Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  “Twice a year they hold meetings,” he said. “In Rome and Paris. All kinds of people belong — government officials and scientists and writers and priests — the Pope is one — and industrialists. You can’t apply, you have to wait to be invited. It’s a great honour.”

  “But that’s marvellous,” I said warmly. “How terrific that you get news of it now! And Ponsonby said it was pretty well a foregone conclusion that you’d be elected.”

  “Yes, once you are nominated you are virtually in.” Ty’s tone was absent. “They do a tremendously thorough scrutiny of your life to make sure you qualify — it’s a very strait-laced set-up. I believe divorce or litigation in your past gets you blackballed; or bankruptcy; maybe even having your driving licence endorsed.”

  “Oh well, it’s lucky you have a nice respectable wife,” I told him cheerfully, and as soon as I’d said it a faint, the very faintest of chills passed through me. Had Ty’s marriage provided the final seal of respectability rendering him eligible for this honour? Could there possibly have been any thought of this consideration when he proposed to me?

  “Do you know,” he said, “I believe I could eat something light — perhaps an omelette. And some fruit. Can you call Room Service?”

  From that moment on, his recovery was swift. In fact, as he later said himself, in grateful wonder, he had never come out of a migraine so fast.

  It seemed slow enough to me, I said. By now it was eleven-thirty at night; the headache had hit him between two and three in the afternoon. Eight hours of excruciating pain seemed no light thing to me. But he assured me that one of his really bad attacks could last five times as long.

  “When it’s over, though, I always come out fighting fit. That isn’t really a compensation but it seems so at the time. Ready for anything. Bursting with energy.”

  In proof of which he started kissing me, and it was true, he did seem newly charged with vitality. We lay entwined, very happily, and I asked what special privileges or titles would accrue to him as a Companion of Roland. “Will you be Sir James, as well as Lord Fortuneswell? Do you get to wear a purple garter? Or one of those terrific crosses with ribbons and diamonds? Is there a ceremony? Shall I be allowed to come and watch it? Do you keep vigil all night before, in a haunted chapel?”

  Ty was not accustomed to this kind of foolery; I had discovered on previous occasions that it tended to disgruntle him (can you disgruntle transitively?); but just now he was so lit up that nothing could have diminished his euphoria. He was even able to reply in kind.

  “Certainly I have to keep vigil; and you have to kneel down behind me as well, stark naked apart from a wreath of ivy round your neck. And the ceremony takes place next day under the Arc de Triomphe.”

  It turned out that in fact he knew next to nothing about the procedure; the Companions of Roland keep their profile so low that it is practically underground.

  His complete and joyful recovery was a huge relief. Ty as I first knew him, with his healthy outdoor appearance, thick upspringing hair and commanding ways had seemed such an epitome of life and vigour that I had assumed this was the whole picture. (How happily would I turn over the task of looking after me and my inventory of ills to this capable stranger. Little did he know what he had taken on.)

  So it had been with a sense of dismay and let-down that I learned he had an Achilles heel of his own. I did my best to feel kindly and forgiving towards him, though, as the beggar-maid must have felt when she learned that King Cophetua held his throne in the teeth of several other claimants and a strong Republican party.

  Our lovemaking that night reached unexampled heights of excellence. It carried a kind of wild gaiety, happy absurdity — we would break off from whatever we were doing to put crazy questions to each other, address one another by extempore names — “Might I inquire, Sir Conrad, where you have concealed the cruet? Could I trouble you to be so kind as to pass the ketchup if I’m not robbing you?” “Why, for you, liebste Frau Burgermeister, it will be an honour, but can you untie the octopus?” “Did you remember, your Grace, to wind the grandfather clock and take off your galoshes?”

  It makes me sad, very sad, now, to remember that night. Sad and faintly queasy; lovers’ jokes are not for repetition. Not even for remembering.

  “You are wonderful — wonderful — wonderful,” he mumbled at one point.

  Words, what do they really mean? Not a thing.

  Wonderful, I? I was an image in his mind; it suited him that I should be wonderful.

  And all the time the Venetian rain was pitching down outside like a black forest growing backwards into the ground.

  “Do you like this?” he said. “What I’m doing? Do you like it?”

  And I said, “Yes, it’s entirely, extravagantly perfect; just make me a promise — will you — that you’ll do it again — in precisely the same way — every night for the next twenty-five years —”

  “You don’t think that might be a little repetitious?”

  “Oh no. Just promise.”

  “I promise,” he said. “Or may the Chichevache swallow me whole.”

  The Chichevache rang a faint, ominous bell in my mind but I had no leisure to attend to its message just then. Later, however, I asked, “What in the world is the Chichevache?”

  “Our weekly cleaning woman in Jersey used to swear by her. She is a skinny cow-horned monster who dines only on virtuous wives, and so she spends her whole life in a state of starvation and bad temper . . . ”

  His explanation touched no echo, then, in my memory, but I went on puzzling about it vaguely while we refreshed ourselves with a little Pol Roger.

  Then suddenly — fifteen minutes later — it all came back to me, the entire occasion, in one complete scenario — scents returned, sounds, colours I’d forgotten for seventeen years came hurtling back — and I stammered out dizzily:

  “Why — why, I remember you! — I’ve met you before — oh, not to speak to — seventeen years ago at Ludwell Hospital — but you had a beard in those days, didn’t you? It was you — wasn’t it? You were making some promise to the dying old man — what was his name? — the darling old man —”

  Only then did I notice his face.

  And slowly began to realize that I had burst our bubble.

  “You were a nurse?” he said slowly. “At Ludwell Hospital? But why? You must have been idiotically young? Why did your family allow it? Didn’t they want you to have a proper education?”

  He seemed to ask these questions, not because he wanted answers, but to give himself time. Time for what?

  “Why be a nurse at — what — sixteen?”

  “Seventeen. It was a training scheme.”

  “But why not university first?”

  I wasn’t about to go into Papa’s change of life, or the years of money spent on crazy Uncle Laurence in his expensive bin. That, I feared, might alienate Ty’s sympathy even further. I knew he didn’t like illness or oddness. And he was looking at me in a very chilling way.

  “But why didn’t I remember your name? It was Nurse Smith — but she was killed in a road accident.”

  I felt a queer shock. “How in the world did you come to know that?”

  He bent his frowning gaze on me; it had come back from miles and years away.

  “Oh — I heard — everyone said — old Ossy had been fond of Nurse Smith. But when I inquired — thinking — some remembrance — I heard she was dead.”

  Odd; very odd. I noticed, but did not raise the discrepancy. Poor Celia Smith, a devoted, dedicated girl, my absolute antithesis, had not been killed on the A30 with a boyfriend until more than a year after the old man’s death.

  And why should Ty have been asking for her so long afterwards? Why not right away? That was when you gave people remembrances.

  “But you,” he said, slightly shaking his head, with the movement that wriggles a
blade into a crack, “You were working at the Ludwell then? For how long afterwards?”

  “Oh, not long. A few months.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  Tell him about Fitz? Or not?

  Fortunately — perhaps — at that moment the phone rang. A cable for Milord. Perhaps urgent. Should it be brought to the room/read aloud/left in Milord’s pigeonhole till morning?

  Read it, read it, he said. It was the provisional acceptance from the Companions of Roland.

  After that, out of sheer alarm, I went to sleep almost at once.

  I heard Ty get up later in the night and, I thought, rummage in my top drawer. Was he looking for Paracetamol? I tried to rouse myself but fell back into a troubled dream of crying children and fallen trees. In the morning I forgot the impression and noticed without registering that the articles in the drawer were disturbed and that my passport lay on top; weeks later I realized that he must have been studying it.

  Late that day, returning from a shopping excursion — suddenly I had felt the need to get away from Ty and go off on my own, do something disconnected from him, buy an extravagant, foolish present for Joel or Fitz — I ran into a chambermaid, my favourite, the very pretty, kittenish one, with a bloom on her cheek like the pollen on a tiger-lily. The cheek was not blooming now, though; it was scarlet. She was walking along the corridor, heaving with suppressed sobs, holding her hand to it.

  When she saw me she stopped, gasped, spun on her heel and scurried away down a service stair.

  Vaguely puzzled and disturbed, I went on to our suite, where Ty was writing letters. Telling people his news, I supposed. A tray of coffee stood on the marble table.

  “Was the chambermaid in here?” it suddenly occurred to me to ask.

  “What chambermaid?”

  “I met her — she seemed to be upset about something.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  Ty shrugged and returned to his writing.

  Next day the rain continued. And now Venice was in flood: St Mark’s Square had become a great grey lake with, along the edges, slippery wooden duckboards for pedestrians.

  “Perhaps we should go back to England?” I suggested, for Ty’s mood today was beginning to alarm me; he seemed utterly remote, cocooned in his own calculations, like a cat collecting spit necessary for washing, with no time to devote to casual exchanges.

  “Back? Oh — yes — very well — if you want to,” he replied vaguely.

  “Well — shall I tell Parkson to organize flights?”

  “If you want,” he repeated in the same tone; I wondered if he had really heard me at all.

  Later that morning a call was put through to us from a Principessa di Montefiori, an acquaintance of Ty’s in Venice whom I had heard him describe as a prize nitwitted bitch, an American film magnate’s widow now remarried to an Italian, whom he had been at pains to keep in ignorance of our presence here. Now she had discovered it — from the jeweller I gathered — and was inviting us to lunch. Rather to my dismay and greatly to my astonishment, I heard Ty accept. — Yet perhaps a lunch with strangers might help to dissipate this queer unpleasant mist that seemed to have descended between us, veiling us from each other?

  I would far have preferred to stay in our cosy hotel, not go out in the wet and face a crowd of unknown Venetians, but I doggedly donned some trousseau items, thinking, This is married life. The rough with the smooth, etc.

  For some obscure reason I remembered an occasion, years earlier, when Fitz told me that, at the time when he started searching so acrimoniously for God, Papa had become impotent. But which had been the cause, Fitz wondered, and which the effect?

  “How in the world do you know that?” I had demanded. Not that I doubted Fitz; the story seemed wholly probable; it was his knowing it that surprised me.

  “Masha told me.”

  “Masha told you? Why?” I was still deeply astonished.

  “Reckon she just wanted to talk about it to somebody. It had been a dreadful blow to her at the time. Physically and mentally. Old Masha was quite a girl in her youth, I bet,” Fitz added in his pondering way.

  I said, in a cantankerous tone, “But why should she tell you when she never told me?” I had to swallow jealousy which rose in me bitter as bile. The loss of Masha, the loss of Fitz: they had each other, but I was cast out into the world on my own to sink or swim. And the fact that I knew this was an unfair judgment made it no easier to bear.

  Fitz answered with calm reasonableness, “Probably she knew that I’d sympathize with the poor old shard. It would only have increased your prejudice against him. And it’s easier to tell some things to a man.”

  “Hah!”

  Fitz gave me two impatient affectionate little taps, very fast. “Come on, out of it, old Cat. You know what I mean. There were plenty of other things she told you, not me.”

  That was perfectly true.

  Fitz is tall and slight. He has dark hair and his eyes are beautiful — deep grey and very wide-set — Tartar eyes perhaps, though they do not slant. He does look Russian. And his mouth is always curved in a half smile, up at the corners, even when he is quite serious. His clothes invariably appear neat and clean on him, even when they are not.

  Thoughts of Fitz, buried in his work at Harvard, comforted me as we stepped out into the wet glacial Venetian weather. One thing Venice, like the Kingdom of Heaven, does is reduce rich and poor to the same level. All are pedestrians. (By good fortune the Principessa’s palazzo was not far from our hotel.) Thoughts of Fitz, though, I suppose also made me careless: I slipped on the duckboard, which was like frosted grease. Ty grabbed me but that only helped to unbalance me still further and I fell heavily.

  “Watch out!” someone shouted, and a woman let out a high, piercing cry.

  I lay where I was, feeling sorry for myself. I had heard my wrist crack as I fell on it — what a thing to happen on one’s honeymoon! And my left leg was doubled underneath me in a very awkward position. Also the Grand Canal was only a couple of inches from my cheek, which lay pillowed uncomfortably on icy, greasy stone; the canal water looked exactly the colour of ratatouille, never my favourite dish. So I lay where I was until kind, careful hands picked me up.

  To my utter astonishment, two of the hands turned out to belong to my friend Joel; he was being aided by a couple of gondolieri, for whose services, in such weather, there was little other demand.

  “Joel! What in the world are you doing in Venice?”

  “Came here to take pictures of Posy wearing a Mancini coat,” he said, nodding at the girl who had cried out at my downfall. “You and she know each other, don’t you?”

  I nodded without enthusiasm. She was Posy Winchester, a debby model girl who did small parts and some TV commercials. I had never liked her much, but now she was certainly being very solicitous, exclaiming in her languid nasal croak,

  “Poor darling, you did come a purler! What a shame! Just look at your stockings! And your poor fur. How did you come to slip I wonder?”

  I wasn’t concerned about my stockings or my poor fur, but about my wrist and my ankle, both of which felt as if they had suffered serious damage. Also I was aware of Ty, quietly furious, just behind my shoulder; if there was one thing he hated, as I had already discovered, it was public mishap and fuss. First his black eye and now this! It seemed our honeymoon was doomed to grotesque disaster.

  The gondolieri made a chair of their hands and carried me back to the hotel. There a doctor was swiftly at hand to tell me that I had broken my wrist and badly sprained the ankle. During my trip to the hospital for x-rays, setting, and plastering, Ty was not in evidence: all this misfortune had been too much for him, evidently. I wondered if he had gone off to the Principessa’s luncheon. But Joel and Posy kindly accompanied me to the x-ray unit, and I was glad to have him at hand though I could have done without her
cooing and lamenting. Afterwards they saw me back to the hotel and Joel ordered soup for me from Room Service; I didn’t want it, feeling rather sick from pain, but he made me swallow it down. “Helps you to sleep,” he said sensibly. I knew this to be true. I have a built-in sleep factor that takes over when I am ill or injured, and on this occasion I fairly soon began to droop and drowse.

  “That’s the way,” said Joel kindly, and settled a pillow under my plastered arm. “Just lie back now, and as soon as you’re sleeping we’ll leave you alone.”

  I lay back and their voices, softly murmuring at the other end of the big lavish bedroom, dwindled into a vague blur.

  Joel’s did, at least. Posy, with that trick of italicizing every other word, came through here and there.

  “. . . Only married her for publicity reasons, of course,” pronounced her carrying whine. “Anybody could see that. Vida says she knows for a fact that’s why he did it . . . wouldn’t give it six months myself . . . darling Ty such a rover—as we all know . . .”

  “Shut up, Posy,” said Joel. “Don’t be a raven.”

  Bird of ill omen, I thought. That’s just what she is, with her fuzzy golliwog hair and black malicious eyes; and then I did fall asleep, and when I woke was not sure if I had really heard their voices or imagined them, since it was just the kind of remark that Posy could be expected to make.

  Also when I woke up, Ty was there, politely inquiring how I did, but still, as I was acutely aware, separated from me by that curious imponderable screen of misty distance. He had, he told me, revised our arrangements, in view of my accident; he must fly back to London tonight because of details connected with his forthcoming investiture; but the doctor had forbidden me to travel for several days yet.

  “You won’t feel too abandoned, I hope, as your friends are here,” he observed, and I realized from his tone that he probably disliked Joel very much.

  “Posy’s no friend of mine,” I muttered.

  “But Joel Redmond is in love with you, which compensates. I’m sure he will take very good care of you,” Ty said in a gentle measured way.