by A. L. Barker
A bird called, ‘Philip, Philip, Philip’ from the shubbery. Pam ran for her life.
*
She made the mistake of telling Antony. She hadn’t the words for it. They stayed inside her: horror, revulsion, bitter, bitter dismay, fear and anger. ‘I’m so frightened!’
‘What of, for God’s sake?’ Antony spoke as if she was talking about spiders.
‘It just lay there under the water – it had no legs—’
‘A mermaid. Was she pretty?’
‘It wasn’t finished, it shouldn’t have been born!’
‘You’ve got a sick imagination.’
‘I didn’t imagine! It’s there in that boat, The Maid of Orleans, down on the beach. Go and see for yourself—’
‘I shall. This sort of thing puts me right off you.’ He grinned, his eyes hard.
*
Owen made a start on the garden. He bought a book about weeds so that he would know what he was up against. The glossary fascinated him: he pored over lanceolate, panicle, pinnate, apomictic, eleistogamous. When it came to identifying individual species, he was alarmed. Flourishing in his patch were things with such names as Goutweed, Twitch Grass, Coltsfoot, Fleabane, Black Medick, described as obnoxious and virtually ineradicable. The good old dandelion he welcomed as Taraxacum officinale, and the little lawn daisy as Bellis perennis.
‘I was hoping to find a root of agrostemma githago.’
‘Why?’ said Elissa.
‘It’s a sort of wild carnation. The seeds are poisonous. In the Middle Ages it was thought to contaminate cereal crops and cause leprosy.’
‘Are you trying to frighten me?’
He started to say ‘My dear girl’ but bit back the words. ‘The plant is extinct as a weed and only survives where it’s cultivated – which it certainly hasn’t been here.’
‘You’ve changed.’ She had a way of quizzing him from time to time: he could actually see her weighing his pros and cons and reaching some conclusion which she never imparted. As a young husband, ardent and unsure, he used to beg her to tell him what she was thinking: nowadays he was truly thankful that she wouldn’t. He believed they had achieved the right degree of ignorance to sustain a happy marriage. ‘Since we came here,’ she said, ‘you’re different.’
‘Be odd if I wasn’t. You said yourself it would be like turning a page.’
‘I haven’t changed.’
He escaped to the garden. Stinging nettles, he was reliably informed, had been leaving their seeds and pollen in deposits since before the last ice age. They had adopted the reproductive system which kept the human race going: male and female flowers were on separate plants, but they didn’t have to wait for close encounters. Cross-pollination was by air current. Cooked, he understood, they were indistingishable from spinach and a source of Vitamin B. He was reluctant to cut down such an enterprising plant.
‘You want a billhook for that lot.’ Mrs Latimer had come with her elevenses into the garden.
‘I’ll manage.’ He wondered if he would when the blades of the shears rebounded from the stem of an oak seedling. He tugged at it, poked round the root with the points of the shears. The seedling would not budge. He feared it was already well enough established to be clocking up the first of its seasonal rings.
Mrs Latimer watched him pluck a handful of grass to clean the blades. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, you’re not cut out for manual labour. Bank manager, weren’t you?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘I didn’t think to see you grubbing in the dirt with them filbert nails.’
Confound the woman, thought Owen, and moved away towards the fence. He had mixed feelings about the fence. It was the barrier between himself and Angela, a stern reminder that the fibres of his being had rejoiced. The jubilation was best forgotten. He owed that much to Elissa.
At one o’clock it came on to rain and he was glad; he had been hacking away for hours without making any real impression. When he tried to straighten he was seized in a grip of fire. It was impossible to stand upright. He sank to his knees, crouched groaning under a clump of cow-parsley and was obliged to witness in close-up the evacuation of an ant-hill which he had disturbed. He shouted, but was too far from the house to be heard. Gritting his teeth, he struggled up, a knee at a time. He crept across the garden with a red hot poker at the base of his spine.
Elissa scolded, ‘There’s no need to overdo it. What are you trying to prove?’
‘We’re landowners now, I’m accepting responsibility for the land we own.’
‘Shouldn’t you accept that you’re not as young as you used to be?’
‘Do you think I haven’t?’ Wincing, he lowered himself into a chair.
‘I’ve got some excellent liniment. I’ll rub your back and bring a hot-water bottle.’
‘I’d sooner you brought the whisky bottle.’
‘The garden’s bad for you.’
‘Someone’s got to tame it.’
Next morning the pain had subsided, except for a savage jerk on what he supposed were his hamstrings when he stooped.
Elissa had driven into town to do the weekly shopping. When she was out of the house he allowed himself to remember the jubilation. He owed that much to Angela. She had revived his vital urges to match her own: the time-honoured function of young women who took elderly lovers. He had reached that bleak conclusion when she knocked at the door.
‘I can’t find James. Is he with you?’
She had come through the wet grass in her thin house-shoes. Seeing her on the step, rubbing one foot against the other, Owen’s logic evaporated. He drew her over the threshold, heard himself say, ‘Elissa’s not here.’
‘I know, I saw her drive away.’
The relevance of that did not escape him. ‘And James isn’t here.’
‘It happened, didn’t it? Our loving?’
‘My dear – I’m not likely to forget.’ She came close. He said, ‘Shouldn’t we look for the boy?’
‘I have looked. He hides.’
‘Hide and seek?’
‘He doesn’t play games with me.’
‘We’ll try the garden first.’
‘He isn’t there, I’ve searched.’
‘The tool-shed? Do you think he’s in the house?’
Impatient, she took his arm. ‘Come.’
Owen said as they walked across the grass, ‘I found him sitting in the road, remember?’
She went straight into her bedroom, threw off her coat and her shoes, came to him where he waited in the doorway and stood in her stockinged feet on his feet. He fancied he could hear her heart beating somewhere below his ribs. ‘What about James?’
‘He won’t have gone far.’
Reaching up, she brushed her lips against his, lightly but with increasing ardour. He held her elbows. ‘I should have left a note for Elissa, she’ll wonder where I’ve got to.’
‘Do you want her to know?’
That was the question – like Hamlet, he thought, and stooped to kiss her. Pain hit him in the small of his back. Transfixed, he could only stare over her head. ‘There’s something in your bed—’
‘What?’
‘I saw the bedclothes move.’
She drew away, turned back the eiderdown. James lay curled underneath. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Waiting for you.’
Owen saw his face. His expression was ugly: in a child, frightening.
*
‘Good as new,’ said the mechanic, switching on the ignition. The car leaped forward and was braked with a stylish screech of the tyres. A puff of smoke, pure as a rabbit’s scut, issued from the exhaust.
‘I didn’t ask you to make it new, I asked you to make it go.’
‘There’s a towing fee, and VAT.’
‘That car was original,’ said Charlie. ‘Every part contemporaneous. It never needed a distributor, why should it start now? And what’s the coil for? Family planning?’
The mechanic turned t
o the small print on the back of the bill. ‘No responsibility can be accepted for mechanical defects of replacement parts occurring outside the specified running-in period.’
‘What’s your time worth? Fifty pounds an hour? I’ll pay you twenty-five cash to cover the half-hour you spent screwing screws.’
The mechanic, who had a ponytail and a gold ring in his ear, smiled sourly. ‘Payment by cheque and/or Visa must be cleared with the issuing bank.’
‘I’ll just take it for a trial run.’ Charlie held out his hand for the ignition key. The mechanic put it in his pocket.
‘No repossession of vehicle until repair bill’s settled in full.’
*
Back at the Bellechasse, Charlie worked off his emotion on his sketch of the tree escaping from the cliff. He blocked in the background with winged furies, thickened the slender twigs to a head of bristling hair and did a mountainous sea rolling in on a beach of skulls.
There was still Nina. He telephoned: ‘Remember what you said about my car repair bill?’
‘What did I say?’
‘That you’d pay for it.’
‘I did?’
She sounded surprised. Whatever well-springs of feeling the offer came from had dried up.
‘It would only be a loan. I’d pay you back when my show comes off. Ordinarily this wouldn’t present a problem, but the garage have had their fingers burned and are touchy about cheques. And I didn’t bring a lot of cash.’
Whenever he spoke to her on the telephone he used to ask what she was wearing so that he could picture her breathing. He had seen it so often and never tired of it. At each intake her bosom lifted to a precise degree of perfection before sinking to rest in her ribcage. But J.T. must have bought her a new wardrobe. ‘Have you still got the peacock-blue dress?’
‘That old thing!’
‘It was the beginning of a rainbow.’ The dress had picked up skin tones which he had introduced into Nina Complaisant. Nina clothed to reveal Nina nude. The colour, strident on its own, was tenderised in her veins and softened to lavender in her crevices.
‘Come, but don’t bring that girl.’
She rang off and he went to collect the sketch which he had left on a bench in the garden. Wellington was shading his eyes to look at it. ‘What the hell’s it about?’
‘Just creaming off some of my profane thoughts.’
‘Don’t let Pam see those skulls. She gets funny vibes on the beach.’
‘I know, I’ve had them. I mean to put them over on canvas, a spawn of fingerlings, homunculi, moppets, freaks.’
‘She swears she’s seen something so bad it’s still giving her nightmares. Sort of a giant tadpole so far as I can make out.’
Charlie laughed, but Wallington looked glum. Charlie said, ‘My ex-wife used to wake me to tell me her dreams. She dreamed a lot, I hardly ever got a full night’s sleep.’
‘Pam and me aren’t wed. She had a key cut and moved into the flat while I was at the shop. I got back to find her tights drying on the radiator, the fridge full of fat-free yogurt and garlic pearls in the bathroom. It brought me out in a worry rash.’
‘Is it the bed thing?’
‘I can handle that. I’m actually very fond of her, but she’d like us to be together all the time.’
‘That’ll pass,’ Charlie said knowledgeably.
‘She wants to get inside me and throw the switches.’
*
Pinned to the hotel notice-board was a typewritten sheet: ‘There will be a boat-trip to explore the creeks on Thursday, available to guests of the hotel at the special price of £2.50 per head, payable in advance, bookings at reception, cast-off 2.30 p.m. Signed: E Clapham.’
‘Shall you go?’ said Antony.
‘I don’t know, I’ve business on dry land.’
‘Come, but don’t bring that girl’, Nina had said. Mellilot was not on a bus-route, the ferry was miles away, even as the crow flew. Charlie had toyed with the idea of flitting overnight, hitching to Mellilot, and unburdening to Nina. He believed there were in his burden things which could be relied on to interest her, and possibly charm a loan out of her.
Felicia Soulsby said, ‘We took a vacation to Louisiana and saw the bayous in the Mississippi delta. Those are some ponds! But I give you your houses. You have the prettiest houses. Blenheim, Warwick Castle, Longleat, Luton Hoo, Hampton Court – I lost my heart to the Chinese dairy at Woburn.’
‘You’ve seen Mellilot?’
‘Melliwhat?’
‘The jewel of the West Country. Not so big as Woburn, but history in every stone. It dates from early Roman to Victorian England.’ Charlie reckoned he could say that with some truth: the Rape of the Sabines was – or had been – featured on the terrace and there was the wagonette in the stable yard.
‘Guess I’ve had enough history. I need to freshen up.’
Charlie said thoughtfully, ‘It’s not generally known that Mellilot was the direct inspiration of the best-selling novel Rebecca.’
‘I tend to read biographies. That film was popular entertainment, a contrived representation of the morbid psychoses actuating a man who couldn’t manage his wife when she was alive and was crazy for her when she was dead.’
‘Mellilot was Manderley.’
‘It was burned down.’
‘In the film. The present owners don’t talk about the things that are still going on. They have a lot to put up with.’
‘Such as?’
‘Ghostly voices, cold draughts, weeping women—’
‘Malarkey. Incorporeal beings cannot speak, or weep or leave the yard door open. Such phenomena as are experienced by the living have been attributed to the dead out of ignorance and the refusal to look into our own depths – whence cometh sin.’
Charlie feared he had been wasting his time. What did he hope to achieve with such a yarn?
Felicia, a tall woman, drew herself to her full height and her glasses glittered. ‘Where is this Melliwhat?’
*
While he was eating lunch Charlie considered what he should do with her when they got there. He could leave her in the car while he went ostensibly to enquire if they could visit the house. With luck – not to be relied on – he would have presented Nina with the repair bill and thought of a watertight excuse to get back to the car before Mrs S’s patience ran out. He could then explain that the house was shut up, the family away and no visit possible. The difficulty was the watertight excuse – finding one. If he told the truth, Nina would be sure to go to the gate to check who was waiting for him, and seeing Felicia Soulsby, by no means an unpresentable woman, would assume he had unrestricted access to every female at the hotel.
The drive proved eventful, the events being a road-holding contest with a Massey-Ferguson earth-mover, a girl on a restive horse, a road gang with a tarboiler and a herd of cows which Felicia failed to take into account until the last split second because she was intent on delivering a child’s guide to psychotic phenomena.
‘Fear of the unknown is in point of fact fear of oneself. When one’s sensibilities peak, there ensues an upsurge of extra-sensory perception. It is as simple and as beautiful as that. How much happier we should be if we accepted it!’ How beautiful would it be, mused Charlie, if they ended up flattened like the hedgehogs? ‘We are all born with inner percipience, though few of us have the power to use it. My husband’s sensibilities are hopelessly blunted.’
‘Shame.’
‘In the business world he need look only as far as the next buck.’ She spoke with bitterness.
Charlie said, ‘Everyone has to take the short view sometimes.’
When they drew up outside the gate she saw the padlock and said, ‘How very unwelcoming.’
‘Naturally Mellilot’s not open to the public, it would be bound to attract sensation-seekers and the media. I’ll walk up to the house. I happen to know the family and when I’ve explained your interest is legit they’ll be happy to show you round.’
‘I’ll walk with you.’
‘Let me talk to them first. They’re sensitive about the things that happen here. I’m sure you can understand that.’
‘I shall want to know what happens.’
Charlie climbed over the gate and sprinted up the drive.
Nina was wearing the peacock-blue dress. A sign that she was prepared to be co-operative? The first thing she said was, ‘How did you get here?’
‘Does it matter? I’m here and it’s just the two of us,’ Charlie said warmly. ‘Like the old days.’
‘I don’t want to talk about the old days.’
‘They weren’t so bad, were they? We had good times.’
‘You don’t have to soften me up. I know you’re here for the bad old reason. Money.’
‘I don’t recollect ever asking you for money.’
‘You didn’t need to ask, you just never had any. It was as simple as that.’
She sounded like Felicia Soulsby. Nice, Charlie thought, to be able to dispose so easily of two seminal questions, sin and money. ‘This is a purely local situation. I have great expectations in Golders Green, but here they don’t believe in them.’
‘Cornish folk like to see the colour of your money.’
‘If I can’t get home I can’t raise the money and if I can’t raise the money I can’t get home.’ He tried to keep it light: when she saw the bill, it was going to get weighty. ‘You’re looking well, married life suits you.’
‘It didn’t suit you.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘You’ve shed ten years since we parted.’
‘I get more sleep.’ She looked at him with an old gleam in her eye. He said, ‘Where’s J.T.?’
‘Around.’
‘What’s he done with your portrait?’
‘Hidden it.’
‘Nina complaisant?’
‘It’s not a side of me he’s familiar with.’
She was serious. Charlie checked his grin, said, ‘If he’d paid me a decent price for it I wouldn’t be coming to you now,’ which was a mistake. Too late he bit his tongue. The old gleam became a flickering flame. She was going to make an emotional issue of it – the woman discounted. ‘I meant to give the picture to you both. I came with that intention because this is where it belongs – you married the house. He made me a derisory price and I’d like to go away and forget it.’