not, now, continue in the old style for she dismissed him without a blessing.

‘Go away,’ she repeated. ‘Don’t come back, don’t ever come back. I don’t want any more to do with you.’

She was extraordinarily beautiful and radiated a gripping air of excitement; Lee soon ceased to laugh for he was seized with the conviction she had dressed herself up so splendidly only for the sake of his brother.

‘Has he been back, then? Did you come to terms, you and him?’

‘Why are you waiting?’ she said. ‘Get out.’

He was furious to find how much he was weeping, as if his eyes were dazzled and he choked on a farewell, shrugged, dropped his briefcase on the floor and left her to herself, though he had only nine shillings and sixpence in the world and nowhere else to go.

She was hardly aware who he was, unless he were a materialization of a picture from her books; she had even forgotten she had branded him. When she bent down over the page again, a lock of yellow hair fell forward with a soft plop onto a sketch of the chief of the Mohawks walking on a roof and she bit back a scream for she saw a yellow snake and heard a thud. Only when she touched the snake with her finger did she realize it was only her own hair though this, too, seemed an unnatural substance now it was so yellow. Then she became aware of a slow, rhythmic banging which must be her own heartbeat and soon she heard the brisk drumming of her pulse. She waited impatiently for it to grow dark because her excited senses turned the vigil into an ordeal; when it grew dark, she would go into the bedroom, seal the double doors with adhesive tape, turn on the rusted gas outlets above the mantelpiece, lie down on the bed and suffer herself to be blotted out but she thought,
this night of all nights, perhaps the sun might never stop shining. At that, she moaned with terror and panic. There were no clocks in the flat so she could not tell whether or not time was passing.

Now he had been granted his liberty, Lee did not know what to do with it. He sat on the kerb outside his former home for a while, shielding his eyes from the sun, anaesthetized by sleeplessness and shock. Because he could think of nowhere else to go, he went to the park and slept on the grass for three or four hours. He woke up in the cool, blue dusk which signed Annabel’s order of release. He was hungry and went down towards the dock road, looking for a café, as she scraped a flake of varnish from her fingernail while she taped the tops of the doors and tsk’d with annoyance for she wanted to look perfect on her deathbed. But then she thought perhaps a minor imperfection would make the spectacle even more touching and, besides, the important thing was to get it all over with and not mind too much about impressions for the quality of death would make her impressive enough in itself. She put clean sheets on the bed for last night’s were printed all over with false passions and she did not want to die in the bedclothes between which she had used her body and her imagination to extricate herself from her fantasies and failed at it so badly. The arrival of night, on schedule, had given her some confidence and she worked quickly and eagerly. In the café, Lee fell into conversation with two bored lorry drivers playing a fruit machine and, before long, found himself in a bar.

It was a glum and barren place though an old man played upon an out-of-tune piano and a group of exhausted whores now and then broke into song. Lee drank the drinks the lorry drivers bought him and let a whore reveal her teeth to him in thin, smiling chatter that fell on his ears like the pattering of raindrops. Unfamiliar as he was with the phenomenon of rejection, he could only diagnose his condition as one of positive grief modified by indignation and he cast around for some retributive act or, at least, an invitation from a stranger to cancel out his dismissal and restore his self-esteem.

As if on cue, as his indignation reached its peak, into the bar came the girl Joanne, always an unexpected apparition, sulky as ever and more voluptuous than he remembered unless he garnished her with a little extra voluptuousness because his antennae indicated she was available. She was immediately aware of Lee, though she said a few words, perhaps imparting a message, to a middle-aged man seated in a corner with a sodden group before she came over to her teacher and took up such an aggressively defensive stance before him he had no idea she shook with nerves to find him accessible and alone. Her semi-circular eyebrows gave her bland, white, motionless face the look of a screen star of the thirties. The piano player thumped out ‘Roses of Picardy’ and Lee knew everything was stale, boring and inevitable; he would seduce this trusting child to once more validate his amorality and again find himself in a swamp of self-disgust so he gave her his dazzling smile and waited for her to sit down beside him, in order that the action should commence.

She wore a tight, short dress of a vulgar, printed material and Lee, indulging a dislike of her which considerably sharpened his intentions, thought how he had short-circuited the time scale of the old saw, ‘From clogs to clogs in three generations’. She was one of the back-street bad girls of his teens and, now Annabel had deserted him, he would revert irretrievably to type, throw up his job and education, join, perhaps, the Merchant Navy or go to work on a building site. He was ravenous for the commonplace. Saturday’s fight gave her the chance to accost him at last; she thanked him in a breathy, almost diffident manner, shifting from foot to foot, before seating herself on the torn, plastic-covered bench, taking great care she did not touch him.

‘That’s my dad,’ she said suddenly, indicating the drunken middle-aged man with a jerk of her head. ‘He’s in here every night, the old soak.’

There was no affection in her voice.

‘Where does your mother go?’

‘She’s dead,’ she said without emotion. They were the
family of whom the street was a little ashamed, the boozing father who made complicated deals about second-hand cars and his farouche, sluttish daughter, who lived discontentedly together and often brawled in a mean house where there was nothing that could be remembered with affection. Avid for the crass, Lee put his hand on her thigh with such a coarse and blatant gesture she started. She had not expected an advance quite so soon for he had rescued her from a similar embarrassment a night or so ago and, besides, he was a schoolteacher although tonight he looked drunk or somehow subtly unlike the presentation of himself he gave in the classroom. Nevertheless, she expected something like finesse, at least, and she snapped: ‘Hands off!’

Lee was delighted to hear the fishwife clang in her voice and offered her a drink. She accepted half a pint of shandy and, giggling occasionally, she sipped it, eyeing him over the rim of the glass in a manner which brought back his early youth so strongly he was both attracted and filled with distaste. She was angry with herself because she knew she seemed gauche but she could not help it for she was very unsure of herself. When he gave her a cigarette, she coughed at the first draw and, knowing she had given more evidence of unsophistication, she became withdrawn and sulky. She huddled morosely inside her skimpy dress and looked at him with barely concealed antagonism. But, when her father left the pub, she relaxed visibly; she could behave more freely.

‘He’s gone off after a deal,’ she said and stubbed out the cigarette. As she did so, her susurrating mass of hair brushed his cheek and, spontaneously, without any reference to a putative seduction but only because its friable texture was quite unlike most girls’ hair, Lee bit at it to see what such strange, white, flossy hair tasted like. She shivered and tensed, stirred by this unusual advance; then she shrugged, sighed, glanced round to see she was unobserved and kissed him full on the mouth with profligate abandon. Then she sank back away from him on to the bench but she no longer giggled. She stretched out her hands and examined her fingernails, waiting the next move.

Her eyes were pale, ingenuous blue and her fat, soft mouth the colour and somehow the shape of old-fashioned cabbage roses. In conversation, her voice had a harsh, subtly discordant timbre that at times grated unmercifully like the sound of a knife scratched on a plate and her laughter always seemed contemptuous because it was so rasping but she did not speak often and she laughed even less. Beneath the pads of puppy fat which formed a protective mask for the vulnerable forms of what she might become, the lines of her face were inquisitive and, perhaps, demanding. Now and then Lee surprised upon her face an expression of hungry curiosity which might be half desperate to satisfy itself and was probably the explanation of her kiss. Whoever she was, she only played at being a trusting child or else became a trusting child intermittently, when she had no other signposts as to how to act. As she grew more self-assured with Lee and stopped nervously chewing her swollen under-lip all the time, she revealed signs of a sharp, unripe cleverness. Once she was fully embarked on the adventure he represented, she unfolded a few more of her astringent petals and, though she spoke of her father and his ways with a sardonic regret, she did not seem to be unhappy. But she was plainly hungry for new company and, at closing time, it was she who suggested they walk for a while in the park together, the old euphemism, before Lee had a chance to do so.

She had a bounding, springy walk and carried her head so high her voluminous hair followed behind her rather than hung down her back, buoyantly rippling as if imbued with its own share of her energetic grace. She walked like a woman entirely at ease within her skin. Though the sky in the west was still streaked with green and rose, a fornicator’s moon beamed down already and, as they entered the park from the south side, Lee, sentimental, cheerful, not altogether cynical and accustomed to making the best of any given set of circumstances, let the guiltless night take control of him.

No shafts of moonlight dared enter the absolute night of Annabel’s darkened bedroom as, in darkness, she balanced on a chair to reach the gas taps which were rusted, stiff and
difficult to turn. However, she was quite determined. It was an exquisite pleasure to hear the first, faint hiss that announced the inrush of gas into the room. She knew it would take a long time but, like Ophelia, gladly lay down on the river and waited for it to carry her away as if she was light and will-less as a paper boat. She left no notes or messages. She felt no fear or pain for now she was content. She did not spare a thought or waste any pity on the people who loved her for she had never regarded them as anything more than facets of the self she was now about to obliterate so, in a sense, she took them with her to the grave and it was only natural they should now behave as if they had never known her.