Half Light

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘She is bad, Thomas, bad …’

  ‘Get out! You evil cow, get out!’

  He left Elisabeth, moved towards Maria, making in the depths of his chest growling, threatening sounds, more animal than human. The sounds became confused with angry sobs. His glasses fell away: he was angrier, more lethal than she had ever seen him. ‘Get away, you monster. You ugly devil. I’ll kill you …’

  Maria screamed once, a rising cry of grief, which prefaced the following of his order and the sound of her crashing out of the room, out of the flat and down the stairs, into the distance, falling against the walls at each bend of stairs. The dog streaked before her with a greater grace, terrified of them all.

  It had taken mere minutes of waiting for them both to be bored, restless and ready for recriminations. To deflect the accusations she knew would come in her direction, Annie tried to pass the time by constantly looking through the windows of the big door. Finally, she was rewarded.

  ‘Look,’ said Annie. ‘There’s a dog in there. Coming down with someone. Quick. When they come out, we go in.’

  Francis nodded grimly. It had been silly to imagine they could wait indefinitely. Both of them, he in particular, wore with their sombre clothes an aura of tension, a mixture of anxiety, embarrassment, and dread. As they stood with an assumed innocence of purpose, the door was wrenched open and an ugly dog shot forth. Followed by an uglier woman, gasping for breath, staggering, yelling at the dog to wait, but the dog did not wait. Francis gripped the edge of the door in the nick of time before the woman could let it slam behind her. She looked at him and he recoiled in revulsion. Not only ugly but warped with malice, streaked with wild colours, the eyes narrowed. Maria did not know why she spoke or who they were. She only saw a man looking fair and handsome but repelled, as all human beings were repelled. She wrenched out in her breathlessness the final words of mischief.

  ‘Upstairs. He’s killing her.’ Words flung back as she stumbled down the last steps into the street, leaving him holding the door. Francis was fit, Annie not. He bounded beyond her up one flight of stairs, the next and the next, horror mounting with each flight. There were smears of blood, it seemed, in the corners where the stairs turned, filthy-looking smears of red along the cream-coloured walls evoking a bleeding body dragged, telling of cruelty, flogging, humiliating violence. And at the very top, an open door on to a sea of cream carpet, also smeared. From inside, the underwater murmuring of voices. His head was pounding: the dream of the Venus was back. On the long way upstairs, led by the trail, he had been propelled by the vision of a body sliced to the bone, blood welling through canvas skin.

  Following the sound, Francis came to that room where the light was fading with a sudden darkening of a freak shaft of sunlight. At first he saw only one thing: Elisabeth, standing and pinioned, leaning silently against the man who seemed to hold her while reaching clumsily with one hand towards her bound wrists, speaking low with words which might have been reassurance, but could also have been obscenities. The man was fumbling: Thomas with one hand could not undo the window cord; he was realizing he could not. As Francis watched, Thomas let go of Elisabeth, reached for a knife which lay on the floor, looked up without retrieving it. His formal jacket looked incongruous; both he and the knife were smeared with colour. Elisabeth’s hair was matted with touches of red. The face, also turned towards Francis, looked streaked with blood, the eyes half closed as in the image of some heavily beaten prisoner not yet cleaned up for presentation on television. Bowed and bloody, she was trying to speak. Francis launched himself at Thomas as he rose upright with the knife in his hand. He had lost his dark glasses: the undisguised face glowed with a sinister innocence and Francis saw without room for surprise that the chubby cheeks were streaked with tears. Regardless of that, he struck the face and body repeatedly, pummelled blows with his strong fists into that chest, seeing red as he struck, seeing stars, wanting more than anything to inflict the maximum, disabling pain, unable to stop. He scarcely noticed the feebleness of resistance: he was black with vengeful fury, hysterical with righteous rage, and his blows were somehow more justifiable for the woodenly muscled flesh with which they seemed to connect: the token resistance enraged him more, so he wanted to do more, hit again and again. Then he remembered the blade, seized it in his left hand, made a clumsy, threatening aim towards the hateful baby face before him, dimly, but only dimly, aware of Elisabeth screaming, ‘Leave him alone, leave him alone … He didn’t touch me … Leave him alone.’ A plea which rang in his ears later, penetrated only when he saw Thomas crouching at his feet, a thin line of blood emerging on his forehead and across the hand which had endeavoured to protect his face. Thomas, kneeling and silent with blood pouring over his red hand, down on to his filthied shirt in a redder stream. Then Annie was behind Francis, pulling him away, latching her elbow round his neck, he remembered later, while Thomas crawled like a dog and then knelt again, with one hand over his face, the other held loosely over his mouth, like an animal’s paw.

  ‘He didn’t touch me …’ Elisabeth’s voice, breaking, pleading. The room was full of breath, silent for seconds which resembled hours as the whole tableau slipped into the place of nightmare memory, all of them panting, from the running, the fighting and the fear. Annie, heart bursting from the stairs, undid the knots behind Elisabeth’s back, holding out arms to support her in case she fell. Elisabeth said something which sounded like thank you. She stood stiffly, a drunken person wondering how to take the first step. And then came the most obscene episode of all, to Francis, far the most shocking, so hard on his soul it took away the last of his breath as he watched what Elisabeth did. She did not stagger across into his arms, nor did she take the support proffered by Annie, but moved trancelike towards Thomas. She crouched with one arm round his shoulder, the other lifting the hem of her skirt, searching for a piece of unsullied material to hold against the blood which flowed between his fingers, mingled wetly with hopeless tears. She shielded him with her own body, rocked him, held him, pressed him against her. ‘Thomas, Thomas, Thomas … there there, it’s all right. Not your eye, please, not your eye. Look at me.’

  Then she turned to the others, her terrible face streaked like Thomas’s with greasy rivulets of tears, and spoke with maddening, insulting control, a voice full of weary but accusing despair.

  ‘You stupid bastards,’ she said. ‘Can’t you see? He never touched me, he never. Do you hear me? He never actually touched me … never, never, never, you stupid fools.’ She turned back to him then, ignored them, murmuring to this disgusting apparition who crouched there, sobbing. She pulled him to his feet, led him two steps to a chair, placed him in it. A handsome wing chair, Annie noticed, the only thing unturned; it was on the tip of her tongue to make the prosaic observation that you’ll get that chair dirty if you aren’t careful, but she did not speak. There was nothing to say. Whatever this mess, whatever she had suffered, it was Elisabeth who was in control. Speaking to Thomas, soothing, questioning, deciphering his mumbled replies, then issuing orders.

  ‘Would one of you please go into the bathroom attached to the bedroom at the far end of the flat? There is a telephone in the cupboard under the basin. You plug it in wherever you can find a point, and phone for an ambulance ….’ Thomas stirred, clutched her with the pathetic paw, mumbled. ‘No, you don’t. You phone for his own doctor. Can you, Francis, go into my bathroom, bring me a towel? I just need to stop some of this paint getting near an open cut. If you see what I mean.’

  Paint. Annie stared at the floor. Merely paint. Near her feet was an overturned bottle of acetone, releasing the smell of almonds, the spilt liquid whitening the polished stain of the wooden floor. She knew nothing but humble confusion and a sense of horror, looked towards Elisabeth in a kind of plea for enlightenment before she obeyed. She was rewarded with the ghost of a smile.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Elisabeth. ‘It’s good to see you both. I just wish the circumstances were different.’

  Outsi
de, the sky had darkened. When Annie turned on the. light on her way from the room, nudging Francis into life as she went, she could see it all for what it was. Paint.

  ‘He never touched me,’ Elisabeth said. ‘Never, never, never, did I tell you that? He never touched me.’

  She was crying with the helpless sound which took the mind of Francis and reduced it to liquid. Like spittle.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  They were listening to him, so it had to be a dream Two women, listening, hanging on to his every word. The blurred image of Elisabeth was listening to him: he could smell her scent from fifty paces, perfume, calamine, turpentine, could guess the colours of her skin, wanted to touch but did not dare. When the light had gone, perhaps she would not notice.

  The other face was puzzling, womanlike, sharp as a ferret, but far from ugly. I am enrapturing two beautiful women, Thomas thought. I do this simply with my own face, the way I look has them bound to me. I am not dead, so it may not be a dream; although I wish I might be allowed to die for the mortal sin of failing to acquit myself well with any human being, but how fine to be so handsome that I draw such an audience. His face twisted into a grin; his body heaved slightly, with laughter. His hand was compelled to travel round his face, feeling for the sockets of his eyes to recognize the same deadness of the one containing its orb of glass, wincing when his fingertips encountered the other and felt the tracery of stitches, whose insertion he could not remember at all. They felt like stiff spiders marching up towards his hair in a line. He wanted to brush them away: tiny predators on a fresh corpse.

  Although he could see, he did not really want to open wide. One of the spiders twitched in the corner of his eyebrow, a distracting tick which made him want to scream. The gust of a noisy panic rose in his chest. Then another hand took his own away from his face, placed it by his side; held it there in a clasp which was loose, warm and dry. He could not feel love, but he could feel rapt attention.

  ‘Thomas, we’re going soon, for a while. Talk to me, Thomas, tell me why.’

  ‘I didn’t touch you, did I?’ Thomas said loudly. ‘I never touched you.’

  There was a moment’s hesitation, a clearing of throat, another pause.

  ‘It depends what you mean.’

  The sharp face had disappeared with a snort. How can she? Annie thought. How can she touch him after all that? I do not, cannot, fathom the nature of such forgiveness.

  Walking back across the square flanking the cathedral, a route he had crossed innumerable times in the week since he had trodden that way first, Francis thought how much he hated it. Shops, church, fine dwellings, God and Mammon juxtaposed. He could no more go inside that place and pray, knowing what he half knew, than he could have worshipped the moon, even though he would have loved to have prayed for forgiveness for the savagery within him. Francis was acting as errand boy: he had been taking things from one place to another today, a plethora of things: he was the key man. In his pocket were the instructions for the combination lock on the front door of the flat where he was bound: he had dismantled it once and now he would mantle it. Francis was hoping that Elisabeth would love him for his practical skills, his dependability at least, or his humility. As long as she could love him for something, because he had little enough reason to be proud of himself. As he covered the square with his long stride, he looked neither left nor right. There were pigeons and human beings strutting beneath an iron-grey sky. Winter was upon them.

  He had missed the moment earlier when a woman had been arrested in the corner of the square. She had not been drunk, only seemed so. Disorderly without the intoxication, she kept trying to get inside the locked door of the cathedral at night, singing hymns loudly. A new one here, not a regular. The others would have pounced on her forced her to move on outside their territory, but her dog frightened them, protected her although she abused it all the time. The dog was chased off, finally, and Maria taken away after she began to beat her head against a wall, banging her forehead, scratching her groin, still singing. She said she was called Bernadette, looking for holy water. Then she said she was Sebastian with an arrow in her crotch and that made her laugh. Then she said she was called Francis but the pigeons would not come to her. There was no way she would give her name, did not seem to know it. In lieu of identity she carried holy pictures in her pockets. She had been seen at church: it was assumed she was foreign. Maria liked the custody of her cell and since she did not appear to be waiting for anyone to come and claim her, it was assumed, again, that none would. There were other fights in the environs, battles in nighttime doorways voided by day. They would keep her away from there, they said, as long as they could. The dog ran free: he was caught again in the park, snarling at children.

  It was far colder. Thomas could feel it through the open window. Another week gone and all those shufflings of departure. There were no spiders near his eyes. Now he sat in one of the winged chairs. In the north-facing room: he could not bear the brighter light of the other.

  ‘Must you go? But of course you must. A nurse you said? You will leave me with a nurse? Where’s Maria?’

  ‘I don’t know. I have neither asked nor reported. You must do that. Go on with the story. We only began last week.’

  ‘I don’t want to do anything.’

  ‘Tell me about her.’

  ‘Look at me, then.’ Elisabeth saw a face without spiders. An old man baby face, a head too large for its body, another livid scar, still pink. Not ugly, but not appealing. She saw a belly in a chair, dressed in brown and a hand with a wound of alizarin crimson. She did not see a friend, but she did not see an enemy, either. Rather a mass of colours, to whom she owed nothing. She heard an appeal which was for so little and still too much, but she complied.

  ‘They did not love us much, our mother and our father. They had instead that perverted love of religion which has nothing to do with the real kind or the quality of goodness. They prayed; they shored up the walls of churches; they were part of the foundations. The making of their children was in furtherance of some order to increase and multiply, not, I think, the conclusion of desire. They did not approve of the physical; sex could not be mentioned in this house. The walls were adorned with icons and pictures of saints: they collected these as others might pornography, symbols of the opposite, of purity, promises of heaven and terrible threats of hell. That was our inheritance, but I was a boy, therefore educated; Maria the girl they wanted to give to God. She is older than I: enough difference in the years for her not to be a companion. At some point she went missing, pregnant, miscarried, hauled home bleeding, in disgrace from wherever she had run, kept here in safety while I spread my wings. Oh God, she was made to repent: she was encouraged in a sort of flagellation which was an extension of theirs … They died, these parents whom I resented, en route back from Lourdes with her. They believed that the intervention of saints could cure that lip and what they considered the cancer of her soul, but she survived, madder, sadder. They left everything to me, nothing to her, God knows why, but their God did. She lived here alone: I was never going to come home. But I did, of course, after Clayfields, I had no choice, and there she was, the only person in the world who loved me, would be with me, let me act as her second reason for living. Telling me meantime all about how I would be punished by God for what I had dared to do, because I had taken away almost all the icons and certainly all the saints which lined these walls. I did that straight away, could not bear them, vulgar, crude, threatening. Maria said I had killed God in this house … I laughed at her, collected more paintings like a madman, anything to dispel the gloom. Oh and I spent money like water to make up for all the comforts which had never been here: they were spartan, rich saints themselves, our mother and father. They taught one to turn the other cheek against any blow, despise the riches they had; they believed only in suffering and sacrifice, compulsive martyrs. I put silk where there had been cotton, pictorial scenes where there had been icons, all but a few, left to placate her. She hated that
, Maria; loathed everything I did, but the paintings worst of all. Perhaps some small part of her was right: I keep my bedroom spartan, bathroom more so; I have never been quite easy in the luxury I can afford.’

  ‘Not even the brandy?’

  A ghost of a smile hovered, but it might have been automatic.

  ‘Ah yes, food, brandy, but never much and never with cigars. Paintings were the luxury: I chose paintings of those with luxurious lives, so I could capture their mood. Like primitive man, do you think, painting the animals so he could tame a little of their spirit? A brandy would be nice,’ he added.

  She fetched it, spilt a little on the carpet. He was aware of another, alien presence, blenched.

  ‘Maria?’

  ‘No. My friend, Francis.’

  He did not move, detached his hand, sighed and gripped the glass.

  ‘He’s just going, aren’t you, Francis?’ The voice held an order. A door closed and a shadow walked across Thomas’s grave, lightly. He sipped the brandy. She would leave soon and go to her younger hunter, and he himself had turned the other cheek. A life for a life, he supposed. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘… Maria.’ A little of the brandy landed on the arm of the chair and Thomas resolved to be more careful.

  ‘I ignored her, but you cannot quite ignore the one soul who loves you. Nor can you say you hate them. I put her downstairs, could not bear her so close; there was always plenty of money to do things like that, set her up in some sort of style, but she made her own place into a kind of monastic cell, liked it like that, whatever I urged her to do. I had my little life, my endless rounds of rescuing fine and anonymous art, doing this and that before I saw your photographs and then saw you and then had this stroke. After that, there she was again, in power. And I in her debt. Without speech, only dreams.’