Polystom

by Adam Roberts

  ‘You hurt me,’ she said, interrupting him with her deceptively soft voice. ‘By locking me away.’

  He stopped. Flustered. ‘You’re missing the point,’ he said. He tried to remember what his uncle had said, what his exact words had been. ‘It’s about growing up, you know,’ he said. ‘It’s about necessity. It’s for your own good. You need to learn, you see. Necessity and authority. The point is,’ he said, warming up a little, ‘that you don’t seem to understand what a wife should be. How a wife should act. You are a wife, you know. You don’t seem to have the . . . proper attitude, the appropriate attitude. You see.’

  There was another silence, with the only noises the hum of the flames and the intermittent gunshot bangs of sticks splitting as they burnt in the fire. Then Beeswing did something she had never done before in all the time that Polystom had known her: she asked a question.

  She said, ‘What have I done wrong, as a wife?’

  The fire bickered at its log.

  Polystom leaned back. He was tempted to snap at her, what did you say? but he knew that she would not retract the question, not even repeat it, and would merely look at him with her infuriating eyes. Perhaps it was a breakthrough, the first step on the road to true sorrowfulness and associated repentance. He refilled his glass and sipped at the dark wine once, twice, three times, trying to compose an answer that would make it plain to her that he had seen through her, that her subtle routines of insurrection were obvious to him, that the game was up. But now that he came to think of it, it was very difficult to put into words exactly what the issue was. It was in the slippery nature of her transgression that words failed to encapsulate the nature of her wrongness. And even if he could express precisely how this and precisely that needed to change, he would somehow be serving her lack of respect, he would somehow be lowering himself in front of her.

  ‘I think,’ he said, slowly, sipping again at the wine, ‘that you know very well what the problem is. I think you know just as well as I, what the problem between us is.’

  He expected a denial, but instead of saying no I don’t know what the problem is she said nothing. Her attention appeared to have wandered.

  ‘I don’t deny,’ he said, filling the uneasy silence, ‘that it may have been difficult for you, adjusting. Adjusting to your new life, you know. But the sooner you make that adjustment!’ He beamed at her, his false smile ghastly in the flickering light. ‘Do you see what I’m saying? The sooner you do adjust, the better for you – never mind the better for me, although that is also true. But the better for you!’

  She was on her feet now, a little unsteadily, and with her left hand touching the side of her bandaged head as if supporting it. He stood up too.

  ‘Tired,’ she said. ‘I’m going to bed.’ And she turned round, and half glided, half staggered out of the library. She disappeared so quickly that Stom did not have time to say anything.

  In the morning, he sought her out after breakfast. It was past eleven, and after the chills of the night the sun was hot and bright. Beeswing had eaten outdoors again, and was being helped inside, into the shade, now that the sunlight was too hot. Stom waited until she had been settled into a settee, and then waved away her servant.

  ‘I wasn’t satisfied,’ he told her, having prepared this opening sentence, ‘with last night’s conversation.’ He sat down opposite her, and folded his arms. He expected her to respond, but there was nothing there. Her expression was as distant and vacant as if her whole mind were a space of interplanetary ether.

  ‘Look,’ he said, meaning to say something decisive. But he couldn’t think of a suitably decisive statement. ‘This won’t do,’ he said, eventually. ‘This is mad. Insane! We can’t go on like this. Look – let me ask you a question.’ He felt a bubbling excitement inside him as if the two of them were about to breakthrough, and everything was going to be all right. ‘Let me ask you a question.’ Leaning forward, fixing her languid eyes and her perfect, faery face. ‘Are you happy? Answer that question. Are you happy?’

  She looked at him with one long unbroken stare, as if trying to answer the question with her eyes alone. Then she moved her head, slowly, sweeping her glance away from him, moving across the far wall like a searchlight, and finally to the window. The grass gleamed bright green in the sunshine. The funnels of a petrol-delivery ship poked above the curve of the hill, outlined against the grey-blue of the Middenstead behind. They slid, disembodied pillars, across the garden landscape and went behind the trees.

  A minute stretched to two. Two stretched to five. This was absurd. Was she going to answer him? He stirred uneasily. Clearly she was not happy. That was evident! Does a happy person dash themselves head-first against a heavy wooden door? She didn’t need to answer him – all he had to do, to reach her, was make her see that the thing standing between her and her own happiness was herself. Once she grasped that idea, things would start to go well between them.

  ‘I want,’ he said, gruffly, and cleared his throat. ‘I want,’ he continued more smoothly, ‘you to be happy. I want us both to be happy. This insurrection of yours,’ he said, finding his uncle’s word on his tongue, ‘only adds to the sum of unhappiness. Believe me; people have married and settled for a thousand generations. There’s a profound truth in it, you see.’ He knew a poem about it, a trio of lines that expressed the inherent rightness of what he was trying to say, but maddeningly he couldn’t recall them. Come, no, You forget so easily, come, no that wasn’t it. Never mind. It wouldn’t be quite right to borrow the eloquence of a poet; he had to make her see for himself. ‘Ownership and being owned,’ he said. ‘It can only make us happy – we can only be happy – if we allow ourselves to be. These structures, they surround us, they surround us completely, supporting us, lifting us and not letting us to fall.’ He wasn’t capturing his mind’s gleam in words. He reached out and touched her knee. ‘Do you see?’

  She shifted a little, her gaze still through the window on the range of the shifting sea. ‘Man,’ she said. Her word hung, peculiarly, in the air. Stom didn’t take the sense of why she used the word. Was she addressing him? ‘You own a world, and the people who live in it,’ she said softly. ‘But you’ll not own me.’

  It took a moment for this rebuke to sink in. Stom’s hand was still on her knee, but when the sting of her words pricked home his body stiffened. He pulled away, sat back, and then almost at once he got to his feet.

  ‘You don’t wish to be owned by me,’ he said, fiercely. ‘Very well. But you are my wife. We are married. I am a Steward of this System, and it is not possible for us to unknit our bond. It would be untenable, for me. You understand this?’

  She was looking at him. It was only a look, but it fired up his rage again. He could hardly bear to be in the same room as his wife now. ‘Say yes,’ he barked at her. ‘Say that you understand what I’ve just said to you.’

  Her eyes were almost placid.

  Stom crashed out of the room and went upstairs, to the Lesser Library. It was maddening, impossible. He marched the length of his room, spun like a jaguar in a cage, and marched back again. How to reach her? To compel her – to make her understand the idiocy she pursued?

  [seventh leaf]

  With whatever thready knits of commonsense still holding his sanity together, he knew that he could not confront her in his present mood. He needed to be calm with her, and rational. He understood that she would rebuff any too aggressive insistence on his part with an automatic stubbornness of personality over which – perhaps – she had little control. It was infuriating, but he would have to cool himself down, and try and reach her with a more rational discourse. She could hardly fail to see how her present behaviour contributed to her own as well as his unhappiness, provided only that she thought through her actions intellectually.

  Stom called for Nestor, and had him bring up some lunch, a bottle of blue-wine, and a gramophone. He would, he decided, sit and collect himself, listening to some music. ‘Bring up the disks for Nephelai,’ he
told Nestor. ‘I want to listen to the final arias.’

  And so he sat, drinking, whilst Nestor busied himself plugging in the gramophone machine and pulling out the final one of the seven disks from the box marked Nephelai. He set the machine playing, and slid away. Polystom wriggled himself deeper into the cushioning of his settee and let the music wash through him. Erodeo had composed few operas, but those few were all masterpieces. The tenor was Hippocles, and the soprano Meleta, and their voices intertwined and arched into the ether of pure song. She – Nephela – had been betrayed by her lover, and was consoled by her childhood friend Touto, but he hesitated to declare his own passion, believing himself unworthy of her. The delicious, agonising, uncertainty of the middle act of the opera was precisely captured in Erodeos’s extraordinary, stichometric music, which managed somehow to be simultaneously brittle and yearning. Then, as that act closed, Touto had resolved to declare his love, regardless of its impossibility.

  But Nephela, never suspecting that her friend carried adoration for her in his heart, has learned that her first love, a warrior called Stasimon, is returning from his distant campaign. She plans a spectacular suicide, eating a certain poison that will (with the strange logic that is found in operas) cause her flesh to dissolve and disappear into the air over a period of hours. She vows to attend Stasimon’s homecoming rally with this poison in her system, and to sing her final song of love rejected to him and his followers as she passes away. Touto discovers the empty phial of poison too late, and the tragic conclusion is inevitable. This was the scene to which Polystom was now listening: Nephela sings her great aria, declaring that she will soon die, but that a fading-away death is inevitable for those spurned in love. There is consternation amongst the followers of Stasimon; but before the soldier can himself reply, Touto rushes onstage declaring that love can be spurned by fate as well as by individuals, and singing a matching aria that bewails circumstance and the poison, now rooted in her flesh and unretrievable. Stasimon himself now intervenes, with a song to a martial melody but in a minor key, where he reveals that he has loved Nephela all along, and had returned specifically to claim her as his bride. But the poison is now taking effect, and Nephela is fading away, dissipating into the cosmos, something Erodeos captures in music with a long drawn-out diminuendo, very difficult for a singer to sustain. In this final aria she sings of the beauty of the air into which her constituent elements will soon dissolve; of the clouds moving slowly like lovers’ limbs and the birds fluttering like lovers’ hearts, of the warmth of the sun and the cool of the night like an indrawn and outward breath, repeated through eternity. Then, softer and softer, she sings that her love for Stasimon had been a kind of illusion, fostered by his magnificent reputation and his splendid armour; but that she has come to realise that her true love was for Touto. As both men weep, she passes away on an upward-drifting melody line of such sweetness that Polystom, listening to it, cannot prevent tears from coming out. The softness of the music is so exquisite that it brings the hairs at the back of his neck ticklishly to life.

  Aenaoi Nephelai—

  Arthomen fanerai droseran fusin eu ageton

  Aenaoi, Aenaoi—

  Patros ap’ Okeanou baruacheos . . .

  She dies into silence, and silence is maintained upon the stage for fully four minutes, a bold move for a composer of operas (whose job, after all, is to fill his listener’s ears with music). Then Touto and Stasimon conclude the piece with a mournful coda-duet, in which they declare their intentions to act as brothers to one another, and return to the wars to seek an honourable death.

  For some reason, Stom’s tears, and the blue-wine he had drunk, had exhausted him, and he found he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He slept. He awoke with a jolt, the turntable of the gramophone still rotating, and sat up with his mouth dry and his head strained almost to the point of headache.

  He switched off the machine, and poured a glass of water from the jug Nestor had left for him.

  He descended the stairs with Erodeos’s melody still in his head, humming it as he stepped down, Patros ap’ Okeanou baruacheos. But there was confusion downstairs, people hurrying back and forth across the hallway and spilling out through the front door. Stom, his tranquil mood dissipating, dissolving into air like Nephela’s dying body, found Nestor waiting just outside the front door.

  Beeswing had disappeared again.

  ‘How can she be gone?’ Polystom blustered at Nestor. The butler had fortified himself with company before breaking the news to his master, gathering round him half a dozen anguish-faced underbutlers.

  ‘Sir,’ said Nestor, ‘she just slipped away.’

  ‘A nurse was with her!’

  ‘Chrysorosa,’ confirmed the butler. ‘Yes, sir. A pantry and laundry girl, normally. The Lady seemed to get on with her. She liked few enough of the servants, to be truthful, sir, but she tolerated Chrysorosa.’

  ‘Collusion?’ shouted Polystom, his anger now feeding on itself. ‘Between mistress and maid?’

  ‘Almost certainly not, sir,’ said Nestor, involuntarily stepping back half a pace, his normally slow eyes darting back and forth. ‘Almost certainly not. They were in the garden. The Lady sent her in to fetch a shawl. When she came back out the Lady had gone.’

  ‘Why didn’t you wake me immediately?’

  ‘This was only ten minutes since, sir. Perhaps twenty. I thought to . . . recover the Lady, and . . .’

  ‘You searched the woods,’ interrupted Stom, his rage riding him. ‘The orchard? The greenhouse? What about the boathouse?’

  ‘I’ve had men in all these places. Immediately, sir, I sent men out to look for her – as soon as—’

  Strom hit him, a cross between a backhand slap and a rabbit punch, on his cheek. Not hard, but it froze the scene completely.

  Everything hung, for an awkward moment.

  ‘I,’ said Stom, feeling as if he ought to explain himself, and yet feeling even more furious that he felt that need (to a servant!) ‘I left her in your trust! I trusted you!’

  ‘Sir, I’m sorry,’ said Nestor, quietly but a little hoarsely. A red patch like a blush rouged his cheek. Stom saw, uncomfortably, Nestor’s wearied age – he’d never really noticed before how old the butler was looking. There were dark areas of tiredness below his eyes, like drooping petals. His skin looked thin, its wrinkles more like cracks in a potter’s glaze than creases.

  ‘She can’t be far away,’ said Stom. His innards were tumbling with impotent anger, leavened with fear, and a kind of self-disgust that was an unfamiliar and unpleasant sensation. ‘She’s ill! She’s still wearing the bandages on her head, isn’t she – the doctor said she should stay in bed – this might kill her,’ he added with a nauseous glee compounded of anxiety and hope. ‘She might die, if we don’t get to her soon. Send the men out again – we’ll search again.’

  ‘The men are still out, sir,’ said Nestor.

  ‘Then, more. Send out everybody. Where would she go? Where would you go?’

  But this was an impossible thing for Nestor to imagine (a servant? Running away?).

  ‘Did she take a boat again?’

  ‘No, sir, all the boats are accounted for. And cars.’

  Polystom had the weeping nurse-servant brought to him, but she had no idea where her mistress could have gone, and could barely speak through her enormous, epileptic sobs and the copiousness of her tears.

  Stom hurried out of the house, agitated by emotions greater than he could articulate. He took two young under-butlers whom he sent off left and right on little running excursions. For some reason he got it into his head that she was hiding in the glasshouses; and so he had both exits manned and went inside. Nestor assured him that the place had been thoroughly checked, but he looked through each of the glass rooms anyway, finding only the hot plants waving their fronds and leaves at him in the draught he caused, in what he took to be languid mockery of him; and one broken pane of glass whose punched-out hole formed a jagged heart-shape.


  Made even more furious by this wasted time, Stom hurried to the waterfront. The tide was out, and the beach dotted with servants checking the great haystack heaps of seaweed. The stone pier lay over the beach like a great serpent. Prompted by something, he didn’t know what, Stom ran all the way along to the end of this, to where the water still sucked at the base of stone. He tried to fight the sense of certainty, rising inside him like bile, that Beeswing had simply come down to the water and drowned herself. Perhaps she had flown along the spine of this very pier, on her delicate feet, to drop herself off the end into the water. He wanted to order servants to drag the water below him, but the words stuck in his throat. It couldn’t be. Was she there, below him now, mocking him again in death? Should he leap into the water and dive down to try and find her?

  Stupid thoughts. ‘A net,’ he yelled. ‘Somebody bring a net down here!’

  As figures scurried in response to his words, Stom looked out again at the shuffling surface of the Middenstead. It stretched away to the horizon; and beyond that, he knew, it reached as far again, before sweeping eastward in a great arc and filling a large depression that reached as far as the southern hemisphere. Its immensity, like the immensity of the sky above him, had always given Stom a sense of security, of being surrounded by a greatness that supported and sustained him. He thought of the fishing trips he had taken with his father and co-father; of swimming expeditions from boats or from this very pier. Had Beeswing polluted even that childhood memory with the ultimate transgression? Had she filled his sea, his childhood bathing ground, with death?

  Nestor was at his side now. ‘The tide turned only quarter of an hour ago, sir, if that,’ he said breathlessly. ‘If she went in the water it won’t be far from here.’

  But even as men arrived with the weighted net, and others came dragging a boat over the sand, Polystom felt the urgency go out of his body. He turned, waving Nestor on, and started walking back along the pier. There was an utter certainty in him, as deep as his bones, that his wife was dead, and sodden in the water behind him. The awfulness of it settled over the surface of his thoughts like snow; but deeper down was a curious feeling of vacancy.