by Tanith Lee
And he, the black cat at the top of the house, the black cat in the symbolic tower with a door up to the roof where, under the golden awning, the metallic telescope was pointing like a tongue at the sea. The black cat was a poet and scholar. So, if you had opened the doll’s house you should see him seated in the brown shadow at the desk, lost in some elegy or epic, among the open paper mouths of Plato, Virgil and Homer. And instead you saw him at the narrow window, the doll poet with the clockwork stopped inside him.
Below, the silver hammers of the piano began to strike each other, and a girl’s lovely singing winged up, yet the sounds had an undersea quality, stifled by the leaden air. Sibbi, her flowers meticulously imprisoned in their bowl, singing her siren’s song to the poet in the tower. She sang to disturb him as he worked, to get her image between the pen and the paper. If he should say to her as they ate dinner: “I heard you sing”, she would answer: “Oh, I am so sorry. Did I disturb you? I never thought you could hear me.” Her eyes were the colour of blue irises; they gave an impression of great depth simply because a world of vacuity opened behind them. She was a claw delicately scratching at him. All three women, the priestesses presumably of his shrine, were claws in his body—Sibbi clawed at his loins, very softly and with her own curious art, promising and never quite giving, giving, and promising more, like all empty vessels offering an illusion of hidden things. Laura clawed at his conscience; sharp-tongued and clever Laura, reminding him of her rights to him by means of a past neither wished to recapture.
Only Albertine clawed at his heart. Albertine, who was sad and travailed not to show it, who was brave and good and adored him, Albertine the best of women, whom he no longer loved. They had metamorphosed into different people from the two impassioned children who met in a graveyard in order to be secret, embraced on graves, and finally, hero and heroine of their own romance, had fled security with a wild hymn of abandon. Now they had grown up, security had gathered on them after all, like barnacles. The dismal shadow of reality overlay them both. They had found out they were not gods and they were not suited.
The light from the sea, so darkly bright, made him shut his eyes. Sibbi sang below. No one else responded to the heat as he had done with this anaesthetic languor. There was a timelessness around him now. No past, no present, nothing to come. He could sense the mechanism stilled, the unheard drone of the sun. A perpetual, well-known knowledge of loneliness gnawed somewhere inside him, yet he scarcely felt it. Only the sullen noise of the sea ran up the beaches of his mind and swooned like an indigo woman against him, and slipped away through his fingers, sighing when he tried to hold her, while down below Arthur Merton knocked the dottle from his pipe, refilled it, lit it, and leaned back in his chair, and considered it was very hot.
“Damned hot,” he said.
Through the smoke of the pipe, and through the embalmed-looking stalks and scarlet rose-heads in the Indian bowl, Merton could see Sibbi at the piano in the next room, playing and singing prettily, sometimes glancing towards the open veranda doors with the sly, half-excited, half-evaluating look she reserved for Ashburn. Inadvertently Merton’s eyes slid up towards the weary stucco of the ceiling. Above them all, Robert Ashburn would be writing in the tower room, working in this infernal heat. If he was. Too hot to do much now. Even the boat, Ashburn’s love, lay neglected by the quay. The sailing days had been good. When it was cooler...
Merton sensed, as if through the steam or fog of his thoughts, the glamour of the girl at the piano, the witchery of that curious straying glance, once turned to advantage on himself. He felt no resentment. He also, in an improbable, asexual way, stirred at the thought of the dark young man above, the anguished poet—anguished by everything or nothing. The moods of the poet lit up dim glares of unrealised fire in Merton himself. Sonnets he did not properly understand, written perfectly obviously to his wife Sibbi, nevertheless pierced Merton’s wooden soul like splinters of glass with a painful, inexplicable delight.
Sibbi finished her song. Notes and voice ebbed from the room, and the heat seemed to flood into the empty spaces. Presently she came to the doorway and stood looking at him, like a cat with a canary dead in its mouth, contemptuous, cruel and affectionate, knowing it will be forgiven simply because it is as it is.
“That was very nice,” Merton observed.
Sibbi smiled.
“How would you know? You don’t care for music.”
“Well, I care for yours, you know.”
“Actually, I was playing for Robert, but I’m glad you enjoyed it, Arthur dear.” She leaned her hand with its wedding ring on the upright of the door, admiring it, her eyes a little glazed with heat and excitement. “How bad of him to be in the garden at this hour, when he should be working. Laura will scold him, I expect. He hasn’t completed anything this summer.”
Merton laughed.
“We shall have to visit the eye specialist after all,” he remarked. A year ago she had been threatened with the nemesis of spectacles, now some little spark of intransigent animosity made him refer to the terror whenever possible, in the form of a joke. “Robert was never in the garden.”
“Don’t be absurd. I saw him quite clearly. I see better than you do.”
“But you don’t hear better, Sibbi. I heard him upstairs, walking about while you were at the piano. You know how he walks, like an animal in a cage, up and down.”
“I think you must have sunstroke. You had better lie down. I saw Robert absolutely distinctly, by the stone urn at the end of the walk, listening while I played.”
Merton got up with a reluctant irritating air of investigation and went slowly across the room, past Sibbi, to the veranda doors. The garden, stripped of shadow by the two o’clock sun, offered a vista of lank and blistered green with clumps of statuary, like unhealthy fungus or sores, pushed up at intervals. The local gardener was trudging complainingly beside Albertine along the walk. The old sunburned islander and the tall, fair girl advanced in a desultory slow motion; nothing else stirred except for an inflammatory scatter of crickets, crackling as if trying to set the grass on fire.
“I spy with my short-sighted eye Albertine and that old devil from the village.”
Sibbi came to his side.
“Well, no doubt Robert’s come indoors. He was just there a moment ago.”
“Then he’d come through these doors here, wouldn’t he? The only other way is to jump off the wall and, since the tide’s in, swim round to the front, which seems”, he knocked dottle from his pipe to stress the point, “unnecessary.”
“Then he’s still in the garden. What a fuss you’re making.”
“You, my dear, are the one making the fuss.”
Merton went out on to the terrace and waved to Albertine. The girl lifted her head; the gardener picked his fangs, disdaining the mad people of the house, recounting whose debaucheries and insanities kept him in free liquor at the village.
“Did you pass Robert on the walk?”
“Why, no, he’s upstairs in the tower room.”
“You see,” Merton exulted.
Sibbi shook her head. Her teeth snapped on canary bones. “I distinctly saw him, I tell you.”
Albertine crossed the lawn, glancing up anxiously at the shuttered landward window of the little tower and at the yellow awning above.
“Now you’ve made Albertine uneasy,” Sibbi said crossly. She glanced at the girl with the same mixture of contempt and liking she had displayed for her husband. She had enchanted the poet, and could afford to be generous to his dull, pleasant handmaiden. Laura, the serpent-tongued, was the one she feared. Albertine called in a high light voice:
“Robert,” and then again: “Robert!”
They all stared up as if mesmerised at the closed shutters, even the mahogany gardener, his thumbnail worrying at his canines, added an oil-black stare to theirs.
“Robert,” Sibbi suddenly sang out, as if certain her magic would conjure him where Albertine’s could not. The heat swirled sulkily an
d reformed. The gardener muttered ominously:
“He write. He deaf to you.”
Abruptly, for no particular reason, each one of them shouted at the masked window.
“Here I am,” Ashburn said.
They looked down and saw him coming between the veranda doors.
Albertine and Sibbi exclaimed; the gardener turned and spat disgustedly.
Merton said, “Well, well. Just down from the tower.”
“That’s right.”
“But you were in the garden,” Sibbi asserted almost angrily. “I saw you standing on the walk while I played.”
The poet looked at her and seemed not quite to see her. His eyes, also glazed by the heat, and very dark, appeared to gaze inwards, backwards into the shadows of his brain. He gave one of his absent, charming, half-apologetic smiles. “Yes, I heard you singing upstairs.”
Sibbi failed to take up her cue. She looked feverish, annoyed; she went to him and touched his hand and gave a little hard silver laugh like piano notes.
They went in arm in arm to dinner. Merton trailed after. “Perhaps, you know, we have a ghost.”
The food was served and partly eaten. It was too hot for food. Merton, watching Albertine’s gentle cameo face, the barley-coloured hair, visualised all the paraphernalia of a saint, fashioned for crucifixion. She ate little. If Ashburn looked at her she might eat something, pathetically attempting to deceive him. Merton passed her rolls reverently and helped her to wine. She was a fine woman, a sweet girl. Her devotion to the poet moved Merton, for perhaps, in some obscure way, it justified his own devotion to his blue-eyed cat wife.
Now, striving to cheer everyone up after the labour of eating, he revived his little piece and filled his pipe.
“Do you think we might have a ghost?”
“Such fun,” Laura observed acidly.
Albertine lowered her eyes and played with a piece of bread. “I’d far rather we hadn’t.”
Sibbi, quickened, seated next to Ashburn, caught his eye. “But how romantic—to think I supposed it was you, and all the time it was a spirit. How edifying!” The wine had gone to her head, and her appetite was unimpaired.
“These old houses, you know,” Merton went on, “though I don’t really believe in such stuff myself. Rather wish I did, you know.”
“Of course,” Sibbi said, “you’d frighten any ghost to death.”
Laura said; “Does it also write poetry, I wonder? Though, of course, Robert doesn’t write anything at present.”
“Don’t chide me, dear Laura,” he said.
“I shall always chide you,” Laura said. “No one else dares to do it, and without chiding you would perish.”
Albertine rose. “I wish it weren’t so hot,” she said.
She drifted towards the windows. Merton stared at his plate. Albertine’s eyes were full of tears, a nakedness which thrilled and embarrassed him.
“Just think,” Laura said, also rising, “if there were a ghost, we should have to call one of those village priests to exorcise it.” She crossed to stand behind Ashburn’s chair, and set one hand very lightly on his shoulder. “Do you know,” she said, “they are praying for rain—actually praying. And never in my life did I hear such pagan screaming as emanates from the Catholic church. Come now, Robert, we will take a walk in the garden, you and I, and you shall tell me what you are writing.”
Sibbi said: “Yes, the garden, I think I shall come with you—”
Laura smiled at her. “I have a much better idea. I heard you playing earlier. You have such a delicate touch and yet, I believe, that latest piece would benefit from practice—why not practice now, Sibbi? It’s a little cooler, I think.”
Sibbi narrowed her cat’s eyes as Laura and Ashburn strolled into the garden. She stalked to the piano and began to play very loudly and brilliantly. “How do you stand that woman, Albertine?” she demanded. “Does she suppose she owns everything?”
Albertine sat in the wicker chair by the veranda doors. Her dress spilled about her feet like a pool of milk. “Never mind,” she said soothingly, as if to a child. She watched Ashburn and Laura go up and down the walks among the burning green with its little filigree flickers of shade. The brazen clangour of heat was mulling, darkening, lying down like lions under the trees. Albertine could imagine Laura saying to Ashburn:
“Yes, I know what I am to you. Albertine is your heart, and this silly little Sibbi your appetite. And I am your brain. Do you think you can relinquish me?”
Albertine imagined she saw how the poet became animated, speaking of what he wrote to Laura. She sat very still in the wicker chair, watching them. A whole procession with its banners travelled through her mind, the first meeting, the first dream, the first embrace, the green graves, the seascapes, the hot gipsy summers with, superimposed upon it all, Laura, with her sharp dark gown slashing at the grass.
Suddenly Sibbi jumped up. “Why didn’t I think of it before? We must hold a séance. There is an ideal little table, and I recall there is something one does with a wineglass—” She ran to the veranda doors and called out. Ashburn turned at once. Sibbi stood, like a slender flower stalk, holding out her hand to him across the lawn.
And shortly they all sat round a table, like figures inscribed on a clock.
They held hands, the obdurate glass discarded. Nothing had happened, but it was too hot to move. Merton, seated between Sibbi and Laura, fell suddenly asleep and woke as suddenly with a wild grunt. As it had mummified the flowers, the earth, the island, the heat mummified the two men and three women at the table.
Only the eyes of the women sometimes darted, like needles stabbing between their lashes, observing the poet. Sibbi held one of his hands, Albertine the other. Ashburn, blinded by the heat, shut his eyes and experienced the sensation of two leeches, one on either palm, sucking his blood from him. He thought he had fallen asleep for a moment as Merton had done; he could not resist looking down at his hands. Albertine’s hand was cold as ice, Sibbi’s warm and dry. A peculiar stasis had fallen over them all. The poet glanced up and saw the clock had fittingly stopped on the mantelshelf. The eyes of the three women and of the man, as always, were on him.
“This is very irksome,” Laura said. “Really, Sibbi, can’t you use some blandishment to persuade your ghostie to appear? I have three letters to write—”
“I could sing,” Sibbi said; her hand moved in his. “If Robert thinks I should.”
“That should charm any ghost, I’m sure,” stung Laura. They had drawn the blinds; the room was drowned in a bloody shadow. The poet stared at the silent clock.
“What would you like me to sing?” Sibbi murmured, offering the sting so that he could draw the poison from it.
“Anything,” he said. What does it matter, he thought, what she sings? Desire ran through her hand into his body, yet he scarcely felt it, sex, like an absent limb lost in some war, castrated by some mental battle... His eyes unfocused on the face of the clock. He did not want to go back to the room in the tower, to the unfinished work, the spell which evaded him, urgent once, now meaningless. He had put it off. The girl began softly to sing; she sang as if far away over some hill of the mind, words he had written to an old tune of the island:
“Stream, from the black cold sun of night,
Phantoms in robes of darkest light,
To muddy the clear waters of our lives
With dreams.”
And after this dream, what? The room began to breathe about him, or else it was the sea. Nothing achieved or to come, and if achieved what did it signify? Ants crawling in ant cities... He felt the floor tilt a little beneath his chair and thought distantly: Now, an earthquake.
But it was the sea, the sea cool and green, washing in across the floor.
“By George, we’re flooded,” Merton observed jovially, without rancour or alarm. “And the roof’s come down.”
The house was gone. In a paper boat they rocked gently over an ocean glaucous and slippery as the backs of seals.<
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“Look at this,” Merton said, prodding the paper. “Soon sink. Dear chap, I said the shipwright should look at her. Not sea-worthy, you know.”
The ship was composed of manuscripts. The ink ran and darkened the water.
“You have had my wife, of course,” Merton said, “but it’s all for the best. Ballast, you-know. Jettison extra cargo.”
The poet looked down and saw that Laura and Sibbi floated under the glass-green runnels of waves with wide eyes and fish swimming in their hair and in and out of their open mouths. With his right hand he was holding Albertine beneath the water, while her garments floated out like Ophelia’s, and she smiled at him sadly, encouraging him to do whatever was necessary to save himself.
Ashburn leapt to his feet and the bottom gave way in the paper boat and, as the water closed over his head like salty fire, he saw Merton knock the dottle from his pipe—
Albertine still lay against his arm, he was trying to lift her above the sea and she was calling to him and struggling with him and suddenly he found himself in the blood-red room with fragments of glass on the table, Sibbi cowering in her chair, and no hands visible except Albertine’s, both holding on to him, as if he and she were drowning indeed.
But it was night which drowned everything, all confusion and outcry.
It swooped on the island. The sea turned red then black, the sky opened itself to an ochre moon. A serpent of lights wound out of the village at sunset and settled upon the beach below the house with the hoarse screeches of predatory bats.
“Our favourite pagan-Christians are restive again,” Laura said. “Dear God, who would believe such ceremonies could still exist. Are they sacrificing maidens to the sea?”
“Praying for rain,” Merton said. “Poor beggars. They get little enough from the land in a good year, but this drought—well, there’s no telling.”