Nightshades

by Tanith Lee

  In the muddled aftermath of the 'accident', Kristian discovered grey-faced grey men like gathering ravens at his door. His father's debts were numerous. Like all men who live hour by hour by means of their own reputation, he had left only chaos and unfinished business behind him. It became clear that the northern estates must be sold.

  Walking about the grounds, in those last days, among the vast stretches of pines, beside the lake, through the familiar house with everything now stacked up in crates or masquerading under sheets, the death which had precipitated it all became of necessity elevated,

  unique.

  Finding one night the empty bottle of sleeping tablets in his dressing room, Sovaz hidden away, the valet wiping his hands on a towel, Kristian had fallen prey once again to a compulsion which he did not recognize. He must in some way elevate, he must simultaneously eradicate and deny, the thing which repelled and drew him.

  Experiences are initial: whether exact or distorting, all later situations are only mirrors of what has gone before.

  Kristian wrote his signature over the final batch of letters. His secretary, a self-effacing young man, took up the correspondence neatly and silently and went out.

  The previous night, coming back to the house at about midnight, Kristian had heard the gramophone whispering softly through the walls of his wife's bedroom. Both doors were shut. The music moaned, the records were occasionally changed or else played over and over. Sometimes water ran into the bath. Once Leah had been called to fetch her the fruit and black coffee that Sovaz habitually took on rising. Yet Sovaz lay on the bed, the turntable of the gramophone whirring ominously, the cigarette box half empty, a scattering of sketches for some new painting cast indiscriminately about the floor like fallen leaves. The black girl was not adequate to the task of describing to Kristian the subject matter of these drawings. She imagined she had seen one or two of an animal resembling a panther running with a white cloth draped loosely across its body. Despite her lack of descriptive power, a faint look of fear came over the black girl's face when she spoke of this, a fear so subterranean that she herself did not seem to be aware of expressing or even feeling it.

  Sovaz had now been shut in her suite for thirty-nine hours.

  Kristian rose. The items on the escritoire were meticulously arranged, the inkwell of black onyx, the Persian paper knife which had once actually tasted blood when some woman of past acquaintance - this time not Sovaz - had picked it up and flung it at him in a cataleptic fit of rage. The blunt little point, thrown with such force, had torn through the sleeve of his shirt and nicked his flesh before it fell back exhausted on the rug. The woman had fled. Going upstairs to change

  his shirt, he had discovered the empty tablet bottle lying face down among his brushes, and presently his valet had come through from Sovaz' bathroom, a towel in his hands.

  Now, mounting the stairs, Kristian was not unaware of a distasteful unease building in him with each step. For six years his wife had been unassertive. Yet suddenly, once again these curious and hysterical lies, this demanding seclusion. The little bottle reappeared with a sharp perfection of detail in his mind's eye.

  Prescott had told him the American boy had taken the train inland.

  Perhaps this might be the root of her behaviour, only some trite quarrel. A small package had come for her this evening and been left with Kristian's mail beside the fresh newspapers in the cedarwood rack. The valet had mentioned to him that, on removing the papers yesterday, he had discovered a page had been torn from one of them.

  Outside her door, Kristian waited a moment. The gramophone, not playing yet still active, throbbed. He did not like her records: Stravinsky, Kodaly, Prokofiev - these seemed to pierce his ears like burning wires - neither Rachmaninov, whom he found impure and cloying.

  He knocked. She did not answer. He tried the door, which opened.

  She lay on the bed, smoking. The room was wreathed in smoke, smoke from her cigarette, smoke from the burning joss sticks he abhorred. She had on no make-up, which had the peculiar effect of making her appear excessively young to him, and yet, about the eyes, very old. She had lost weight. He did not like this look of her.

  'Are you unwell?'

  'Yes. But it's nothing.'

  'Do you want me to telephone Florentine?'

  At the mention of the little doctor, she abruptly laughed, but almost at once was again lifeless. She made a small loose gesture with one arm.

  'If you like. But it isn't at all necessary. I shall be perfectly all right tomorrow.'

  He caught sight, through the half open bathroom door, of steamless water held unused in the bath. He crossed to the gramophone and, lifting the needle, set the arm on its rest. One of the drawings Leah

  had reported lay on the table.

  Kristian took up the sketch. A panther, caught in the midst of a statuesque static leap, filled in jet black with a heavy and merciless lead pencil. The lack of subtlety that always offended him in Sovaz'

  paintings prompted him to discard the paper at once. Nevertheless, he became aware that the white cloth Leah had described as draped across the animal's back was in fact an unconscious woman, her head dangling, her tangled hair trailing on the ground.

  'I have something for you,' he said, producing the small package. 'It came with this evening's mail.'

  'Oh, leave it there,' she said, immobile, uninterested. 'I'll open it later.'

  As she spoke, the crystal clock suddenly sang out eight chimes like a tiny soprano.

  The voice of the clock galvanized him. He set the package down beside her and was turning to go out, when she asked abruptly: 'Who brought this?'

  He glanced back at her. She was all at once sitting up, holding the thing, unopened, in her hands. She looked excited, feverish.

  'I don't know. Why not unwrap it and find out?'

  Perhaps the American had sent her some cheap, paltry and emotional token. Yet she did not undo her parcel.

  Kristian opened the door.

  'Please,' she said, 'wait a moment.'

  He paused impatiently.

  She pulled at the paper ineffectually. It appeared to come away only in despite of her. Her face which had been white now burned as if a fire was concealed in the wrapping. Sovaz thrust the contents, the paper, everything, from her. Blood seemed to splash out on to the black carpet. A pool of rubies. He knew them immediately, and crossed to the bed.

  'He was watching,' Sovaz said. 'He saw me. He's sent them back.'

  'What are you talking about?'

  'The necklace. I threw it away, threw it down on the beach.'

  'You're talking nonsense,' Kristian said, 'I don't understand you.'

  A small fragment of paper still adhered to the coverlet. Kristian picked it off, for he could see a single line of writing on it. The words were part of a quotation from Virgil: Nos cedamus Amori - we must yield to love. He held it out to her. When she would not take it, he let it fall beside the jewels on the carpet, and went out.

  Going into the library, he closed the doors, and presently telephoned Florentine.

  The doctor arrived at the house in the late afternoon. As on previous occasions, the hundred steps had left him breathless. In his black coat and white shirt, both still formally buttoned despite the heat and the climb, holding the apologetic cliche of his bag beneath one of his short arms, he resembled perfectly a penguin.

  There was a tired gentle eagerness about the doctor, a nervous compulsion to ease pain, alleviate fear. He seemed to beg his patients to get well, if only for his sake. Standing in the foyer, upon the tessellated floor, it was plain that Kristian's house overawed him, not by its wealth or magnificence, but because of the emotions and aims so apparent in it.

  Ushered by the black girl into the bedroom of Kristian's wife, oppressed by the sombre furnishings, the sombre sunlight soaking through the polarized windows, Florentine's psyche responded nevertheless to the isolated figure of the woman seated there
. Her white silk robe, the loose hair, seemed to increase her appearance of youth and defencelessness. The doctor found himself falling into a stance - half avuncular, half conspiratorial -which he adopted with sick children.

  'Well, Madame Sovaz. And how are you feeling today?'

  'Quite well. It was nothing at all. A migraine.'

  'Ah yes, but they can be unpleasant. Have you had any vomiting?'

  'No. I am quite well. I can't imagine why Kristian should call you.'

  'A husband worries.'

  Silence greeted this.

  She let him take her arm and wind around it the serpent he used for checking blood-pressure. Unexpectedly she laughed.

  The little doctor smiled at her encouragingly, cocking his eyebrows, asking to be let in on the fun.

  'I was only thinking,' she said, 'how absurd it was that you should suppose Kristian might worry about me.'

  Dr Florentine dropped his eyes, embarrassed, and was unnerved to see suddenly that she wore about her throat the mesh of rubies Kristian had told him of.

  He took her pulse; her flesh was cold. She seemed too entirely relaxed, relaxed to an extraordinary degree, as if drugged. Peering into her eyes, he was reminded of an oriental belief that women have no souls. Discouraged by this idea, which sprang from racial memories he at all times attempted to suppress in himself, the doctor packed up his bag and perched before her, with his prescription pad.

  'Well, I don't think there's anything much the matter. These tablets should help.'

  'In what way?'

  'Oh,' he dismissed the question softly, 'a mild stimulant, nothing drastic.' He finished writing and pretended to have trouble with the spring of his pen. 'I'm so glad that you recovered your jewels, Madame Sovaz.'

  'Yes. It was very lucky.'

  He waited, but she said nothing more. He put away the pen and glanced up at her. The alteration in her demeanour was strikingly obvious after her lassitude.

  Her cheeks were slightly flushed. Her hands, formerly loose on the arms of her chair, were twitching. She was a young girl of seventeen, a virgin, or a woman pared of her youth, unloved and unkindled for seventeen years, seeing her lover advancing for the first time towards her bed. On her face there was briefly such an amalgam of vulnerable innocence, fear, longing, bewilderment and desire, that a complementary sweat started out on the doctor's forehead.

  'And did you really throw such lovely things down to the beach?' he asked her, with the rusty playful air he used sometimes on the very old, unbalanced and ailing, in his care: Did you really swallow all those pills? Did you really poison the concierge's little dog, after she had been so kind to you? The usual response — ' I did, I did' - was not

  forthcoming. Sovaz' face paled serenely.

  'How strange you should think that.'

  Kristian had told him what she had said. In Kristian's opinion, she had no doubt mailed the rubies to herself, including the note - written in a palpably invented hand. Understanding that he had been employed more as detective than physician, the doctor now did detect, in her cool denying volte-face, the sinister rational stealth of the truly insane.

  A little later, standing in Kristian's study, he observed painfully, 'I don't think I am qualified to treat this condition.'

  Kristian's cold face made Dr Florentine afraid in a general, unlocalized way - perhaps of inhumanity.

  'This is a confidential matter,' Kristian said. 'I don't intend it to go further than yourself.'

  'Well, of course, I am always discreet - it is my duty to my patients to be so. But the sort of attention your wife may need -'

  Kristian was not listening, only politely waiting for him to finish. Dr Florentine began to say the things Kristian would tolerate from him.

  A clockwork mouse, he thought. He winds me up, I must perform as I am meant to. The key in his back was real enough: Kristian's generous promptness in the matter of bills, his donations. One of my few paying patients. Well, if one could not live by bread alone, certainly one could not live without bread. But what should he say?

  Love your wife. A simple cure, as possibly the cure might be for sclerosis or cancer, once it was discovered.

  Going down between the savage horses' heads of the stairway, he saw again the scatter of leaves across her black bed, which he had surreptitiously observed as he moved about the room. Press cuttings concerning a murder, smudgy photographs of a stretcher, the Frenchman weeping and trying to shield himself from the flashing eyes of the cameras - it was the killing of the Gallier woman on the beach.

  So many cuttings.

  In her current mood, the crime might have obsessed her for any number of reasons. Perhaps she was afraid. Near the edge of the bed lay a sketch, unfinished. It filled the doctor with a sense of enormous

  horror, a horror he could not translate at all into cohesive thought.

  The drawing, surely, was a sibling to the cuttings. A leopard straddled a gazelle, tearing at its flesh. Underneath had been written the word ·áéõáò (maenad).

  The bar was hot and humid, alive with the buzzing of flies, the cursing of a card game, the ineffectual noise of two electric fans whirring in a trance from the ceiling. The girl who had served him his drink had chattered to him with a spontaneous bright chatter, like a little bird. Her English, obviously learned from tourists, was spoken with an unintentional accent as American as his own. She was a pretty gentle girl, a girl plainly not of the city. Ten years maybe before the city stripped her down to greed, vulgarity, envy and despair, ten years or five, or two, or less. Yet now she fluttered her eyes at him sweetly. Adam Quentin, longing to become involved in the mayfly tragedy of her life, could think only of Miss Havisham in the crumbling white dress, Miss Havisham with her vampire eyes, not sweet at all, only starving. This girl's eyes were also black, yet a superficial warm blackness, a shallow river, containing uncomplex instincts, quite animal, even understandable.

  And yet, when he stood up and left her, he saw on those eyes the first stoical scars, the adult tiredness…

  The number of the house he had seen about a week ago in Mikalides'

  book of numbers, which the Greek carried with him as a magician carries his trick cards, and for similar reasons of deceptive magic.

  Adam telephoned. Then, the receiver clicking in his hand as if with radioactivity, depressed the cradle.

  The girl, polishing glasses at the bar, no longer watched him. Adam took up the receiver a second time, dialled, and presently stood once more waiting, at a loss. A servant answered.

  '… Madame Sovaz…'

  'Who is calling, please?'

  'My name is Quentin. Q-U -'

  'One moment. I will see if Madame is able to receive your call.'

  Three days. He had taken the inland train. He had worked one day at

  erecting administrative buildings of white cement like guano, on the river. He had worked one day at unloading the cargoes of fish, oranges, melons, the tourist-bait of enamelled blue alligator skins, the aphrodisiac tusks of rhino. The second night, lying with a girl, empty of anything except Sovaz - the smell of her, the touch of her flesh, her hair, her premature oldness, her cold hands and burning mouth, her vacant hungry eyes. Again the train. The night train. Families asleep, children sobbing fitfully, rattling into the city over tracks reverberating like machine guns.

  The telephone clicked against his ear.

  'Adam,' the telephone said.

  He could only stammer. He had not, after all, expected her to speak to him.

  The line was poor.

  'What?' he asked her.

  'Help me,' she said faintly. 'I'm going mad,' she said. It was only a whisper. 'I must leave here - help me - help me -'

  'Sovaz? You know I'd do anything -'

  'No. You won't do anything. No one can help me. Why did you call?'

  The line blanked suddenly out, and began to sizzle. She had cut him off, or else her handsome pale-eyed husband, inter
cepting, had cut them off, or else the erratic wires had played a joke on them, or else the city had abruptly broken in two, and one half, crowned by Kristian's house, had vanished into the sea.

  He dialled again, then hung up. He went to the bar and stood there, indecisively.

  'You want another beer?' The girl looked out from her tired dark eyes.

  She no longer flirted with him. He had been appraised.

  'No, thanks.'

  He went out.

  He began to walk along the shore road. He did not want to. His muscles ached, his belly was leaden.

  The sun lay smashed on the water. A meeting of flame and liquid that produced no smoke. Eastwards the sky spread great lammergeyer

  wings. He could reach the house in half an hour.

  He felt no pity for her. He was apprehensive of her. And yet her voice in the telephone, the voice of a terrified old little girl, impelled him towards her as if by sorcery.

  The day fell below the sea. A torchlight redness faded over the waves, leaving them the colour of the night. The crickets began their eerie irritation in the scrub at the roadside. Two or three battered cars passed him, going south, and a donkey cart loaded with pale flowers.

  Finally he was staring up at the facade of the enchanted castle, towering above its prison wall.

  The shadow of it, the scents of its garden disturbed him, but he had expected nothing else. Waiting to be admitted, he noted his own shabbiness, impartially. Like an armour the stained denims, the bleached shirt, a charm to keep him safe from the spell of the house.