Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  She told me about her job at the Dorchester Theatre. In professional matters she was both intelligent and capable. But I knew plenty of directors who would have nothing to do with her because of her inability to finish work on time. It was clever — highly ingenious — and always weeks late.

  Then — “Fancy you being married to old Ty,” she said. A reminiscent, melancholy smile played around her mouth; she could, I gathered, if she chose, tell me a thing or two about old Ty. As I asked no question, obstinately sipped at my coffee: “He’s hard, you know,” she said. “Can be heartless. Has a crazy streak. I know a girl — once knew a girl — he treated very heartlessly. He’s not one to be relied on. But then —” she widened her great dark eyes at me again — “you are such a practical, self-reliant little person, aren’t you, Cat? You can look after yourself so well. So perhaps you will be the very thing for darling Ty.”

  “Would you like some of this coffee, Olga?” I asked neutrally. “And do you think you ought to be telling me all these things about darling Ty? After all, I’ve been married to him less than a month.”

  “But, my angel, everyone knows you’re on the point of separation already? Why would Ty go haring off to Paris in the middle of your honeymoon? After knocking you down in the middle of the Piazza San Marco? Why, even Joel — who never gossips — said he saw that happen —”

  Luckily — just as I was about to explode — a child came in by the back door and studied me with interest.

  I was not sure what age she might be — having had so few dealings with children, really — eight or nine, maybe. She was a neat, complete little character, hair done in tidy plaits on top of her head, face rather plain but with bright intelligent eyes and remarkable eyebrows which gave it force.

  “You must be Lady Fortuneswell,” she said to me. Her voice was clear and her articulation beautifully precise; she could get a TV part in a twinkling, I thought, if she had a pushy, stage-struck mother; that plain little face would make up very well for the small screen.

  But she looked as if she had brains; too intelligent to be an actress, perhaps.

  “Yes, I’m Lady Fortuneswell. And you are — ?”

  “This is Shuna,” Olga said proprietorially. “Shuna is my great friend, aren’t you, darling?” She put her arm through that of the child, who said “Yes,” in a noncommittal way. I noticed that her eyes were fixed thoughtfully on the toes of my right foot, which extended out of the strapping. They looked rather grimy. Grime from Venice, from the plane journey, and honest Dorset soot.

  “Won’t they get cold?” she asked.

  “Yes, they do, rather. Nobody thinks of that.”

  “You need a thing like a tea-cosy.”

  “So I do.”

  “I expect I could make you one. — Does that chair move by itself?”

  “Yes, like this — see —”

  I demonstrated. While I was doing so, Miss Limbourne and Miss Morgan returned, full of bustle. “Ah, you found the kettle — that’s right —”

  “Well, I suppose I had better get off to my job,” said Olga with a harassed smile.

  “Yes you better had, at ten minutes to noon,” I thought, as she fluttered her fingers at us all and left, wistfully.

  “We have been as busy as bees,” Miss Morgan told me, “setting your house to rights. Those good Greeks! One of them, Stavros, confessed that it might have been he who left a smouldering cigarette — they did find a stub near the front door — he was so dreadfully guilty and cast down about it — as well he might be — that we agreed to let the matter go no further! They have already replaced the broken panes; and Mrs Monkton is helping scrub and clean up. Pat is going to telephone for a replacement sofa and some more chinaware — I’m afraid you just had a scratch lot from our own supply —”

  “It was extremely kind of you —”

  “So,” said Miss Limbourne, “if you’d like to stay and have some lunch with us, we can promise that your own place will be fit for habitation afterwards — if you don’t mind corned beef, that is.”

  “There are two huge hampers of food up at my house,” I remembered. “Won’t you share them with me? There’s pâté and game pie and all sorts of stuff — in jars and plastic packs, I don’t suppose affected by the smoke —”

  “Love to,” said Pat Limbourne promptly. “Elspeth is supposed to do our provisioning, but her mind’s always in the garden. Shuna, do you want to come up with me and bring back some goodies?”

  “Is Shuna your niece?” I asked when the pair had gone off.

  “No, her mother was the daughter of a friend. She’s dead, poor young thing, and there really seemed to be no one to look after the child, so we took her in.”

  “How very lucky for her,” I commented, thinking that an orphan might do a great deal worse than fall into the custody of this capable cheerful pair.

  “Lucky for us!” Miss Morgan’s face creased up fondly. “She’s an excellent little person. More than a touch of genius too. No, I mean it —” as I must have looked a trifle sceptical — “her I.Q. is way above normal. But her family history was a sad one — I won’t go into it — so Pat and I are very keen to see she doesn’t get spoilt, or have her head turned by the wrong kind of attention. That’s why —” Miss Morgan glanced briefly out of the window, then gave me a very shrewd look — “I’m not wild about her getting taken up by theatre people, such as Olga Laszlo, clever and well-meaning though she is. We brought Shuna down to Dorset because we thought country life would be just right for her — not too much excitement —”

  “Yes, I perfectly understand. Judging on two minutes’ acquaintance, I’d say you were doing a terrific job.” I could indeed understand why Miss Morgan was not over-enthusiastic about Olga’s friendship for her chick; and was I being tactfully warned off too? “Will she go to school by and by?”

  “Oh, she’s down for Oxford already. Somerville and Balliol are both interested.”

  “Good heavens,” I said faintly.

  At this moment Miss Limbourne and the child returned, swinging a basket of food between them and carrying french loaves and bottles under their arms.

  “Might I use your telephone?” I asked.

  “Of course, my dear, it’s for the convenience of anyone in the village.”

  “I ought to call my director and tell him I’m here.”

  “Randolph Grove?” said Pat Limbourne. “I’m sorry, I ought to have told you. There was a message from him. The team can’t get down till Thursday next week — something in connection with a sequence they are shooting in the studio? — so, he said, they won’t need you till then. You can give yourself a good rest, convalesce, take your time. And he sent his love.”

  “Thank you.” I felt a little blank, as one always does, after rushing to an appointment, only to find that it has been postponed to the fairly distant future. Suddenly I had a vacant week — eight days really — what should I do with it? Go back to London? But to which domicile? My own place? Ty’s penthouse? And where was Ty? Still in Paris? I assumed so. Would he get in touch? Would I ever see him again? Did Olga’s hints have any foundation in fact? And where the devil did she get her information from?

  Feeling, suddenly, very tired, when lunch was finished, I said I thought I had disrupted the ladies with my presence quite long enough, but was afraid I must ask for their assistance — or somebody else’s — in returning to my house. Perhaps one of those helpful Greeks? (Their presence had been manifest outside all morning in the roadway, clanking up and down with barrowloads of mortar and marble, shouting vigorous Greek comments and directions from top to bottom of the hill.)

  “Of course. Dmitri will take you,” said Miss Limbourne. She stuck her head out of her front door and shouted, “Dmitri!”

  “Kyria Limbourne!” A curly-black-bearded countenance appeared in the door about thirty seconds later.

 
“Can you wheel the Kyria Fortuneswell up to her house?”

  “Sure, no problem.” (He had evidently learned his English in New York.)

  “And I’ll help!” Little Shuna bounded to the door. She was plainly dying to study the mechanics of the chair.

  “You are to come right back as soon as you have seen Lady Fortuneswell to her house,” Miss Morgan told her firmly. “She needs a rest and so do you.”

  But, counterbalancing this admonition as we passed the open window, I heard Miss Morgan say to her friend, “Well, she seems a perfectly nice girl; not at all spoiled.”

  “I should hope not!” said Pat Limbourne.

  Now, for the first time, as Dmitri dragged me backwards (but much more carefully and gently than Parkson had done) up the central roadway towards my house, I had a view of Caundle Quay, transmuted by my husband into Glifonis.

  I was bound to admit that I would never have recognized the littered, rutted, squalid field, crawling with caravans as a sheepskin with maggots, messily curving down to the little combe at the bottom where the original hamlet nestled.

  A certain amount of landscaping, I thought, had taken place. The field itself had changed shape, the central area been flattened out, the sides made steeper. The stepped track wound down, zig-zag, zig-zag, between small white Greek houses with tiled roofs, angled irregularly among plots for vineyards and gardens, as they would be on a Mediterranean hillside. The result was charming. (Where had they found the roof-tiles? Even in Greece they were now hard to come by.)

  Down at the foot, I could see from a glimpse of roofs and chimneys and mature trees, the original Dorset hamlet still remained. I was glad of that, for it had been pleasant in its own right: its forlornness had derived from the hideous squalor up above. Beyond lay the sea — today blue as a postcard, smiling under the benign sun. And, yes: I thought I could hear a distant whisper as we paused outside my front door. I preferred to believe so, anyway. But, in actuality, there were plenty of other sounds to drown the noise of waves. Caundle harbour had never been much to boast of, but now an impressive mole was in process of construction, curving round like an elbow. A dredger was at work, its great arm rising and falling as it scooped shingle from the sea bed and dropped loads into a waiting drifter. Bulldozers plied back and forth along the completed section of sea wall. Motor dinghies hurried about.

  As from another life I remembered Ty’s voice in Venice saying, “There has to be a viable harbour.”

  How strange, how very strange, that all this activity, all this change, all this (I must admit) very pleasing and imaginative creation, which had made something quite rare and special out of a wretched vulgar dump — all this was due to Ty, his vision, his force. Somehow, for the last few days, I had been denigrating him in my mind, underrating him, because of his odd reaction to that small — not particularly crucial?—discovery about his past. Why had it seemed so important to him? He appeared really shattered at finding that I had been a witness to the event. So, he had made a promise and not kept it. Well, that was bad, but keeping a promise is not, always, simply possible. Circumstances alter. I wouldn’t begin to make any judgments about that. But why such a startling change of aspect towards me? What had I done to deserve that?

  Gazing down at Glifonis, the fruit of his imagination, of his drive, made me feel kindly again towards Ty, and wish that relations between us could still be mended.

  Though, deep down inside me, I was certain they could not.

  “Could you take me round to the back of the house, on to the terrace?” I asked Dmitri. “I’d like to see what the view is from there.”

  I was pleased to find that from my back porch you could look right down to the harbour; and I also noticed, what I had not last night, that if my chair had burst its way through that planted hedge of cupressus, it and I would have catapulted over a sharp drop, across the next bend of the causeway, straight on to the upper terrace of Miss Morgan and Miss Limbourne. I could see the dandelion head of the elder lady, pegging out washing, twelve feet below. While assimilating this fact, I heard a curious croak behind me, and turned to see a skinny waiflike little elderly man vigorously beckoning the child Shuna. She ran and talked to him at the far end of my terrace, he waving his arms about a great deal, she shaking her head. He kept looking towards me, evidently asking some question.

  “What does he want?” I called. “Anything I can do?” The little guy looked both piteous and urgent — very like the Ancient Mariner.

  “It’s Odd Tom,” Shuna said.

  “How are you, Tom?” I said. He jerked his head and mumbled something unintelligible.

  “He wants to know where Lord Fortuneswell is.”

  Why in the world would he want to know that? I wondered. Had he some favour to ask? I explained, rather slowly, wondering if he were mentally defective, that my husband was not with me, that, to the best of my knowledge, he was at present in Paris. The old man shook his head and went into another long stream of communication, all thrown away on me because of his lack of consonants. But Shuna seemed to understand him perfectly well.

  “He was sure your husband was with you.”

  “He really isn’t, I’m afraid. Tell him I’m sorry. Is there any message I can pass on?” (Not, I feared, that Ty would take much interest in a message from this queer old derelict — unless it related in some way to the welfare of the Glifonis project?) However, Odd Tom shook his head, shrugging; his business could wait, it seemed.

  The large cat, whose name I now knew to be Arkwright, made its appearance through my open kitchen door (the glass had been neatly replaced) and jumped with an accustomed air on to my lap.

  “Oy! Mind my bad leg!” But I stroked him, pleased to see that he had survived the fire.

  “He saved your life,” Shuna stated. “By waking you with his howling. He saved you. Otherwise you would have been suffocated. Aunt Elspeth said so.”

  “Perfectly true. But also I saved his life. By smashing a way out for both of us.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that. Arkwright, that ought to teach you not to go into other people’s houses without leave. — I wish I could have seen you come crashing through that glass door,” Shuna added sadly.

  “Well, I’m not going to do it again! Still, you can see me go back through it in the regular way, now, if you like — cat and all.”

  I demonstrated. But Arkwright, disliking the sudden movement, jumped off my knee and went to join the old man, who had wandered away down the steps, scratching the thin ruff of hair under his cap and talking to himself with an air of perplexity. Arkwright walked behind him.

  “Does the cat belong to Odd Tom?”

  “Oh yes. — He says he was sure he saw your husband.”

  “Last night?” I asked, enlightened. Had the old man perhaps been hovering around when we arrived? “No, that wasn’t my husband, it was Parkson, the man who drove me down. He’s gone back to London.”

  “Do you have all you need?” inquired Shuna, after I had steered myself into the kitchen. Carefully restraining a smile — her tone was so adult and solicitous — I said thank you, yes, I was sure I had, thought of suggesting that she should drop in for an orange juice later, remembered Miss Morgan’s gentle warning-off, and finished, “I can always send a Greek with a message. They seem to pass to and fro nonstop, like ants.”

  She flashed a grin — which showed dimples, much more attractive ones than Rosy’s — and ran off.

  The house had been vigorously cleaned, and little trace remained of last night’s episode save a touch of damp here and there, new putty round the window and french-door, and the sharp sour smell of sooty smoke, which takes days and days to disperse.

  I wheeled myself through into the bedroom, left the chair, negotiated the step, and levered myself on to the bed pushing aside some bits of paper and builders’ wrappings that lay on it. By now I was becoming
quite expert at these antics, I thought dourly: rather depressing; I would much prefer not to find in myself such a blind instinctive talent for survival. Who wants to survive? Where’s the percentage in doing so? I remembered a verse by a female poet with whom I used to feel I had some affinity, Ingrid Christ — she drove her car over a cliff, though, poor thing, I wouldn’t ever do that:

  My cunning corpse, as I lie sleeping

  Takes stubbornly the air I grieve

  And thus with breath keeps warm the coffin

  Which I would give my life to leave —

  Lying on the bed (newly made with clean sheets and blankets), I felt very peaceful. Remembered I had omitted to shut the back door after I came in, but what did it matter? The day was warm — remarkably so for March; I would get up by and by and close it . . .

  Just before I slept I had a dismaying playback of Olga Laszlo’s last remark: “Everyone knows that you’re on the point of separation already.” Who was everyone? And was that true? Olga, I remembered from the days when we were friendly, had a fearsome talent for over-dramatization and exaggeration. Even when younger, even when I looked up to her and admired her, I had observed that. Now, for the first time, it occurred to me to wonder: did Olga feel any residual grudge, any bitterness towards me, for the part I had played in her own catastrophe? It would not be rational, exactly, but — I supposed — it would be no more than understandable if she did. There had been something spiteful, ill-wishing about that remark. Perhaps she envied my luck; grudged it? After all, compared with her, I must seem to be sitting pretty; a plum of a television part, and married to Pyramid’s Lord Fauntleroy, as the Mirror called him.

  I wished very strongly that Olga were not here in Dorset, and hoped that her stay might be a short one.

  Little does she know, I thought gloomily, making an attempt to shift my creaking, aching right arm without putting any pressure on the point where the bones joined, little does she know what my real state is.

  My back hurt, my neck ached, my throat was sore from smoke inhalation. My wrenched leg was numb in a particularly sinister way; perhaps it was beginning to gangrene and would have to be amputated.