by Lee, Tanith
Three old women had come into the room during the meal, which comprised a soufflé and fish in a hot sauce. The names of the old women were Miriam, Livia and Unice, which as usual did not mean very much. They did not stay, only filled their eyes with great draughts of Rachaela and pattered out.
‘There was something outside my room,’ said Rachaela.
‘That would be Uncle Camillo,’ said Stephan. ‘He likes to play tricks, cut capers.’
‘Yes, I think I saw him on a stuffed horse. And he’s been following me.’
Anna shook her head gravely. ‘Camillo is very old,’ she said quite seriously. ‘Very naughty. But harmless as a silly child.’
‘It wasn’t Camillo.’
Anna hesitated. She said, ‘There is a large cat in the house. A nocturnal beast. We see it rarely, it leads its own life.’
Rachaela shook her head.
‘I don’t think a cat—’
The door opened.
‘Here is Sylvian,’ said Anna. ‘Sylvian, here is Rachaela.’
The eraser of books came forward slowly, his hands clasped at his chest, eating eyes on Rachaela.
‘I’ve been wanting to meet you,’ said Rachaela. ‘Why do you rule through all the words?’
‘The words,’ repeated Sylvian. He looked too fragile to be interrogated but this did not stop her. They were all fragile as the chitinous wings of grasshoppers, and predatory as locusts.
Tn the library. And there was a globe with scratches across the continents.’
‘Words mean nothing,’ said Sylvian, ‘they gather like the dust.’
‘Words convey concepts and dreams,’ said Rachaela.
‘Also nothing.’
‘So you deface the books.’
‘I correct them,’ said Sylvian in his cracked firm voice. He unclasped his hands and spread them out, ‘When I have finished, the library will be sound.’
‘I hope I can find some portion you haven’t damaged,’ said Rachaela idly.
‘The north wall,’ he told her, helpful. ‘I have yet to work there. A long task.’
‘Sylvian does what he feels he must,’ said Anna, the translator. ‘I’m sorry if you wished to read the books. But I send for books from the town. Allow me to order some for you, if you will give me some idea—’
‘Are the books delivered here?’ Rachaela asked swiftly.
‘Oh, no. The van brings them to the village, and Carlo carries them back for me.’
‘I see.’
‘And the globe,’ said Stephan, smiling benignly. ‘That isn’t the work of Sylvian. Alice scratched at it with a hat pin.’
‘The places from which the family has been driven out,’ said Anna.
‘The pogroms,’ said Rachaela.
‘Oh, Sasha uses that word,’ said Anna. ‘It’s a word she finds applicable. It will do.’
‘So many countries drove out the Scarabae,’ said Rachaela, the globe suddenly vivid in her mind.
‘Why?’
‘The family is ancient,’ said Anna.
‘And unpopular,’ chuckled Stephan.
‘Superstitious fears of the ignorant,’ said Anna.
‘Of what?’
‘We are different,’ said Anna. ‘You’ve seen. We keep close, and have our own ways.’
‘The windows here,’ Rachaela said at random.
‘Some have come from our other houses. We are safe here.’
‘But the windows,’ persisted Rachaela, ‘scenes from a Bible of hell.’
‘Just so,’ said Anna simply. ‘Several were broken by the mob and have been pieced together by artisans. Not all are old. Some new ones were fashioned.’
‘And you don’t like the views from the house.’
Anna said, ‘It’s the daylight we dislike.’
Rachaela remembered the double doors of the hallway. She visualized Cheta and Carlo on their journey to the village, muffled as if against a storm.
Night creatures then, nocturnal like their cat.
‘And you expect me to live like this?’ Rachaela said.
‘You will come to find it comfortable,’ said Anna.
In their places, Dorian and Peter abruptly laughed, as one.
Rachaela said, ‘Aren’t I allowed to go out?’
‘Of course. Of course, Rachaela. By night or day. Oh, let me show you the garden. Come.’
Stephan hurried before Anna to widen the door, already ajar, which Rachaela had seen revealed the previous night. It led into a conservatory of gigantic plants. Ferns towered to the glass roof. Ribbed and ornately paned, the glass was clear.
A stone lion’s head stood among the cups of flowers.
‘Here is the way,’ said Anna, and thrust wide a second door on to the open night.
Rachaela gasped with instinctive relief.
There was the smell of leaves and frost, the night breath of great trees.
A moon hung over the land, an unbroken chandelier. It showed with its blue-white shine the garden of a fantasy, rampant and overgrown. A yew tree, a poplar, a cedar spreading tremendous boughs, and oaks like columns to uphold the sky. A roof of bare stitchwork which in summer would be a parasol of foliage. Ivy mounted the trees, and the rose briars had climbed upon the cedar.
The sea raced and boomed, tireless, on the wall of night.
‘At the end there is a little gate. A path leads along the cliff. Quite safe if you are careful,’ said Anna. She raised her face of wrinkles and fissures into the balm of the moon. ‘Smell the pines,’ she said. ‘Such terrible trees, they overgrow everything if they can. Carlo weeds them out from the garden, and cuts the lawn in summer.’ She flitted forward like an aged fairy. The others ventured after Rachaela, murmuring and susurrating, into the garden. Stephan pushed in among the shrubs to inspect the briars, Dorian and Peter posed grotesquely on the rough grass, Sylvian in the doorway.
There was a moon-dial, the moon’s crescent face also a skull. The dial could not tell time, there were no numerals.
Rachaela pushed through the briars towards the gate. She tried it. It was not locked. Outside she saw the free night, the cliff with its clumps of wild flowers, the terrace of pines. The sea beyond the cliff was smooth as silver cigarette paper. Ozone, salt, carbon dioxide.
Behind her the elders stood, pleased at her pleasure, looking on, their sewn faces placid round their hungry eyes.
She woke, and the shock of the window burned her, made her start. The tower clock told her it was ten o’clock.
It occurred to Rachaela that she was waking at the routine time of seven-thirty, as she had done in the days of Mr Gerard and the shop. Ten, then, meant seven-thirty, or the eight-thirty of the black clock of the angels, that meant seven-thirty also.
The reasonableness of this exulted her. It was a triumph over the house.
She threw off the covers, and the body of the golden Devil which had lain on hers as she slept.
Today she need not explore the corridors and rooms. The liberty of the garden and the cliff path were before her.
She would not trouble with breakfast, as in her former life often she had not. She missed coffee with anger. Perhaps Cheta would buy her a jar of instant from the fabulous seven-mile-distant van. It would be playful to send Cheta and Carlo with her rogue list, such things the old ones never needed—batteries and tampons.
The lower house might be empty. Dorian and Peter breakfasted in the morning room—she did not even know where it was.
She went downstairs. The two high windows reflected their violet urns and saffron sunsets into the chequered floor. The wooden nymph was at her post.
An impulse made her approach the iron-bound door. She tried it, it was locked. Recollecting the structure of the house as she had seen it during her approach, it seemed to her this door might lead into the tower. That she found it locked was only in keeping with the capricious mystery of this church of eyeless mirrors.
Rachaela walked through the drawing room and so into the dining room. The table
was bare, and Maria was mildly polishing it. Overhead the years-dusty chandelier looked down into its reflection.
‘Good morning, Maria.’
‘Good morning, Miss Rachaela.’
Maria went on drowsily polishing.
Rachaela crossed to the curtain and pulled it back to reveal the door, closed. Did the conservatory still endure beyond, or had it phantasmally vanished?
As she opened the door a violent smack of whitest light burst over her. It made her mind reel, almost she shielded her eyes. Daylight—already foreign. So quickly the house had blinded and steeped her in its ichors.
She heard an indrawn breath, and looked back to see Maria groping her way from the room.
Rachaela drew herself out into the crystal glare of the conservatory, forcing her eyes to adjust to its brilliance. After two or three minutes her focus returned. She stood and breathed in the light.
The plants were revelling in it, for there was sun today and the glass room was already quite warm.
Rachaela picked her way between the tubular leaves, the green feathers of the giant ferns, the trumpeting lilies out of season.
Although she had found the conservatory door also closed, at night—surely to the detriment of the plants—it stood ajar. The house doors too were kept open after dark. Night was welcome in the house, day not.
There were lily petals on the stone floor by the doorway. No. Not petals. Strong white feathers scattered like an offering. And there was blood.
She thought of the cat Anna had mentioned. But the feathers were large, great quills, surely the cat would not tackle something of this size, perhaps a big gull.
Rachaela moved the disturbance of the feathers from her mind. She refused to be distracted, and opened wide the door, closed it, and stepped out into air.
The winter’s day was cool but not harsh. The sun rode in a thin blue sky meshed with vaporous clouds.
The pines were a black wall. They had crept up on the house to this side and, further off beyond the angled steeps of its architecture, they had built on their terrace, staring out across the cliff edge at the sea. The path was well-defined and broad. Quite safe, as Anna had said. Wild flowers starred the border, flowers that had no business there, it being too early for the spring. The cliff bulged before it fell, it curved. In gaps ahead it became possible to watch the splintering of the breakers eighty feet below.
Rachaela walked along the path, exhilarated by the freshness of light and open air. The vistas of the sea made her giddy. She knew the death-wish pull of space, the ease of falling, and kept well to the inside of the path.
Presently it coiled its way aside, in among the pine trees.
She looked back at the house.
Pale grey, stained with drainage of rain, other weather, and the velvet fingering of lichens. The roofs raised their crenellations, the smoke of their chimneys, their parapets, a brace of weather-vanes, which had somehow contrived each to point a different way. The cap of the tower was just visible. The windows did not pierce or breach, though many passed down the face of the building nearly to the ground. They were a solid witches’ brew of darkness. Here and there some inner shaft of light sent up a flare in them of yawning rose or stagnant green or the blue of an old medicine bottle. But this was a jewel not an opening. Keep out the windows said. A costive house, containing and intemperate. It fulminated in the grey skull of its walls.
Rachaela admired it. It attracted her. All she liked least about it, its imprisoning smother, appealed to her artistically and intellectually, even while the gusts of real air revived her body. She would succumb to the house in time, Anna had been right. Why fight it.
She walked on along the path and in among the black pines. Needles crunched under her boots. The earth was fox-coloured. More feathers were littered about a tree trunk; that was proper, that the cat should do its Goliath-slaying outside in the savage wood.
The trees broke and the landscape altered. The pines had ended with a virile finality on the brink of a rolling grass lawn quilted with heathers and gorse. The sea spread below and the heath above, away and away. She could see distant coves, the cliffs green-ankled and ashed by spume. And too the swell and tumble of the land, pale green and woven brown, the odd tree standing like a mast and closer to hand, a great tilted stone like a descended lightning bolt.
Rachaela walked towards the stone. It was old as the trees, far older very likely. Perhaps it had been here when the Romans assayed these coasts. Perhaps they had marched by and marvelled at it or muttered to their own gods.
Rabbits feeding on the turf shot away as she approached.
The stone was smirched white and carious. Its curious lightning shape hinted at legends of violence. These, like the marching Romans, did not count at all. Words mean nothing, Sylvian had said. Of course, nothing did.
Even this. Even Rachaela standing here in her black hood of hair and her London coat, and her white face that was still that of a young woman, even she did not count, or what became of her.
She would catch the virus of age off them. She would grow ancient, gaunt and friable and tough, like them. Perhaps her hair would turn grey, her breasts drop like withered sacks. She would not lose her teeth, for they had not. There was no evidence among the Scarabae of any crippling disease, no arthritis, no limping and twisting. Their metallic snows of hair were as thick as her own. Their eyes more concentrated and feral.
It was stupid to ask herself what she did here. It had been inevitable. Her mother’s nagging voice, which never quite went away, continued to warn Rachaela against the Scarabae, but even the warnings had driven her, so it seemed, into their lair. Her horror of them had now melted. She was trapped.
And when she was old like them, what after that?
She was not like them. She was the unlike one. That was her purpose.
Rachaela went round the stone. She had noticed strange ripped places on the trunks of some of the pines, and in the soil under the stone were long claw marks, as if from a rake.
Could she walk from here to the village? Six or seven miles. How long would it take her—the going looked very uneven. And she did not know the way.
A bruised cloud, which had been creeping from the horizon, covered the sun. Dark light obscured the heath. She would walk to that hill there and look out. Then she would be tired, for she was not practised in walking. She would go back to the house for food, climb up to her room and switch on her radio for music. Tomorrow she would walk further.
How isolated was the heath. No one in the world but she and the Scarabae.
❖
That evening Rachaela wore her green dress and a necklace of green glass beads she had found at a jumble sale.
Anna and Stephan were in the drawing room seated on a sofa, already drinking their pre-dinner tipples. Rachaela helped herself to a glass of the white wine.
‘Did you enjoy your walk?’ asked Anna, comfortably.
‘Very much.’ Tired out, she had fallen asleep again in the shards of the window, listening to Verdi. ‘Which is the way to the village?’
‘Across the heath. But it’s eight miles. Surely too far for you?’
‘I might work up to it,’ said Rachaela. ‘The exercise will do me good.’
They went into the dining room and three places were laid. Cheta and Maria served them. Maria had recovered from her hurt, the blast of daylight from the conservatory.
There was asparagus soup, and then a meat dish already sliced in a sauce. It had a fishy taste, and was rather stringy.
‘What meat is this?’
Anna looked obliging. ‘Seagull,’ she said. And then, ‘I do hope you don’t mind it.’
Rachaela had checked and put down her fork. To eat a gull was no worse than to eat a rabbit or a lamb, yet somehow it offended her. She did not want any more.
‘I’m afraid I don’t like the idea,’ she said.
‘Our habits spring from necessity.’
Who had hunted the gull, scattering its feathe
rs underfoot? Surely not after all the cat, as she had supposed.
‘No, I quite see that,’ said Rachaela. ‘But nevertheless, I’ll leave it.’
There was an apple tart to follow, and Anna urged her to take two helpings, which Rachaela declined. She was used to eating sparely.
After the dinner, they did not speak.
Stephan stared into the fire. Anna embroidered, long flowers and streamers of foliage.
Rachaela sat in the silence and eventually excused herself.
Out in the hallway she sensed a sizzling undercurrent in the drugged air. Something had passed, or lingered still in the shadows. She went to what she took to be the tower door, and tried it again. It did not give.
An old woman in purple came down the stairs and went by Rachaela with a single look. Rachaela did not guess whether or not they had met before. Was it Livia or Unice? Would she know any of them again? Anna and Stephan, perhaps. And Sylvian the destroyer.
In the passage upstairs there was a scent of warmth, of something living, but nothing stirred. No mice lay on the threshold.
Beyond the closed sarcophagus of the house the wind was rising, moaning round the corners. Rain struck the window of the temptation. The cool quiet day had ushered in a storm.
Rachaela imagined the rain splashing in at the conservatory, at the double door at the front of the house, through any other apertures left ajar on the night.
The thunder smote the house like an engine of demolition. The house shook.
Rachaela opened her eyes, lifted herself. The darkened window pulsed and quivered with rain, the wind and the sea between them made a noise in which ancient screaming and the collapse of walls might distantly be made out.
The air was galvanic, a sheen on it like sightless fire.
Rachaela wished she could see through the window to the storm. She sat upright in the bed and waited for the lightning. It came. The picture in the window flashed a ghostly blue and ochre and imprinted itself upon the room, on Rachaela’s white arms and features. And in a chair across the room something sat, facing her.
The light was gone.
Had she mistaken it—some trick of shadow?