I had been observing the two of them while they were side by side and working in my yard. Though considerably prior to that … the clearing up, the making good—the appalling task of clearing up, of making good, following the demise of the loathsome pig man, that inept and importunate blackmailer whose cupidity was his downfall … this I confess to having found taxing to the utmost. It is fortunate that in a butcher’s yard, the embedded grime of hardened blood is hardly out of keeping—for despite my constant swabbing, the interstices between the cobbles, still they are thick with it. The pig I had dismembered in the customary manner—alas, no buckets of blood for the black pudding man upon this occasion, for it was awash, and seeping into my shoes—hurtling away into the gullies, there to coagulate. Church’s, I had been wearing at the time—half brogues, in a very fetching chestnut shade. Thoroughly destroyed, of course, as was my suit, shirt, tie … and the number of times dear Milly has since, like a magnet, cleaved to the topic: “How on earth could you have forgotten to wear your apron? Hm? And oh—your suit, Jonathan! Your beautiful suit …!” Yes well, dear Milly, I had constantly to assure her, I do have other suits, yes? My wardrobe is reasonably extensive: it is hardly a calamity. And all this pursuant to that ludicrous outburst of petty-minded and so very bourgeois jealousy upon her part—for all the world as if, I don’t know … as if she can somehow imagine that she has some sort of a claim upon me. As women, girlishly, so often seem to come to believe. And how very thoroughly stupid of her not to have perceived that I was lying. Could she not honestly have addressed the question as to why else a person of my stature should care to spend so much as even a moment of my time with so vacuous a child as Doreen, if not in order to ravish her rigorously? She is, after all, so very young. Firm, yes … and not inflexible. She is also in awe of me, and in common with seemingly just everyone, may be bought in exchange for so very pitifully little. A pound of Black Magic in her particular case—as I later shall be demonstrating. And even in my hot and fevered bloodied state, following an unforeseen and wholly impromptu murder, whatever abject nonsense I had come out with, Milly had accepted without question: was gaspingly grateful to me for having expressed so evident an absurdity, along with my lavish contrition for all the distress that so silly a misunderstanding had quite evidently occasioned her. Women, you see. Oh dear. Oh dear dear me.
Well I burned them, all of my clothes. Burned them in a brazier in the yard, along with those of the pig man. Had to cut them off him, with my boning knife: his body had so very quickly become unyielding. It came to my ears that one or two neighbors and passers-by with nothing else whatever to occupy the chasm of their echoingly vacant minds were grumbling and wondering at the rising smoke, and so I quickly spatchcocked a couple of chickens, threw them on to a grille over the flame: gave away the pieces in the shop. The peasants were predictably delighted and silenced: what a very fine idea Mr. Barton, they chirruped and chorused—and how uncommonly generous of you, Mr. Barton: this to be a regular thing, is it …? Simple-minded to a fault. A scrap of griddled poultry … they seemed to value it above sovereigns.
I have hanging on the wall a series of tough jute sacks which I regularly fill with bone, gristle, skin and heads. In France, they would pay you for the heads, and handsomely, but in this benighted country we tend not to care for all that sort of thing. Each week, someone from I know not where with a gammy leg and just the one tooth in his skull—a nicotine fang, in tune with the horn of his fingernails—calls to collect them, the sacks, in exchange for hardly more than pennies. They boil it all down, he was telling me. Yes, he said: we boil it all down. I did not inquire further. I simply added this to my fund of redundant information: that all across the nation there are sick-seeming, angular and maimed individuals, malodorous in greasy leather aprons, who heave up on to their slight and bony shoulders large, weighty and bulging sacks of nearly putrid animal detritus, and this, at a later date and for some unspecified purpose, is all boiled down. The pig man I have had to eke out. Mingled with cow bone, trotter and chicken carcass. Dribs and drabs, you know. Piecemeal, so to say. Unrecognizable parts, chopped up small. There remains, however, still a fair deal of him within the refrigerator. I daresay by Christmas I shall see off the very last portions. In reasonable time to take stock of the turkeys.
I had called in the negroes to build for me a sort of a shed affair out there. Not really a shed, I suppose—more what you might call a large stout cupboard, in which I intend to have installed a sizeable butler’s sink—in order to make for more convenient sluicing—as well as a safe. My money, that which still I have, all that is left to me, it is strewn about the building in a manner which now, in the light of these recent and more than somewhat unsettling events, I regard to be wholly unsatisfactory. The money, it must be consolidated, easily accessible and neatly portable, should sudden and solitary flight one fearful moment become an awful necessity. And at first I had thought there was nothing to choose between them, the negro chappies—both rather tall, fit and able … well you see they really all do appear to me to look exactly the same, is the truth of the matter, and I hardly think I can be alone in that. Even the women, when occasionally you glimpse them—if you take away those childish decorations in their unspeakable hair, ignore the gaudy garb, then they look not at all unlike the men … all of whom, of course, so very closely resemble one another. Must be so strange for them. Or maybe they don’t quite see it like that. Who could know? And who, frankly, might even care? But then I observed that one of these black and glistening strapping young lads, while they both were toiling in the sunlight, was constantly smiling. Truly, all the time—great big beam, the size and whiteness of his teeth, the flash of gum and tongue, so very startling, in a lascivious if also faintly nauseating manner, within all the encompassing sweat-flecked black of him. Even was singing a bit, some or other rather irritating thing. The other, though—he moved with reluctance, like a sullen cat. His ugly hooded yellow eyes, hard and glowering at me with undiluted loathing. He was taut with bands of anger, his brow so rigid and heavy from resentment embedded darkly, and fathoms within him. Cheated by life, does he imagine himself to be? Dealt with harshly by God himself? A justifiable grievance, I should have said, though one clearly unshared by his lackadaisical, conceivably merely simple, companion. In my judgment though, here was a man both ready and waiting … though quite for what, I am sure he would be thoroughly at a loss to articulate. He is coiled, tightly coiled, quite prepared to pounce, seared by the age-old weals of barely deadened burning rage, soon to bubble back up into fury—and therefore most certainly of easy morals. In return for the proper remuneration, this man, I considered, would be most eminently biddable: there is nothing he would not be prepared to do for me. As so indeed it proved. For Obi—he now was my man.
I have, of course, to gamble upon the supposition that the pig person had neither the time nor motivation to pass on details of my whereabouts. After considerable reflection, I now am quite convinced that this distastefully oleaginous and slack-minded attempt at blackmail was a thing of his own creation. A hastily arrived at piece of personal business—a bonus, as it were, riding on the back of his doubtless bountiful recompense for having located me, which I am positive is all that he was charged with. For here was no louche and professional executioner—though that particular swift and silent ghost, he would soon enough have manifested himself in order to slickly deal with me. And so with regard to the pig man, I have deduced that a confrontation could hardly have figured within the remit of his instruction: for why would it be desirable for my senses to be pricked by such an odor? The swinish scent of imminent catastrophe. So one must, I suppose, come grudgingly to admire this pig person’s spirit of enterprise: really too too sad that it couldn’t have turned out more positively for him, one might even come to think—should ever one find oneself in so preposterously generous a frame of mind as to be teetering upon the cusp of losing it altogether. But you see, if one is to be a successful criminal, then brains and determ
ination can never be permitted to flag, no not even for a moment: one must always be devotedly committed to seeing the thing through, no matter how appalling that thing might well turn out to be. As I was, in the case of John Somerset, all those many years ago … but for that one single and really very vital element: I should have quickly killed him. I must say that now, it really does appear quite terribly obvious to me. And yet I hesitated. I cannot even take succor in the milky protestation that I was done and gone, that all now was finished and over, before such an idea could even have begun to flower. For no. Always it was at the forefront of my mind. And yet I hesitated. A thing that I so extremely rarely have done in my life as to render it virtually without precedent. Such shilly-shally, this lack of action, that now could easily evolve into the weapon of my undoing. For two things now are very plain to me: Mr. Somerset, following all those years of enforced absence from society, finds himself once again at large, while demonstrating—quite as I might have foretold—no sign whatever of eventually having succumbed to any state even approaching that of surrender. He has not seen fit to absorb all the happenings of the past into the core of his bones. On the contrary—he has been avidly feeding the avenging fire. And how, sanely, could ever I have imagined anything other? He remains quite wholly determined to find me, to deal with me … to deal with me, yes, and in a manner—aware as I am of his mighty resources, not to say the depth and solidity of his hatred—I hardly would care, or dare now, even to dwell upon.
Long ago though, we were friends. I think it axiomatic that any bitter enemy will once have been a friend: for surely no one other could come to care so very deeply. Fiona and I had recently removed to Henley when first I encountered John Somerset. Amanda in those days was terribly young—the prettiest and sweetest little thing in my life by far, and so very tender. Henley was, and I am sure remains, a highly agreeable little town, though I found myself living there solely by way of happenstance. My father, who had always been a very keen boating man ever since his balmy and golden days at Cambridge, over which he seldom ceased to rhapsodize, had resided there for many years, and quite recently had become a widower. For some quite unfathomable reason, he had been, throughout his marriage, perfectly devoted to my mother. On one occasion, I recall, I even made a point of pleading with him to explain to me how this could possibly be—for he seemed on the face of it a sensible man, an educated man, and even something of an intellectual, in an admittedly minor sort of a way (he had published several papers on various arcane matters—uniformly abstruse and punishingly dull, though doubtless academically worthy). His discernment in such as literature, music, wine, epicureanism, art and tailoring were immediately and strikingly apparent to all, and commensurately admired. For prior to the barbarian age in which now we are each of us compelled to dwell, all such attributes bestowed upon a gentleman a notable distinction among his peers, and also the sort of well-intentioned though rather grimy and besotted uncomprehending affection that arose like steam from the heated flanks of the common herd. They would metaphorically clamber in jostling huddles in the winter snow to eagerly take turns in hoisting one another to scrabble at a windowsill, this in order to catch even so fleeting a glimpse through the lit-up mullion of the warmth, erudition and munificence within.
My mother, by contrast, I could not possibly love because she was the one thing for which I could never forgive anybody, and least of all her: she was, you see, irredeemably ordinary. There was nothing to openly despise—no single act of cruelty on her part had been perpetrated that would have justified any abiding resentment, let alone a lifelong grudge. Though equally nor was there anything that struck me as being even within the broadest vicinity of fine or laudable. My father had told me that in her youth she had been a considerable beauty, and despite how she seemed to me now, I had no reason to doubt his word (while noting in passing with a withered cynicism that never within my hearing had an old man recalled his boyhood bride in any other terms). But it was this one particular man who exercised me, and I found it so puzzling as a boy—it gnawed at me, I wrestled with it daily—for surely a man such as this, I earnestly reasoned, must so in his heart have needed to be with a woman who was quite thoroughly bedazzling: a woman whose smile and wisdom, whose style and demeanor (her laugh, her grace, her beauteous eyes filled with the sparkle of private amusement while very nearly veiling such maddeningly tantalizing secrets) would have rendered her as a goddess to all who were fortunate enough to have basked within the sphere of her radiance: the one true shining star at any gathering, no matter how grand, the cause of heartbreak to legions of forlorn and listless suitors, all now quite bereft of hope. And then amid the hot thick velvet of the night, she would inspire and impel the scribbling by candlelight of all such breathless stuff in fevered diaries, their scribble quickly degenerating into a panicked and impassioned scrawl, and accompanied by a howl of longing for the thrill and glamour already now waving its final farewell, before seeping away into the encroaching dark—though desperately still clutched at like the very most gorgeous dream, on reluctant awakening.
But my mother, she was possessed of none of this. I might be able to go so far as to say she was “kindly,” while often she was not at all. On one morning only, I saw her but briefly before she had attended to her toilet (I believe the reason for this unprecedented state of déshabillé was that she had been taken unwell during the course of the night). The face was of the palest bisque, an unglazed white and stark Venetian mask, awaiting cosmetic decoration, a carefully drawn personality—spurious and daubed-on characteristics. But for now, there was nothing for me to see there, nothing at all. When she died, my father was inexplicably broken: all means of expression were quite lost to him. And in silence, he set to wandering among the catacombs, the corridors of death: you could observe and only wonder at his meandering progress day by day—all life leached out of him, a pained and insidiously gradual process that stole from his eyes their shine and alacrity, leaving just a blankness without inquiry; his skin translucent, his heavy limbs just simply hanging there. No blood, you see: there was no blood. Within less than a year, he was gone—guttered for so very long, and now snuffed out.
And this, I own, was sad, though timely—for I, as the only child, inherited the house at Henley. Fiona, Amanda and myself had hitherto been living in no style at all in an exceedingly nasty two-bedroomed flat in the Charing Cross Road. Her annuity had never been bounteous, and I was struggling ever harder in order to have published fewer and fewer poems. For this is what I did, this is who I was: I wrote verse. Elegiac. Romantic. Pastoral. Metaphysical. I was the poet. And yes, there still was then an abundance of little magazines, this is true, but you were seen to be prospering should you manage to secure for yourself half-a-guinea for a sonnet that had been quarried with a pick and bloodied senses from within a golden seam at the depths of your soul. Fiona on more than one occasion suggested I should try my hand at the novel, and of course I simply laughed at her, not to say the very idea. The novel, I did my utmost to explain to her, is no more than a baggy contrivance, a ramshackle edifice without foundation—alluring only as is a tawdry bauble, a bright-painted Jezebel jammed and caked with gimcrack coincidence so as to insult the intellect, while peopled by the flimsiest shades that defy all absorption or credulity. Poetry, however, is water and air: fire, as well. Pure, yes. It is clean, it has no smell—and yet it lingers within and around you forever and ever.
It is difficult to project … quite what might have happened, had it not been for the fortuitousness of my father’s legacy. I was feeling as caged as ever I have done in that perfectly wretched little flat in the Charing Cross Road—a dangerous sensation, if you happen to be me. But now, liberation had come.
“New around these parts, aren’t you?”
I had been strolling on the towpath hard by the arch of Henley bridge, I recall it well, and doubtless grappling with the peculiar nuance of an elusive iambic pentameter—for such then was the extent of my inner contemplation. The man wa
s sitting on a bench, the ferrule of his cane gently disturbing the earth at his feet.
“Name’s Somerset,” he continued, with rather a beguiling and languid grace. “John Somerset. Do please call me John.”
He was standing now, and extending a hand. A man rather older than myself—here was my initial observation—though devilish hard to put an age to him. The defiant and aristocratic curvature of a proudly prominent nose was dapplingly encrimsoned by crazed and hectic lattices of detonated veins. He still was strong and vital, while carrying easily the heft of experience. Educated, supremely confident, and not without an undertow of danger.
“Frost,” I told him—for this, I should say, is indeed my name. Barton, well … such a coining … that, perforce, came after, really quite a good time after: initially in the form of a capricious and momentary improvisation, and then later as a means to my continued survival—a quickly rigged-up guise, an attempted baffle, tightly bound into the intention to temporarily elude, if never quite ultimately escape, the eternal tenacity of the very gentleman whom now, and for the very first time, I found myself to be so very casually addressing. “Jonathan. Yes—quite new, I suppose. We’ve been here for, oh—no more than a couple of months now, I daresay.”
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