They were there, the eyeless ones, this time in front of the others. Perhaps Thomas liked to remind himself of what he had done: perhaps it was the thrill of his tiny existence, the thrill denied by sexual contact or love or any equivalent, even friendship. She gazed at the first, the alternative madonna by the same hand, another portrait, modest but not saintly, the eyes stabbed out of existence with repeated, savagely precise thrusts. And still on the floor, as she had seen the first time and forgotten to notice on the second, a duster, a shred of bandage.
She placed a little finger inside an eye. The holes. Not made with a swordstick, surely, lethal though they were? How then? With Thomas’s less than steady balance sometimes, he would have to stand so far away from the dreadful task that he would take the risk of inaccuracy. Were these not the inflictions of a smaller blade, the vicious stabbing of close quarters, much too precise for Thomas’s one good hand? Squatting on her haunches in front of this disfigured beauty, Elisabeth lost her bearings for a minute. Wondering how it was that someone, even with the strength of Thomas, could have held down the painting while he struck at it with such precision and force. How very nearly impossible he should do that all on his own. Or with his disablement, the useless arm and the less than focused eyes, at all. The clarity in her mind was that of a person suddenly seeing life under water: the clarity of someone not quite drunk, on the first tier of drugs, the perception which leads to confusion, so blinding in its conclusions. She thought of the vulnerable, taunting, beseeching, sinful madonna on her easel in the studio, freshly shone with varnish, and she ran.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Annie waited outside Westminster Cathedral. She was as clean and neat as she could make herself in black leggings, stiff tan cotton shirt and heavy woollen jacket, also black. She looked efficient in a masculine way, betrayed only by the high-heeled boots hiding her thin calves as she strode up and down, competent for nothing but fooling the world that she was far fiercer than she felt. It was the uniform of movement, striding about, an ample disguise for the shivering soul within, where anger flickered and faded into a profound irritation, first because she was early, and secondly because Francis was late. The day was sharp November, full of brilliantly brief appearances from a sun abruptly masked by black cloud, Annie noticed, although rarely an observer of anything as irrelevant as weather. In the meantime, the aggression which made her laugh, sing, dance and shout stored up a residue until he arrived, melted slightly when he appeared, as she was afraid it always would, but the trick was not to let it show. That way lay madness, so she flexed the cold muscles and scowled.
‘You said three o’clock.’
‘I know I said three. I’m late. I’m sorry. Is that enough? I had to stay, I thought it would be sooner, but he went to prison, my client. I had to talk to him, I’m sorry.’
‘You missed a slice of life here, I’m telling you.’ Annie led the way, talking to hide the fact that she had not liked the waiting, had actually been afraid, not a physical fear but an alienation. In the course of twenty minutes, she had seen a weekday wedding, hats and all, spilling out of the cathedral in the wake of a smattering of tourists armed with bags, others gawping as they sat in the cold and ate their hamburgers. The newly-weds were importuned by the itinerant population of the square, whose sleeping bags and cardboard arrangements littered the alcoves of the nearby shops. These were frisky to the point of desperation in the afternoon, too long after the hostels closed for business in the morning and too many hours before they opened. Winter was cruel, Annie thought, not uninterested as three of the itinerants began to fight, swaying with drunken malice, slugging with ugly, dizzied blows and roaring threats until a policeman came and parted them. Each melted, muttering, into the corners of a dirty square suddenly vast and sinister in their absence. The edge is near, all life lived on a precipice. Annie could not admit her fear. Where will Elisabeth go if we find her? What is the release if she is captive? Back to her flat and her interrupted life? Stay with her captor? She had better do that than ever join these, and yet Annie could see her here, picking up her bedding and moving on at the first sign of conflict, a city refugee with no lineage and no defences. She shuddered, wanted to put her arm through that of Francis, who looked, in his suit and winter coat, a fortress.
‘Prison, you said?’ she questioned over her shoulder, still leading the way and wishing he would go first. ‘Poor sod. What for?’
‘Grievous bodily harm,’ said Francis.
‘How grievous?’
Francis stopped, a spasm of vicarious pain on his face, not echoed by the cynical, professional shrug of his shoulders. ‘Oh, he threw ammonia at someone, nearly blinded him.’
‘Nice friends you have.’
He stopped. ‘No, I have no friends.’ The remark felt like a blow: it made her angrier than all the waiting. He grinned to defuse the effect he did not guess. ‘Present company excepted, of course.’ The words were sincere, as far as he could be in his state of nervousness, but they sounded like an afterthought. Annie mimicked his shrug and walked on.
They were halfway down an avenue of colossal mansion flats. ‘Next turn right,’ said Annie tensely, who had looked up the route they should take in her A to Z. It had been something to do.
‘I know,’ said Francis. ‘I looked, too.’
There were such dense, such silent streets. Aberdale Mansions, Churchill Mansions, the environs of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament, blocks of flats which had fallen out of fashion and crept back in, built to a scale which was expensive to maintain, inhabited by foreign residents, pied-à-terre owners, the right honourable member for such and such, or his mistress, people who only lived anywhere half the time. The mansions all had the same red brick, the same stucco round their huge doors, the same eccentric numbering: a row of them resembled a layer cake sandwiched with the uniform cream of their windows and useless balconies. It was cooler in the valleys made by these dwellings: cold and calm. Grafted on the massive doors of two such blocks Francis saw the twinkling symbols of security: a video entryphone, a combination lock. The building they sought would be the same, locked and barred: he could feel it in his bones, hear the echo of distant closing doors.
‘I don’t know what we’re worried about,’ he said flatly. ‘All wound up like this. We won’t be able to get in.’
Annie stopped, swung her great satchel bag in front of her, rummaged in it for cigarette and lighter before moving on.
‘So what? We’ll wait. Oh Christ, look.’
She swung round to face him, jerking her thumb over her shoulder, pulling on the cigarette as if it were a source of life. ‘Look,’ she hissed. ‘Him coming up the road. Behind me, twenty yards down.’ Francis looked. There was a sole figure walking from the opposite direction, carrying a carrier bag, along with a cane. Walking up the street in his dark glasses, melting into one of the massive front doors. Francis wanted to run towards the man. Annie sensed it, put a warning hand on his arm.
‘Don’t,’ she hissed, the more cautious for once. ‘Just don’t. It might not be him. You ring the bell, just like anyone else.’ When they found the right door, the door they guessed he had entered, they found it was double-fronted with glass panels in the upper half. Through this door, painted black, they could gaze into a hallway with stairs curling out of sight. The numbers of the apartments were painted in gold on a black background alongside the battery of bells for fifteen separate residences. Francis looked up, thinking to himself that magnificence was not homely. Annie, bolder, bent forward on the top step after pressing a number on the elaborate entryphone system drew no response, peered rudely into the hall.
‘We’ll wait,’ she said. ‘Won’t we?’ Francis was silent. He wished he had run when he had wanted to run. His own anxiety, fuelled by Annie’s twitchiness and then subdued by her, curdled into the mixture which makes men want to fight.
The sight of the madonna on the easel seemed to disturb Butler. Scurrying back to the kitchen in a state of hopeless, q
uavering hatred, Maria did what she always did when she felt like this and busied herself with the necessary, put out Butler’s food hours early, slopped water into his bowl. The door of the room where she had so often spied Elisabeth working like an angel with an aura round her hair, quiet, industrious, the very soul of virtue, the door which had led on to the most wonderful presence of that virgin mother on her easel, had been closed latterly, barring Maria’s silent presence, and it was only with thinking about it that she had begun to mind. Rushing past now, Maria did not notice how Elisabeth, in her own headlong rush to meet and greet, had burst out and left the door open; but if Maria did not stop, Butler did. He went in, saw with his fuddled, elderly eyes some great focus of light, a shining, threatening plane angled to face the door. Some canine instinct suppressed the barking: the threat was not moving. He stood with the hackles forming ridges along his spine and his throat full of a slow, heavy rumbling. Yards away, in the kitchen, Maria was wrinkling her nose in distaste as she spooned his tinned food into his tin bowl, noticing, only with the last spoonful, his absence. She was, in her perverse way, using the same spoon she used to scrape up the leftovers of all those frozen meals to eat herself; she stood with the implement in her hand, wondering why the dog was not there and salivating. With the refinement of instinct they sometimes had for each other, she caught the vibrations of his mood and his sound, the same way she tried, had tried for years, to do with her brother.
Leaving the spoon, Maria stamped back out into the corridor, sensing another terrible rejection. Perhaps the hated dog was siding with the new enemy, but there was silence in the corridor, where the carpet was flawed with footprints. She saw Butler backing out of the studio room as if afraid, the light streaming from it as the clouds outside suddenly parted to reveal a ray of shifty sunlight which glowed and faded. Enough for Maria to see from the door the smile on the face of the painting, catch from the brilliant, temporary glow, the skin of the bosom and the naked neck, the eclipsing of the halo round the head and the aura of flesh and dreadful wickedness. The madonna was defaced, stripped of all purity, her eyes bright with temptation: eyes which were already damned but still luring some other down all those well-worn routes to hell, the wide roads, not the narrow paths strewn with thorns. The eyes of the madonna, no longer glazed with Maria’s interpretation of holiness, but like all the other eyes; they challenged and pleaded, lustrous with their own perfection and all the threat such perfection implied. The madonna was all the temptations of the flesh, thrusting her own into the nearest hand, asking it to curl inside that bodice and knead the swollen nipples. Beside the canvas on a chair, well below the point of that half-bare breast and unbuttoned bodice, lay Elisabeth’s tools, palette, palette knife, all those paints in tubes which Thomas had bought to tempt, perhaps even to seduce. And this, it seemed, along with other gifts, was what they had done, seduced. Both of them, the madonna and the girl, blasphemers of the saints. Of all that she had seen, this was the most hateful and hideous sight, a defacement of what she had loved as well as revered, and the rage exploded.
Maria was looking for a knife. Any knife. In that mushrooming of existing fury, she could not uproot herself from the site of this outrage to go away and seek a better tool for the task, a pointed stick, or even search for the knife she had put in her pocket this morning in some half-formed precaution of self-defence. Then the palette knife was in her hand punching towards the smiling face, the wooden handle held firmly in her fist. But the knife stuck to the canvas, skidded first on wet varnish, proved futile: there was no edge to this blade. Other blades might achieve as little. Maria could not think clearly: there was none of her former precision, no ritual in this destruction. Her glance lit on the tubes of paint; her shaking hands were still able to unscrew the cap of something brilliant red, not for the colour but because it was nearest. It was a large tube; she had handled it before, awkwardly. The paint inside was viscous and smooth as it blurted into the palm of her hand and was smeared, from there, over the mouth of the non-virginal face. The other handful was next, over the nostrils to stop them breathing, but the paint lay on the surface like an insult, a thin disguise, more of it on Maria’s own skin, in her fingers, the smell in her nostrils. She applied the nozzle of the red tube straight against the face. All gone. Seizing another tube, yellow, she added that, spread it all round with the palette knife. Bitch, bitch, bitch. Mother of God, do not have mercy on this sinner. The red danced before her eyes, mixed with the yellow. The eyes of the painting were camouflaged with the new, vulgar colours: she felt as if she had just lanced some enormous cyst or caused, beneath that luxuriant hair, some massive, satisfying haemorrhage of foul, infected blood. She seized another tube, another red, spat that towards the hair.
Viewed from behind, Maria looked calm and industrious in the eye of this violent storm. A calm, squat creature, busy about her easel, like an amateur painter in evening class. From the relative darkness of the corridor, it took Elisabeth a while to see the vivid, puslike decorations to the canvas, hear the guttural breathing and angry snorting which accompanied the artistry, deafen herself with her own scream of terrible rage, feel under the dry palms of her own hands the massive power of Maria’s damp shoulders as she leapt on her with all her own weight to pull her away. Maria was rock-solid, reminiscent of Thomas in her physicality, a powerhouse of ugliness, stronger than Elisabeth and fuelled by a fury which was not mortal but divine retribution, receiving directions from some single-minded God. Who directed her then to propel her elbows into the softness of Elisabeth’s bosom, to turn and punch and then to claw, with her paint-filled hand first towards the other’s eyes, then to her clothes. There was deadly method in her fighting; in Elisabeth’s, none. The easel overturned on them both. The canvas hit Butler as he slunk away from furies far worse than his own. His paws on the wooden floor took up enough paint to make him skid. He stood beyond the door, whining for escape while the wrath of God triumphed. Knocking over chair, table, pushing the ever resisting Elisabeth before her, delivering with soundless speed blow after blow to the abdomen of her quarry, Maria finally rammed her against the wall below the high windows. Looking up, fighting back, Elisabeth registered the dying of the sun-filled light pouring through. Her eyes were filmed with oil: the light was a vision of hell. Maria punched once more, this time with full force. Elisabeth’s unshod feet slipped from under; she clutched at the window cord to break the fall, hitting her head on the way down. She crumpled like rag and for one full minute slipped into another, blacker world, where colour was, for a matter of seconds, extinct.
She was conscious now, kneeling against the wall as if at prayer, her vision blurred by the paint in her eyes, hurting, drunk with shock and pain. Maria was holding her hair and seemed to be smearing more paint on Elisabeth’s forehead. Elisabeth suppressed her scream, instinctively remembering to avoid the poison of paint in her open mouth, spat instead, tried to claw back, but her hands were pinioned above her head, towards where the high window swung and tugged at the cord which bound her wrists. Clever Maria. Mixed with the smell of oily paint, the overturned acetone bottle and its scent of almonds, was the pungent smell of Maria, a stench of uncleanliness and urine. Mad, bad, about her business of disfigurement, grunting like a pig. Somewhere in that blurred vision, there was the glittering of a real blade, not the dull palette blade, but a blade waved in front of Elisabeth’s face as if held by the hand of a malevolent hypnotist, the movement accompanied by a kind of singing. A stubby set of fingers felt their way round the sockets of Elisabeth’s eyes, forcing one eye open, then the other, feeling for purchase. Elisabeth did not know what Maria had done. She knew her cheeks were covered with thick fluid, dripping from her eyes, and she was whimpering. All her sight registered was the reflection of a blade cutting through a pool of glutinous red. The pain was intense. Maria’s fingers slipped, probed again. Then she was speaking, her guttural voice whispering, Look at me, look at me, look towards me …’ The singing resumed. ‘Sweet heart of Jesus, make u
s know and love thee …’
Elisabeth tried to close her stinging eyes tight shut. She imagined the name of manufacture printed on the blade. Kitchen Devil. The pain was greater and now she had no sight at all. Then all motion stopped. In a wave of terrifying silence, the singing stopped, then changed to a sobbing.
‘Maria! Come away. Enough!’
He had seen, from the door, a face covered with trickling gore. A forehead streaked with wounds. Deep red sockets where there had been eyes, the bloody wreck of a face destroyed, so hideous, the vision made him preternaturally calm.
There was a glacial quality in Thomas’s voice. A rustling signified the abrupt abandonment of whatever he carried, while a whimpering howl might have been from the larynx of the dog, or from Maria herself, a furious, frustrated, half-repentant keening from a figure paralysed by discovery.
‘Put it down. Now.’
A clunking sound as the glittering thing fell from her hand to the floor. His voice, developing a tremor, rising higher, but still calm.
‘What have you done? You will go to hell, Maria. Another knife? I told you, no knives. Where did you steal it? What did I tell you? Get out of here, go to hell. Get out, and never come back. Do you hear me? Out!’
The last words were orders over the shoulder as he stumbled across the barricade of fallen furniture to where Elisabeth attempted to struggle to her feet, disorientated, half blind. Maria’s keening growls rose to a wail of despair: there was nothing from him, no pity; he did not even look towards her handiwork on the fallen easel, or to her. He went instead straight to Elisabeth, murmuring like a lover, ‘Oh, darling darling child, I’m sorry, so sorry, I didn’t know, I should have known, I couldn’t guess, speak to me, speak to me …’ He was trying with his one hand to raise her from her stance of awful subjugation, her pathetic, shameful kneeling attitude of sacrifice. Maria watched, all fury gone, nothing left but pain and loss. ‘Get out!’ he screamed at her. ‘Get out! Go to hell!’
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