Thorn (24 page)

Sexual.

The thought of Dan Tudor surfaced again, and with it all the memories, some of them good, some of them outstanding, every one of them linked to Edmund.

I
t had never been possible to find Edmund's exact replica, of course; Thalia had known that, and she had never tried.

He had been the most beautiful child. Even Royston had said this once, and the aunts had always made a great fuss over him and said, oh,
what
a lovely boy, and wouldn't his poor dear father have been proud? It was only natural that Edmund should like being the centre of attention; it was kind of him to let the aunts fuss over him. The aunts enjoyed fussing and it did not hurt anyone.

It had been much later that Royston had turned against Edmund, saying the boy was lazy and selfish and a parasite and that if he carried on like this there might not be a place for him in Ingram's. This was spite and jealousy on Royston's part, and in the early years it could be disregarded. It was only when Royston began trying to persuade the rest of the family to his side that it became dangerous and it was then that the schemes and the plans for making Royston and the rest pay for their treachery began to uncoil in Thalia's brain.

And Edmund was not lazy or selfish; it was just that different rules applied to him. You did not apply the rules of a carthorse to a thoroughbred. Edmund was at odds with the harsh, jarring twentieth century; he would have been more at home in an earlier age, one of the golden Renaissance ages, a time of music and poetry and love, because he had been filled with all those things. But it was no good expecting Royston and Eloise or the aunts to understand any of this.

Thalia's discovery that there existed in the world a few young men (and one or two girls) who possessed a spark of Edmund's own golden quality happened without warning, shortly before his fifteenth birthday. He had changed by then, of course, and he had grown up. The golden-haired seraph had grown into a wand-slim young boy; a mischievous Apollo, with secrets in his eyes. He was charming and irresistible and it was small wonder that annoyed or embarrassed fathers – once or twice mothers – came to the house to complain. Trying out his wings, Thalia had said. Acting like a dirty little pervert, rejoined Royston. The aunts had twittered anxiously, because fourteen was surely
far
too young for, well, for that kind of thing. Elspeth's husband George said severely that he himself had been a
great
deal older than Edmund before embarking on his first physical relationship with a girl, and added that he wouldn't have dreamed of attempting anything of the kind with Elspeth until after they were married. ‘
Well
after,' said Elspeth.

‘It isn't just that,' said Royston curtly, and called George into the small study at Hampstead. They were closeted together for a very long time, and Elspeth said afterwards that George had emerged shocked to his toes but had refused to tell what had been said.

The trouble was that none of them had understood that Edmund would want to experience all the pleasures available to him and that those silly girls had been utterly bewitched. It was unfair and unkind of Royston and George to say that Edmund was behaving like a pervert. Even Juliette once remarked that Edmund was precociously immoral and acted like some half-fledged Arabian princeling, draped on a silken divan and disdainfully inspecting females as if they were a new consignment of Circassian slaves brought for his consideration. There was nothing callow or half-fledged about Edmund, and anyway Juliette was the last person to talk about immorality.

It had been the oddest of coincidences that after the first of these episodes Thalia should begin seeing similarities in one or two of the young men who came her way through her charity work, but so it was.

The work itself was tedious beyond words – Thalia had got into it without realising how boring it would be – but once involved it was difficult to get out. The first time she saw this pallid likeness to Edmund was shortly after the first of the incidents with the bewitched girls, and the similarity struck her with such force that for a moment it blotted out everything else.

She had tried to dismiss it; it was surely only the bloom of youth, or a likeness of colouring and type. But it would not be dismissed. The young man was helping with a student counselling service that some boring Hampstead women's group were setting up, and Thalia had been asked to help as well. He was reading psychology at London University and he had what people called a social conscience. Helping with the new group was part of what he said was field work. Edmund had been away at school then, and the days were occasionally empty and there had been a fierce satisfaction in seducing the student. Seeing the spill of golden hair on her pillow, feeling the firm, supple thighs and strong jutting manhood had brought such violent satisfaction that Thalia had begun to look for others: strong, attractive young men who possessed bright, darting reflections of Edmund. It was astonishing how many there were. It might only be colouring or the slant of a cheekbone or the curving smile. Or it might be a shard of intelligence, or an interest in the things that interested Edmund. They were all golden and special, of course – Thalia was not going to associate with monosyllabic yobs.

The gratifying thing was that when she beckoned to them, they came to her bed without hesitation. They were not monosyllabic, although occasionally they were genuinely inarticulate. Once or twice she miscalculated and they turned out to be impotent and therefore had to be discarded. But the strong, virile ones, the ones who had been made in Edmund's likeness, could be used several times over. After Edmund died it became even more necessary to continue the search.

Dan Tudor was the exception. He had not been made in Edmund's likeness at all but there was the sharp, bright mind that Edmund would have developed if he had lived; the impression that he would not suffer fools gladly, too slight to be called arrogance but too definite to be missed.

And Dan was neither inarticulate nor important.

Yes, it would be a pity to let Dan get away.

Dan had gone back to Sleeping Beauty's origins, back beyond the Grimm brothers' emasculated version, beyond the nineteenth-century Covent Garden actor-managers with their pantomimic extravaganzas, and certainly back beyond Disney and the film-makers, to the story's core.

He had begun with Charles Perrault's startling tale, and had found it so very much grislier than he had realised that his imagination had been fired and he had worked backwards to uncover other sources. There was an Italian writer called Giambattista Basile who had published an even earlier version than Perrault's, around 1636. Dan half-bullied, half-coaxed his local library into tracking down a translation, promising any number of author's acknowledgements and credits by way of reward. It occurred to him as well that Perrault and Basile and one or two others might provide good subjects for biographies sometime, and he jotted a few notes down. When he finally got Basile's translation, he was so pleased that, without thinking, he took it to bed to read that night, only to discover that it was so strong and so macabre it would probably give him a fresh batch of nightmares to put alongside the ones already engendered by Oliver's material on Victorian madhouses. Dan had to get up and check that all the doors in the flat were locked before he could read any more of Signor Basile.

Perrault and Basile both presented the villainess not as the cross fairy godmother who had sulked at not being invited to the christening and thrown out a bad-tempered curse as a result but as a fierce, blood-guzzling, child-eating creature who, in Perrault's picturesque prose, ‘had come of a race of
Ogres,
and that it was whispered about the court that she had
Ogreish
inclinations, and when she saw little children passing by, she had all the difficulty in the world to refrain from falling upon them . . .'

Monsieur Perrault, clearly anxious that none of the horror should be lost on his readers, added a rider which further informed his audiences: ‘Now an Ogre is a giant that has long teeth and claws, and with a raw head and bloody bones, that runs away with naughty little boys and girls and eats them up . . .' Which was all a very long way indeed from Tchaikovsky and Walt Disney.

Basile portrayed the villainess as the prince's mother, but Perrault portrayed her as the prince's wife. Adultery as opposed to mother-in-law problems, then. There was a black irony in regarding the fairy princess as the prince's bit on the side, but whichever way you viewed it, the prince had not been nearly as eligible as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and certainly Walt Disney, had made him out. As for the ogreish lady herself, Dan felt a cold prickle on the back of his neck at the resemblance to Margot. He felt a clutch of fear in his stomach at the resemblance between Margot and Thalia Caudle.

He burrowed deeper in, finding echoes in the unlikeliest of places, like a bloody thread running through scores of gentle romances. Yes, there was unquestionably material for a half-scholarly, half-entertaining non-fiction book here. Dan carefully noted source references as he went.

The legend surfaced in English lore as well as French and Neapolitan; Dan thought it was even possible that Shakespeare had tipped his Elizabethan bonnet to it in the writing of
Titus Andronicus.
There were resonances in Norse legends as well, most notably in the
Volsunga Saga
where Brynhild was placed in a deserted castle by Odin and surrounded by a massive barrier of flame in order to escape the curse of being mated to a coward, and a human coward to boot. Dan supposed that this was something any self-respecting immortal might go a long way to avoid.

But it was amazing how strongly the menace of the prince's mamma came across.

It was amazing how strongly the sensuality came across when Dan heard Thalia's voice on the phone. There was a purring resonance, and there was certainly no hint of the strange and arousing ferocity of last time.

The supper invitation was proffered with a kind of amused cap-doffing to the conventions. I'm really inviting you to bed again, Thalia Caudle was saying. I know it, and you know it. But it's polite to pretend for a while, isn't it?

Dan thought he could be forgiven for feeling a quickening of his heartbeat as he went up the stairs of the Great Portland Street block. Well, all right, it was more than just a quickening, and it was not his heart that was most affected either. But, for heaven's sake, he was surely allowed a scudding of lust-ridden apprehension. Of apprehension-ridden lust.

Thalia, on the phone, had said something about leaving the door on the latch for him – ‘Just push it open and come inside' – and it was ridiculous in the extreme to hear the dark echo:
Lift the latch and step inside, my dear
. . . But Dan did hear it, and the scales tipped over to apprehension because this was surely the timeless invitation by all dark ladies of chill and hungry intent, and by all icy-hearted snow queens of sorcerous lineage.
Come inside, my dear
. . . But here I go again anyway. Straight into the land of the greenwood shade where sinisterly beautiful sorceresses offer the poisoned chalice and the tainted apple. You'd think I'd know better.

But Margot and Thalia were still inextricably tangled in his mind, and Margot, his own dark, sensuous Margot, had slid under his skin and fastened her claws, if not about his heart then around his loins. He disliked and distrusted Margot, but he could not deny her sensual pull. And it had been almost impossible to forget the feeling that Margot's phantom had come into the bed with them that night, raking her nails across his skin, sliding her hands between his legs . . . As Dan went warily into the flat, he thought that Margot was at his side. Down into the greenwood shade together then.

Thalia was lying on the smooth-sheeted bed, only her bare shoulders and arms visible. There was candlelight again, just as there had been last time, only tonight there were dozens upon dozens of tiny glowing flames, reflecting over and over in the mirrors. There was a strong scent of expensive perfume and candle warmth, and Dan could almost hear the heady, sensuous thrumming of the air.

Thalia said softly, ‘The wine is in the cooler over there, Dan. Will you pour us both a glass?'

So it was not only the greenwood shade, it was the poisoned chalice as well. But she does it with style, thought Dan, pausing transfixed in the doorway. You have to admit she does it with tremendous style.

‘And when you've poured the wine, come to bed, Dan,' said Thalia.

For the second time Dan fell fathoms down into the surreal world of his own creating.

There was virtually no conversation after that soft invitation; it was as if Thalia had created a flame-lit cave, a glowing secret world for them both; a land singing with sexual stirrings and erotic rustlings. To have made polite small talk would have splintered the atmosphere. Never let it be said I killed an atmosphere, thought Dan, shedding his clothes at speed and turning back the sheets.

This time it started off by being easier, and by being very nearly companionable because they were a little more familiar with one another's bodies. Dan was managing to keep Margot at bay, and Thalia's hands were insistent and exciting, her fingers flicking at nerve endings, her tongue probing. She pushed him flat on the bed, and bent over him. Dan drew in his breath sharply as he felt the silken brush of her hair between his thighs. Her lips closed over him, working expertly, and for a time that could have been five minutes or five hours he was totally lost in voluptuous eroticism.

Without warning, something began to seep into the warm sensuous room; something jarring and faintly disturbing. It reached Dan through a warm sea of pure pleasure and rasped lightly on his mind. Something to do with Thalia? Was she about to suggest something outrageous? Something that would probably be erotic but that might verge on the perverted? Wild visions of throbbing sex toys –the empty wine bottle, even? – of animals introduced into the bedroom or whips and chains and near-strangulation to heighten orgasm spun through his mind. He had absolutely no idea how he would react if any of these were proposed.