The Silver Swan (28 page)

 

Yes, this place Leslie had brought her to was a different place, a place she had not known existed, and yet somehow it felt not at all strange to her. It was like a place she had been to in childhood and had forgotten about and then had come back to suddenly, unexpectedly. What she felt when she thought of Leslie was the same feeling
that she would have when they played games of blind man's buff at home at Christmastime. It was a mixture of giddy anticipation and gleeful terror, and it made her skin tingle and her throat go thick. Or maybe it was a feeling she had known even further back, when she was a baby, yes, that was it, with Leslie she was a baby again, a babe in arms. She had tried to explain this to him one day but of course he had only laughed at her, and said sure, she was a babe, all right, his babe, and he had pinched her breast so hard with the long, pearly nails of a finger and thumb that it had made her gasp.

 

It was strange, too, that she was not jealous of the woman in the fox fur, the woman she had seen Leslie meeting in the bookshop on the bridge, the one showing herself off so brazenly in the photo. When she asked Leslie about her he had given that smiling shrug of his and said that of course he had fucked her—the word made the blood rush to her cheeks—and then picked up the other photographs and splayed them under her nose like a hand of cards and grinned in that cold-eyed way that he did sometimes when he wanted to hurt her and said, "Fucked them all, didn't I." She did not know whether to believe him or not, but it did not matter, she did not care if he was telling the truth or lying just to tease her. No, she did not care; she was not jealous. Where she was now, the old rules did not apply. It was all right if Leslie had slept with Foxy—that was the nickname she had invented for Mrs. T., since Leslie still refused to tell her the woman's real name—and even if he had slept with every one of those women in the photos, that was all right, too. Somehow, they did not matter, they were like the people in the fantasies she wrote out for him, not real at all. Leslie, for his part, said he did not mind if she went with other men. In fact, he wanted her to find people to sleep with, men, women, anyone, so long as she would tell him about it afterwards. On that one thing she was adamant, though: she would never go with anyone but him.

 

"Oh, yes," he said, "and what about old Billy Boy?"

 

That, she had discovered, was Leslie's one big weakness: she might not be jealous of his women, but he was certainly jealous of
Billy. The thought of her husband so much as touching her made him furious. She had to pretend to him, had to swear to him, that she would not let Billy near her, ever again. It was hard to convince him. When he had first demanded that she promise it she had asked, offhandedly, almost laughing, just how she was supposed to fend Billy off, for he was a strapping fellow and insisted on his conjugal rights. Leslie had given her a frightening look then, his head at an angle and his eyes seeming to draw even closer together, and had said nothing; only when, a little later, they were in bed together, he had twisted her arm up behind her back until she thought it might break, and had breathed into her ear the one word,
"Remember."

 

Yet he could be gentle, too, and even kind sometimes. She hated her hands, they had never been anything but square and blunt, but now they were all sinewy, the veins in the backs of them almost like ropes, a masseuse's hands, yet Leslie always said they were lovely, and twined his slender, pale fingers in her sausagey ones and lifted them to his lips and kissed the tips of them, one by one, smiling at her with his eyes.

 

He brought things for her to take when they were in bed together, pills, and drops of odd-tasting oily stuff out of little glass bottles. There was a powder that he mixed into sugar and coaxed her to eat, which just gave her an itch and made her feel bilious, and which only afterwards he told her was Spanish fly. Then one afternoon he produced a velvet-lined box with a hypodermic syringe in it, and a handful of ampoules of liquid clear as water, and offered her a "toot," as he called it. She drew the line at that. "It's good for you," he said, in that crooning way that he had when he was trying to get round her. "It's made from poppies. It's like a health food." Oh, no, she said, oh, no you don't. She had not worked in a chemist's shop all those years without being able to recognize dope when she saw it. He said she did not know what she was missing. All the same, when he had rolled up his sleeve to give himself the injection she noticed that he turned away from her and held his arm pressed in close against his side—how naked it was, suddenly, that arm, how naked and white—and
she was reminded of a cat doing its business and trying not to be seen. Yet how beautiful he looked there, too, sitting half turned away from her on the bed with his leg bent in front of him and one foot on the floor, the overcast day's pale, dry light from the window falling across the side of his face, with its long, sharp jaw and sharply pointed chin. When the stuff had taken its effect he lay down on his side on the bed, and she lay down too and put her arms around him, and so they remained for a long time, so peaceful, he with a hand under his cheek, gazing up at the window, and she looking into his face, which seemed, with the window light still on it, to be made of silver, a different silver to his hair, and so like the face of a saint, a martyred saint, in an old painting. He slept for a while, breathing like a baby, and when he woke up they made love, and he was so dreamily tender that she almost cried in his arms. "Next time," he murmured into her hair, in a slowed-down, underwater voice, shivering a little, "next time you'll have to try a toot of joy juice."

 

She supposed she should not have let him come to the house. She supposed that was the worst thing she could have done to Billy, or would have been if he knew about it, which God forbid. Billy was away in Switzerland, hobnobbing with the swanks, and maybe it was out of resentment—before they were married he had been full of promises about taking her with him to Geneva, but he never had—that she said yes when Leslie asked if he could "pop out" to Clontarf and see her. He was just itching to get into the house and have a look, of course, that was all; she knew that. She let him in from the laneway at the back, afraid some busybody on the street would spot him. She was determined to get him out again double-quick, for already she was having cold feet, but no sooner was he in the back door than he swept her into his arms and kissed her on the mouth so hard and deep that she forgot about the danger and the hurt she could be causing Billy.

 

Leslie walked all round the house, with his hands in his pockets and bouncing on his tiptoes—he had a way of walking that reminded her of a tennis player—smiling delightedly and saying how fascinating
everything was, the wedding photos on the sideboard, the silver-plated tea service her Ma and Da had given her, Billy's salesmanship diploma in a gilt frame, and the Sacred Heart lamp and the reproduction of the
Monarch of the Glen
over the fireplace. She trailed behind him in silence. Instead of being pleased that he liked the place—
her
place, since Billy had no interest in it except as somewhere to eat and sleep and slump in an armchair on a Sunday afternoon listening to the football matches on the wireless—she felt a growing sense of doubt, of misgiving. The things after Leslie had looked at them seemed changed, dimmed, somehow, as if he had breathed on them and left them covered with a fine, gray mist that, unlike real mist, did not fade. But then he made her take him upstairs, into the bedroom, hers and Billy's, and took off her clothes in that slow, dreamy way that nearly drove her mad with desire for him, and they lay down on the bed, and she lost consciousness of everything except his lips, and his hands on her, and his pale, cool, glimmering skin pressing against hers.

 

Afterwards, of course, he had to have a
toot
, and she warned him not to forget to take all that stuff away with him, the needle and the empty vial and the cotton wool and the little bottle of alcohol he was so careful to swab his arm with before injecting himself. Those would be nice things for Billy to happen on when he came home.

 

That was the evening that she told him about the time in Dr. Kreutz's office when she had drunk the herbal tea and passed out. She had said to Leslie, while she was getting dressed, that she supposed he had got that stuff, the Spanish fly and the dope and so on, from the Doctor—nothing anymore would surprise her about the man she used to think so highly of—and then she heard herself blurting out about how she had woken up on the sofa that day feeling as if she had been hit over the head. No sooner had she spoken than she regretted it. Suddenly, for the first time, it was clear to her what had happened, what she had known without knowing had happened, and her heart froze. So that was the reason her clothes had felt as if they were on back to front. Why, the dirty old . . . Even though he was half doped
Leslie had been listening, and had heard even more than she had said, for Leslie had an ear for such things. He was still in the bed, lying on his back with the sheet pulled up to his chin, like a patient after an operation; it gave her a shiver to see his head where she was so accustomed to seeing Billy's. He swiveled his eyes until the big pupils of them were focused on her, and waited, and of course she had to go on then, though she tried to make light of it. "There must have been something in the tea," she said, with a little laugh that sounded even to her a bit hysterical. She sat down on the bed to fasten her suspenders, her fingers nervously fumbling with the clips. "I suppose it was something relaxing that he gives his clients. I must say, I did have a good sleep." Leslie made no comment, only went on watching her, and then, slowly, he smiled. She knew that smile. It frightened her, though she tried not to show it. "Right, mister," she said, smacking her hands on her thighs and rising smartly to her feet, "you better be off." He made no move to get up, though, only turned his face away and sighed. His long, thin white feet were sticking out from under the sheet.

 

Again she had the icy sensation in her chest. If Kreutz had knocked her out to take pictures of her, what was he going to do with them?

 

She found out soon enough. When the morning post was delivered at the salon a couple of days later and she saw the big brown envelope, with the square handwriting on it that looked so innocent, somehow she knew straightaway what would be in it. She had a client on the table—she was getting to be good, really professional, at massage, even though she had no training and had only read it up in a book—but she had to stop immediately and wipe the oil off her hands and open the envelope, though it was addressed to Leslie. When she saw the photograph the blood seemed to drain straight down out of her brain and she almost fainted. She must have caught her breath out loud, for the client, a crotchety, fat old bitch with asthma, lifted herself up on her elbows with her eyes out on stalks to try to see what the picture was of. She turned away and hurried into the cubbyhole behind the curtain and sat down at the desk there and made herself take three or four deep breaths. She had thrust the photo back into
the envelope—was it really her?—and though she tried to she could not bring herself to look at it again. She had gone white first, but now she could feel herself turn bright red with shame. How could he, the dirty brute! It was as if a bucket of slops had been flung into her face. Even the things her Da used to do to her when she was little seemed not as bad to her now as the way Kreutz had betrayed her.
How could he?

 

Leslie only laughed, of course, and held the photo at arm's length and pretended to study it as if it was an old-master painting or something, shutting one eye and tilting his head first to one side and then the other. "He definitely has a flair, old Kreutzer," he said. "He should take it up professionally." He grinned. "Photography, I mean." They were in the room in Percy Place, and he was lying on his back on the bed with his jacket still on and one leg flexed and a skinny ankle propped on a knee. There was a summer storm, and the wind was blowing rain in sheets diagonally across the light from the street-lamps. She had bought cheese and a Vienna roll and a bottle of Liebfraumilch for their supper. Leslie was still chuckling. She said it was not funny, and asked if there was nothing he would not laugh at. Could he not understand how ashamed it made her, to see herself like that, with her dress up round her and her legs all over the place and every bit of her on show? "He's made you look quite the doll, I think," Leslie said. "Quite the pinup."

 

She said she did not look anything of the kind, and that it was only what it was, a dirty picture.

 

"Oh, I don't know," he said slyly. "I'm sure I could find some connoisseur who'd pay a pretty penny for a framed copy of this."

 

"Don't you even think about it, Leslie White," she cried.

 

She knew he was joking about selling it, but even so the very idea made her go hot all over. When she was handing him his glass of wine she could not help glimpsing the photo again, where he was holding it up to the light to study it, and she shivered. Strangely, the worst part of it for her, though she did not say so, was the fact that in the photos her eyes were shut. It made her look like a corpse.

 

"What was it he gave you, I wonder," Leslie said. "Must have been
something pretty good, for you to stay knocked out while he was setting up this little scene." He threw her an impish look, the sharp little tip of his tongue showing. "You're sure you weren't just pretending?"

 

She did not deign to answer him. The whole thing was disgusting, and yet somewhere inside her, deep, deep down inside her, a small flame flared at the thought of herself sprawled unconscious there on that sofa, on the red blanket, and Kreutz, with the camera round his neck, leaning over her and pulling up her dress and taking off her knickers and parting her knees . . . Leslie was watching her. He always knew what was going on in her mind. He laid the photograph flat on his chest and reached out a hand to her. "Come here," he said softly. She wanted to say no, that she was too upset, that she felt dirty and ashamed. But in the end, of course, she could not resist him. As he undid the buttons of her dress he hummed under his breath, as he always did, as if she were a job of work he was about to get busy on.