Later that day, as he climbed the stairs to his apartment, Don Juan stumbled for a moment and had to seize the broad handrail to steady himself. Blood drained from his face, he felt a touch of dizziness; it was over in a moment; and when, later in the day, he reported the incident to Mary, he saw on her lips a small, melancholy smile.
Don Juan had never given much thought to the sexual relations of husbands and wives, which had always struck him as tedious, ludicrous, and utterly superfluous, but sometimes he wondered a little about Hood and Mary. They had separate bedrooms, which might mean anything; Hood seemed fond of her in a dim way, sometimes patting her on the arm and sometimes commenting on the color of her gown, but more often appearing rather surprised that she was there at all. It was as if he misplaced her each night and found her again the next morning. He had once said to Juan that he was pleased, for Mary’s sake, that Juan had come to stay at Swan Park, for he himself was devilish busy with his projects, and Mary— an angelic wife, who never complained—was often without employment.
Sometimes it seemed to Don Juan that there were two lives: a public, proper, entirely uninteresting life witnessed by everyone, and a secret life of bliss and torment that had nothing to do with that other life. In one life he sat sipping a cup of green tea, among friends, in the pavilion of an English garden, while in the other he was lying rapturously beside Georgiana on the floor of a hut in the middle of an impenetrable forest at the bottom of a hidden valley surrounded by impassable mountains. Mary Hood smiled over a cup of tea, but in her eyes was a night-world where she and Don Juan wandered hand in hand forever through the rooms of an abandoned country house filled with beds and sofas. And what of Georgiana, pointing at a bird singing on a branch—is it one of yours, Augustus?—or urging Mary to eat a biscuit?—she too must be the mistress and goddess of a secret world where, unknown to Juan, she led her other life, the one she concealed from him behind her cool smile and quiet gaze. Hood was no less difficult to unriddle, since he lived in a world of contrivance and artifice, of secret mechanisms and skillful illusions, as if, desperately dissatisfied with the actual world, he must continually replace it with another. In Hood’s case, then, it might be said that the secret world was repeatedly erupting into the first world. But Hood, for all his frank friendliness, was also elusive, like a child or an elf, so that perhaps he too concealed, behind his restless activity, another life that he inhabited more deeply than this one. Juan, who was unaccustomed to working things out in his mind, felt suddenly exhausted, and studied the rim of his cup without interest.
Because Georgiana did not love him, because he could not compel her deepest attention, Don Juan had grown to dislike himself, and above all to dislike his face. Staring into the mirror in his sitting room, at a face so famous for its beauty that women had been known to swoon when he entered a room, he saw only a repellent mask: the sharp beard that looked like a dagger pointed at his chest, the teeth too white and too sharp, like instruments for inflicting pain, the nose a blade, the forehead harsh, the whole face tense with will—and the dark eyes, fierce with sorrow, staring up out of deep pits like drowning rodents.
One afternoon when he was sitting in an armchair by a window in the library, trying to concentrate his attention on a book about the harrowing of ninth-century Wessex by Danish Vikings, while imagining that he was alone with Georgiana on a green island in a blue lake in Elysium, he was irritated by a sudden knock at the door. Georgiana entered and closed the door quietly behind her. Juan stood up. Georgiana walked to an armchair on the other side of the high window. She sat down and said, “Pray be seated. Forgive me for—disturbing you.”
Juan, who could scarcely look at her because the sight of her hair against her cheek made him want to cry out in pain, opened his mouth to make a witty reply, closed it, and sank wearily into his chair.
“You are looking tired, Don Juan. But I’ve not come to speak to you about that. I’ve come to speak to you about Mary. She worries me, Sir. She does not eat; she is growing thin; yesterday she grew dizzy again on the path. She refuses a doctor, insists she is well. She is behaving strangely. ’Tis plain she is fond of you; she watches you. Be kind to her, Don Juan. I fear some terrible disaster.”
Juan looked at her sadly. “Am I unkind to Mary?”
“Pray forgive me. I did not mean that you have been unkind to her. I meant that I wished you to be particularly kind to her, since she is unhappy. Hush!”
Georgiana held up a hand to command silence and tilted her head to listen. Rising quickly, she strode across the rug and pulled open the door.
Mary, standing with her arm out as if to turn the handle, gave a little jump.
“You frightened me, Georgiana.”
“He is in the library,” she replied, striding out with a loud rustle of silk.
Mary closed the door and walked across the room to the empty chair beside the window, where she sat down.
“I was looking for you, Don Juan. I didn’t know you were with Georgiana. I thought you might be, but I didn’t know. May I sit here? I shall be very quiet while you read. I don’t know how it is, but I wanted to sit with you, for a while. There is no reason. Don’t you find that very strange? That there should be no reason for things, I mean.”
Juan, who was so tired that the bones of his face ached, did not know whether she was speaking nonsense or uttering profound truths in riddles. Meanwhile, he tried to understand what Georgiana had said to him. He was already spending a good deal of time with Mary—was she asking him to spend more? Was it possible that she meant something else, that she was asking him—but surely she could not have been asking him to become the lover of her married sister. Perhaps she was being kind to him again: since you cannot have me, Sir, I offer you her. He felt that he was not thinking clearly, or perhaps too clearly. Mary sat in the chair. Suddenly he stood up. Mary looked at him with wide, nervous eyes. He placed a finger severely over his lips, then walked swiftly across the room and pulled open the door. No one was there.
“I thought I heard something,” he said, as he returned to his armchair and picked up his book, which he immediately closed.
“I hear things,” Mary said. “In the dark.”
Juan leaned back his head and closed his eyes. Through the high window, sunlight struck his face. He was lying back in a warm gondola with the sun on his face, listening to the lapping of water and the distant song of a gondolier.
“Oh, look,” Mary said, and when Juan opened his eyes he saw her studying a spider on the back of her hand.
“I used to be afraid of spiders,” Mary said. “But not any more. Hello, little spider. Do you want to play with me? Oh!” She shook her hand violently. “He startled me. Poor little spider.” She began to look for it in the folds of her overskirt, but the spider had disappeared.
Don Juan had always known exactly what he wanted from life, and it exhausted him to recognize that he no longer knew. At night, lying restlessly awake, he posed questions to himself that seemed crucial and unanswerable, as if he were a stern priest administering the catechism to a bewildered pupil who knew nothing but feared eternal damnation. If you were allowed one night of bliss in the arms of Georgiana, followed immediately by banishment, or a lifetime of chaste friendship, which would you choose? If you were permitted to ravish Georgiana night after night for the next ten years with the knowledge that she despised you, or to leave tomorrow with the knowledge that she loved you passionately, which would you choose? Would you love Georgiana if she were a leper? A dwarf? An idiot? If you were given the choice of leaving Swan Park for thirty years with the knowledge that when you returned she would love you, or of remaining forever with the knowledge that nothing would ever change, which would you choose?
Sometimes he had the weary sense that Georgiana had been a little more kind to him than on some other occasion. Then he would find an excuse to be alone, in his sitting room or the library, where he savored the moment, turning it over in his mind, before it had a chance to be damage
d by the little knife-points of indifference that glittered through her friendliness. At other times he tried to lose himself in the routine of Swan Park, as if the familiar motions of strolling along the riverbank or riding out with Hood would stimulate in his mind an earlier exuberance. But the familiar motions had suffered a change: Georgiana walked with a more measured and attentive tread, Hood watched Mary carefully, and Mary, tense and pale, her eyes large and restless and burning-dark, a hand fluttering now and then to her hair or to her gown, talked in sudden breathless bursts or not at all.
Dr. Centlivre, with his powdery frock, his watch in its polished silver case, and his melancholy eyes, had visited Mary in her sitting room, and had left behind a small brown bottle and strict orders for plenty of bed rest and no mental agitation. Juan wondered which would agitate her less: his absence, his presence, his speech, his silence, his coolness, his kindness— but he was so sunk in apathy, a restless, feverish sort of apathy, a nervous languor, a drowsy sluggish fire of leaping and falling feeling, that it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other, after which you were supposed to put the first foot in front of that—an absurd succession of slow deliberate footsteps, leading with maniacal precision to inevitable death.
Late one night when Juan was sitting before his casement window, staring out at the glimmer of distant river under the moon, he became aware of a figure moving on the lawn below. It was white, with whiteness shimmering around its head, and Juan’s first impression was that a ghost such as he had often read about in his childhood had come floating out of a book in the library and was drifting across the grass. A moment later he recognized Mary’s walk and her cap of Brussels lace. He hesitated long enough to see her turn into the plum orchard; then he stepped up onto the windowsill, climbed partway down the wall, and leaped softly onto the grass.
He followed her at twenty paces through the orchard and the coppice of beech trees and entered a darker place, where paths wound among yew trees and weathered statues with broken forearms and decaying shoulders. Juan passed a headless woman with two broken arms who stood in the heavy marble folds of a moss-covered mantle, baring to the moon a single broken breast. Beside her in the grass lay her upturned head. At a dark pool rimmed with crumbling stone he stopped. Mary, white and black in the moonlight, like a drawing in a book, stood on one of the cushioned seats carved into the roots of the great oak. She was touching the tree with both hands, caressing the bark as if she had come out for a midnight tryst with a lover who had been turned into a tree. Suddenly something stirred and Juan saw the door in the tree begin to open. Mary stepped up and disappeared into the oak. Juan strode along the length of the pond, stumbling on something white that might have been a marble arm, stepped onto the cushion in the carved root-seat, and climbed up into the hollow tree.
Dim moonlight falling through the leaves of the oak revealed a stone stairway going down. Juan made his way down the turning stairs, which wound around a column of stone. As the moonlight rose above his head the darkness became blacker, until he felt that he was pushing his way through a thickening mass of blackness as palpable as feathers. He pressed one hand against the central column and one against the concave wall. Below he heard a steady soft silken sound, like a distant rustle of high grass stirred by a wind; he imagined Mary’s wide gown brushing against the column and the wall, dragging behind her on the turning steps. His hand dislodged a bit of stone, which fell clicking on the stairs and suddenly stopped. As he descended he had the sense that he was dissolving in a solution of blackness, that soon there would be nothing left: one day on a stone stair in a hollow tree forgotten by generations of squires a young woman with gray-green eyes who happened to be walking in the woods would discover a ring, a skull, a rusty sword.
Now the darkness seemed to become thinner, as if it had been penetrated by an alien substance, a faint light glimmered, and when he came to the bottom he could see a passageway stretching off to the left and right.
Here and there dim lanterns in wall niches gave off a gloomy half-light. He saw Mary turning out of sight along the winding path, from which other passageways branched off on both sides. Hood had spoken of his system of passageways, and Juan imagined a vast underpark of crisscrossing paths, connected to the upper park by circular stairways emerging in grottoes, rotundas, ruins, summerhouses, tea pavilions, hollow statues and trees. Mary turned into another passageway. The path became broader; Juan noticed a narrow rivulet running along one side. The streambed sank lower, the water widened, and when he turned a bend Juan saw Mary stepping into a boat. The oarsman stood high on one end, holding his oar; the boat was long and narrow and curved upward at bow and stern. As the oarsman began to push off, Juan stepped into the boat and sank into the dark cushions of the seat across from Mary.
“Why, Sir Juan! You must be a dream—or a ghost. You’re pale as a ghost—so wan, Sir Juan!—oh, I shall call you Sir Wan. I really do think you must be a ghost, after all. So am I, too: the ghost of Mary Hood. You remember Mary Hood. First she was glad, then she was bad, and then she was very, very sad. And now she has disappeared! Indeed, I cannot find her anywhere. Nothing left but us ghosts, Sir Juan. That is what happens to us, once we disappear. And we can never never rest because—because—oh, I forget why we can never rest. ’Tis our punishment, I think. For our wicked thoughts. Do dons ever have wicked thoughts, Sir Don? Oh, my.”
The boat had rounded a sharp bend and was entering a broad waterway. There were the great palazzi, looming in the torchlit dark; there were the arched bridges, the stone steps leading into the water, the passing gondolas, the masked revelers. Hood had even fashioned a night sky of twinkling lights, a round moon, and blue-black clouds. “ ’Tis but recently begun,” Mary Hood said. “Augustus was hoping to surprise you. I heard him speaking of it to Georgiana. Georgiana thinks I am too much alone. And yet I do not lack society. My thoughts are my daily companions, and at night—why, at night I lie down with Despair. Oh, Johnny had a wife, and a right fine wife, and yet she was a maid, Sir. And how that may be, I cannot cannot tell, and fol de rol de rol, Sir. Georgiana says—oh, look.”
Mary was pointing to a gondola in which a young lord wearing a plumed hat sat leaning back against the cushions. Hood had captured everything: the cut of the sleeve, the insolent grace of the man, a certain tilt of the face as he said something to his gondolier, who wore a straw hat set back on his head. The face was perhaps too youthful, too lovely in a languorous way, but the line of the nose, the slope of the forehead, the small sharp beard, all composed a remarkable likeness. A masked woman in a passing gondola called out to the young lord, who turned his head in her direction and spoke a few words. In every gesture of his face and hands he revealed the supreme confidence of a man accustomed to the attentions of women. He laughed lightly as he turned away—and Juan, startled by the sound, and pressing himself down on the cushions so as not to be seen, tried to remember when it was that he had last felt laughter rush through his throat.
“Do you suppose she is happy?” Mary was saying, as a band of revelers burst into shouts of laughter on a nearby bridge; and when Juan turned to look at her, he saw that she was gazing after the masked woman with sorrowing eyes.
“Pray, that way,” Mary said to her gondolier. They were approaching a building where an arched doorway with an iron portcullis came down to the water. The portcullis rose as they drew near, and the gondola entered a watery courtyard bounded by stony ground strewn with trestles, buckets, and barrels. Long wooden beams slanted up from the ground and rested high against the back of the palazzo facade. The inner surface was unfinished; in the light of lanterns Juan could see the unpainted boards, which on the outside had been painted to resemble ancient stone. At a small pier an old man with a boat hook pulled them in. Juan followed Mary out of the gondola and up a flight of rickety wooden steps that led to a winding passageway. Under a dim lantern an arch revealed a stone stair. He climbed behind her, round and round, and now he had the sense that the darkness was u
nraveling and trailing behind him, fold after fold, until it lay at the bottom in a heavy black pile. He smelled leaves; a moment later he emerged behind Mary through a door in a tree on the bank of the Ymber, far upstream.
“Oh look, Sir Juan! A spy.” Juan placed his hand on his sword hilt, but Mary was pointing to the brilliant summer moon.
“Come, Mary,” Juan said wearily, and as he walked with her along the winding river in the direction of the house, it struck him that they must have emerged on the distant bend of river that he liked to watch at night from his casement window.
Mary was not at breakfast the next morning; Georgiana said she was headachy and dull. “She said she dreamed about you all night,” Georgiana remarked, glancing at Juan and looking away. Juan, opening his mouth to reply, was seized suddenly by a shuddering yawn, which he violently repressed. His eyelids felt hot. Somewhere a fly buzzed. Georgiana fidgeted with her tea.
Sometimes he tried to imagine that Georgiana was playing an elaborate game, that she was trying to provoke his interest by an apparent indifference that concealed a secret passion. Because he did not believe what he imagined, which was contradicted by every visible sign, he was able to sustain the illusion only by avoiding Georgiana—an act that enabled him to imagine that she was aware of his avoidance and was moved by it to tumults of feeling she could scarcely suppress. When, helplessly, he found himself in her company, he would force himself not to look at her face. Instead he concentrated his attention on Mary, whose wide eyes looked at him with sorrow, or on his own hand, which lay before him like a hand broken from a statue and set down for his inspection—and sometimes, suddenly, he raised his eyes to Georgiana, whose head would be turned the other way.
He was always tired. At night he lay exhausted and awake, with burning eyes, and in bright sunlight he narrowed his eyes tightly, as if someone were flinging sand in his face. He tried to remember when it was that he had last slept well. As a boy in Seville he had slept in a big bed with gilt hawks on the posts. In the mornings his mother would come in and touch his face with her hand. Remembering, he touched his face with his own hand. He immediately withdrew it, as if something unpleasant had been pressed against his cheek, like the forepaw of a dead animal.
The King in the Tree Page 11