Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  “Constance, I love my wife.”

  “But of course you love her. I never doubted that for one moment. After all”—she gave a small impatient gesture—“I promoted your marriage. I told you she would suit. You need her, just as I need Montague—up to a point. However, you also need me. You want me. You always have. If you touched me, you would know that. You don’t dare to touch me—and that’s why you’re running away so fast.” She shrugged. “It’s quite useless. You can’t leave me. I’ll be there in your mind. You’ll consider, speculate, wish. Just as you always did. Just as I always did.”

  She spoke with an air of absolute certainty. This arrogance angered Acland.

  “Do you believe that?” he said in a quiet voice.

  “Of course. I’ve never doubted it.”

  “You’re wrong. I could touch you—and feel nothing at all. The point is, I have no desire to touch you.”

  At this, Constance gave a small cry. It seemed to Acland too perfectly timed, that cry, and the gesture of apparent pain she gave, too contrived. From arrogance and certitude a moment before, she switched to vulnerability. This seemed to Acland mechanical. Constance used these shifts, he thought, like ratchets. Obedient to the leverage of her will, they were designed to manipulate speech into a scene, a scene upward to the peaks of drama, or melodrama.

  “Look, Constance,” he began in a reasonable voice. “Think a little. I am married. You are married. You came here for my daughter’s christening. A moment ago we were talking about your father’s death. You were distressed, and I tried to comfort you. That’s all. Nothing more. If you misinterpreted my actions—I’m sorry. Now, can we stop this, and forget this, and go back to the house?”

  “You saved my life, once—” Constance gave another cry.

  “Constance, that was so long ago. You were ill, and perhaps I helped, in certain ways, in your recovery—”

  “You promised me not to die.” Her eyes had again filled with tears. “You swore to me. And you didn’t die. You came back.”

  “Constance, I know all those things. I don’t deny them. They were before my marriage.”

  “Oh, before your marriage! You make your marriage sound like some horrible barrier. A great wall.” She clasped her hands together. “How can you speak like that—in that dismissive way? All those sacred things. And you wave them aside. I believed in you. I believed in us. It’s the only thing I ever have believed in—in all my life.”

  “Constance, I’m not dismissing them. I’m just saying they are over, that’s all.”

  “You are! You are! You’re denying them!” She gave another cry. She covered her ears with her hands. “I won’t listen. I can’t bear to listen. It’s like Saint Peter, and the cock crowing, three times. It’s hateful. It’s sinful.”

  “Constance—stop this. Listen—”

  “I won’t.” She dropped her hands. She took a step back. Acland realized he was no longer certain whether she was acting or was sincere. All color had left her face, which had a blanched, stricken look. She was again trembling with the force of her own emotion.

  “You loved me. I know you loved me. There was something there, between us. It was alive—so alive. And now you’re trying to kill it. You’ve changed. You wouldn’t have done that once. You’re less than you used to be, Acland. You took risks once. Now, you won’t even admit the risks are there. You pretend they don’t exist—it’s safer that way! Oh, Acland. When did you decide to make yourself an ordinary man?”

  Acland turned away. He looked at the lake, the darkening sky. The woods were now invisible, a shadow beyond the water.

  “Is it ordinary,” he said slowly, “to love your wife, and your child? Is it ordinary—to value a marriage? Perhaps it is.” He shrugged. “Very well, then. I am … ordinary. That is … what I have become.”

  There was a silence. When Constance next spoke, her voice had changed. She spoke slowly, in a considering way: “I wonder,” she said. “How strange. Maybe you always were. Maybe no change was involved. Perhaps … I invented you. Montague suggested that. Yes, I see now. It could be that. I made you, Acland—into such a fine creature. A hero. I looked at you—and do you know what I saw? A unique man. No, not even a man. An angel. Your hair was like fire. Your eyes could strike me dead. You were invincible—one of the immortals. All that power, and I gave it to you! I coined it, in my mind. I breathed it into you, year after year. I made you so strong. I looked at your two hands, and do you know what I saw? I saw death in the one hand, and life in the other. My redeemer, and my deliverer. The creature who could save me, the creature with the courage to kill my father. So much then, and so little now. Ah, well—”

  “Constance—”

  “I am not so small, after all. I see that now. I seem small sometimes, even to myself. I look at myself, and I shrink before my own eyes. But now—I’m not so sure. Perhaps I am … considerable.” She gave a sigh. “Does it make someone considerable, do you think, if their imagination is large?”

  “Constance, we should not have come here. You’re not well.”

  Acland turned back to her. She was standing stiffly, her hands clasped in front of her, looking out toward the darkening water of the lake. She had spoken as if to herself, as if she did not see Acland at all.

  “Come back to the house.” He took her arm. “Constance, can you hear me? Listen. It’s late. It’s cold. Come back. Come back now.”

  “I’m braver than you are. I understand that now. I begin to understand it.” She turned upon him a blank gaze. “I shall never forgive you for that, Acland.”

  “Don’t talk anymore. Look, take my arm and we’ll walk back to the house. You should rest—”

  “I don’t want your arm. I shall never rest. What a fool you sound! Leave me alone.”

  “Constance—”

  “You know the only courage worth having? The courage to kill. And I thought you possessed it. How stupid I was! You loaded your gun. Then you turned back. God, I despise you—”

  “Constance, stop this. You don’t know what you’re saying. Look—sit down. Try to be quiet.” Acland looked about him in a helpless way. Constance did not move.

  “Shall I fetch someone?” He turned back to her. “Steenie—perhaps if Steenie came down? He could talk to you, and then, when you feel calmer—”

  “Oh, but I feel perfectly calm. Look.”

  She held out her hand, palm downward.

  “You see? Not a breath of wind. The water quite still. So black. No ripples.”

  “You’re ill. I’m going to fetch someone.”

  Acland moved toward the steps, then stopped. It would be unwise, he knew, to leave her. He turned back, still hesitating. Constance remained staring in the direction of the lake, just visible still in the gathering dusk. Her face was white as chalk, her gaze wide-eyed and intent. The proximity of that lake made Acland afraid. No, he could not leave her.

  As he stared out toward the water, there came a sudden sound, so startling after the silence that Acland flinched and then—with a reflex that remained, all those years after the war—lifted his arm to shield his face. He felt the susurration of the air; saw, dimly, the passage, very close, of a black and indeterminate shape.

  Even as he recognized it to be a swan, lifting into flight from the water, he thought: Will I never be free of this? And as he thought this, Constance screamed.

  Her gull cry: one clear, high, piercing note. Acland swung around. Fear and confusion made time reverse. For a second, turning, he expected to see a child, white-faced, black-dressed, bending, straightening, screaming—and then freezing, fixing him with her accusatory eyes, black and unwavering in a small stone face.

  No child, of course. Constance, in her gray coat, had also flinched. Her arm, too, was lifted before her face, as if to ward off a blow. As he looked at her she backed away from him, into the shadows, so her figure merged with them, so he could see only the pallor of her face.

  She said—later he would think she said—“Don
’t. For the love of God. Don’t.”

  She made a tiny sound, a whimpering sound, like a small and injured animal. Then, as Acland, recovering, made a gesture of concern, began hesitantly to move toward her, she dropped her arm and straightened up.

  Acland stopped. Her face stopped him. Constance paused, seemed to consider, then walked forward a few steps. She lifted her head to look at him, dusk making her skin silvery, shadow dissolving, then re-forming the features of her face.

  She said, in a clear precise voice: “Do you know what my father did once? He gave me my own blood to drink. In a very small glass. The tiniest glass. As small as a thimble. Or was it wine? No, I don’t think it was wine. I couldn’t be mistaken, could I? Wine tastes different from blood.”

  Before Acland could speak, she lifted her hand, then felt for his face.

  “Poor Acland.” Her expression changed, beneath that glassy overlay. Her hair merged into the dusk. “Poor Acland. I’m not ill. My mind never felt so clear. I understand now.” She seemed to gather herself, or to summon some last vestige of her will. “I knew I would understand—in the end. All day today, I could feel it coming, closer and closer. You helped—I think you helped. The voice was always there, you see—I just had to listen to it. Did you hear it just now? I’m glad I listened. I should have listened before, but I was too afraid. I thought time would drown it out—but of course it couldn’t. Not even twenty years, two whole decades, not the rest of my life, not the deepest water would silence that. After all, you can’t drown a voice, can you? A person, yes—but not a voice.”

  She gave a small shake of the head. Acland felt her fingers trace his own features; then she let her hand fall.

  “It’s growing dark. I can’t see you so very well. Let me look at you. Yes, I thought so. Such a small imagination. So quick, so clever—but you still don’t understand, do you? Shall I show you? Shall I show you now? Yes, I think I shall. I owe you that.”

  She ran down the steps ahead of him. At the bottom of them she paused, looking back. She drew her gray coat close about her. She gazed at him for a moment, then turned and began to walk away up the path to the house.

  The light was almost gone. Acland ran out after her. He heard the sound of her small feet, the crush of gravel underfoot, then the crack of a stick.

  He peered into the dusk. Constance, clearly in sight a moment before, was now invisible.

  Here I am. And here I am not. Acland felt alarm tighten in his chest, felt an acute sense of foreboding. He ran down the steps. He stared along the path. He could see the lights of the house in the distance, the pale thread of the gravel; shadows wavered; half-light witched his eyes.

  He thought he saw, some way in the distance, her figure move. Constance, or a trick of the light? He hesitated, uncertain, afraid she might have turned away in the direction of the lake. He began to walk, then to run. A branch reached out and caught at his hair. A trunk twisted at him, startlingly white. His pace slowed. He stopped.

  From the darkness ahead of him a voice called. He felt an instinctual fear, a chill on the back of his neck. His mother’s voice.

  In the silence that followed he stood irresolute, telling himself that darkness distorted, that he imagined this. Then the voice came again, its accent and its tone unmistakable. A perfect piece of mimicry.

  “Eddie,” called his mother’s voice. “Eddie. This way. I’m over here.”

  When Acland reached the house he paused in the hall. From the drawing room beyond he could hear the sounds of normality: the crackle of logs on the fire, the chink of teacups, the murmur of conversation. He listened: his wife’s voice, Wexton’s voice, an interjection from Steenie, some exchange of remarks between Freddie and Winnie; then, interspersed with the others, Constance’s voice. He could catch only phrases, for Constance’s voice was always low-pitched, but those phrases were enough to tell him: Constance had returned to the family circle. She was discussing, it seemed, varieties of honey. Her voice and manner of speech were not odd in any way. There was no indication of stress, or emotion, in her speech. Acland leaned against the wall. He closed, then opened his eyes. He thought: I imagined this.

  Constance had always possessed this ability, to drag him through the looking glass, to make—of inversion—sense. He gazed at the staircase; he watched it branch. He was reluctant to leave the protection of this hall; he wanted to remain here, on the borderline, on the frontier. He did not want to look Constance in the face.

  Standing there in the hall, Acland felt certain the events of the afternoon had taken place; he felt equally certain they had not. He found he could not remember precisely what Constance had said to him, or the order in which she had said it. His mind was full of scraps; he could assemble them in an infinite number of patterns. Their innate energy, their malevolent capacity for change, perturbed and confused him.

  He was sure that, on the path, Constance had called back to him in his mother’s voice. He thought he was sure of the words she had used. He understood that, if he had heard this, the voice that had called to him was the voice of patricide.

  This, too, was possible, and impossible. He was not prepared to trust the accuracy of his own memory, or its implications. Constance, after all, was a liar, as well as a fantasist. Cross-examine. Decode. Acland tried to force his mind to work—he had prided himself, once upon a time, on the incisiveness of his reason.

  If he had heard what he thought he had heard, then Constance was capable of murder, or was not sane, or, at the very least, had a seriously disturbed imagination. Guilt, as he knew, was a flexible, devious thing; it was possible to feel it for an action wished but never committed. Had she committed a crime, or merely imagined she had committed it? That was possible: He knew Constance’s ability to believe her own fictions. Yes, he could talk this thing down, level by level, until it became something within the grasp of the rational. Yet he could not be certain. Flux, distortion, an almost infinite capacity for interpretation—nothing could be fixed. This crime—if it was a crime—was too old. There it lay, twenty years in the past, beyond the reach of reason, or forensics.

  I shall know when I look at her, Acland told himself. So he crossed the hall and entered the drawing room. Constance’s face told him nothing; her manner told him nothing. She was neither quieter nor more animated than usual. She took tea with his family. She sat there in a chair to the left of the fire, sipping tea, her small feet extended toward the warmth of the flames.

  She had, it seemed, just presented her christening present, and Jane—disguising the dislike Acland knew she would have for such an object—rose to show it to him as he entered. An extravagant, costly, pagan-looking bracelet: a snake, with a jeweled head, designed to coil about the arm. Constance, negligent about this present, said she had not wanted to provide the usual predictable christening trinkets. This present was one Victoria could wear when she was older; it looked best on bare skin. Constance smiled. A pretty thing, she thought; she had bought it on impulse, the previous day, in Bond Street.

  Nothing happened. Acland found this unnerving. His head began to ache. When he went to dress for dinner the pain worsened. He had suffered migraine attacks since the war (and was to continue to suffer them, throughout my Winterscombe childhood). Usually, the only cure for these attacks was silence and a darkened room—but that evening such cures were out of the question.

  A special dinner had been planned in celebration of the christening—just a family dinner, but one he knew was important to his wife.

  Acland took codeine to dull the edge of the pain. Looking toward light sources, he found them rimmed with black, a blackness that nauseated him, that probed some space behind the eyes, was an affliction to the retina.

  At seven-thirty he went downstairs. All the household was assembled except Constance. Constance was to come down late; while the rest of the group drank glasses of sherry downstairs, Constance paced about her room. She turned back and forth before her mirror; she reassured herself of her own beauty. Glitter
y: as perfect as ice; her hair electric with purpose, her fingers like daggers.

  Constance was planning her little scene. Should she say this first, or that? Should she just punish Acland for being ordinary—or should she punish them all, one after another? All of them, she decided.

  She sent a mind-message to Montague, who was—she saw now—not ordinary; her husband, who would approve of what she was doing. We are alike, she said to him: We know how to hate; if it came to it, we would both have the courage to leap into the chasm. Watch me pull the temple down, Montague, she said—watch. I know you will find it amusing.

  I shall wear your diamonds, for you, Constance said—and she strung them around her neck, a chain of water. She turned her throat, this way, then that; she watched lightning spring out from their facets.

  Time to go. Her skin was white. Her dress was black. Her lips were red. I can kill, said her will; and then it said: I can do anything.

  She turned out the lights, one by one. Even the darkness was not frightening. Then, taking the stairs slowly, admiring, as she went, the trimness of her tiny feet, the fit of her satin shoes, the buckles like prisms, she went down.

  Hurt them, said Constance to herself. And, since she was a child in this respect as well as others, since she was never to understand that to punish others is a poor way to ensure the punishment of the self, her will gathered strength.

  She entered the drawing room with confidence, as she always did when she was undivided in her purpose. She looked from face to face, and then—just as she had planned—she set about procuring her own banishment. Acland may have been the instrument for that exile, but I have no doubt that it was Constance who acted judge and jury. In ensuring that she became an outcast, she was passing sentence on herself.

  Imagine it: it was an old-fashioned, a very formal dining room at Winterscombe. Reduced circumstances, yes, but the old rules still prevailing. A polished table, too large for seven people, and the numbers odd—a fact that was indisguisable. William, assisted by one of the elderly maids, was serving. He would have poured the claret (and it would have been a fine one) as he always did, with an air of reverence. The four men, in dinner jackets; the three women, in evening dress. Candlelight; a fire; heavy silver, well polished; over-ornate crested dinner service, four hundred individual pieces, once a source of pride to my grandfather Denton. A well-cooked plain meal—an English meal; the cook distrusts what she calls fancy dishes. No herbs here; not a whisper of garlic. The fillets of sole come curled up like small white fists; their only adornment, lemon. The roast is saddle of mutton—it is excellent, but will remain untasted. The puddings—a nod to Freddie here—are the kind Englishmen claim to prefer: nursery puddings; starchy, heavy, and reassuring. They would not be eaten either, for it was when the saddle of mutton had been brought out, and Acland—as was customary—had crossed to the sideboard to carve, that Constance began. It was Winnie, poor Winnie, who gave her her cue.