by Tanith Lee
'Dear God, how terrible,' the doctor murmured. The permanently unhealed wound of his compassion received this fresh pain with dismal fortitude. Through it he was able to wonder briefly at Kristian's exactness in describing the accident, even to details which did not concern Sovaz, all reeled off in that impersonal, almost casual fashion.
'My wife, although uninjured, is deeply shocked as you will imagine,'
Kristian said to him. 'Which is my reason for troubling you.'
Again the doctor strove, half unconsciously, to detect behind Kristian's voice the motives and intents that moved him. It was not love or concern for the woman he lived with in this house, merely he wished her, like an expensive piece of precision machinery, to function. It is a watch-mender not a doctor you require, Dr Florentine thought, yet with no anger. He got to his feet.
'Very well. I will do all I can. But, as I have said before -'
'And as I have said before,' Kristian interposed smoothly, 'I intend the matter to go no further than yourself.'
The doctor spread one flipper as if to balance himself on the ice of
Kristian's indifference.
'But Madame Sovaz is -'
'Is in need of your attention. You underestimate yourself, my dear doctor. You should have more faith in your own skill.'
So the doctor arrived once more at the threshold of the black bedroom, and thought, I've been putting this off. What shall 1 see now?
The black girl opened the door to him. Her expression was enigmatic.
He glanced hurriedly about, and discovered Sovaz beside a half open window. She was seated in her silk wrap, her face bowed, intent as a child's, over a drawing. The memory of the other drawing he had seen accosted him - the leopard and the deer, with its obscurely dreadful label ·óéíáò. The grey autumn leaves of her press-cuttings, he noticed, had been removed, tidied or destroyed.
'Well,' said Dr Florentine, 'well, well.' And he went towards her briskly, as if stepping quickly under a cold shower.
She suffered his examination - this time more thorough and thus more complex - in a dreaming silence, a rapt inattentive submission not unlike her demeanour during the previous visit. Yet, as with Kristian, there was something altered, something not as it had been.
Despite her appearance, her pulse was quite rapid. She seemed, but no longer was, apathetic. He recalled the extraordinary reaction that had come over her before in his presence, the look of waiting and anticipation, of frightened desire and longing which had so unnerved him.
The maid was clearing the drawing out of his way before he could examine it, as if instructed. He was not certain of this, but it added to his sense of unease. He found too in Sovaz evidence of some drug, possibly nembutal, probably administered to her last night as a sedative. This also somehow hinted at a form of coercion, of a jail.
Kristian had mentioned no sedative to him.
Physically, she was sound enough, by some miracle. Only the hidden region inside her skull seemed full of abrasions and plagues.
The driver of the car - what was he to her? A lover, surely, no less.
And she said nothing, did not, when he probed with his awkward questions, respond at all. Yet she was no longer shocked as far as he
could ascertain. Not even mildly so.
'I'm sorry to hear that your companion was killed. At least it would have been mercifully quick,' he eventually wildly said, attempting to unlock whatever strictures held back her emotions. But quite calmly, and with surprising cruelty, she answered, 'How is it possible to know? It may have seemed longer to him. Poor boy,' she added, but remotely, indifferently.
Packing his bag, the doctor found himself abruptly transported backwards in time. He recalled the old scholar, Sovaz' father, discovered smiling in the public surgery among the human wreckage, a small leather case of manuscripts tucked between his knees, and the sadly inadequate sentence (a sentence indeed in every sense), 'I am having some bother with a cough.' At first, suspecting cancer, Dr Florentine had treated him with a painful kindliness which shortly became nearly jovial when tuberculosis was instead diagnosed. For this a complete cure would almost certainly be possible, at the worst the progress of the illness could be arrested. Presently the doctor became aware that the scholar would not accept the cure. This was madness. The scholar shook his head.
'No, no, it's not feasible. I cannot give up the time. My work -do you know, only yesterday I received by post, from America, a request for a fresh translation of certain portions of Plato's Republic -'
'Either you will spare the time from your work now, in order to get well,' the doctor said, 'or you will have no time left to spare for anything. You must understand this. Now -'
'No, no,' the scholar said again. 'You see, I have many debts, yes, this is true, I am not ashamed. They are, shall I say, honourable debts. My work is more expensive than people suppose. And like you, I suspect, my dear Florentine, I don't always collect my fee. And there is my daughter, my Sovaz - how can she support herself while I am in some clinic? She's still such a child. That is my fault, I admit as much. I have made her as unworldly a being as myself… No, no, I must go on with my work for her sake, do you see? And I shall soon be better.
I have not rubbed shoulders with these philosophers for nothing - the cure is in my hands, and in the impartial hands of the gods. I must show them I am worthy to be spared.'
There had flashed then across the doctor's mind, as suddenly as it did
now, the remembered vignette of Sovaz as he had briefly glimpsed her at fourteen. Passing below on his way to assist at a birth, he had glanced up and seen a face like a cameo, set in the high twilit window of the scholar's house like a picture in a dark frame. There drifted down from behind the picture the scratchy recorded notes of a Khatchaturian piano concerto, which mingled eerily with the sullen pipes of snake charmers in a neighbouring street. Having met her earlier in company with her father, Dr Florentine raised his hand in greeting, for she seemed to be watching him. Yet even then her eyes were fixed inwards, she had not noticed, and he, feeling all the unaccountable foolishness of one who makes such a gesture in error to a stranger, passed on. The child, a male, which he delivered that night, was still-born. Malignant superstition had inextricably connected the dead baby with the girl hailed in the window. The doctor hated the roots of superstition in himself which refused to wither, just as he hated the superstitions of his patients which caused them to lay filthy and tetanus-conveying relics on their sores, and to practise contraception by means of a small scrap of cloth pasted over the navels of their women during intercourse. Nevertheless, now as then, he fell prey to the evil djinn. The boy baby died because the doctor had looked up at the girl's window; the girl's father died because he must keep her safe from the world. And yesterday a young man drove through a railing and down on to the broken rocks, and she was left beside the road unharmed -
No, all this was stupidity. He snapped shut his bag. He must speak to Kristian again, it was essential that she receive help of some kind other than his own. Perhaps a psychiatrist could unravel those areas of shadow in her skull. Certainly little Dr Florentine could not.
As he was going towards the door, he noted the black maid standing before the mirrors, Sovaz' drawing held defensively close, yet at such an angle that it was reflected in the glass behind.
Dr Florentine checked. He turned aside and held out his hand.
'Please. You will let me see that.'
A ripple of unmistakable fear went over the black girl's face. Dr Florentine saw at last it was the drawing itself she feared and therefore attempted to hide. She gave it up, however, immediately.
After a moment the doctor looked back at Sovaz. She had risen and
was standing at the open window, her eyes staring blindly outwards.
'And what's this?' he asked her.
'Oh, that,' she said. And unexpectedly her head turned and she was looking straight at him, holding him in a c
lear and perfect focus as if in the sights of a gun. 'I am working on a painting taken from the Bacchae. Dionysos revenged himself on the king of Thebes, Pentheus, by sending him to spy on the maenads. I expect you recollect the story.'
'No. I don't remember,' the doctor said slowly.
'Why, the women found him and tore him to pieces. Because he had come between them and the god, do you see.'
Dr Florentine discovered that his hands were shaking. Like the black girl, he was experiencing a completely instinctive revulsion, though the picture itself, which showed the king in the grip of the shrieking women, was horrible enough. Setting the paper carefully down, he went out and stumbled along the gallery, clutching his bag like an amulet.
He had recognized again in her logical voice the cunning of the insane. And at the last moment her eyes had fastened on him so sharply. He realized now what had been wrong when he had spoken to Kristian in the study. For that antarctic and pitiless gaze had been today vacant and blurred over as the eyes of the woman had always been in the past, and suddenly were no longer.
The sun stood on its own fiery tail just above the purple water. The magnificence of its display was not quite lost on the Englishman. As he crossed the terraces of the garden, he paused to regard it, his hands in his pockets, yet not bothering to remove the tinted glass from his eyes that distorted all the colours.
As he watched, Prescott heard a woman's voice call his name from the avenue of lemons. He turned at once, and saw Sovaz in a long, white frock, the girl Leah waiting about three yards behind her. He walked towards them.
'Good evening, madame.'
She seemed unusually alert. The sun flamed on her face like the glow of a great fire, but her eyes, though narrowed, were intent.
'There is something I have been meaning to ask you,' she said.
He waited. He thought she would refer to the previous night, the blazing car on the rocks below, his own treatment of her, her inertia.
She said: The last dinner party my husband gave at this house - do you recall?'
'Yes, Madame Sovaz. I think so.'
'Perhaps you were on the terrace outside the ballroom - at about nine o'clock?'
'Yes, madame. I was there until about nine. Then I went round to check the lawns, as I usually do.'
'On the terrace,' she said, 'did you notice a man? A tall slender man, very pale, handsome, with dark hair and eyes?' Her own eyes as she said this narrowed to slits.
'No, madame, I don't recollect seeing anyone like that.'
She drew in a breath.
'Please think,' she said. 'I am certain you must have seen him there.'
'Perhaps, if you could tell me who the man is.'
'I don't know his name. A guest at the reception, but not for dinner.'
Prescott looked at her implacably. The only man he had seen on the terrace had been the American boy, the golden boy now ash and charred bone. He had thought at first she had been going to speak of Adam Quentin.
'Possibly,' she said, 'he may have been with a woman - a woman with diamond earrings and garnet rings and a long evening scarf - a French woman.'
At once there rose from Prescott's adhesive mind the briefest of images - the dark garden, and the white flash of diamonds in a woman's ears catching the light from the open terrace windows, a scatter of words… A là plage … je veux aller a la plage -
'On second thoughts, madame, I passed a man and a woman as I was coming away from the terrace. The woman, if I remember, was dressed as you describe.'
'And this was all you saw?'
'Yes, madame.'
She smiled, but not at him. The conflagration in the sky still dyed her
pale face like a blush of shame or delight. 'You think that she was a French woman?'
'Yes, madame. At least she was speaking French.'
'Good,' Sovaz said clearly, as if congratulating him. 'Thank you,' she said. She turned and moved back towards the house, and the black maid turned also and followed her.
Prescott drew from a crumpled pocket a crumpled pack of cigarettes and lit one. The peculiar conversation had stuck in his throat. They had not often spoken together, he and Kristian's wife, yet they shared a curious intimacy - the night years before when he had found her in the tenement on the quay, last night when he had found her lying at the edge of the road watching wide-eyed the burning thing below, its light reflected on her face as the sun had reflected on it here in the garden - these dialogues of darkness had tangled their lives together in a violent wilderness of actions.
The sun now threw itself beneath the ocean, symbol of death, of bright young lives snuffed out, and whom the gods loved, no doubt, died young indeed. And somewhere out there the ashes of the young American were blown by the sea currents in and out the fabulous caves, the mouths of fishes, and the scorched human bones drifted with the scorched bones of the car to the bottom, to lie among the bones of galleys, Roman legions swept away by naval wars, Greek merchantmen, Egyptian pirates, all turning to coral, suffering their sea-change, full fathom five, in a company unhindered by racial discrimination or the divisions of time.
At four AM Prescott, as a matter of routine, had come cruising by the beach house, driving from the direction of the town. As soon as the road dipped he saw the lights, and shortly he made out also that the door which gave on to the veranda was standing wide open, while a single lamp burned like a marker on the sands. Coming closer, he noted the absence of the white sports car from beside the villa.
Prescott parked his own vehicle and went down the beach and into the building. The first examination was slight, for he merely wished to ascertain the presence either of the boy or of Kristian's wife. Both were gone. The house had taken on necessarily a slightly Marie-
Celeste quality, the open doors and burning lights, the lamp outside on the beach, and upstairs, the bed pulled open. Judging the direction the white sports had taken from the scuff of its treads on the verge, Prescott reversed his car and drove back towards the town, and consequently through it, travelling north.
He was taking the road at an average speed with already several of the huge drops behind him, when he became aware of a dull fluctuating colour, now orange, now blue, to the left, slightly ahead, and below. Coming round a bend, the headlamps broke over an upended cart and the diamante glitter of glass; next a stretch of mashed and mutilated railing. He stopped the car at once, got out and, going to the railing, looked down.
The returning tide had already partially smothered the flames, although at intervals, between the inrush of surf, small oases of fire reasserted themselves.
No sense of shock or horror came over Prescott. The nacre of experience had long since hardened on his inner skin. Only disgust rose in his belly.
He had assumed that both of them had gone with the car on to the raw teeth of the sea. For Sovaz he felt only a mocking ghost of pity.
It was the boy he visualized, the boy's broken limbs barbecued down there in that gape of spume and night. It came to him that he had been a little in love with the boy, or the idea of the boy, his youth. Not in love to any sexual or even sensual degree, for these titillations of the flesh had long since become a superfluity to Prescott's inartistic and sufficient body. It was what he himself had outgrown, or never possessed, attributes he had perhaps cynically observed, attributes now obliterated by gravity, fire, and flood, which now assumed an almost unbearable poignancy.
Then, half turning, Prescott caught sight of what he took in a moment of furtive incomprehension to be some extra merchandise from the fallen cart, a white shape lying just across the gap in the shattered railing.
But the fire leapt again below. Prescott saw the shape emerge on the light, the black foliage of hair, the glowing face made predatory by the movements of the flames. Sovaz.
The disgust in Prescott changed to a sort of loathing. The sensation
had no basis in any kind of logic. Therefore he found himself unable to reason
it away. He crossed to her and asked matter-of-factly, 'Are you hurt?'
Like a fish in a net, she flopped on to her back and stared up at him.
She said something.
'What?'
He leaned closer. He realized she was speaking in Greek, one word over and over: ' Bakyn, Bakyn, Bakyn, .'
He knelt down beside her and felt her over for broken bones. He had become conscious of the lucky solitude of the road and accepted the need to hurry. She seemed sound so he pulled her up. She gave a laugh then, a mindless yet lilting laugh.
'Shut up, you bloody bitch,' Prescott told her, and dragged her to the car and pushed her into the back where she fell down as limply as a swathe of white silk. But he did not trust her, for as she was she might be capable of anything. He went round to the boot of the car and presently returned with a coffee flask. He offered her a capsule -
she only turned her head away. He took hold of her and forced the capsule brutally into her mouth and followed it with the coffee. She responded to this treatment with total obedience. The swallowed capsule did its work rapidly. Soon she slept.
Prescott returned in the car to the beach house, and parked a little way down on the track. This time he laboured methodically, tidying the house, packing the clothes of Kristian's wife, and separately those things of the boy, even making the bed, rinsing and stacking away the cutlery and china they had used, removing all trace of their presence.
There would, naturally, be other forms of tidying to be done, by means of telephone and chequebook, once he had contacted Kristian.
As a matter of course, Prescott checked that nothing had been stolen from the villa while it stood empty, glancing especially into the unlocked travelling jewel case. The most precious items, the rubies, emeralds, sapphires and diamonds, that marked, like inexorable sparkling milestones, the seven birthdays that Sovaz had experienced as Kristian's wife, these had been omitted by Leah, as always on similar occasions of Sovaz' absence with a man. Only a scatter of little silver and gold ornaments remained, and one long string of pearls, a gift of her scholar father. Beneath the pearls was lying a