by Lee, Tanith
Chapter Sixteen
When dinner was ended, and tea had been drunk, and Ruth put down her cup, and the words had been said: Shall I go up now? Yes... Rachaela too got up. ‘I’ll go with you, Ruth.’
Ruth stood still, docile from the years of casual obedience.
Anna said, ‘She knows the way, Rachaela.’
‘I’m sure she does. But I’d like to watch the piano lesson.’
All about the room the Scarabae faintly stirred, like leaves in a light breeze. Dorian poised with a chess knight in his fingers. Alice had seemingly dropped a stitch.
‘It may put Ruth off her playing,’ said Stephan from the empty hearth. ‘A young girl. She hasn’t been learning very long.’
‘Of course not,’ said Rachaela. ‘I’m her mother.’
A sigh appeared to go over them.
‘Naturally then,’ said Anna.
Ruth turned and went towards the doorway, but not quickly as on the previous night, allowing Rachaela time to follow.
Out in the hall, where Ruth’s lips blended into the ruby lamplight, Rachaela said, ‘Do you like the lessons?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Ruth, ‘How do you get on with him?’ Rachaela asked mundanely.
Ruth countered airily. ‘You said he wouldn’t like me, but he does.’
‘Does he?’
‘He says I learn very fast. He plays to me.’
‘Yes,’ said Rachaela. They had reached the door. She said swiftly, ‘Do you remember the first thing he said to you?’
‘Yes,’ said Ruth.
‘What?’
‘He said, ‘My name is Adam. I’m your father.’’
‘Did you believe him?’
‘Yes.’
‘How old does he look to you?’
Ruth put her hand on the door. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you think of him?’
Ruth looked at Rachaela, her face like paper with nothing on it, or more accurately with all the writing lined through and unreadable—one of Sylvian’s books.
‘He’s my dad,’ said Ruth.
The ghastly banal statement came between them like a cleaver blow. And Ruth turned the door handle and the door to the tower opened.
Ruth went up the stair first, to the upper room.
Rachaela climbed slowly, her body aching as if with fever.
The room.
The window was already dark, it was not credible to see if any damage showed in the face of the lion. Candles and lamps lit the furniture, the broad black pool of the piano with its shore of keys.
By the dark and open hearth, the giant cat lay sleeping, a heap of bones beneath fur pelt. As they entered, it lifted up its lids and the blurred moons of its eyes looked on them as if from miles away.
Ruth sped at once to the cat.
She kneeled down and embraced it, rubbing her head against its face, caressing the thick fur.
Then she looked up at the man in the chair.
‘Hallo, Adam.’
She was not shy, not even arch. Was she possessive? This mysterious stranger, author of her existence, who would, she had been told, care nothing for her. Now before her in all the cogency of his masculinity. Hers for an hour, or however long it was they spent together, this evening tryst of theirs.
He wore a white shirt. That was different, Rachaela remembered him only in black. Or naked, clad in skin.
The long hair was tied back, in the way she recalled. It was like Ruth’s hair, so straight, a torrent.
He did not turn to look at Rachaela, looked only at the child-woman kneeling before him.
So Rachaela saw only his profile. That had not aged a moment. It was just the same. The sombre eye fixed. He did not smile at the child, he had no expression. Presently he said, ‘Come to the piano.’ And got up and walked across the room. And Rachaela saw his face, the unremembered face. No wonder her mind had not been able to retain it. It was too absolute, too like itself and nothing else. But there was the medium of another resemblance. For Rachaela saw now that Ruth was like Adamus more than like anything else. Perhaps this was why Rachaela had never found pleasure in her face.
As Adamus walked towards the piano his eyes inevitably met Rachaela’s. She found his gaze unendurable and unavoidable, horrified that so much had stayed in her, of him.
And in that instant Ruth darted up from the hearth and came after him, and plucked at his arm.
‘What shall I play?’
‘I’ve put the Mozart out for you. Try that.’
And Ruth was the centre of the room again.
She sat down before the piano, glanced at the music, and spread her white hands. She began to play. She was deft, starlingly so. She did not fumble, but once or twice she slowed, frowning at the music. She gave the piece an eerie measured quality perhaps not suitable, but it was an interpretation. So quickly she had learned so much.
‘That’s very good,’ he said. ‘But when you misread the music, you mustn’t bluff. You must stop and play it as it’s written.’
‘Yes, Adam,’ said Ruth. And now she smiled at him.
She had smiled at Emma like that. There was no artifice, yet the smile was subtly flirtatious, sure of finding a reception.
And Adamus smiled at Ruth, a cold and quite indifferent smile, a teacher dutifully showing friendliness for a clever pupil.
Rachaela felt herself breathe, as if she had not done so for the past ten minutes. A rush of blood passed through her head.
She made herself speak.
‘Ruth’s very proficient after such a short time.’
‘Yes,’ he said, as if they had been speaking all the while, had spoken together every day for twelve years, ‘it’s remarkable. But I was the same. She takes it from me.’
‘I take after you,’ said Ruth.
‘I hope not,’ he said.
Ruth giggled like a happy child with a new joke.
‘Play the scales now,’ he said.
And Ruth played scales.
Rachaela walked away from them and sat down in one of the chairs before the hearth. She leant and stroked the cat’s sleeping head. The gauntness of age had invested all of it. Easy to feel the skull beneath the skin.
So they had not infected the cat.
After the scales, Ruth played some simple pieces by Clementi. Adamus spoke to her quietly. He never corrected her while she was playing, but after, sometimes making her return and assay the piece again.
Rachaela listened to the sounds they made, and the piano, until a sort of trance had her, in which what they did seemed quite natural, as if their relationship were ordinary, or nonexistent.
Finally the lesson ended.
‘Play to me,’ said Ruth. ‘Play the Chopin, I like that best.’ She pronounced the name Chopping, a child’s joke of her own.
Adamus began to play.
Rachaela steeled herself.
As the notes sprang round the room like flung silver daggers, she glanced at the two of them, her lover and his child.
Ruth stood at Adamus’s shoulder. She did not touch him. She stared at his hands, curved slightly forward like a slender branch in the breeze. Less than ever did she look like a child, in her moss-green party frock and tortoiseshell combs. She looked like a spirit, a malign fairy, the Devil’s handmaiden at Adamus’s shoulder.
Rachaela felt a wave of rage.
Yes, I am jealous. I have every cause to be. There is my successor.
When he stopped playing, Ruth said, ‘Play the Prokofioffyev now.’
‘Not now, Ruth. That’s enough for tonight.’
Ruth did not remonstrate.
She twirled round and came back to the hearth, throwing herself lightly down beside the cat to stroke and caress it.
‘Ruth,’ Rachaela said, ‘say goodnight to the cat, and then go back downstairs.’
‘I’ll stay here,’ Ruth said.
‘No,’ Rachaela said, ‘not tonight.’
Ruth looked up at her. She said, ‘I always stay an ho
ur after the music.’
‘I told you, not tonight.’
Would Ruth obey her now? There was no reason. All the old laws were vanquished.
But Ruth got up. ‘All right.’
She went back to Adamus, who sat still at the silent piano.
‘Mummy says I’m to go down now.’ A pause, perhaps for his contradiction. Which did not come. ‘Good night.’
‘Good night, Ruth.’
And Ruth bowed forward and kissed the man on the cheek.
Then she went out and down the stair, her dress slipping after her along the treads.
Rachaela heard the lower door open and close.
The cat raised its head, listened, and lay back to sleep again.
‘I’m sorry to curtail your evening,’ Rachaela said too harshly. ‘I realize you must have a lot to say to her.’
‘I have nothing to say to her,’ he said. ‘I teach her to play. The rest of the conversation comes from Ruth.’
‘Are you defending yourself?’ Rachaela said. ‘You’re indefensible.’
‘Am I.’
‘You know that you are.’ She stopped, and tried to slow her breathing. ‘Or have I misunderstood all of it?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Can it be true then, can it really be true, that you are to be mated to that child?’
‘Mated,’ he said.
‘What else can it be called? Some ritualistic thing ending in the sexual act.’
‘Eventually,’ he said, ‘presumably.’
‘You’re her father.’
‘And her grandfather,’ he said. He stood up and came back across the room to the fireplace. He stood facing her, the lamp unbearably lighting his face. ‘Let’s not mince words.’
‘Yes, let’s not. How can you contemplate such a filthy, disgusting, ludicrous act?’
‘I don’t contemplate it. It will simply happen sometime.’
‘As it did with us. At least I was a grown woman.’
‘Ruth will be a grown woman. They’ll wait until she’s fourteen or fifteen.’
‘They. What are you, Adamus, their robot? Don’t you have any say in it? Or are you just a machine?’
Tart of the mechanism of the Scarabae,’ he said.
‘I don’t believe you accept that.’
‘Of course I accept it,’ he said. ‘I’m here.’
Rachaela stood up also. At her feet the cat growled softly in its sleep.
‘I shall take Ruth away,’ Rachaela said.
‘You’re not strong enough,’ he said, ‘physically or spiritually. Ruth is part of their collective soul for good or ill.’
‘You think I’ll sit by and allow it?’
‘You’ll have no choice,’ he said. ‘You had power over your own life, that was all.’
‘Did I? Did I, when you saddled me with that thing—that baby—I meant to abort it, flush it away.’
‘But you didn’t,’ he said. ‘Did you?’
Rachaela closed her eyes. Her weakness, her bad luck, had they truly been Scarabae reaching out to hold her to their course?
She said, ‘If I’d stayed, what would have happened?’
‘They would have feted you. You’d have been the Madonna. You’d have had every care.’
‘And no doctors,’ said Rachaela.
‘Unice and Miriam have delivered at least twenty children successfully.’
Rachaela laughed. ‘Locked up in the tomb-womb of this house with two old women hauling Ruth out of me.’ She thought of her hallucination in the hospital, Camillo on the beach. ‘And what else? Some sort of ceremonial marriage to you, and you coming to my bedroom once every two years?’
‘Something like that. They would have used us to renew the family. Very simple.’
‘Very. And this is what they plan now for you and Ruth.’
‘While I’m serviceable.’
‘And while Ruth is able. Until it kills her.’
‘It won’t kill her. The family is very strong. Even you are, Rachaela.’
‘Even me. The outsider. The one unincestuous birth.’
He said nothing and a wall of soundlessness rose between them.
She wanted to strike it away with her hands.
She said, ‘I shall talk to Ruth. I’m going to make her understand what all this really means. Then we’ll see.’
‘Good luck,’ he said.
‘You think she won’t listen. But I’ve lived with your child. She’s interested only in herself, and what can entertain her. This is a new and fascinating game, but she’ll tire of it. She won’t wear it, being the brood queen of your hive.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘You think your Scarabae sorcery is the strongest thing of all? You’re just a puppet. You have no mind. You’re nothing. Their seed machine.’
‘So many angry words,’ he said.
The beauty of him struck inside her like a colossal chord. She longed to go to him, to lean, to lie against him. To be told this did not matter. She wanted his arms, his mouth and his body, as much as she had ever wanted them in that day and night of preposterous ecstasy. Damn Ruth, what was she—a grain of sand, a mote of dust.
But she would never let him touch her again. She would not let him have Ruth for his passionless and raging lust.
‘Well, I’ve finished now,’ she said, and she went away from him and down the stair to the door of the tower, which like Ruth she opened and closed behind her.
Two hot days passed before she found Ruth alone.
Rachaela had seen her daughter in the evenings at dinner, after which she went away to the piano lesson with Adamus, vanishing again. Rachaela had gone over the house, looked into the garden where the briars climbed the cedar tree and roses perched upon its boughs. Even into the red bedroom she had looked, and seen the window with the crimson Madonna, the tiaraed child, and the golden kings with diadems and animal faces. But Ruth was not there.
On the third day Rachaela walked out on to the heath, and Ruth was sitting by the standing stone. She wore a day dress from the turn of the century with little puffed sleeves. There was no make-up on her face and her hair was done up in a ponytail.
Rachaela went to her and stood, letting her shadow fall into the sun-scorched grass.
Butterflies were in the tobaccoy bracken. Birds made an aerial display across the pale blue roof of the sky.
‘I want to talk to you, Ruth.’
‘Yes,’ said Ruth.
Rachaela sat down on the grass facing her child. Hers. This person in the dress.
‘I suppose you’re enjoying yourself here.’
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Ruth.
They made you very welcome. They’ve given you lots of presents. They let you do as you like. And no school.’
‘And the piano,’ said Ruth, helping her.
‘And the piano of course. And Adamus.’
‘He lets me call him Adam.’
‘I know. Have you noticed, Ruth, that people are often kind to you, nice, when they want you to do something for them?’
Ruth looked at Rachaela. Her look was frankly speculative. And what do you want? She replied, ‘Sometimes.’
‘And that people let you down.’ Rachaela waited, and thrust home the dart. ‘Like Emma.’
Ruth did not flinch. Her eyes were black and impenetrable. ‘Yes.’
‘I want you to think about this, Ruth. The Scarabae are being nice to you because they want something.’
They want me to stay,’ said Ruth. ‘I’m Adam’s daughter.’
‘And have they told you what they expect of you and Adamus?’
Ruth did not answer at once.
Then she said, ‘They told me I’m going to be betrothed to him.’
Rachaela recoiled. She held herself level.
‘Do you know what that word means? Betrothed.’
‘It means bind with a promise to marry.’ Ruth added, ‘Anna showed me in the library, in the dictionary.’
‘Do you underst
and what was meant?’ Ruth watched her. ‘That they mean you to marry him?’
‘Oh yes.’
Rachaela said, too loudly, ‘Daughters don’t marry their fathers.’
‘Yes they do. The Egyptians did.’
Rachaela cursed Miss Barrett, Mr Walker and the primary school with its unsuitable gobbets of knowledge. Or perhaps Ruth had got it from some book.
‘You’re not Egyptians.’
‘The kings did it. The important families. To keep the bloodline pure.’
‘And that’s what the Scarabae told you you would be doing?’
Ruth smiled, secretively, and looked at the grass.
‘Have you thought,’ said Rachaela, ‘about what you would have to do as his wife?’ Be taken by him, broken into, forced to experience a hell of sweetness—Don’t think of it. ‘Ruth.’
‘No, Mummy,’ said Ruth.
‘You’d have to bear his children,’ said Rachaela. ‘And do you know what that means?’
‘You told me about babies.’
‘All right.’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Ruth. ‘Anna explained. The line has to go on.’
‘You don’t mind because there’s no way you can understand. My God, I can’t make you realize in five minutes. It’s painful and degrading, Ruth. It means your body isn’t your own,’ Christ, she thought, I sound like Jonquil. ‘And you’ll be expected to do it again and again. Do you follow what I’m saying?’
‘It will be easy, Anna said.’
‘Oh Anna’s explained about babies too has she?’
‘We’re special,’ said Ruth. ‘You’re different. You don’t understand about that.’
Rachaela gathered her wits. She saw again Ruth kneeling on the floor in her shawls and lipstick, while the child Lucile snivelled on the blue bed.
‘You mean this family legend about vampirism.’
‘They are,’ said Ruth. She corrected herself. ‘We are. There’s no daylight in the house. They only go out of doors at night. Apart from Cheta and Carlo, the servants, who aren’t pure Scarabae, and they have to muffle up.’
‘Then why are you sitting here in the sun, Ruth?’
‘I haven’t changed yet.’
‘And when will you change?’
‘When I marry Adam.’
Ruth writhing, kicking and screaming on the black piano, Adamus on top of her, his mouth at her throat, a tiny trickle of scarlet.