99. Their spoons tinkle in concert. They have sweet teeth, both of them. Through wisps of steam their eyes meet. Behind her she has a week of knowledge of this strange man, mountainous, hairy, flaccid, decaying, powerful, who tonight comes into the open full of bravado to announce her as his concubine, his property. Does she think of her husband at all, rolled in a blanket beneath the cold stars or groaning in his forlorn cottage, as her new owner’s knees enfold her under the table? Does she ask herself how long he will protect her from her husband’s anger? Does she think at all about the future, or did she learn at her mother’s breast to live and be damned in the luxury of the present? What does this new man mean to her? Does she merely part her thighs, stolid, dull-nerved, because he is the master, or are there refinements of pleasure in subjection which wedded love can never give? Is she giddy with her sudden elevation? Have his gifts intoxicated her, the coins, the candies, whatever he has picked out for her from his wife’s aftermath, a feather boa, a rhinestone necklace? Why have those relics never come to me? Why is everything secret from me? Why should I not sit too at the kitchen table smiling and being smiled on in the warm haze of coffee fumes? What is there for me after my purgatory of solitude? Will they wash the dishes before they retire, or will I have to come out in the middle of the night like a cockroach to clean up after them? When will she begin to test her power, when will she sigh and get up from the table and stretch and drift away, leaving the mess for the servant? The day when she does that, will he dare to bark at her, or will he be so besotted that only the allure of her haunches as she ripples toward their bedroom will have any meaning for him? If she ceases to be the servant who will be the servant but I, unless I run away into the night and never come back, but die in the desert and am picked clean by the birds, followed by the ants, as a reproach? Will he even notice? Hendrik will light on me in his wanderings and bring me back in a sack. They will tip me into a hole and cover me up and say a prayer. Then she will light the fire and put on an apron and wash the dishes, the great mound of dishes, coffee-cup upon coffee-cup, that I left behind, and sigh and begrudge me my death.
100. I toss about in the dark whipping myself into distraction. Too much misery, too much solitude makes of one an animal. I am losing all human perspective. Once upon a time I might have shaken off the fit and, pale, tearstained, vacant, dragged myself down the passage to confront them. Then the erotic spell would have been broken, the girl would have slipped out of her chair, my father would have seated me and given me something to drink to restore me. The girl might even have vanished into the night: all would have been well again, the moment postponed when the door clicks shut behind the two of them and I know finally I am excluded from a room I have never been good enough to enter. But tonight I have beaten the waters too long, I am weak, I am tired of telling myself things, tonight I am going to relax, give up, explore the pleasures of drowning, the feel of my body sliding out of me and another body sliding in, limbs inside my limbs, mouth inside my mouth. I welcome death as a version of life in which I will not be myself. There is a fallacy here which I ought to see but will not. For when I wake on the ocean floor it will be the same old voice that drones out of me, drones or bubbles or whatever it is that words do in water. What tedium! When will it ever stop? The moon shines on the black folds of a woman on a cold floor. From her rises like a miasma a fiend of ashen face. The words that whisper through those blue lips are mine. Drowning, I drown into myself. A phantom, I am no phantom, I stoop. I touch this skin and it is warm, I pinch this flesh and it hurts. What more proof could I want? I am I.
101. I stand outside the door of their room: three bland panels and a china knob over which my hand hovers. They know I am here. The air is alive with my presence. They freeze in their guilty posture, waiting for me to act.
I tap on the door and speak.
“Daddy . . . Can you hear me?”
They are silent, listening to the enormity of their breathing.
“Daddy, I can’t sleep.”
They look into each other’s eyes, his look saying, What must I do?, her look saying, She is not mine.
“Daddy, I’m feeling strange. What shall I do?”
102. I trail back to the kitchen. Moonlight strikes through the uncurtained window on to the bare table. In the sink lie a plate and two cups waiting to be washed. The coffee-pot is still warm. I could drink coffee too, if I felt like it.
103. I caress the white doorknob. My hand is clammy.
“Daddy . . . Can I say something?”
I turn the knob. The latch moves but the door does not open. They have locked it.
I hear him breathing on the other side of the door. I knock heavily with the side of my fist. He clears his throat and speaks evenly.
“It’s late, child. Let us rather talk tomorrow. Go and get some sleep.”
He has spoken. Having found it necessary to lock the door against me, he has now found it necessary to speak to me.
I thump heavily again. What will he do?
The lock snaps open. Through the crack his arm snakes out at me milky white above the dark hair. Instantly he has my wrist in his grasp and crushes it with all the strength of that great hand. I wince, but I will never cry out. What sounds like a cascade of corn-shucks is his whisper, rasping, furious.
“Go to bed! Do you understand what I say?”
“No! I don’t feel like sleeping!”
These are not my tears, they are merely tears that pass through me, as the urine I pass is merely urine.
The great hand slides up my arm till it finds and grips my elbow. I am forced down and down; my head is against the doorjamb. I feel no pain. Things are happening in my life, it is better than solitude, I am content.
“Now stop it! Stop irritating me! Go away!”
I am flung back. The door slams. The key turns.
104. I squat against the wall opposite the door. My head lolls. From my throat comes something which is not a cry, not a groan, not a voice, but a wind that blows from the stars and over the polar wastes and through me. The wind is white, the wind is black, it says nothing.
105. My father stands over me. Clothed, he is his complete masterful self. My dress is rucked up, he can see my knees and the black socks and shoes in which my legs end. I do not, on the whole, care what he sees. The wind still whistles through me, but softly now.
“Come on, child, let’s go to bed now.”
The tones are gentle, but I who hear everything hear their angry edge and know how spurious they are.
He catches my wrist and draws my limp puppet-body up. If he lets go I will fall. What happens to this body I do not care. If he wants to stamp it to pulp beneath his heels I will not protest. I am a thing that he holds by the shoulders and steers down the passage to the cell at the farthest end. The passage is endless, our footsteps thunder, the cold wind eats steadily at my face, devouring the tears that drip from me. The wind blows everywhere, it issues from every hole, it turns everything to stone, to the stone, glacial, chilled to the core, of the remotest stars, the stars we shall never see, living their lives from infinity to infinity in darkness and ignorance, if I am not confusing them with planets. The wind blows out of my room, through the keyhole, through the cracks; when that door opens I shall be consumed by it, I shall stand in the mouth of that black vortex without hearing, without touch, engulfed by the wind that roars in the spaces between the atoms of my body, whistles in the cavern behind my eyes.
106. On the familiar green counterpane he lays me down. He lifts my feet and prises my shoes off. He smooths my dress. What more can he do? What more dare he do? Those gentle tones come again.
“Come, sleep now, my child, it is getting late.”
His hand is on my forehead, the horny hand of a man who bends wire. How tender, how comforting! But what he wants to know is whether I am feverish, whether at the root of my desolation lies a microbe. Should I te
ll him there are no microbes in me, my flesh is too sour to harbour them?
107. He has left me. I lie exhausted while the world spins round and round my bed. I have spoken and been spoken to, touched and been touched. Therefore I am more than just the trace of these words passing through my head on their way from nowhere to nowhere, a streak of light against the void of space, a shooting-star (how full of astronomy I am this evening). So what is the reason that I do not simply turn over and go to sleep as I am, fully dressed, and wake up in the morning and wash the dishes and efface myself and wait for my reward, which must undoubtedly come if justice is to reign in the universe? Alternatively, what is the reason that I do not fall asleep turning over and over in my mind the question of why it is that I do not simply go to sleep as I am, fully dressed?
108. The dinner-bell is in its place on the sideboard. I would have preferred something larger, a loud jangling bell, a school-bell; perhaps hidden in the loft somewhere is the old school-bell, coated in dust, awaiting the resurrection, if there ever was a school; but I have no time to search it out (though would their hearts not be sent leaping into their mouths if they heard the scuttle of mousepaws, the shuffle of batswings, the ghostly tread of the avenger above their bed?). Quiet as a cat, barefoot, muffling the clapper, I creep up the passage and put my ear to the keyhole. All is silent. Are they lying with bated breath, with two breaths bated, waiting for me to make my move? Are they asleep already? Or are they lying in each other’s arms? Is that how it is done, in motions too tiny for the ear to hear, like flies glued together?
109. The bell makes a thin continuous genteel tinkle.
When I am tired of ringing it with the right hand I change it to the left.
I feel better than when I last stood here. I am more tranquil. I begin to hum, at first wavering this side and that of the bell-tone, then finding its level and staying there.
110. Time drifts past, a mist that thins, thickens, and is sucked into the dark ahead. What I think of as my pain, though it is only loneliness, begins to go away. The bones of my face are thawing, I am growing soft again, a soft human animal, a mammal. The bell has found a measure, four soft, four loud, to which I am beginning to vibrate, first the grosser muscles, then the subtler. My woes are leaving me. Small stick-like creatures, they crawl out of me and dwindle.
111. All will yet be well.
112. I am hit. That is what has happened. I am hit a heavy blow on the head. I smell blood, my ears ring. The bell is torn from my hand. I hear it strike the floor, clamorously, far down the passage, and roll left and right as bells do. The passage echoes flatly with shouts which make no sense to me. I slide down the wall and sit carefully on the floor. Now I can taste the blood. My nose is bleeding. I am swallowing blood; also, when I stick my tongue out, tasting it on my lips.
When was I last struck a blow? I cannot think when. Perhaps I have never been struck before, perhaps I have only been cherished, though that is difficult to believe, cherished and reproved and neglected. The blow does not hurt but it insults. I am insulted and outraged. A moment ago I was a virgin and now I am not, with respect to blows.
The shouting still hangs in the air, like heat, like smoke. If I want to I can reach up and wave my hand in its thickness.
Over me looms a huge white sail. The air is dense with noise. I close my eyes and every other aperture I can. The noise filters into me. I am beginning to jangle. My stomach revolts.
There is another blow, wood on wood. Far, far away a key clatters. The air still rings, though I am by myself.
I have been dealt with. I was a nuisance and now I am dealt with. That is something to think about while I have time on my hands.
I find my old place against the wall, comfortable, hazy, even languorous. Whether, when the thinking begins, it will be thought or dream I cannot guess.
There are vast regions of the world where, if one is to believe what one reads, it is always snowing.
Somewhere, in Siberia or Alaska, there is a field, snow-covered, and in the middle of it a pole, aslant, rotten. Though it may be midday the light is so dim that it could be evening. The snow sifts down endlessly. Otherwise there is nothing as far as the eye can see.
113. In what is properly the hatrack by the front door, in the place where umbrellas would stand if we ever used umbrellas, if our response to rain here were not to lift our faces to it and catch the sultry drops in our mouths and rejoice, stand the two guns, the two-bore shotgun for the partridge and the hare, and the one known as the Lee-Enfield. The Lee-Enfield is graduated to 2000 yards. I marvel.
Where the shotgun cartridges are kept I do not know. But in the little drawer of the hatrack, where they have lain for years among odd buttons and pins, are six .303 cartridges with sharp bronze noses. I find them by touch.
One would not think it, looking at me, that I know how to use a gun, but I do. There are several things about me one would not think. I am not sure that I can load a magazine in the dark, but I can slip a single cartridge into the breech and slide the bolt to. My palms are unpleasantly clammy for someone who is normally dry to the point of scaliness.
114. I am not easy though I find myself in action. A vacuum slipped into me somewhere. Nothing that is now happening satisfies me. I was satisfied while I stood ringing the bell and humming in the dark, but I doubt that if I went back and groped about and found the bell under the furniture and wiped off the cobwebs and stood ringing it and humming I would recover that happiness. Certain things seem to be forever irrecoverable. Perhaps that proves the reality of the past.
115. I am not easy. I cannot believe in what is happening to me. I give my head a shake and suddenly cannot see why I should not be spending the night in my bed asleep; I cannot see why my father should not spend the night in his own bed asleep, and Hendrik’s wife the night in her own bed and Hendrik’s, asleep. I cannot see a necessity behind what we are doing, any of us. We are no more than whim, one whim after another. Why can we not accept that our lives are vacant, as vacant as the desert we live in, and spend them counting sheep or washing cups with blithe hearts? I do not see why the story of our lives should have to be interesting. I am having second thoughts about everything.
116. The bullet rests snug in its chamber. Wherein does my own corruption lie? For, having paused for my second thoughts, I will certainly proceed as before. Perhaps what I lack is the resolution to confront not the tedium of pots and pans and the same old pillow every night but a history so tedious in the telling that it might as well be a history of silence. What I lack is the courage to stop talking, to die back into the silence I came from. The history that I make, loading this heavy gun, is only a frantic spurious babble. Am I one of those people so insubstantial that they cannot reach out of themselves save with bullets? That is what I fear as I slip out, an implausible figure, an armed lady, into the starlit night.
117. The yard is awash with silver-blue light. The whitewashed walls of the storehouse and wagonhouse shine with a ghostly pallor. Far away in the lands the blades of the windmill glint. The groan and thud of the piston reaches me faint but clear on the night breeze. The beauty of the world I live in takes my breath away. Similarly, one reads, the scales fall off the eyes of condemned men as they walk to the gallows or the block, and in a moment of great purity, keening with regret that they must die, they yet give thanks for having lived. Perhaps I should change my allegiance from sun to moon.
One sound that I hear, however, does not belong here. Now fainter, now stronger, it is the sound of a distempered dog whining and growling and panting without cease; but it comes not from a dog but from an ape or a human being or several human beings somewhere behind the house.
Holding the gun before me like a tray I tiptoe through the gravel, circling the wagonhouse and coming out in the rear. All along the wall of the house is a bank of shadow. In the shadow against the kitchen door lies whatever it is, not dog or ape but man, in fact (I se
e as I approach) Hendrik, the one man who ought not to be here. His noise, his babbling, if that is the word, ceases as he sees me. He makes a play of rising as I approach, but falls back. He stretches his hands towards me palms outward.
“Don’t shoot!” he says. It is his joke.
My finger does not leave the trigger. I am, for the time being, not to be taken in by appearances. A stench rises from him, not wine but brandy. Only from my father can he have got brandy. Bribed, therefore, not tricked.
With a hand behind him against the kitchen door he tries again to rise. His hat falls out of his lap on to the ground. He stretches for it and collapses slowly on to his side.
“It’s me,” he says, putting out his free hand toward the muzzle of the gun, which is far beyond his reach. I take a step back.
Lying on his side on the doorstep with his knees drawn up he forgets me and begins to sob. That, then, is what the noise was. At each tremor his heels give a little kick.
There is nothing I can do for him.
“You are going to get cold, Hendrik,” I say.
118. The door of my father’s room is locked against me but the window is open, as ever. I have had enough, tonight, of listening to the sounds that other people make. Therefore it is necessary to act swiftly, without thinking, and, since I cannot plug my ears, to hum softly to myself. I slide the barrel of the rifle between the curtains. Resting the stock on the windowsill I elevate the gun until it points very definitely toward the far ceiling of the room and, closing my eyes, pull the trigger.
In the Heart of the Country Page 7