The Brimstone Wedding

by Barbara Vine

  ‘What?’

  ‘You're going to get it dirtier.’

  He closed the boot lid and got into the car and reversed it out of the garage.

  The tape ended there and I have turned it over.

  I only remember one thing he said before we got into the car and that was, ‘I did my reconnaissance while I was out. I think I know a place.’

  It was nowhere, miles from anywhere, the end of the world. Perhaps, by now, a few houses have gone up in the area and perhaps more hedges have come down. Then it was remote, distant, uninhabited. The fields went on and on, with here and there green woodland to separate them or the pale line of a winding lane. And some of the fields were black where the stubble had burned and some were already ploughed after the burning, brown and ribbed and spotted with white and grey pebbles.

  But now it was dusk and there were no lights from houses or lamps. There was no moon or none yet risen. The countryside began to lose its colour, it was no longer green and earth-brown, it was all shades of grey and the black of the burnt fields. But why do I bother to describe it? What does it matter now?

  Alan knew where to go, light or dark, dusk or day. He had found the place some hours before. He turned the car down a track that was an avenue of limes and backed it into the field he had chosen. The limes walked in pairs up the shallow hill and the track between them was a double rut of dry baked earth. There was no gate, just an opening, and boards laid over the ditch. Recently, the day before very likely, the field had been burned. And the farmer, perhaps because the time had seemed right, while he had his fire, had uprooted part of a hedge to enlarge his field. An ancient hedge it had been, of oak and hawthorn, maple and rose, elder and dogwood. A welter of half-burned logs lay still smouldering at the edge of the black stubble, limbs of trees and twisted roots. Smoke came out of their joints and gnarled growths in little thin trails. The fire, Alan said, had been raging when he came this way earlier in the day.

  You told me once that farmers were supposed to leave six feet between the burning and the hedge, but he hadn't done that. He had meant to burn the hedge. A tree stood with its branches like burnt arms, the leaves still on them, shrunk and curled and black. A leaf fell as I stood there, spiralling down, stiff as a piece of rolled paper.

  We began with the newspaper. I laid the fire among the ashes the way I used to in Auntie Sylvia's house, screwed up newspaper first, then wood, then a log or two. Logs were everywhere, and wood chips, too, on the grass, in the gouged-out pits where the hedge had stood for five hundred years. Some were burnt but most were raw wood, wounded and splintered by the axe. Alan poured on paraffin and then we laid Gilda's body on the pyre.

  Not far away, down in south Suffolk, is a place where they burned a living man in the sixteenth century. There's a monument to him now. He was one of those martyrs condemned to death by Mary Tudor for refusing to be a Roman Catholic. I wonder how long it took to burn him. Of course there was no compulsion on those people to destroy the body. But what happened to it? No one ever says. No one tells you. Perhaps, like us, they kept the fire going for many hours. It took us hours, it took all night. To burn a body is easy. To destroy a body by burning is a long and laborious and terrible task.

  I tried not to look until it no longer looked human. And that happened quite soon. I couldn't stop myself from smelling the smell. I tried. I held my nose, I turned away and retched into the ditch. When I came back I looked. I told myself this was another log lying there, an ordinary log that had been an oak branch, only a particularly cumbersome one. The smell changed and became sulphurous, the bitter, choking stench of brimstone, the burning stone.

  Alan had brought a bottle of gin. We drank it, directly out of the bottle. I'd been sick but perhaps it was because of the gin that I was never afraid, that I never expected a car to appear suddenly behind us in the lane or see the blue lamp of a police van or a troop of angry men fanning out across the meadow. We took nips of gin. The raw fire of it running down our throats comforted us and gave us strength to work on feeding the fire, keeping the fire going. Once, and once only, we turned to face each other and closed together in a strange, mindless embrace.

  We let the flames die, with a long branch we raked at the cinders and the ashes, and, when it cooled, piled on more fresh wood, surrounding that log that was no log with more wood. Alan made a petrol bomb. He filled the gin bottle with petrol and wadded the neck of it with his handkerchief and told me to stand back.

  ‘I've always wanted to make a Molotov cocktail,’ he said.

  He lit the wad and threw the bottle. That was when the rear of the car was burned. Petrol doesn't flame like paraffin. It explodes. I should have known that. Everyone who understands the principle of internal combustion knows that, but there were many things I didn't understand before that night. Gilda's pyre went up with a roar, the flames leaping into the sky and bringing a moment of broad daylight. Neither of us was hurt, though Alan's eyebrows and the front of his hair were singed.

  We knew, both of us knew, that we must never say, that's enough, that will do, it's not good but it will do. There was no discussion. We knew what the other was thinking, for each of us had the same thought: there must be absolute destruction, total reduction to an unidentifiable mass. A point had to be reached where we were satisfied, when what we had come there to burn was changed into burnt wood and blackened stones.

  It was daylight before that happened. It was the grey dawn that comes before the sun rises. The place where we had worked all night looked now much as it had when first we came, charred logs from an uprooted hedge smouldering on a dozen square yards of ash. We were exhausted, we were drunk and filthy and sick and nearly mad. Alan drove us back, the car weaving all over the road. The awful thing, one of the awful things, was that we didn't speak but we weren't silent. He was groaning, making sounds like someone in intolerable pain, and I was crying without tears, a dry sobbing. But what does it matter how we were? It's self-indulgence to go on.

  At my house we slept, he upstairs this time, I on the sofa. I gave up the bed to him, he had worked so hard. His hair was burnt and his hands were blistered. I watched him fall on to the bed face-downwards, but I don't think I could physically have brought myself to lie down beside him. Later in the day, when we had once more been through our bathing and changing-clothes rituals, we went out into the garden and sat on the grass. It was very warm and very dry. In the distance I could hear the sound of machinery, a farmer taking advantage of the weather to harvest or to plough. My head ached and I expect Alan's did.

  He was nervous, in a way I had never seen him. We would have to go back, he kept saying, we would have to go back and check. He couldn't remember how we had left things. Had we really destroyed it all?

  ‘I want you to tell me,’ I said, ‘what you did between the time that garage man went away and the time he came back again?’

  ‘You mean, after he'd told us what to do, don't you?'

  I made an impatient gesture. I'd never done that to Alan before. I'd never before put up my arms at him and shaken my hands from the wrists.

  ‘After he'd told us there were just the two of us.’ He looked at me as if I were a stranger. ‘You mean, did I kill her?’

  ‘Yes, that's what I mean.’

  ‘I've told you I don't know how many times that I didn't. I did nothing. What matters now is how we left things last night. This morning, I mean. I mean this morning. I can't remember, I drank so much.’

  ‘I can remember,’ I said. ‘Everything was destroyed. We knew we couldn't stop till everything was destroyed.’

  ‘I still want us to go back.’

  I went up to him. I crawled up to him on my hands and knees and squatted in front of him on the dry grass and said,

  ‘Tell me the truth. Did you kill her?’

  ‘For God's sake,’ he said. ‘She was going to die. That blow to the head, that was fatal. I untied that scarf she had on. I held it against her face, against her nose and mouth, just for a mom
ent, a second, I don't know why. I said to myself, you can't do this, what the hell are you doing, and I took the scarf away, it was fifteen seconds at the most, it was no time, I took the scarf away and she was dead.’

  25

  Out in the garden I sat on the lawn in a deck chair and wondered if it was the one they'd used as a stretcher to bring Gilda's body home.

  He hadn't killed her, had he? She'd have died anyway. I've got that green scarf here with me now, I've put it across my own face and pressed with my hands against my face, and it hasn't stopped me breathing. It's thin and transparent, you could tie it round your face to protect yourself against smog and still breathe normally.

  On the other hand I'm not ill. I'm a lot younger than Gilda was and I haven't been injured in a car crash. No doubt, too, his hands were stronger than mine are, but I still think you couldn't smother anyone with that scarf.

  Then why did he put it over her face and hold it there? Why did he? Because his intent was to kill her, it must have been. He was afraid she'd recover, so he put the scarf over her face to kill her and then he thought better of it, almost immediately – fifteen seconds is immediately, isn't it? – he took the scarf away. And she was dead. So did he kill her or did she just die? And if he meant to kill her…? Oh, it's too deep for me, I can't untangle it, I don't know.

  I listened to the second side. It's just half of the last side and then it stops.

  I remember everything very clearly. I remember every word and gesture. Everything is clear-cut, precise, distinct, cut with a sharp knife.

  When he had told me what he had done I asked him to repeat it, and he did repeat it, rather sulkily, like a child. And I listened, the stern parent, weighing up the pros and cons of punishment. But before he could say it, I said it.

  ‘All right. I wanted it too. It wasn't just you.’

  ‘She would have died anyway, Stella. I don't suppose I even hastened her dying.’

  ‘From the moment that man asked us if we were just two we both hoped she'd die, we wanted her to die.’

  ‘God knows, we'd played it often enough,’ he said. ‘It hasn't been much like the Killing Gilda Tease though, has it?’

  As we were driving back to the place of the burning I knew it was all over between us. He knew too, but he wouldn't let himself believe it. He kept saying to me that we had to stay together, we must support each other. In case questions were asked. In case the work of destruction had not been complete. If fragments were found, bones, teeth. She had been his wife and he was talking about her bones and her teeth. In case the police came, he said. We must present a united front.

  No one was burning stubble. The burning was ended and the air was clear. The sky was white, a roof of very high cloud, no sun, no wind. It was the 1st of September, the end of summer, the end of everything. And I saw it as an approach to absolute finality, termination, apocalypse.

  The nearer we got to the place the more the dread I felt increased. It was as if something awaited us there. I don't mean the police or some sort of search party, I don't mean any officials or arm of the law. I mean retribution. I've never had any belief in the supernatural but I was afraid of unearthly agents, angels of vengeance, principalities and powers, of justice personified in unimaginable forms, waiting for us.

  I even said to him, ‘Let's go back.’

  ‘We can't go back,’ he said. ‘We've come to see. We have to know. I want to sleep at nights.’

  It was so quiet. All the way we had met no cars, followed or been followed by no cars. When a pheasant ran across the road in front of us with a shriek and a rattle of wings I cried out and clenched my hands.

  As we approached the place we heard the tractor, the steady mechanical throb that is as much a part of the countryside in autumn as the neighing of horses must once have been and the clatter of their hoofs. The noise deterred us and Alan slowed the car. We crawled the last bit along the narrow road.

  No avenging angels, of course. No one waiting at the gate to summon us before some bar of justice. Alan parked the car up on the grass verge. He put out his hand to take mine but my hands were clasped together against my chest. We looked into the field and he was silent but I made a little moaning sound. I whimpered like a puppy. Alan stared.

  The field which had been black was brown, the signs of burning gone, for all fifty acres of it were going under the plough. He had wasted no time, that farmer. His stubble was burnt, his hedge uprooted and burnt, and now the plough was turning and grinding and burying the burnt cornstalks and the ash and the cinders.

  He was nearly finished. The tractor was turning for the last time at the top of the field where the hedge had gone. He came slowly down the slope close to the lime avenue, lumbering like a heavy animal or a tank. He seemed to be coming straight for us, inexorably, our retribution. But I could see him in the cab, smoking a cigarette, an ordinary middle-aged man with a red face and receding fair hair. His smoke drifted from the cab, a wispy ghost of what had been.

  Alan drove on a little to avoid being seen. We parked a hundred yards up the road. In the rear mirror we watched the tractor and the plough come out of the gate and turn laboriously on to the road. We watched. He was going home. To a waiting wife and a great farmhouse tea and his children perhaps, to his family and his friends and peace and good things. He passed our car and raised a hand to salute us.

  Alan turned the car and drove it up the lime avenue as we had done the night before. He backed the car into the field over the boards across the ditch. We got out. There was nothing black any more, not a trace, no coal-like roots and branches. The earth here was a rich chestnut brown, soft as breadcrumbs, not many stones to ring against the plough-shares. It was ploughed in parallel lines, expert and even, like knitting, like the ribbing on a garment. There might have been no burning, all signs of fire were gone, absorbed by that soft brown crumbly soil, drawn under and hidden for ever.

  Alan said in a conversational way, ‘When they'd burnt Carthage they ploughed over the site so that no one would ever find the remains.’

  I stared at him, I asked him what he meant.

  ‘Gilda's our Carthage.’

  We put the car away into the garage. Gilda's green scarf was in the boot but I left it there, I didn't know what else to do with it. I had had enough of burning. Alan tried to take me in his arms, and when that failed he tried to take my hands. But it was no use. It was not that I didn't love him, but that I was no longer fit for him and he was no longer fit for me. That was all.

  I seem to remember that we ate something, standing up in the kitchen. We drank some gin, not pink gins but the neat spirit in water glasses. I told him nothing about my feelings, I didn't explain. He said,

  ‘I can never be a widower now. Because Gilda's not dead, is she?’

  I asked him what he meant.

  ‘How can I tell anyone she's dead? How could I, if I wished to, prove she was dead?’

  ‘But why would you?’

  ‘The house I live in is her house. Any money is hers. My car is a wreck but I can't use hers. Hers is in France with her.’ He looked at me. ‘I can never re-marry.’

  Of course I understood then. It made me shiver.

  ‘She's gone,’ he said, ‘but she'll never be gone. She's more dead than I ever wanted her to be, but she's more alive too.’

  There was silence then, a long heavy silence.

  ‘We'd better go home,’ I said at last.

  ‘Where's home?’

  It should have been Molucca but it wasn't, not any more. Gilda had been there, Gilda had lain there dead. To me the place smelt of ashes. I spoke to him politely, as if he were John Browning or one of Marianne's friends.

  ‘Will you drive me to Bury, please, before you go back to the farm?’

  He shook his head. His glass was empty and he re-filled it.

  ‘I told you, I can't use her car. I can't risk anyone seeing me in it. It's supposed to be in France. I can't risk it ever being seen.’ He drank the glassful and for
a moment shut his eyes. ‘There's a bus from Thelmarsh. God knows when it runs. I'll walk to the stop and wait for it.’

  So he did. He went into a call box on the way and phoned for a taxi for me, the Thelmarsh station taxi. He hadn't told me he would, he simply did it. Anticipating my wants was something he was good at, he was a thoughtful man. The taxi came and I locked up the house and had the driver take me back to Bury. It still wasn't dark, it was only about eight. I cried on the way home, thinking of how kind he was to me, getting a car for me as a matter of course.

  There isn't much more to say. I am tired and my chest hurts. You mustn't think we never met again, that we parted then and there for ever. I suppose we saw each other twice more, once at my house and once in a restaurant. We had dinner, we thought we could manage something, some reconciliation. But we couldn't. The fire was between us and the ploughing over of the site, that and the fifteen seconds he had held the scarf over Gilda's face. I dreamed about it a lot, and the dream went on for years, not about the scarf or the fire but the ploughing, everything drawn under and churned into the depths by the turning plough-shares.

  Oh, well. It was a long time ago. I have wondered sometimes about folie à deux, those couples who conspire to kill someone, a wife or a husband. They seem to face each other afterwards, to live together, to go on loving. How do they do it? How do they forget and adjust? How do they lie beside each other at night and eat their meals opposite each other and laugh and talk and have a social life?

  I abandoned him, but he abandoned me too. He looked at me as we were leaving the restaurant and said,

  ‘Why did we do it? I can't remember, can you?’

  And when I didn't answer, he said, ‘Blame it on the garagiste.’

  I saw him once more and then never again.

  Richard is coming in a minute. We're going out for a drink to the White Hart at Thelmarsh and I'm going to tell him about my nurse's training. I think he'll be pleased. The tapes in their ordinary black cases are on the table in front of me and the woman in the portrait seems to be looking at them, her eyes cast down. What am I going to do with them?