Darkness, I

by Lee, Tanith

  Lix did not ask who he had been or where they went.

  Camillo told her.

  ‘There wouldn’t be enough trouble without him, at my niece’s.’

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Someone had stolen the van. And so they were very sorry, they could not do the delivery this week. Maybe not next week either. They apologized profusely—after all, she was a very good customer. Thirty bottles of white wine every seven days, sometimes a rose or a few red as well, and now and then a litre of Gordon’s, about one a month. Aside from that, the mineral water, and sometimes orange juice. It was a pity, about the van.

  Rachaela said it would be all right.

  She would go down the hill and fetch some wine. Reg and Elizabeth she had sent away just before Christmas—she did not need all that cleaning and food and fuss, not for one. So there was no car. But there were cab firms. She would use one of those.

  The man from the cab firm, seeing the man from the off-licence come out with the four boxes of wine, the water and juice and gin, said grimly: ‘Having a party?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She thought, A party just for me. She tried to be lenient, the man probably only saw a bottle of wine at Christmas or birthdays, or when he took ‘the wife’ to the local Chinese. And driving, when could he ever drink, now? But he still annoyed her. His implicit jealousy. The old thing, enemies everywhere. She had seemed able to avoid them for so long. But now, now she had to face the grimy world again, the insults and threats, the little peering eyes.

  As they turned up the perpendicular hill to the house the cab-man said, ‘Hardly worth a car. You should’ve got the bus. You could walk up this hill.’

  Rachaela clenched her teeth. It seemed worse, after the interval. How much the Scarabae, Althene, had got between her and these people. A pane of bullet-proof glass.

  Just then something else caught the driver’s jealous, peering little eye.

  ‘Look at that.’

  Rachaela looked.

  Two jet-black Rolls Royces skimmed past them, and floated up the hill.

  ‘Bloody funeral, is it?’

  Rachaela did not respond. She watched silently as the great sharks of cars pressed on between her own garden walls and away up the drive of the house.

  Scarabae.

  What else?

  It must be.

  Althene? No—

  And then she felt vaguely a twist of fear, or interest, in the pit of her belly.

  ‘I won’t drive in,’ said the driver. ‘Those big cars’ll make it difficult to turn round.’ He glanced at the boxes in the boot. ‘Can’t carry nothing. My back.’

  Rachaela waited until he opened the boot, then hauled the boxes out on to the space just inside the gate; the driver watched impassively. He overcharged her and she tipped him, wondering why—but then that too was a defence. He knew where she lived.

  As he drove off, she stood by the boxes, and looked up at the two Rolls parked before the bare poplars.

  No one had as yet got out.

  Rachaela picked up the first box of wine and walked up the drive with it.

  When she reached the white, two-storeyed house, she glanced back at the black cars. Not a hint of movement. Smoked-glass windows—nothing to be seen.

  Rachaela keyed the door panel and the house opened itself. She carried the box through and deposited it in the hall.

  As she was straightening, the foremost car put out a wing of door.

  A man got out. No, not Althene, not even as she had become. He was slender, about thirty-seven, in a long, belted overcoat. Which she realized abruptly was stiff with mud and other dirt. She did not know him, only that he was Scarabae. He had their look. And his jaggedly hacked hair was white. Somebody to do with Malach?

  Then he turned to summon someone else from the car. Something in his movement—the profile. He was older. He was fifty. It was Camillo.

  The other passenger was a small thin girl-woman in jeans and an anorak. She carried a knapsack. Her hair too was a sort of spiked crew-cut. She was patterned by something black, clothes and face. Perhaps paint.

  ‘Here we are,’ the man who was Camillo said. ‘Want some help with those boxes?’

  A chauffeur, effortlessly and frighteningly smart, had got out of the car belatedly to see to the door.

  ‘Fetch the boxes from the gate,’ Camillo said to him.

  And the elegant chauffeur went without a word.

  Then Camillo stalked to the other car and rapped on it. And here another chauffeur, like clockwork, got out and opened the second door.

  Two incredibly foul and fouled old men fell forth, bent almost double, coughing and laughing. They supported between them a sort of filthy black bolster with a slightly human head encrusted by grey hair and muck, which sank to its knees, saying, ‘Fokken, fokken,’ and spewed there, under the bird-bath.

  ‘Friends,’ said Camillo. ‘Come to visit you for the weekend.’

  ‘It isn’t the weekend,’ Rachaela said.

  As she stood, watching Camillo, seeing the first chauffeur coming back with two boxes of wine, and the other one going down past him, presumably to help, one of the old men staggered by her. He stank, an incredible smell of sheer desolation that lived.

  He was in through the door. He careered against the first box of wine. Paused to inspect it—she heard the bottles crack against each other.

  The black-coated vomiter had finished.

  ‘Fokken,’ he said, glaring into her eyes like a rabid dog that knows.

  Camillo said, ‘Thought you’d like company. Not good to be alone.’

  ‘I prefer to be alone.’

  ‘Have to put up with it then, won’t you.’ He half turned again, ‘This is my wife. Mon amour. Ma femme.’

  Rachaela looked at the woman in jeans. She had very blue eyes. That was all there was to her face, eyes.

  The second chauffeur was coming with the last of the wine, the water and the gin.

  The other two dirty men rambled by and through into the house.

  She had made no attempt to stop them; to attempt it would have meant contact. They were any way unstoppable. Why else had he brought them? Camillo the avenger. Always out to work some scheme of ill or accident on her for some reason—

  Inside the house something, perhaps a bottle, broke.

  ‘This is my niece, Rachaela,’ Camillo said. ‘Lix, say hallo.’

  ‘Hallo,’ said the blue-eyed woman, in an educated dead little voice.

  How had he found her? Scarabae could always find Scarabae.

  For a moment she thought of telephoning the house above the common, but the impulse faded. Camillo had spared them. And for her, well. So what? The rest of life had seeped through, and Camillo with his ghastly antics was only another facet of that. Strange he should have become so.

  The old men milled into the kitchen first. They opened the fridge, and so presumably they knew what fridges were for—they seemed to be primeval, or at least from the era of Thomas Hardy, Dickens...

  There was not much in the fridge, actually. A small raw steak, some ham in a packet, Camembert—they did not like its odour—tomatoes, and three cartons of yoghurt. However, there was also a last bottle of wine.

  One of the old men did not care for that. He said that the wine was ‘too noo’. And next Rachaela heard him go upstairs, just this one old man. She followed him, because she had now opened a bottle of wine herself, cool only from the cold day, and she was curious.

  The old man went into the first bathroom, which had been Anna’s. He began to rummage among the cabinets.

  ‘Got any cleanser, missus?’

  ‘There,’ she said.

  ‘Uh.’

  The old man took out a half-full bottle of apricot cleanser, and another one of astringent. Anna had sometimes bought these things, and seldom used them, merely washing her white and flawless face, which was never too dry or too greasy.

  The ghost of Anna came into the bathroom.

/>   But the old man did not see.

  He undid the cleanser and sampled it, smacking his lips. Pleased, then, he raised the bottle to Rachaela.

  “S good. Any more?’

  ‘I’ll have a look.’

  She went out, filling her glass as she went, bottle in one hand, glass in the other, and opened the large cupboard in the other bathroom, which she had shared with Althene.

  Oh, yes, he would like this.

  He came in after her.

  Take your pick.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said the old man. He hovered behind her and his abysmal, knife-cuttable stink mingled with Coty and Lancôme, Boots No 7, and the ubiquitous marshmallow aroma of cold cream.

  ‘Anything you want?’ he asked her.

  ‘No, it’s all right. I only use it on my face.’

  ‘Don’t need to,’ he said gallantly, ‘lovely girl like you.’

  He put his free hand, the one empty of apricot cleanser and astringent, into the cabinet, and things fell out, bursting in the wash-hand basin.

  ‘Sorry, missus.’

  Rachaela left him there. She could use the other bathroom or the downstairs loo if she had to pee. Or be sick. What if the other one were sick again? No doubt he would be.

  Downstairs, he sat with a bottle of Colombard, on the Chinese rug. The rug had rucked up, already dispoiled. The last tramp was on the sofa, lying there, with his boots on the cushions. He too drank wine, dreamily.

  Camillo sat on a chair, and the woman he had called Lix was on the floor, also, cross-legged. She did not drink. Nor did Camillo.

  ‘That’s Pug,’ said Camillo. ‘And the one upstairs—has he broken a lot of things?—is Vinegar Tom. This one we don’t know. What’s your name, daddy?’

  ‘Fokken, fokken,’ said the one who had been sick. ‘Fokken mind your fokken fokken.’

  ‘Adorable fellow,’ said Camillo, with unsullied affection.

  The nameless man surged on the rug, but did not quite come up. He relapsed, and drank from his particular bottle.

  Rachaela went out again.

  She stood in the hall and listened. She could hear the other man—Vinegar Tom—lumbering about in slow-motion.

  Suddenly the cat, Juliet, sprinted down the stairs. Her white face looked like a startled mask as she stopped and stared at Rachaela.

  Rachaela’s heart fell two or three other stairs behind her breast. The cats. She had forgotten them.

  ‘Yes,’ Rachaela said. She went to Juliet and picked her up. Juliet protested in a shrill coloratura. ‘Don’t struggle.’ Rachaela bore Juliet to the cupboard opposite the stairs. As she undid the door and shoved Juliet, squeaking top E’s with outrage, inside, the terrible stained-glass window flared its dying light on them, the red and green and gold of Persephone and her mother, Persephone who had been stolen away. ‘Just for half an hour,’ lied Rachaela.

  She shut the door on Juliet and turned the key in the lock. This cupboard had always had the ability to be locked. God knew why. Useful, now. She kept the key in her hand, with her glass.

  Probably Juliet would shit deliberately on the floor, and who could blame her?

  Rachaela went upstairs again. She knew where the black cat, Jelka, was, or had been—

  Jacob was normally outside. He would have too much sense to come in, hopefully.

  Halfway up the stairs again, her hand with the key spilled her drink. She put the glass down and kept hold only of the bottle.

  Vinegar Tom had gone into her bedroom, the room she had had with Althene. He was sitting on the bed, with a stub of fag in his mouth, sniffing at a pillow which maybe had scent on it, and which in a minute might catch alight.

  Anna’s door stood ajar.

  Rachaela went in.

  Jelka was curled asleep, oblivious, inside the coil of Ursula the fox-fur, with her head on the stomach of the white rabbit.

  Something horrible assailed Rachaela.

  She raised her bottle and tilted it into her mouth, but the mellow wine did not help her.

  Christ, what was it. Reality. It was truth.

  She put the bottle on the floor and crept up on Jelka with the stealth of dread. After all, she did not know any of the old men would harm a cat. Certainly Camillo would not. Or had that altered too?

  Rachaela took up the fox, the rabbit, and Jelka, in a tray of softness. She held them to her bosom.

  Jelka woke with a tiny purr and looked up, somnambulist, into her eyes.

  ‘It’s all right, darling. Come and sit with your mother.’

  Jelka stayed quite calm, allowing Rachaela to carry her away downstairs.

  It was difficult, unlocking the cupboard again, making sure Juliet did not get out. Rachaela could not have managed toting the bottle. She was glad she had got rid of it.

  When she had insinuated the furry heap of cat, fox and rabbit into the cupboard, up against a forestalled, amazed and wowling Juliet, locked them in again, and clutched the key, Rachaela sat down on the stairs.

  There were hardly any noises coming from anywhere. The man upstairs must be lying on her bed, sucking the pillow—she could not smell burning. The two downstairs were drinking. And Camillo and his wife—wife?—were still.

  She could pretend she was alone.

  But, she was not.

  If she had been alone, she would have proceeded as always, drinking slowly and thoroughly her medicine of serenity. And the TV would have been on. And quiet night would have been gathering on the empty house.

  It was odd. She had thought of Camillo when parts of London were blacked out by a bomb. Now here he was.

  What did he truly want?

  Rachaela did not care. She was aching, in dense, low waves, a sea of still pain coming in on her.

  She had held it back so long.

  The pain of everything. Sex and birth and loss. Mostly loss. Yes, that was right.

  She thought of Althene, changed back into a man. So fragile as a man. And like steel, leaving her. First Adamus, then Ruth. Then Anna. Then Althene. Alone. But she liked to be alone. No, she was only used to it.

  She wondered if she would cry. That would be a bad idea, for Camillo would sense it, come out and mock her, or worse.

  Any way, she was not going to cry. Her pain, this new hurt, was far too arid for tears.

  She looked, aslant as it were, for the bottle. Where had she left it? Never mind. There were other bottles in the kitchen where the courteous po-faced chauffeurs had left them.

  Had the chauffeurs driven off? She had not heard the soft murmur of vehicles going.

  She got up, walked to the front door, opened it, and looked out.

  The Rolls Royce cars were yet on her drive, beyond the bird-bath with its garland of sick, which decoration gleamed salmon pink in the last of the daylight.

  Rachaela shut the door.

  She crossed back to the kitchen, and went in, switching on the overhead light.

  As she was opening a new bottle, Camillo entered.

  ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘I thought you’d run away.’

  ‘Why should I? It’s my house.’

  ‘Is it? I thought it was Althene’s house. Beautiful, glamorous Althene. Have you heard from her? Anything? What’s she say?’

  ‘I haven’t heard anything.’

  ‘Her male name is Johanon,’ said Camillo. ‘Did you know? The mother gave her that. You’ve been told about Sofie. Crazy Sofie. Potty. God knows what she’s up to. Just think. Tsk. To be mad.’

  ‘Althene is searching for Anna,’ Rachaela said.

  ‘Anna got lost, like Ruth,’ said Camillo. ‘Yes, I know about it. Know everything. Althene went to Sofie first. Probably stayed with Sofie. Trapped by Sofie.’

  Rachaela poured the new wine into three kitchen glasses of pale green crystal.

  ‘I expect your wife will want some.’

  ‘She might. Don’t know her well.’

  Camillo took a glass. They went together, out, and back into the main room.

  L
ight was dying now in the zodiacs of the upper windows, in four places rich royal blue as the eyes of Camillo’s wife.

  Blue eyes. The eyes of Althene’s father had been very blue. She had said. Cajanus. The one perhaps she had gone looking for. The one who might have taken Anna. If he existed. If Anna had existed.

  Rachaela shut her eyes. She could not recall, now, what Althene had told her, what she had imagined, guessed, deduced for herself. None of it, any way, made sense. And so, she supposed, it was all ludicrously factual, had happened and did happen. And where did she fit inside it all?

  Thank you,’ said the educated woman who was Camillo’s wife or property.

  Rachaela had handed her the glass, not looking.

  Pug on the sofa had fallen asleep, his personal bottle drained.

  On the rug, the man who said fokken hugged a brand-new bottle morosely.

  ‘Do you remember my horsey?’ said Camillo to Rachaela.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I left it somewhere safe. Poor thing, it misses me. No one else would. Nasty Camillo. Go away.’

  Rachaela drank the wine. It was like leaden water. Useless.

  Camillo said, ‘You can tell she’s depressed. Someone stole her daughter. And then Rachaela’s lover went to find the stolen child and mad Sofie has got her. Heigh ho, this life is so jolly.’

  Lix glanced at Rachaela.

  Abruptly Lix said, ‘Can I have a bath?’

  ‘Yes, if you want. There are two bathrooms upstairs. Camillo’s old tramp’s in a bedroom. He’s drunk the bath foam probably. There are towels in the cupboard on the landing.’

  ‘Perfect hostess,’ said Camillo.

  Rachaela said, ‘Will these people hurt the cats?’

  Camillo shrugged.

  But on the rug the fokken man looked up with a narrow gleam in his eye.

  Rachaela said, ‘They’re out, the cats. Sometimes they’re gone for days.’

  Lix stood. She was very small, slim, compact. On her face the black was only some sort of mud. She looked clean under it, smelled clean. She went out.

  Rachaela did not want to stay with Camillo. She rose too and followed Lix.

  On the stair Lix turned. ‘I’ll wipe the bath round afterwards. I’m not diseased. So far as I know.’