by Robert Drewe
‘Will the dog ever eat again?’ the vicar asks them.
‘The flag is at half-mast,’ he answers, pleased with his religious insight.
But the vicar slaps on a pith helmet and runs off into the meadow. Horses peer thoughtfully at them over the hedge from the corpses’ field. Angelica tiptoes through this disorder with a queenly, I-told-you-so angle to her eyebrows. Her skin shines like a lamp is behind it. Pearl rings drop from her fingers to the boiling ground, sizzle through the surface crust. The sea booms nearby. Ochre waves frothing like sewage on the shore smell, however, of crushed citrus leaves.
Nothing fancy about the second dream, just standard lust. Her hair falling on his face as she leans over him. Soft hairs, too, under her arms. Her breath like clover is over his mouth. The cushion of her lips. He slips his hand over and around and under and between her. The warm vertical slide of his fingers.
In the dream she is both wanton and shy, her eyes under him wide then tightly closed.
A strange coloured bird sings a tremulous melody like a cascade of pure water.
‘Do you want to know my feelings?’
He looks at her cautiously. ‘Yes.’
‘We have known each other before.’
‘When?’
‘In another life.’
‘Really?’ He’s amused and flattered. It’s hard to either argue the point or talk sense. Looks and smiles are unlikely to shake that confidence.
‘Were we … infamous?’
‘I just know we were together.’
On a Thursday evening rattling with insects they walk along the river from Bath to Bradford. The mood is funny, eccentric. A second crazy river—the Bath-to-Bradford canal—accompanies them. One moment it runs at their elbows, the next far above their heads; boats float both above and below them. Warm smells fill the air: hay, roses, sweet william. From the hills, the sound of sheep bells. Hot yellow lilies tip into the water and at their approaching laughter creatures rustle away in the crisp bushes.
Both of them are bold and shy. Allowing their hips to bump as they walk. The path is white in summer dust. Round-headed children with sunburnt faces stare expressionlessly from cottage doorways. They, too, seem on tenterhooks.
She leans happily into him. The late sun shoots from a prism on her breast, a crystal brooch. Her eyes, too, are twinkling.
‘Aren’t we … sympathetic?’ she says.
Along the intimate spectrum between melancholy and hilarity they already share lovers’ moods. Everything seems to be tiptoeing urgently to this ardent moment. Without discussion, distractedly arm-in-arm, they are searching for a spot they have noticed before and never mentioned. A hideaway, a soft vegetal bed.
They see it simultaneously and draw each other, each the leader and the led, knee-deep in reeds, under this willow on the river bank.
The fronds part like an Oriental curtain into their veiled cave. Some bird flaps away as she places her bathing shawl over a mound of leaves.
Suddenly he feels as whispery as a child, thrilled at this mischievous hide-and-seek. In a fluid movement she eases him onto the shawl and kneels beside him. Under them, dry leaves explode like fireworks. She touches a vein on the back of his hand, moves along it, and sighs, maybe with relief.
But she isn’t one for whispering, and the sudden defensive clarity of her voice surprises him. Her words cut through the leaf rustle and insect hum.
‘What with the theatre life and so forth, I’m far from a virgin.’
A sudden pulse in his neck gets in the way of speech. He coughs self-consciously and reaches out to her, but her hand on his wrist tightens and holds him off. The blue in her eyes greens toward the pupils; her gaze is steady but a little moist. She seems to be waiting for him to say something, some signal.
Through the leaves behind her, a shimmer of river. Willow fronds frame a black swan swimming obliquely against the pull of the water. Charcoal black, red beak, neck thin as a riding whip; it leaves a drifting wake. A curious thing, he thinks: swans are supposed to be white, plumper, more feminine and domestic-looking. Mantelpiece birds, emblems for bedroom dressers.
He ponders the oddity of the black swan as she unloads her unrequired information. This swan is no ornament: rather a too-bold brushstroke, oil paint on a watercolour canvas. In its dark clarity it could be an elongated figure two. Or a comma, a breathing space in the river’s flowing narrative.
When this question mark swims out of frame he tells her to hush, and touches her.
It was different from his erotic dreams. In its moist heat and resilience, far better. Room within room of increasingly fluid heat folding back, and then the warmest subterranean wave sweeping up and breaking over them.
Afterwards he’s unable to speak anything useful. But lying in the rushes in their new intimacy, she murmurs to him, ‘Now we can tell each other all our secrets.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Why won’t you tell me?’
‘It’s yours I don’t want to hear.’
‘Well, what’s the worst thing you ever did?’
He’s beginning to notice insects and itches. ‘I’m not going to tell you.’
‘Neither am I.’
In the night he wakes in her bed to soft, steady weeping and lies a moment pretending sleep, barely breathing, his heart hammering.
‘What is it?’ he says eventually.
‘Let me tell you just one secret. Please.’
‘Yes.’
‘My mother is certified insane.’
He lies still, dealing gently with her while she talks on through the night. From time to time he kisses her wet face. Now and then one of them gets up, and returns to the bed and the other’s embrace. Now they are close. As for the dreaded moment of the chamber pot, neither are stealthy tricklers—but neither his gurgling jet nor her farmyard gush embarrasses them.
In the dark pre-dawn he begins to confide in her, too. He says he wishes to drastically change his life and situation. He warms to the subject: how frustrated he is with this cobwebby century! Now his knees jab and twitch under the bedclothes, his voice rises defiantly from the pillow. He’s tired of reacting to long-existing conditions. He wants to experience different surfaces, risks, landscapes.
For that reason, he confides—his voice drops dramatically—he’s wary of ever falling in love.
‘Is that your secret then?’
‘Near enough.’
‘How humdrum. To love is to change. They say.’
‘I would need to be convinced.’
Only a very young, half-educated man could sound like such a pompous, Gilbert and Sullivan-loving fifty-year-old. ‘What happened to Mister Adventure?’
By now a beam of sunlight is glistening on the white marble slab of the washstand and firing in all directions off the basin and ewer. He has never before seen a bedroom jug and basin made of cut-glass; in his house they are serviceable enamel. In the light’s icy brilliance he reaches for her again.
‘I talk rubbish,’ he says.
‘Another dark secret,’ she says. ‘I’m never going to marry.’
‘I was going to say that.’
‘I have a present for you.’
The act of giving has made her shy and self-conscious. She shows him a bright wooden cage. Inside is a little Australian grass parrot, boldly fluffing up emerald and gold. She clears her throat.
‘I hope you like him.’
‘He’s very handsome.’
‘He used to be an oracle, but he’s happier being a parrot.’
A barrel organ had announced the oracle’s presence. A blowy February afternoon. She was returning from the Phonetic Institute in Lower Bristol Road and the organ and cage were in her path. She was hurrying along, head down, and looked against her will, preparing herself for the inevitable monkey, the darting, pained eyes in a corner.
Instead a small bunch of green feathers fluffed the wrong way by the wind. The reversed feathers passively resisting the gusts. The harassing w
ind revealing the bird’s downy centre. As a little girl she used to blow the pile on her sealskin muff.
Ladies and Gentlemen! A unique opportunity! These foreign birds will consult the FATES for you! For only ONE PENNY they will predict your FORTUNE! So the sign said. In a far corner of the cage cowered the bunch of reversed feathers. She couldn’t avoid it. The Fates would be consulted.
‘Eh, signora!’ The organ-grinder took a stick and began to torment the parrot. Poking it, scraping the stick across the bars. Eventually it darted across the cage, eyes bright with fury. Scraps of paper had been tied to the stick and its beak fought the stick until it caught in one of these messages.
The organ-grinder withdrew the stick and removed the paper. The parrot returned to sulk in the corner. Her fortune lay before her.
The significance of the plural. These foreign birds.
‘How much for the parrot?’ she said.
She has a small tale of revenge to go with Will’s present. She’d needed a perch for the parrot’s new cage, and at the bottom of the old cage lay the stick the organ-grinder had used to tease it into consulting the Fates. When it saw the stick the bird was furious. Longing to explain herself, she’d put the stick in the cage anyway.
‘He avoided the perch for a week,’ she tells Will. ‘Now he sits on it all day. I like to watch him dozing. It’s nice that his enemy is now his footstool.’
‘Very nice. Now he shits on him.’
Her visiting card is attached to the cage. On the front, printed, Miss Angelica Lloyd. On the back in ink are some scratchy hieroglyphics, a small v hanging in the air, an upward-then-downward curved line like a shark’s fin, and a small upside-down u. She’s too embarrassed to point them out.
He looks quizzically at her. ‘But what did the Fates say?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘It’s possible to direct your own fate,’ he says.
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘I know a fellow on the Somerset Levels, Henry Porteous, who has stood in the one position for four years.’
‘What good is that?’ She frowns, wants him to notice the card, ask a question. Wants him not to.
‘Henry has his own posture, settled as an oak. He leans on a partition wall between his living room and bedroom. At first his head rested against the wall, but bit by bit it bumped a way through. So did his shoulders, and his chest came to rest on an inter-joist.’
She’s rolling her eyes.
‘Of course after standing so long his legs are atrophied and beginning to rot, but he still eats and shits like a horse where he stands. No one but his old sister Josephine will come to the cottage to feed him. People have tried to move him, but he shouts and threshes and risks collapsing the roof beams on everyone. “What’s the law against standing up in my own home,” Henry says. “Where does the Lord say we must sit on chairs?” So there he stands, rooted to the spot.’
‘Phew, imagine!’
‘He’s in complete control,’ he says.
‘Except he’s not going anywhere.’
‘That’s fine with him. He has acted. It drove him mad that his house was moving away from him and he could do nothing to stop it. The houses there sink down into the peat. Wetness is a fact of life that tips everything on the diagonal. Horses on the Levels need feet like frying pans just to walk across a field. And men like to test things. There’s this engineering term—Angle of Repose. The maximum angle at which something can exist without sliding.’
‘Anyone can fall beyond the angle if there’s a woman to hold him up.’
‘Better a joist or two. I like the idea of a man being the foundation of his own house.’
‘What religion are you?’
‘Baptist. No, atheist.’
‘I’ve tried both of those and found them lacking,’ she says.
The new lovers enjoy following the rituals of the bath. There are a dozen ways of taking the waters. When they are used as a simple bath the bather is advised to let the vapour that has collected during the preparation of the bath escape, then descend gradually into the water.
Will and Angelica like to approach the bath from opposite sides, down separate stairs, like strangers. They enter the water slowly, the momentum of each making a gentle disturbance which soon strikes the similar disturbance of the other. Only the lack of breeze prevents this clashing of currents from throwing up a minute plume of spindrift. Their tides lap back and forth and ripple against their thighs.
Hip-deep, they face each other boldly, as if for the first time. The teasing warmth, the skidding smoothness of wet bodies.
When they step from the bath, attendants envelop them in warm sheets and press them softly. The gentle friction helps the sheets absorb the moisture. Then the sheets are allowed to slip down, the attendants press blankets around them and they move to a dressing room for a vigorous rubbing with warm towels.
‘When I’m bathing alone,’ Angelica says breezily, ‘I sometimes ask for a bucketing.’
What happens is she lies prostrate on a wooden mat while two of the tallest and strongest attendants stand over her with large buckets and pour cold water on her with great force.
Will says nothing.
She looks surprised and defensive. ‘It’s most stimulating.’
Eventually he shakes his head disbelievingly. ‘What must it remind you of?’
She won’t allow the effect of the bath to be spoiled by a bad mood. In a moment she smiles at him. ‘You see, I’m named after a root that grows in streams. Angelica archangelica.’
‘I eat it like celery,’ he says.
‘It was growing by the bank where I was conceived.’
He considers this image, of red-faced Ham thrashing about in the reeds, then reaches out and strokes her upper arm. ‘Be thankful they weren’t lying in a mugwort hedge. Or a field of stinking-hellebore.’
‘Or toothwort,’ she says. ‘Henbane. Broomrape. Dogwood.’ She collapses against his side. ‘Miss Dogwood Lloyd!’
All these riverside plants he knows like the growths of his own body. Acrid stinking-hellebore, its green petals dyed crimson at the rims. Fleshy toothwort, the colour of a muddy white pig. Broomrape, wrinkled and brown. Henbane, whose veins run blood. In winter stinking-hellebore appearing before any other plants were in bloom and the only colour in the visible world was the orange and red of willow and dogwood at the water’s edge.
For some reason he also thinks of herb paris, a pretty flower but no flower, opening on a black berry with a green-legged spider at its heart. An old country cure for madness.
She darts one of her glances at him. ‘Anyway, I’ve noticed you find bathing quite stimulating, too.’
‘Tell me where the angel comes into it,’ he says.
‘I’ll show you where the angel comes into it.’
He blinks.
‘We’ll need to remove our clothes.’
‘Oh.’
‘Just lie there.’
After the bath his body is awake and sensitive. She begins by slowly covering his head with her hair. This silent gesture closes his eyes. Then her hair flows down his body. A human waterfall.
Hair flowing is like a dance. She moves her body smoothly as she descends, so that her hair brushes down his body in a single long uninterrupted motion.
Her slightest touch is a statement, a language. A flowing blue line drawn with a fine-nibbed pen on sensitive paper. When she reaches his feet, she turns slowly, without breaking contact, and returns to his head.
‘Now I will massage you.’
She nestles his feet into her pelvic warmth. ‘The feet and calves are too often neglected,’ she says.
‘Criminally neglected.’
‘Don’t laugh. Anyway, yours are flat.’
Her thumbs are digging and pressing into his tender arches, her fingers gripping his toes, rolling his ankle and heel bones. Invading the virgin spaces between his toes. He has never felt these sensations before.
But he says g
ruffly, ‘They’re just feet.’
‘Wrong. I’m encouraging the movement of congested fluids towards the heart. I’m stimulating the kidney and bladder meridians. They’re associated with the element of water and help to regulate fear.’
‘Fear of what?’
‘Sexuality and change.’
‘What else is there?’
The calves, the thighs. He lies on his back. She’s on her knees, rocking as she strokes. Their silhouettes bob on the wall. At times her cool skin—a brush of abdomen, a tip of breast—flicks against his leg or side, softer than touch. At no stage does she break contact. Her sensual presence is subdued but suffuses everything. She is like a drop of dye in a glass of water. And when occasionally she catches a spiky whiff of his body she seems to quiver slightly before continuing.
She kneels by his thigh, massaging it with her whole hand. Using her body’s weight, she directs her energy into the heel of her hand. She works the inner thigh with her right hand, and the centre and outer muscles with her left. She works deeply and evenly along the length of the quadricep, from the knee to the thigh joint, staying in line with the muscle.
His muscles are young and limber. She keeps just below the level of pain. And of arousal.
With her thumbs she finds his points of tension. She takes a deep breath and starts the movement, breathes out and leans into him so he feels heat deep in his tissues.
She says: ‘The thighs are held tight by repressed anger and sexual tension. This can bring a powerful emotional release. You shouldn’t worry about sudden sweating or a change in breathing. Maybe you will cry.’
‘I doubt it.’
A deep thumb jab brings a sharp twinge. At his yelp she says, ‘You know we are ninety per cent water and should move and change our lives as fluidly as possible.’
She loves her skill. To massage a body releases something in her. She likes to add musk drops to her massaging oil, or sometimes concentrated clove oil, almond, cinnamon or lemon oils.