Night (9 page)

It was he who sent the casket, silver with little mauve studs on it.

Going, going, gone. Like the walls and the crows and the ruins and the flat stones and the mere stones and the stubble and the voices and the kines of Coose. The perennial divide. First chiselling, then scraping, then the terrifying emptying of all but a sob. I don't mind too much. I mind awfully. I claw, at nothing, at naught.

Dr Flaggler, one of the original princes of darkness. Had a peculiar humour. He put a notice in the
lavatory, having mounted and framed it, requesting that faeces only to be put in the bowl. It was a very old bowl, cracked, and veiny, like one of Lil’s plum pudding bowls that eventually had to be relegated to the dogs. Once upon a time there seemed to have been a design upon it, maybe a spray or a cherub. The sign must have been meant for me as he didn’t open his house or his gardens to any others, to the riff-raff as he would say. He was a curator by profession. It was an old house not far from the moors. I am surprised that I did not get broken veins, always out on the moors, we were, back and forth, walking and stalking; the wind impeding us, the wind battering us. We used to bring scones and a flask of tea. He was very pernickety about his afternoon tea. We used to sit, or rather flop on to some piece of heather, to eat and drink. The view was unvarying, endless vistas of heather, flat, the sky itself reflecting whatever colour the heather happened to be, light mauve, or dark, or a springing green; sometimes a smearing black after it had got charred from accidental fires. In its green phase it stirred and was a bit like a sea, or sea spinach. I used to wait for the waves that never came. He fetched a rug one day, announcing that we would make love but I think too much preparatory work went into it, it was a sad ballocks. Out there you wouldn’t hear a bird at all, only the grounders, the pheasants and tame partridges and moorhens. We used to try to catch them with our hands, very often we almost did. They let out a kind of cackle that was in no way like that of hens. More lunatic by far. The ferns used to stay from one year to the next, so that the
young fronds used to rise out of the old, rusted, swordy stumps.

The sign in his lavatory was accompanied by a snowscape, which is why I refer to his humour, astounding if you will. Ours was not a blessed union. Full of foreboding even at its best. For one who loved the moors and the misted fells he had an unexpected liking for babies, used to say he would rather kiss babies’ skins than the skins of women.

It more or less ended in a little café on a bank holiday morning. The lad was three or four by then, and at home in the charge of a skivvy. The café I remember distinctly, what with its bright blue plastic chairs, all stacked up, its washed plastic tables, and such a wretchedly small clientele, and still the hoping and still the fluttering, like being in a banqueting place. We were on a bus holiday, a single-decker bus with amber-tinted windows. Five countries we toured and for a ridiculously low sum. I said to myself, “It will be all right, this Erebus will pass, Dr Flaggler will mellow again.”

At intervals we – the thirty occupants – tumbled out into some city where there were bells and inns and a church spire. It may have been Bruges, or then again it may have been Brussels. Bells and stone façades do not differ that radically from one strange town to the next. We had to go through the side entrances of these cafés for our meals, and the foodstuffs put before us were unfamiliar. There was a man called Fred who was very chary about it all and kept dreading the prospect of octopuses. He suspected the dyes in them.
He had been on a former bus holiday and was subjected to them three times a week. Dr Flaggler pointed out that that would have been in the south, whereupon Fred said everything being frozen, octopuses were as likely as not being sent all over the continent to physic people. He also testified that the Danube was not blue. He had seen it with his own bespectacled eyes. His eyes were small as nibs. His sister Ethel, for whose holiday he was paying, fell sick along the floor of the bus, and a glut of these foreign nutriments dropped out as she ran from the back seat, her appointed seat, to get to the front door, ran in vain. The rilings and the scoldings that he gave her! Reiterating that she should not have had those
crème
de
menthe
frappes and that she should have stayed away from Vienna schnitzel, since it was cooked in oil. His grey complexion was replaced by another colour altogether, a scalding red. It was anything but becoming. I thought his poor nose would explode so vehement did it become. Everyone heard him except her, afflicted as she was with industrial deafness. She had confided that to me although it was apparent. The passengers did their noticeable best not to whiff or burp but what with the heat and the enclosure, it was not easy. Heads sought the window, Fred went on with his rhetoric and then somewhere along the way the courier stopped and broke off some palm branches which he strewed along the floor. It was then we smiled, he and I. A young courier, very smarmy. I helped him in so far as I trod on the palms that were near to me, to make better their carpeting. Looking down at the floor of the bus and seeing it
green and seeing it rustle was like being plunged into a forest for a moment, and knowing that decay lurked underneath, that there was something rotting and decomposing, as there always is, even with Mother Nature. Dr Flaggler and I did not confer. He was the only male who commanded the window seat. Not that I objected. We sat, he and I, like two solid substances waiting to burn one another up, we never talked, we never nudged, we were very nearly numb, yet we perspired, we stared, we let out involuntary sounds that could be called abortive coughs or abortive cries. In the fields women worked. The courier would point to them as being a sight to see. Sometimes a woman would lift her head and a face would become visible under the straw hat, but the features were not to be seen so that it was like looking at rows of clocks that were unable to tell the time. They all wore kerchiefs under their hats and their skirts were dirndl and a petrol blue. We drove all day and hence we sweltered. The windscreen used to be smeared with dead insects. By the time we got to our destinations so fatigued were we that we plodded out of the bus. In one of our inns I heard the rats scrabble behind the wainscotting. I heard them all night and so assiduous were they that I expected them to succeed and press through. I expected a great congeal of them. I was envisaging my escape, the ledge that I would have to jump on to, the repercussions from them. I had heard tell of one that had adhered to a hand by reason of its teeth. It was presented to a youngster by his guide dog. It being dusk and his guide dog must have taken it to be an odd glove or some matted
leaves. The youngster could not shake it off. It just clung, dug itself in, and every time the dog went fopping its tail stiffened, likewise its backbone and likewise its clench. The boy was afraid to shout in case he frightened his aggressor. Probably the rat was frightened too, not knowing what it had got itself attached to. There seemed to be no solution when of all things a gentleman farmer went by on horseback, jumped down, searched for a big stick and severed them by taking a swipe at the rat, causing it to dismember as it fell away. There had to be a second blow in the lumbar region to extinguish its life altogether. It became one of the marvels of Coose. He excelled himself by describing the clench as being like that of a burr. It appeared in the local newspaper, and the schoolmaster gave him a jar of Virol as a reward for his command of the language. The rats of Belgium did not press through, and in the morning, after the continental breakfast, eaten out on the little landing, there was the usual queueing for the lavatory and the usual dissertations about the beds and the bolsters. While we were queueing, the sheets and the bolster cases were whipped from our beds as the two strapping maids prepared rooms for the next bus party.

I danced in the night with the courier, remembered the crooner, my first. We arranged to meet in the woods. I looked forward to it, certain that we would embrace. I would have embraced anything at the time, a sheaf or a pillar, and my hunger was such that my arms used to lollop out of their own accord, reach blindly for some unfortunate person to hold on to. Another thing that
pleased me was the venue and the fact that I would never be able to revisit it, unlike graveyards or old homesteads or cowhouses or the like. But Dr Flaggler became sensible of it, either through the normal channel of overhearing or else with the sixth sense that he was so boastful of. He locked us in the small wooden bedroom. It was so hot that the gum from the wood had blistered into hard notches of dark amber. Nothing flowed except our hatreds. He said, “You are not going to escape me, not now, not ever, you are not going out of my sight, you poor zealous wretch, you cannot make a life for yourself without me, it is beyond you, it is unattainable.” I sat there in a taffeta dress, meek and couchant, and I thought there was nothing for it but to remain thus, silent, slavish, imitating the fixity of death. Why such enmity and when did it begin to fester?

There was a time when he chanced upon me picking medlars in a field, and we lay next to one another with the sack over our eyes to keep off the sun, and he said, “You make very good children my dear, you make excellent children.” Down underneath the boozing and dancing got to such a pitch that I thought it had turned into a riot, and each time when a lavatory got flushed I thought that the whole world was aborting itself out of existence. I had to feign sleep.

In the morning, we were scheduled to go to a mountain top. It was odd the way the weather went cold up there and the whole atmosphere was misty and foreboding. Like a sepulchre. Whereas down at the terminus it was stifling and the ladies’ mouths much too
garish and the men’s backs raw and inflamed from their daring braces. They were all middle-aged people and though they worked in the same factory and lived in the same town, they boasted to each other about their gardens and their Sunday joints. They were more chummy at night when they were tanked up with beers, and then in the morning everyone was a bit irascible. They didn’t approve of Dr Flaggler because he had brought his own block salt (
He
would be on to glutamate, conversant with it).

The little funicular chugged up between the gorges and the flowering banks. Very small flowers, probably alpine, since we were scaling a bit of the Alps. The higher we got, the chillier it got, and people were rubbing their arms to keep themselves warm, to fend off their depression. It was as if beads of water were being sprinkled through the air, water instead of incense from a censer. Dr Flaggler had a most challenging bout of noseblowing. The courier passed around boiled sweets, to help us with our swallow. I declined. He glared at me. I had kept him waiting in the woods. He called me a whore in the French language. I have picked up one or two foreign words for bandying. The top of the mountain was a plateau and there was the chanting of a cold, piping wind. A very sad madrigal it was. Due to a fog the view was non-existent. We could scarcely distinguish one another. The voices were suddenly subdued and muffled as if people were talking from behind masks or their tombs. Why they brought us up unless it was to introduce us to a sharp change in the weather, to make up for the fact that the
bedrooms were like ovens and there was nowhere to bathe in, not even a pond or an artificial lake. There was constant grumbling and some were preparing to sue when they got back to their own territory. The only surprise was a settlement of shops, various booths, where one could buy souvenirs or lemonade. The women rushed and grabbed things, such as flags or bone paper knives, questioned the prices, then dropped them, incensed. Dr Flaggler hovered. I was choosing a spotted scarf. He said, “Of all the tasteless things you have ever bought, this takes the biscuit.” I wound it round my neck, made a double knot, followed by a nonsensical bow. For some reason I had to get rid of my spending money, which at any rate was nominal.

I had a brainwave. I was in a fog that was vast, a great marquee into which everything and everyone got absorbed. I thought how simple, how elementary, to ditch him up there, to vamoose. No knowing what lay beyond the stalls, the restaurant and the two concrete urinals. I decided to vanish. It was as if I was expected somewhere. Expected? What inhabited up there? No little Red Riding Hood, no ailing grandma, the bear, the hyena, the lone wolf. Not lone – mothers, fathers, insatiable cubs. Did they attack
en
masse,
as a pack, where first? To be eaten alive, to witness it, to hear the self letting out a hideous pierce, a hideous inner “don’t” at each rent, each mouthful, each gollop. Blood seemed to start to glitter on the copse, to infiltrate the mist. Phantoms. Sometimes I stumbled. I would put my hand down through the mist, through the swirls, to test, but I never ventured too low in case
I should disturb or alert something, even a fox dining on a crow. My feet told me that there was rock and low scrub, and each time as I saw the shoe going down, I let out another prayer, another daft invocation. At times I ran and then again I halted. I heard a bell, a wondrous tingalingaling, and knew that my companions, my very own party, were begging me to rejoin them. I changed direction and ran now regardless of scrub, fox or boulder. They were waiting for me all right, some more impatient than others. The courier going Tch tch tch. I was too out of breath to apologise.

“She enjoys her little absconds,” said Dr Flaggler and he mocked at the wear and tear to my shins and my seersucker.

“You never thought it would end in a public conveyance,” he said.

“I never thought …” I said, flatly.

Though there were many more blighted days and nights to follow.

Soon it will be St Valentine's day. I might send a card to the “Duke”, a Love-in-a-mist, or a devil-in-a-bush, a Venus's hair, one of my locks, and adorn it with a snippet about bloomers. He'd like that. Priding himself on being a true wencher and a true trencher. Poor Duke. Called himself thus because his neighbour had a bigger estate, and gave sensational parties.

Met him in a café, wearing a cravat he was, that
he kept knotting and unknotting. Allergic to all shellfish except the oyster. “Call me Bert,” he said. He had a rare command of the French language, and every other word was
“tartalette”
and
“les
modes
manières
” and
“tournedos”,
and how things were in Boulogne. We were in the Drake café down the road, diving into a feed of fish and chips. He was slumming it. I'd seen him before, often. I go on Fridays, my official night out. Their waiter-cum-cashier acted as an intermediary, said, “Guv would like you to have a jar.” All it needed was for my eyelids to be raised and my eyes to give out their baleful looks for matters to be expedited so that his cutlery and his plate were brought and plonked beside mine. The condiments I already had, and a bulbous container for tomato ketchup with a green fibrous nozzle, a likeness to the sprigs of a fresh tomato, God help us. Straight away he asked if I liked things pertaining to the belly. I replied Yes, thinking on how I liked a nice pummel, or a nice massage, or a hot water bottle, I even had a bit of a yen for a Black Mass, which, as I understood it, entailed semen on the belly, a great gout of demons' shampoo. Of course I replied demurely, I said, “Within reason.” He said how he would introduce me to the metaphysic of food, particularly the oyster. Rhapsodised about the shell, its conk-conk, the numerous little fissures, the lustres, the tubbed cavity where the animal rested, the sea smell, the flesh soft as womankind and then he was on about the uvula and the juices sliding down and the epiglottis dropping away nicely at the base of the tonsil. He described how the spawn resembled mere pencil dust and
that the number of ova from one female was variously estimated, that for example Baster calculated it at a hundred thousand, Leuwenhoech put it as high as ten million and that either way the demand still exceeded the supply. I thanked God I wasn't an oyster. He complained about the ridiculous schism between pleasure and nourishment among the Anglo-Saxons, and said we would go to Amsterdam when the tulips were out. He had brought his own wine, a gravelly mead as he said. It was a beautiful subtle green, same as the skins of the white grapes that Dr Flaggler cultivated and that we trod upon in our wine-making sprees. It was a recreation to me, the wine, the company, and all that epicurean guff. Next thing he was on about caprolites – the fossils of hyenas! Scattered he says, like big potatoes, along the shores of that renowned beauty spot Lyme Regis. I caught on, because there was something so unfailingly Cooselike about it, these lumpen and possibly malodorous deposits detracting from the respectableness of Lyme Regis. I might go there one day with my thermos and my ash plant, play a bit of hurley I might, with these phenomena. I had my long wool dress on but no stockings because of reduced circumstances. When he caught sight of my instep, a perished white, he said What pearly pleasures and salivated.

“Strapado ever in use?” he asked.

“Get on with you,” I said, resorting to Coose parlance, a very clever palliative when they get saucy and want to fumble straight away. He was all for drawing my dress up over my snowy thighs and asked if there
were suspenders to snap at. He snapped with his patrician teeth. Suspenders! There was no hose to hitch them to. Yes, he admitted to being a sensualist and said that on his country estate he was breeding a new shade of rhododendron, dunging it day and night – all sorts of dungs – mules, horses, jennets, his prize herd. He intended calling it Sufi after one of his ex-wives. “You must come,” he said, and added that aubergine was his favourite colour, his choice for sheets, towels and bathrobes. Once it had been fuchsia, the original fuchsia fulgens, the kind that invades the hedges of Coose, hangs like trinket, like bell, like blood-bell threatening to resound in the sizzle of August. His list of charities was formidable. In everything he competed with his neighbour, whose house he had to concede was of better proportions. A consignment of spastics came on a certain day, in June each year, when the gardens and the grounds were at their best. It seems he gives them presents, little odds and ends, mittens, smellies and so forth, but always nicely wrapped with coloured paper and ribbons instead of twine. The most uproarious thing of all is their bathing ritual – he insists they take baths in his running stream, stacked in they are, chairs and all, at the foot of his artificial waterfall, the waters splashing all over them. He said they were up to every kind of stunt, every kind of trick. I envisaged being there the following June, sponging their backs or scratching them with long loofahs. I assumed that they undressed for the occasion, got in their birthday suits. I didn't know that relations between us would get kyboshed, like so many others, like all the others. I
wronged him. For some reason that I still cannot fathom he has a porridge pot in his bedroom. Maybe like me he is prey to a supernatural ravenousness at night and has to get up and have a few scoops of porridge, but in his circumstances there is bound to be a little cruet with salt and a jug of cream to hand. He said he came once on a cricket green and for no reason at all except that he was batting well and joking with his favourite first cousin, an underwater biologist. A light sleeper, he always rose with the village cock and was often reminded of the local squire who used to arrange cockfights before breakfast and then start in on a game of backgammon or go racing or ferreting. “Sure you're not catching a chill?” he said, outlining the bone of my knee, pressing, as if his fingers were pincers or sugar tongs. But dissertating about the daffodils, if you please, how they would be two and a half weeks late this year because of the snow, the beastly snow. The heavy falls of it seem to be over but it still snows in dribs and drabs and after I waken from a slumber I often think it's petals on the flowerbeds, a few forlorn ones, but still the precursor of spring. The flowerbeds here are all heartshaped. Out on the common, in the untrammelled places there are still lodges of snow, yellow and turgid, waiting to be shovelled away, or to be rained upon, or to be melted by sun. The sun does appear, very low and imperious, a red-gold globe of it, for all to see in the late afternoon. The only bit of warmth there is, because everything else is spectral, the faces, winter faces in balaclavas and dark garb.

We started a courtship, the Duke and I, meeting for lunches, and in the afternoon going home for abominations in his parlour, tea out of a moustache mug, the blinds drawn, the light latticed, suspenders for his titillation, babble talk, him saying “Mary, Mary, quite contrary” and “Out of me way or I'll smack your arse.” A pair of debauchees, sans shame, sans expertise, comparing what the different flowers symbolised. “I call her the red lily lo”, or “My carnation, my Maisie's fascination”, and then him saying that it was all a bit muchkin, and me turning into the little Widow Fusby at whose gusset he tugged. Not out of the book of Ballymote that. He is foreign on his mother's side, Caucasian, which is why we had raspberry tea and vodka out of a little silver quoich. A lot more nature to him than most of the people I've met, asking how was my anaemia, giving me little treats, pippins, and even one of his china finger-bowls because I admired the bossing. Now he has only eleven in the set. Oftener than not he got the chauffeur to take me home and as we approached here I used to duck down because I felt so incongruous in it. A Bentley is not my habitat, somehow I look better with a cart, drawing it by the thills. It was all proceeding very nicely, the elegant lunches, the little pinnies from his nanny's days that I donned, crystallised violets, the ritual, he would say, “Close your eyes, open your mouth, and see what Uncle Bert will give you.” Simpleton but nice. Then it got banjaxed, at a supper party to which he brought me. Very lahdidah. All “Darling, darling” and “How could you be out of our lives for so long?” and “Isn't it wonderful that
nobody's ill and nobody's abroad.” A telegram from some Godchildren in the Isle of Man – “We hope you enjoy the smoked salmon.” There was a chaise for the coats and a locked wardrobe for the fur coats. The hostess had little leaves in her hair, silver leaves, caught on the ends of grips. She had just received a beautiful collection of shells from Australia, multicoloured, with various stains on them, so that you could see that they had just been vacated by some creature, see traces of the life that had been theirs. These stains overlapped and it would be hard to confine them to a colour, so intermingled were they. I wanted to pinch one and keep it as a talisman along with the crucifix I have, and the heart-shaped stone washed ashore by the North Sea.

He was very careful to introduce me to everyone and I could see the ladies sizing me up, wondering whether I toiled and spinned or was kept in some
pied-à-terre.
I was very groomed. One woman was wearing a fortune, third of a priceless necklace. The other two-thirds had been snipped off and given to each of her sisters. It had been made into a pretty carcanet with fake gems to fill up the remainder of the choker and it was impossible to tell which were real. She used it as a gambit for men to draw near and conjecture and have to touch her pale throat. Then she became haughty. People were commiserating with the hostess because her pet, her singing canary, had got chewed to death that day when her butler, Louis, had left the door of the cage open and the cat got in. There was going to be a funeral and burial in the garden.
Just as she succumbed to tears she would embrace some new person and say, “Isn't it wonderful that nobody's ill and nobody's abroad and everyone's here.” The butler was nicely and it was funny to see him pouring champagne, his strategy, waiting while it almsot brimmed over, in order to pour more, comprehending the monstrous and petty greed of each imbiber, including me. I think he had my measure all right.

The tables were laid for four, circular tables with cloths of tulle and stout candles in black sconces. They were angled in all directions so that no matter where you looked you saw the flame veer, and then under each set of sconces was a pan for the drips, filled with some essence, so that immediately there was a rare smell, a smell of musk, or maybe civet. The plates were differently arabesqued and the Duke and I went around choosing our favourites. Sometimes he would make a pretence of putting one in his pocket. They were Chinese and even the white part was like the whites of babies' eyes, permeated with a light blue. When touched with a fork or his champagne whizzle, they made an eerie tinkle and the sound filtered into the other room where the talk was cretiny itself.

“No wonder my paediatrician looked at me aghast.”

“Edward won't have his rare.”

“You should see him, he looks like a ‘Special Branch' man …”

One of the men I was placed next to made love to his mistress in a bath, in Kensington, one night in 1965. Subsequently she vanished and he heard that
she married somebody in the Royal Navy. He said a bath was
the
place. I didn't challenge it. He kept saying, “Don't forget this was in the sixties before things got permissive.” All of a sudden everyone was clapping, some gent, head of a sanitary company, had gone to sleep but everyone knew that the moment his fork fell on to his plate he would wake up. He was cat-napping, a thing he learnt in Korea during the war. His wife was congratulated as much as he. She was called Georgina. She was wearing a nylon stocking around her neck and took a little pill between the first and the second courses. The second course was smoked salmon stuffed with caviar.

It was impossible to relish the food because of the struggle with conversation and anyhow the plates were soon swept away to make way for the series of courses. Individual soufflés were passed around and everyone cheered. On one side of me was the bath fiend and on the other a very officious man. He kept insisting upon how well everything was served, drew attention to the lilies, the crests on the cutlery, the goblets. Then in brimful tones he told me about an evening in Poland in somebody's flat, eating cold ham and dill pickle while the whole household wept. Then there was a dissertation about striptease in Hamburg, knickers or maybe it was knicker-bockers, and the feats of animals and men. Now and then the Duke, who was next to the hostess, would raise his chin and purse his lips at me. It did not go unnoticed.

I watched their mouths, I watched their tongues, like tentacles, I watched their jaws, I could visualise my
own. I had no business being there. The other lady at the table was sharp-bosomed and evenly tanned and she kept aiming her cleavage at the men like she was holding a motto to them. She vied with me for their attention, and the way it was I didn't want to be intruded upon at all. I would have loved it if most of them scarpered and there were only a select few at different tables, the courses very slowly presided over, everything ordained, music, and then upon the arrival of the desserts, the warm crêpes and the cold chantillies, some singer or some harper to come and transport us until dawn, until the extinguishment of all the candles, until we were carriaged home drowsy, but glad.

A Highlander asked me out on the balcony. Said he was suffering from his post-prandial lust. A young fellow, face a bit pitted, wearing his clan's kilt. He asked what I did. I said I was a lady of leisure which tickled his fancy. We were confronting a piece of very suggestive statuary which was artfully lit and to which he was drawing my attention. “You're a wee baster,” he said, the oaf.

“Let's slip away to a night club,” he said.

“Now, now, me wee lecher, no lady snatching,” said the Duke, and they had a bit of friendly wrangling about the Highlander's seat to which he lured innocent girls and fed them bees-wax and haggis. The moment we were alone the Duke kissed me, and whispered in my ear about the Widow Fusby, my garters, my hourglass waist – a thing I do not have. He said everyone thought I was adorable, especially Helen, talked about my charisma.