Dearest Enemy

by Alexandra Sellers

  She put the woman on a battlement with her back to the viewer, the broad panorama spreading out before her. As she painted, she thought of the woman’s wait—how long did they have to wait in those days, before they knew? Was it days, or weeks, or even months before one learned the truth? If her man had gone on the Crusades, it might have been years. Years of waiting, believing...willing him home, as if her own determination would bring him out of harm....

  As she painted she remembered her own time of waiting: those long, painful days and weeks when she had repeated over and over like a mantra, “He said he’d come. He promised.” They had tried to be gentle with her at first, telling her he would never come again, not because he didn’t want to, but because he could not. When she had refused to accept this, they had become frightened, and in their fright they had become cruel, shouting at her that he was dead, her father and mother were dead, and she could never go home again.

  This woman must have known the truth in her heart. But for her, too, perhaps, there was a sense of not breaking faith with the one who had promised, for whom only death could have caused that promise to be broken. He would have come if he could, and therefore she had been doomed to wait and hope and believe.... Because not to believe was itself a betrayal. Come home. Come back.

  And because there was nothing else to do but wait. There was no other life if he did not come back. There was only waiting...because when you loved that much, nothing else counted. Nothing except to wait, and to will him to come. Elain frowned down at her canvas, concentrating on the shape of the woman’s back, her hands on the stone parapet in front of her...they had been married in heaven—she must have pleaded that with the gods, as she yearned and willed him to be safe. You gave him to me, bring him to me now...come to me, come to me, beloved, come back....

  She heard the scuff of foot on stone and looked up, her brush automatically lifting from the canvas. He stood in front of her, his eyes dark, his face drawn, frowning intently down at her; and for one strange, wild moment she believed she had done it, that after all this time she and the woman had willed her lover home.

  “You called me,” he said, and his voice was hoarse.

  * * *

  Elain’s eyes stretched wide, her lips parting as reality trembled around her. “Math!” she whispered.

  “What is it?” he said. “What’s the matter? You called me.”

  She was stunned, confused. Her brain seemed inert, it wouldn’t function. For a moment she gazed down at the hotel on the hillside below. “No,” she said. “How could I call you?”

  They stared at each other, he with his hands loosely at his sides, she with a brush falling from nerveless fingers. She saw him move closer, and felt how he was bound to her through time and space. Her palette fell onto the grass as he reached for her, and under his hands she stood up and swayed into his arms.

  How strong he was, his arms wrapping her so tightly she would always be safe. She lifted her mouth and his kiss exploded through her body, a thousand separate shocks to a thousand separate nerves, in the same moment. Sensation ran across her skin in a shivering tremor as if she were hot and cold at once.

  She felt an overwhelming sense of urgency, both clear and cloaked at the same time. She moaned and opened her mouth under his, while her hands found his shoulders and pressed and held, and her whole being trembled with the joy of the power she felt in his body.

  His hands cupped her head, and he lifted his mouth and tilted her head back and kissed her throat, then the line of her neck from ear to shoulder. She whimpered, and heard his voice murmuring phrases meaningless to all but her secret ear. His mouth found hers again, and he wrapped his arm around her. Then he lifted his head and, smiling darkly down at her, bent and slipped a hand under her knees. In another minute she was in shadow, the shadow of the keep. He carried her over the carpet of grass, and then her feet were on the ground, and he was drawing her gently down beside him on a bed of soft, lush green.

  Chapter 5

  The grass was soft under her back, as though the earth itself embraced her. Everything was right, even the blackbird that sang somewhere above her head, the sheep that called in the distance. “Yr wyf i yn dy garu di,” she heard in her ear. “Fy nghalon i.” Every creature in the world spoke the same words, and with her secret ear she understood them all.

  “Math, Math,” she cried softly as, above, the blackbird answered her mate, and on the hillside, the lamb the ewe. His hand trembled as he stroked her neck, her shoulder, her cheek; and her heart shook in reply. They were in some other world, where there was only grass, and sunlight, and music. Her heart sang, and his mouth made the melody against her skin.

  His hair was so thick under her hand, like the grass under her body—nature’s richness and fertility proven for her. He kissed her mouth as though he were drowning in the kiss, and lifted his lips again. He turned her head to one side, and kissed her left ear, her cheek. “How beautiful you are,” he whispered, as though he were scarcely conscious of his own words, but with a little shock, Elain became conscious of them. His kisses and his voice followed the curve of her neck from her ear down to her shoulder, and then he was unbuttoning the top button on her shirt, and pulling aside the fabric to kiss her shoulder, her chest...her breast...

  “Beautiful, my be...” she heard, and then all her blood was cold in her veins. In an eyeblink she was ice from fire. She was starving where before she had been offered abundance.

  “No,” she whispered in panic. “No, no.”

  He lifted his head at once, and smiled gently at her, his eyes filled with the light of passion, his arms trembling with it. “What is it?” he asked, and she saw how his will was called into service to rein in a nearly all-encompassing passion.

  No words of explanation came to her. She pushed at him. “No!” she cried. His body was still the length of hers, his right arm still embraced her. She felt his body tense in every muscle, his hands tighten on her.

  “I see,” he said. He swallowed, and his hair fell over his forehead, and there was a fire in his eyes as he looked at her that terrified her. But he closed them, and when he had opened them again, the light was gone. His arms loosed her, and he sat up away from her.

  She was shivering with aftershock, as though she had been in an accident. She sat up and dropped her head forward, feeling chilled and sick. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

  He heaved a breath. “All right,” he said.

  She began to cry. How had this happened? “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, I see.” For a moment he was silent as she wept. Then she was astonished to feel him draw her in against his chest. He held her gently, as a father might, comfort without possession in his hands. “It’s all right,” he said. His voice shook as though he, too, might be weeping, but he stroked her hair and let her cry against his chest, and told her it would be all right.

  * * *

  When he left her she stood in front of her easel, staring down at the valley. The light was still good. She did not feel in the least like painting, but the thought of meeting anyone if she went down to the hotel now made her stoop to pick up her fallen palette and seat herself in front of the easel again.

  The palette had defied the laws of perversity by falling paint side up. She picked up her brush. She had been concentrating on the woman; the background of the valley was only sketched in. She would paint that; in this mood she had no patience for the delicate work on the woman. Watching the valley, she bent and reached for a tube of cold titanium white, and then for lamp black and Payne’s grey, and squeezed some out onto her palette. Then she began to paint the valley.

  She painted a lifeless, cold valley, a valley that might be green to other eyes, but seen through the eyes of the woman a valley of endless, barren winter, a valley where the Goddess never visited, where seeds never sprouted. She painted a valley of emptiness, where the sap froze in the trunk and blood dried in the vein. Where the ewe called but no lamb answ
ered. Where the blackbird flew without a mate. Where the sun shone coldly in a grey sky. Where all the seasons were one, and that one, unmoving winter. Where not even rot occurred, for even decay is a sign and promise of life.

  The tears dried on her cheeks as she painted, and she did not cry again.

  * * *

  Later still, when she packed to go, she missed her Walkman. Reluctantly, unwillingly, she turned to the fortress behind her and moved to the entrance. The sun was lower in the sky, and the tape recorder lay in the line of a long sweep of sunshine that poured in through the door. She wiped her hands on her jeans and stepped over to it.

  She picked it up and fastened it to her waistband, found her headphones and put them around her neck. She looked around her then, and down at the green bed of grass that covered the keep floor like a carpet, and wondered what had happened. What had possessed her, and him? Had it been the waiting woman’s desire that she felt?

  Elain turned and went back into the sunshine, and in curious detachment lifted the lid of her carrycase to reveal the picture. Her own painting seemed new to her now, as though she herself hadn’t painted it. She saw its ugly bleakness in distant surprise, a kind of ugliness she hated and never allowed herself to paint, raw and cold and angry and beaten. She hated ugliness. If her paints had not been packed away, she would have taken a brush and obliterated the picture with bright red streaks of denial: there is life, there is beauty, even though there is none in me. And it will, it must triumph.

  Yet even as the impulse flooded her, it abated, and she heard the thought in her, quiet as it was: that’s my life. I’ve painted my own life, barren as dead water.

  The sun was behind a clump of trees, and she shivered in their shadow and dropped the lid back. Who had almost made love to Math, and who had painted this picture? She must find out. She must think.

  * * *

  They were drinking tea in the garden, and called her to sit with them. Elain smiled and chatted for a moment, then excused herself, saying she must get her paints put away, and took her teacup with her to her room.

  There she opened the windows wide and flung herself down on the bed. It was going to be too much for her. She should never have come here. When Raymond had said there had been a fire, she should have made an excuse.

  Something was on the move in her, something strange and incomprehensible, and whatever it was, she knew it would no longer be held down.

  * * *

  She had awakened because she could not breathe. She remembered choking, gasping, but it was dark and she did not know that it was smoke that choked her. There was a roaring noise that she had never heard before, that terrified her. She staggered to the door and opened it, and then it wasn’t dark any more, but bright with red light and a sea of flames coming up the stairs.

  Something bright fell on her, hot and terrible against her chest. Her hair caught fire and she screamed. Then her father was there, beating her head and shoulder with his bare hands to put out the flames, snatching her up into his arms and carrying her back into the bedroom. She felt his chest move as he coughed, felt how he swayed as he raised a foot to kick out her window.

  Someone called out below. There were people running. “Jump! Jump!” she heard.

  “Richard!” her father called. “I’ll drop Elain out. Can you catch her?” Then there was the cold night air, and she clung around her father’s neck.

  “No!” she cried, loving him more in that moment than her heart could bear. She could feel it tearing with the intensity of her love, a child’s heart too small for the strength of love that flooded through it. “You jump with me!” she begged. “You come, too!”

  He had hugged her tightly, just for an instant. “I’ve got to go and get your mother,” he said. “Then I’ll come, Elain. Then I’ll come.”

  “Promise!” she had cried, but she was already dropping through the icy air, and her cry was swept away by the wind. Arms caught her, and then, as the man who caught her fell back, she was in the snow, choking, and her face and chest were burning and freezing at the same time. Then they were carrying her away, and the house was a torch behind her, and she screamed, “Daddy! Daddy!” as the roof gave way with a roaring that was straight from hell.

  * * *

  She awoke in another kind of hell, one that was white and sterile and empty except for pain. Strangers came and looked at her through a glass, and talked among themselves and wrote things down. No one touched her. When they did, they put gloves on. They made sad faces and shook their heads when they looked at her. She thought it was because she was dirty or ugly that they could not bear to touch her, to look at her. And all the time she was drowned with pain. Breathing was pain. Moving was pain. Consciousness was pain.

  After an eternity, there were faces she recognized at the glass. Her grandparents, crying and trying to smile at her. “Oh, my poor baby,” said her grandmother, making that same sad face. Her grandmother never touched her, either. That was when she knew how terrible a thing she had become, because her grandmother always touched her, hugged her, loved her. Her grandparents never even came inside the horrid white cocoon they had put her in. They stood outside and waved and wept.

  * * *

  “Where’s my father?” she said to the people in white, but they didn’t answer, turning away in embarrassment. “Where’s Daddy?” she asked her grandparents. “He promised to come.”

  “He can’t come right now, sweetheart,” they said. “He can’t come.”

  “He went for Mommy,” she said. “Did he find Mommy? He said they would come.”

  “He can’t come now,” her grandfather said, because her grandmother was weeping too much to speak.

  “When will he come?” she asked, and to this there was no answer. After awhile the question changed. “Will he come?” she asked then. But even to this question there was never a reply.

  In her child’s heart she answered the question as she wished it answered, as it must be answered. “He will come,” she told herself. And when the words had no power to comfort her, she said them more loudly, more determinedly. “He will come! He will!”

  One day her grandfather stood there with one of the people in white. “It’s going to have to be done, I’m afraid. We’ve left it as long as we dare, and it’s not recovering. The damage is too deep.”

  After that there were different kinds of pain. The skin of her leg hurt high near her hip, and now there was a white bandage there, too. “It went very well,” said the man in white to her grandfather. “I expect the graft to take.”

  * * *

  Then she was in the bed she sometimes slept in when they visited her grandparents. People came to visit, and when they looked at her they smiled sadly and shook their heads. “She was such a beautiful child,” they said to her grandmother. “What a dreadful pity.”

  There was something wrong with her hair. She couldn’t understand that. Her mother used to comb her hair every morning and every night, and she always combed it all the way down her back, and they would laugh and measure where it came. Every night her mother would press her back to tell her where her hair was now, and she remembered how the pressure had changed over time, moving slowly from the centre of her back down to her waist....

  Now her grandmother only brushed over her scalp, and never showed her the mirror when she was through. It hurt when she combed, but even so, Elain said, “Why don’t you comb it all, Grandma? Why don’t you comb down my back?” Her grandmother wept then, dropping the brush and putting her face in her hands and sobbing aloud. She was sitting on the lid of the toilet, and Elain turned and put her arms around her. “It’s all right, Grandma,” she said. “It’ll be all right when Daddy comes.”

  Her grandmother had let out a terrible sob then, and wrapped the child in her arms. “Oh, my darling, your daddy isn’t coming, my sweet, he can’t come ever again. Oh, my sweet, your poor hair, your poor face!” She put her hand under Elain’s chin and kissed her tenderly, her lips wet with tears. “Oh,
my darling, I wish he would come, too, but he can’t. He’s with your mother, and with God.”

  “How long is he going to stay with God?” Elain asked.

  “Forever, my darling,” her grandmother said softly. “He won’t ever come, my dearest. But you have us now, and we have you, and we love you very much.”

  She understood that her hair and her face were ugly now, and that was why her father wouldn’t come back. Her father had always called her his little beauty, and it was for her father’s sake that she and her mother had shared the secret joy of her growing hair, because her father had loved her long, shining hair. Her mother used to tie ribbons in it, and when her father came home she would run to the door to meet him. And he would come through the door and look at her, and say, “Oh, my, aren’t you beautiful tonight! Are those ribbons in your hair for me?”

  “Put ribbons in my hair,” she said to her grandmother. “Then my father will come.”

  But the charm did not work. Her grandmother was right. They never came back.

  * * *

  A window banged in the breeze, and Elain rolled over to look at her watch. If she was going to change for dinner, she would have to hurry.

  She stood under the shower, willing it to wash away the memories, but the British shower that will do that doesn’t exist. This one was particularly bad, the water coming out grudgingly, hot and cold not well mixed, so that half her scalp was scalded and half simultaneously frozen. But the last few years of similar showers had made her practically immune to such deficiencies. She turned it full on and stood with her face under the gentle bipartite stream and vigorously pretended.

  Back in her room, she dried herself, avoiding the full-length mirror until she had on bra and pants. Then she stood looking at herself for a moment. She had long, curving, neatly muscled legs; slim but rounded hips that ran up to a small, firm waistline; her breasts...