Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  “Then what happened?”

  “Oh, Dad played golf with Lyndhurst senior and discovered that none of the stories were true. All hell broke loose; naturally, I was forbidden to see him again. I went on being friends with him at school — they couldn’t control that — but their attitude to Lyndhurst really slammed down the guillotine on any possibility of my having a decent relationship with my parents.”

  “Where is Lyndhurst now? Are you still friends?”

  “He was killed. In a pot-holing accident a year later,” said Ty shortly. “Trapped down in a black hole hundreds of yards underground. He was there for two days and drowned by a flash flood before they could get him out. Mother said it was God’s judgment on him.”

  “How horrible.”

  “I have nightmares, sometimes, about his death. If I let out a yell in the night, you might kindly wake me.”

  “Well, of course,” I said, wrung with pity and the inability to convey it.

  I was beginning now to understand the reasons for Ty’s urgent interest in and contributions to the arts — his publishing company, his dealings with television, even the new Greek village caper in Dorset, which I privately thought rather silly. Wholly uncreative himself — I had already found that out — locked in a prison constructed by his parents, he could only participate at one remove. It was a riposte against Dad and Mother — the generous donations to such useless activities as dancing, painting, music.

  Was that the basis of my attraction for him, I wondered — my bits of random facility, the fact that I felt free to sing, to act and model, to paint and make patchwork quilts? — I found such an idea rather depressing. To be somebody’s vicarious bit of God, to be appropriated as a share in the mystery and productiveness of the universe — no, no, this is not what I want at all.

  Well, then, why do I want to be loved? Not for wit, looks, charm, intellect or cookery, which moth and rust can corrupt and custom stale — I want to suit somebody and fit them like an old glove, endeared through decades of habit.

  You may say — and rightly — that this should all have been thought through before I married Ty. So it should. Our lives are lived much too fast. Don’t you get this feeling? That we are all so close to the edge, the final brink of nevermore, that taking time for deliberation seems a waste of the few precious moments yet remaining? Better have some experience before Lights Out.

  “But what,” I said, harking back with probably irritating persistence — still, I really did want to know — “what has all this got to do with your not wanting me to call you Jas?”

  So then, by degrees, I got the rest of the story. It came out so rustily, I wondered if he had ever told it to anybody before.

  His parents always addressed him as Jim, which he hated. It seemed, he said, a typical example of their parsimony — the shortest, meanest possible version of his name, chosen not from fondness as a pet name but for economy’s sake. One of the most boring names in the English language, he said, suitable only for trade union officials or slaves on Mississippi plantations. — So he had rechristened himself Jas. Jas, in his imagination, was the astute one, the clever one, the one who had the adventures and thought of the witty answers; while Jim was indoors cleaning the shoes and getting ten verses of Chronicles by heart, carefree Jas was out climbing cliffs and swimming in wild waters; while Jim cut the grass with a Liar placard across his shoulders, Jas would be freewheeling over the island of Jersey on his bicycle, accosting girls with a tongue full of blarney, going into pubs and making all kinds of amazing friends. While Jim silently, sullenly obeyed orders, Jas created mayhem and havoc, twitched the tablecloth off the table scattering roast beef and yorkshire pud on the carpet, told his parents where they got off, and administered a dose of arsenic to his mother’s hideous asthmatic pug-dogs Ming and Chang.

  Naturally he never did any of those things. At home he submitted to the name of Jim, at school he was Tybold. It was like shifting from one cage to another, he said, each of them the sort in which you can neither sit, stand, nor lie down.

  After school, then what? He had gone to accountancy college again dutifully submitting to parental decision. “And as a matter of fact,” he said, “though I loathed it, I’m bound to say that it came in extremely useful. I learned how to organize, how to look round the financial scene and see which bits are bright and which are dark. It’s rather like studying a painting — a painting which is continually changing. No, I don’t regret that accounts course.”

  “Where did you take it?”

  “Manchester. Father’s forebears had come from the North — my great-grandfather was a weaver, brought up in a weaver’s cottage with nine siblings; he became an itinerant preacher . . . Dad thought it would be good for me to return to those parts — from which he had skived off to more comfortable quarters. So to Manchester I went. At least it was a long way from Jersey.”

  The other students at the business college had been a mixed lot — different ages, different backgrounds — again, much more interesting than the boys at his mediocre public school. Two of them — Ponsonby a law student and Mirthes, his accountant — had remained close associates ever since.

  “Meanwhile what about Jas and Jim? Were they still coexisting inside you?”

  “Oh yes. But Jas seldom saw the light of day. Money was still scanty — I was kept on a niggardly allowance and even that was reduced if my results didn’t give satisfaction — I lived with an aunt and uncle, vegetarian 7th Day Adventists, on a diet of lentils and carrots and bread and marge, which is not conducive to escapades.”

  I made a mental note to keep those items out of any cookery I might be called upon to do in future.

  But would I, in fact, be called on to cook? Or would I merely preside as a gracious hostess at meals conjured out of Harrods and Fortnums by Parkson, or tossed up by catering firms? Sometimes my lack of briefing about our future existence gave me a numb ache at the pit of my stomach. Sometimes the accustomed stabbing pain in my chest aggravated to such a degree that I thought how ironic it would be if the first post-marital collation organized by Parkson were to be my funeral baked meats.

  Ty went on telling me about life as Jas and Jim.

  On the eve of his final examination at business school, he said, came the news of his parents’ simultaneous deaths while holiday driving in the Italian alps.

  “Father was a horrible driver — timid but blustering; he had probably exasperated some Italian by always nudging into the middle of the road when the guy tried to overtake, and when he finally pulled out it was fatally too late, and three cars went over the edge of a mountain road.”

  “How did the news affect you?”

  “I went on and did my exams. Did well, too! Then the lid shot off. I felt ecstatically, unbelievably released. I hadn’t been seeing them much — they were living in Malta by that time — but just their presence in the world — my world — was like a swarm of locusts on the horizon coming my way — it’s impossible to give you any notion of their devastating power to deplete and damage. Dad’s mean suspicions, his vile attribution of the lowest possible motive to everybody — even the Queen — for every act — and Mother’s thin-lipped, utterly humourless conviction that God was sitting up on the picture-rail counting every lump of sugar one dropped in one’s tea-cup — to be rid of that gave me a euphoric feeling of freedom and joy. I’d never, for instance, been able to have sex with anybody before without terrible incapacitations of guilt — Mother would tramp into my mind at the most inopportune moments, there was absolutely nothing Jas could do about that —”

  “A sort of female Holy Ghost?”

  “More like all three Eumenides rolled into one.”

  Not only, after the death of his parents, was Ty liberated morally and mentally, but, he was also dumbfounded to discover, in worldly terms he was now extremely rich. His father had left him over eight hundred thousand. “And before inf
lation, too, when the pound was worth something.”

  “You had never guessed he was so well off?”

  “Hadn’t a notion. How could I? His lifestyle never suggested it. In Jersey he drove a rusty old Morris Minor. Mother had a woman in once a week and did the rest of the work herself. I cleaned the boots and cut the grass. They never ate out — except tea — or went to the theatre. Golf was Dad’s one indulgence — and that only so that he could make useful acquaintances. I don’t think he enjoyed it.”

  I couldn’t help thinking about Masha, how she adored life. Even when Edred was at his gloomiest, sunk almost totally into a swamp of himself and God, floating slowly round the bend into that frozen tundra of Outer Space where he ended up — even then, Masha found endless delight in shapes, colours, sunshine, birdsong. Thrift, she loved, turning a handful of gloomy leftover food — two cold wizened baked potatoes, a hunk of mouldy cheese, a soggy tomato, a cupful of sour milk — into a tasty and inviting dish; scents of leaves and flowers she loved. Looking at things, household objects, and thinking how they would fit into a picture, she loved. She used to exasperate Edred by pointing out beauties to him: “Do look at those geese flying over, Edred, look at the reflections in that puddle!” “Yes, yes,” he would say crossly, trudging on without turning his head. Looking at pictures themselves she adored — those postcards all over the house. Doing jobs properly, she loved. Her standards were high. She was, in fact, fairly hard to help in small ways about the house, unless you realized this. “Thank you, that’s lovely,” she would say, absently, or with what seemed genuine appreciation of your intention, if not performance. She never criticized help that was spontaneously offered. But then, half an hour later, you would observe her quietly putting right what you had done. And you’d realize that the work you had thought sufficiently well carried out had, in fact, been half-finished, careless, unplanned. Slipshod was her worst adjective of condemnation. “I can’t bear things done stupidly or messily,” I have heard her say a thousand times, unwrapping the paper from round a block of butter so as to cut off a neat cube, instead of scooping it out from inside the paper as some people do.

  I wondered what Masha would have made of Ty.

  Would I have married him if she had still been around?

  “What are you smiling at?” he asked, pulling me against him.

  We had got up, eaten a small-hours’ snack of grapes and champagne, and were back in bed, with the rain lashing into the canal outside.

  I could hardly say, “Thinking how lucky I am to have had a mother like Masha instead of your horrible parents.” Besides, what is luck? If I’d had a mother like Mrs Tybold, I should now be a millionaire, instead of married to one.

  “Thinking how different you are from your parents.”

  “When I first knew you,” he said, “I didn’t believe you could smile.”

  He spoke with the comfortable security of long acquaintance — yet it was only a few months since we had first met.

  “You sound as if we had known each other for years,” I said, crossing my fingers to avert the Evil Eye.

  “I’d seen you on TV. Before I met you. In that terrible ghost play. And in rushes of Rosy and Dodo—before we met in that field. You always looked —” he searched for a word — “not toffee-nosed, exactly. Indifferent? As if nothing were worth your notice. It was a shock, at the party, to find that you could laugh.”

  Fooling with Joel, I remembered. Perhaps not a pleasant shock? Did Ty not wish me to laugh? Humour isn’t one of my more highly-developed faculties, I’ll admit — there hasn’t been much time for it. But still, with Fitz, with Masha, with Joel, with various women friends, I have on occasion been reduced to rib-aching, joyful helpless abandonment; this had yet to happen with Ty. We had, of course, acquired various bits of private lovers’ nonsense; but his sense of humour was a region as yet mainly unexplored. (I had, though, made the rather daunting discovery that he was given to practical jokes, apple-pie beds, shoes full of bath-salts, locking one in the loo. Well, what could you expect? They probably did it to him at school. I hoped to wean him to more civilized ways in course of time.)

  We drifted off to sleep, lulled by the sound of the rain’s continual plashing. No wonder I began to dream of some dangerous Dorset beach, where the tide was rising fast, threatening to wash our piles of clothes away, while Fitz and Masha, heedless, deaf to my shouts of warning, continued to swim far out on the horizon, in deep water.

  I was greatly relieved to be woken from this dream by Ty, who gave a loud gasp and called, “Grab him! Grab hold of him! Pull him back — quick!” He had his hands round my throat, half throttling me.

  “Stop that, you fool! Lay off me!” I choked, not wholly conscious yet — and fought him off so violently that we both rolled from the bed to the floor. Fully awake at last we pantingly apologized to one another and I did my best to straighten out the tangle of silk sheets and featherweight blankets.

  “Were you dreaming about your friend, you poor thing?” I asked, massaging my windpipe.

  Ty merely grunted — his apologies had been a good deal less effusive than mine — and readdressed himself to sleep, hoisting the blankets round him so that I had far less than my share. Fleetingly I wondered if his relationship with Lyndhurst had been a homosexual one — who, these days, after all, or indeed at any period, has not some such episode in his past? No business of mine, perhaps, but if we were to make a going concern of our relationship, all these stray bits of the pattern would have to be slotted in.

  Next morning Ty’s taciturnity could be explained by the fact that my fist or elbow must have connected quite powerfully during our brief but fierce tussle — he had a lurid black eye.

  This did strike me as funny and I couldn’t help laughing.

  “Well, everyone must have guessed that we are a honeymoon couple — it’s just more evidence of my wifely passion! Of course the Italians would think it more natural if I had the shiner — shall I make myself one with eye-paint? Or carry my arm in a sling?”

  Later I was to remember this ill-timed facetiousness. Ty was not at all amused. He was, I’d already noticed, more than a touch narcissistic about his quite impressive good looks. Why not? Women turned to gaze at him in the street — specially the discerning Venetian ladies. He received admiring glances under lashes from pretty chambermaids and waitresses, who went out of their way to encounter him in halls and passages. All his wardrobe was most carefully chosen with luxurious thick textures: bloomy expensive wool, rich sombre silk ties, superfine tailored shirts — sheepskin, camel hair, vicuna, yak. Part of my appeal for him, I had, regretfully, begun to admit to myself was because, together, we made a handsome couple; I, still masquerading in my Rosy disguise due to the fact that, when we returned from Venice, there would be a few last interior scenes to be shot, and my final confrontation with Dodo. While we were in Venice they were getting on with the many parts involving other characters. Ty’s position as a member of the Board meant that everyone at Pyramid had fallen over backwards to facilitate the arrangements for our honeymoon: it had been excellent publicity for the programme. Millionaire TV Executive Weds Star from Own Serial was fine tabloid stuff.

  Fitz had been a little disapproving; even American papers carried the story, so he had known about it before my letter reached him. (Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to break the news by telephone.)

  He, however, had phoned me from Harvard.

  “Are you sure this isn’t all a bit hasty? You know I’d be the last person to question any of your actions — ?”

  Fitz rarely questions anybody’s action. His mental motions are so far removed from most people’s daily life that tolerance has to be an inbuilt part of him. I think it’s not that he wouldn’t presume to judge, but that he sees no occasion for judgment.

  “No, it isn’t hasty, it’s a Good Thing,” I assured him. “I’m having fun, set your mind at rest. For the
first time in my life I’m being pampered. And I enjoy every minute of it. Also Ty has promised that I can do a lot of interesting and useful things with some of his money.”

  I detailed a few: opening an art gallery in Deptford, financing a couple of theatre groups run by friends of whom I thought highly, buying a bit of land for a Nature Reserve —

  Fitz admitted cautiously that the programme seemed most interesting and worthwhile. “Though you do sound a bit like Dorothea Brooke with her endless cottages! I always imagined them as the most awful Council Houses. But you’re really happy, old Cat? You’re sure I hadn’t better come to the wedding?”

  No, I said, on the whole better not. I was truly concerned about not taking Fitz away from his intensive year’s work. I did want him to be free of me. And, secondly, I hadn’t got around to telling Ty about him yet. Just before our headlong wedding had not felt like the right moment. Up to this point in our honeymoon the right moment had not arrived. Fitz, I feared, might think this rather laggardly of me, but he’d not consider it of signal importance. Other people are not of great importance to him — unless they are likely to come out with a new philosophical concept.

  Other people are of crucial importance to me, and that is why I waited for a really suitable occasion before telling Ty about Fitz.

  Ty disconcerted me by flatly refusing to go out and walk around the streets of Venice with a black eye. He turned a deaf ear to all my persuasions.

  “You could wear a black patch and look like Moshe Dayan. Or I could disguise it with pearly makeup. Or I could buy you a sombrero — I’ve seen lots of Italian men wearing hats with wide brims — you could wear it pulled down over a silk scarf.”

  “I never wear a hat. And a patch would look affected. And makeup wouldn’t work.”

  “Oh, it would, I assure you.”

  “Well, I don’t want to mess about. The eye is too sore.”

  “Poor dear, it is a shame,” I said, though feeling privately that he was making rather a fuss over a trifle. That morning, for instance, he had retreated into the bathroom and left me to deal with the arrival of breakfast; did he intend to remain in purdah, seeing nobody, not even waiter or chambermaid, until the bruise abated?