The Applecross Spell

by Wendy MacIntyre

  With men, Gemma was quite merciless. And Suzanne fully understood her reasons. In Gemma’s world, women were both centre and circumference and everything in between. They were her friends, her lovers, her raison d’être, her salvation. With women, Gemma was all things she could not bring herself to be with men: forgiving, consoling, supportive. Those she found hardest to forgive were the women who returned to live with their abusers. But even here, she would wrench her perspective round to some point of compassion. It is a hard thing, said Gemma, to throw off a yoke that has been thousands of years in the making. A yoke that women were so conditioned to wearing that they simply thought of it as the norm. “But the poor sod would perish without me.” How often, Gemma would ask with tears in her eyes, had she heard that self-deluding rationalization?

  Gemma’s greatest successes were the abused women who did suddenly see the yoke for what it was. And threw it off. The most glorious of epiphanies, Gemma called this enlightenment; the dropping of the scales from eyes still ringed with bruises.

  For those women who did not see, who returned to the men who had promised to change, Gemma did literally pray. If she learned that one of these women had been maimed or murdered by the man who had sworn to transform, she came close to despair. Then quite deliberately, she gave full vent to her rage, donning the boxing gloves she had bought for exactly this purpose, and battering away at a punching bag strung up in a small, otherwise empty, top-floor room. Yes, she had painted the outline of a phallus on the punching bag, as well as a coiled mass that represented matted chest hair. And yes, she would eventually collapse in a corner, sweaty, untidy, and tear-stained. But largely emptied of the rage. At least, until the next time.

  There must be more than just a few exceptions, Suzanne argued with herself. Murdo must be an exception. The idea of his multi-chambered silence, his heat and force in bed, pulled at her still. Or was she indeed deluded? Was she projecting her own desires on to a man who was not only manipulative but tainted?

  She found she could not concentrate at all on her book. She was in a most uncomfortable state of suspension, moving toward a result she could in no way predict. Like the randomness, she supposed, of Murdo’s wilful electrons. She wondered ruefully if she might somehow be moving backward. If by marrying Murdo, she were simply satisfying some atavistic urge to come under the thrall of the male. He who brings home the bleeding meat; who brandishes the flaming torch when the wolves creep close. Or was her desire for him rooted in something far more pernicious: her unconscious attraction to the doom that she sometimes perceived in his ingrained melancholy? What was the essence of her bond to Murdo?

  “Beware the double. Learn to distinguish the false image from the true.” Another of Ada’s gnomic utterances. As was: “The object of your desire will often ring hollow.” Like a false chime, Ada elucidated, a sound that will set your teeth on edge, and then the nerves. Well, one knew what followed.

  As far as Suzanne was aware, Ada had always managed to avoid the bitter fruit of disappointed love. The Russian and Polish sailors who returned year after year were never in her life for more than three or four days at a time. If Ada missed one more than another when he left, she gave her daughter no indication. As Suzanne grew older, she came to understand that Ada’s great love would always be her craft, and the elements from which it was born. Her mother took most delight in that invisible world where she consorted with daimons feathered, jewelled, and sleek. Those daimons could also be duplicitous, more so than human kind, said Ada. So she proceeded cautiously in the spirit realm – as in the real one – lest she be fooled.

  Suzanne had been fooled, by men and women both. Her instincts, she knew, were not as finely developed as her mother’s. Yet she had been fortunate. When betrayed or belittled, in friendship or in love, Suzanne had never crashed too badly. Nor had she become embittered, one of the worst results by her reckoning.

  This most recent leap she had taken – this marriage -was in part a kicking against constraints. She had begun to feel more and more hedged in by the expectations put upon her as a “feminist” writer. The increasing pressure to align herself with a particular faction made her restless and angry. She sensed they wanted her to play the elegant Amazon, to swear off men just as people swore off alcohol and tobacco. “You could be a media star, a figurehead. Exploit the power structure for the sake of the movement.” How often had she heard that? She had come to loathe the very idea of feminism as a “movement.”

  How did it happen? You started out with a wonderful essential insight, fresh as a mint-laden wind, and you ended up with a hydra-headed institution plagued by petty quarrels and divisions.

  Suzanne was herself most passionate about clear vision. A seeing through and back to the female soul in its primitive shining state. Before parts of it were split off and debased. By men, yes. But more accurately by a patriarchal structure that manipulated and brainwashed men, inculcating a craven fear of women that so easily became hatred. Men took woman’s virgin self and broke and defiled it and traded it and paid coin for it. And her sexual self they cheapened and called a dirty whore and paid coin for it. Her instinctual wisdom they called witch and burned.

  The most terrible irony of all was that men were themselves suffering because of their depredations on women’s souls. And for the most part, they simply did not see. And so the trail of blood and despoilment went on. And we are all cheated, men and women both, thought Suzanne. And would be as long as the heinous historic conditioning continued, and men the world over persisted in not seeing that they did not see.

  Like Gemma, Suzanne did occasionally give way to despair. She fantasized sometimes about a total escape. In a daydream she would not have confessed even to Gemma, she was a round-eyed lemur, purely innocent, a miracle of agility, at one with blue sky and green leaf and sturdy branch. Eating, defecating, scratching, swinging faultlessly arm over arm through space. Looking, always looking, out of those startled orbs. Having – and this was the most blissful aspect -a very circumscribed consciousness. A cowardly fantasy, in other words. A fantasy of absolute retreat.

  Whereas she was in reality in the thick of human embroilments. Not the least of which was the attempt to honour and show all proper respect to millions of women who had died the most terrible deaths, who had undergone assaults on body and soul that she could never imagine. And she had married, taken a course so diametrically opposed to the one expected of her that many of her former friends would forever brand her an outcast. Nor had she married a demonstrably “new” man, but a very visibly older one who did in certain aspects resemble the greying patriarch. Neither was there anything observably androgynous in Murdo’s face. It was too rugged, too broad, too marked by time. Yet she loved Murdo’s face, the gouges and vulnerability he wore with such utter dignity.

  She was therefore shocked when she got off the train at Waverley Station, to see a man so like Murdo, he might be his twin. Yet although the features matched exactly, this man’s face seemed somehow brutish, perhaps because his eyes were narrowed in nasty glare.

  For an instant – no more – Suzanne stood frozen on the platform. The Murdo double glared at her, with a fixity that left no doubt that she was its object. She had the wild thought that this was a twin brother Murdo had never mentioned. But surely, she reasoned, such an omission would be excessively secretive. For a twin was a defining thing. Twins were bound forever, even if they never saw one another. They had a singleness that was written into their cells, if not into their souls.

  She remembered a woman Ada had counselled whose twin had died at birth. This woman was tortured by dreams of the other baby being pulled away and sucked backward down a black, windy tunnel. She heard her twin crying, she said, and would wake from the dream with fear freezing her throat and pity swelling her chest, to a point that she had to fight for breath. She began to avoid sleep and was literally rocking on her feet when she came to see Ada. Who prescribed a potent sleeping draught, and induced an alternative dream in which the wo
man was able to embrace her twin’s spirit and hold her fast in her own breast.

  As Suzanne thought of Ada, Murdo’s double came toward her. She could see the redness of his neck and the sweat on his brow; noted how inappropriately the man was dressed for such a warm day in buttoned-up shirt and tie and a suit jacket. Why did some men, she wondered, have such difficulty in forsaking their uniforms?

  When he spoke, harshly, so that his hot breath burned her face, she put away all foolish thoughts of a twin. This was Murdo, inescapably so. The Murdo to whom she had legally bound herself. She supposed she had entertained that absurd notion of a twin simply to distance herself from this frowning, sweating man. She was actually repulsed by his expression, a glower that he had directed at her across the platform, and still kept on his broad, flushed face. He pushed his head so close to hers that she had an urge to slap him. But, of course, desisted.

  “Whatever possessed you,” he hissed in her ear, “to travel second-class and dressed like... like some street person?”

  “Murdo, don’t be ridiculous.” She spoke quietly, making a supreme effort to control her own temper.

  There was an unpleasant bloodlessness to his mouth that matched his clipped, heartless tone. Unsure of her next move, Suzanne bent to pick up her bag, and swung it over her shoulder. She began to walk away from him, quickly. She did not look back. Her stride was long and free. At that point, she felt she could walk forever, so long as Murdo was always receding behind her.

  Such was her anger that only physical movement could keep it quelled. His remark about her “state” of dress struck her as totally ludicrous – she was wearing jeans and a perfectly respectable T-shirt. Nor did she wish to dwell too much on the irony that they had travelled from London on the same train, sealed off from one another in their separate compartments. She had never in her life travelled first-class even when she could afford it.

  She heard Murdo call her name; then the steady thump of his feet, as he came running after her. She did not turn around. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder, settling lightly as a moth. She turned and looked in horror at the nakedness of his pain. He seemed to be on the edge of tears, and his evident vulnerability intensified all the marks of aging on his face, the complex fretwork around his eyes, and the shadows that gathered under them. In that instant, she understood how much closer he was to death than she. She experienced a great rush of compassion, undercut by guilt. She had not meant to make him weep.

  “I am so sorry, my dear.” His cheek was wet against hers. His voice had regained its normal timbre, low and strong, with its sensual resonant burr. “My nerves are a little frayed, I fear.” He took a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes.

  It was then that Suzanne recalled Murdo’s student. Up to that point, she realized she had only half believed in this student in distress. The whole episode had suggested the convenient deliverance. But his evident distress seemed proof enough that he had recently undergone some ordeal.

  “Your student?”

  “Ah,” he said. Murdo’s ahs were always followed by a little trough of silence. Suzanne had grown accustomed to this habit, and stood waiting.

  “A bit messy, I’m afraid. Aspiring mathematicians are frequently very proficient with an exacto knife.” He lifted his right arm so that his shirt cuff fell back, exposing his wrist. With his left hand, he mimed a long, deep cut through the vein.

  Suzanne shuddered. “Surely he didn’t die?”

  “No, no. Thank God. The downstairs neighbours heard him hit the floor, and came up to investigate. They had exchanged keys, fortunately, to care for each other’s cats if one or the other went away. Most fortunate. Most fortunate, indeed.”

  “Will he be all right?”

  “Ah... well, it depends, I suppose, on his recuperative powers, on his degree of commitment. On the whole, however, I suppose not. He should probably pursue some less demanding discipline. Or is it too late for that? It would appear he simply hasn’t the stamina, a lack I should perhaps have perceived much earlier on.”

  “But you must not blame yourself.”

  “Oh no, by no means. It’s that wh...”

  He could not finish, but broke down again suddenly, burying his head in her shoulder. Then just as abruptly, this renewed show of emotion was over. Murdo knelt down and opened his suitcase; withdrew a clean, folded white handkerchief and dabbed at his face.

  In silence, they walked together to the underground parking lot where Murdo had left the Bentley, and so they proceeded home, with barely a word said. Suzanne checked, as circumspectly as possible, Murdo’s continuing high colour and the somewhat alarming contrast of his pallid lips. Here was the spectre of death again. Yet she understood that it was as much the deaths of Miranda and Kirstie that haunted her, as any rational fear for Murdo.

  She must get him to speak of them, even if only a little. For neither she nor they could be at peace until Murdo opened the way. Her ignorance of the two women was an affront to their spirits.

  The difficulty was that she did not know quite how to open the question. Neither she nor Murdo had yet alluded to the scene he had made before his departure for London. She did not want to mention Miranda’s diary, not only because its content was so unflattering to Murdo, but also because she did not want him to know she had deliberately searched the house.

  Would he interpret her interest in Kirstie and Miranda as an insensitive curiosity? Or worse, an ill-founded jealousy? How was she to begin?

  When the car stopped in front of the sprawling house with its neatly capped turret, Suzanne had to control an involuntary shudder. She recalled with some discomfort the electric force that had repelled her and the odours that had overwhelmed her at the foot of the stairs.

  Once inside, they bathed – separately. It occurred to Suzanne as she lay in the bath, that apart from Murdo’s putting his head on her shoulder, they had not embraced. There had been no kiss of any description, perfunctory, forgiving or tentative. She presumed that when at last they were in bed together again, they would fall naturally into the shapes forged by their heat and desire. That would not be the place to raise the question, she realized. Not between those close-woven white sheets in a bed where he might well once have lain with Miranda. And then with Kirstie. No, she would definitely not ask in bed, for all its boundless intimacy and wondrous shared breathing.

  They prepared a frugal meal. Slices of cheese and whole grain bread, apples, pears and a dollop of yogurt. Murdo suggested that they set the table in the cavernous dining hall. In the month or so they had spent together in the house, they had always eaten in the kitchen.

  The dining hall seemed to be designed for human beings of gargantuan stature, with its lofty ceiling and a floor that Suzanne thought might easily accommodate a hundred dancers. Yet who would choose to dance in a room so fundamentally inhospitable? She found its spartan aspect quite chilling. The furnishings consisted of the huge dining table set under the fan-shaped window, four wooden armchairs set about a gaping stone fireplace, an entire wall covered in a faded red velvet curtain (for what purpose she could not fathom, other than to keep out the oozing damp in the stone). The only other object in the room was a six-foot-wide mirror in a heavy carved wooden frame. The silver backing was so worn that the mirror had little, if any, reflecting power. Once, she had stood tiptoe to stare into its depths, and had encountered only the vaguest form, slightly twisted, much like the image that would be thrown back by a stagnant pond.

  She wondered if the room had ever been warmed by the laughter of children, or of women easy in each other’s company. Ada would know Ada would have been able to hear the voices that had once echoed off the stone walls. For Suzanne, this dour room was a place she could imagine punishment being meted out, or discipline rendered. A most unkind place.

  Tomorrow she would resist if Murdo again suggested they eat in this unpleasant room. Today, she would make allowances for his anxiety over his student’s brush with death. Today Murdo must be
catered to.

  She was relieved to see he had regained his normal colour, his full lips firm and flushed with pink. He spread the merest dab of butter on a slice of bread. He ate carefully, without dropping a crumb.

  Suddenly, there was a high-pitched scream, the sound of a creature terribly tortured. Suzanne dropped the spoon with which she had been ladling yogurt into a glass bowl. Simultaneously, the room went dim. A dark shape smothered the light from the fan-shaped window above them.

  Suzanne looked up and saw the peacock, its wings spread full, displaying all its absurd male beauty, the jewel-like eyes glittering and unseeing. The bird turned its head round to stare in at her. These real eyes were beady, malevolent.

  She was surprised to hear Murdo laugh. “Ah,” he said, “did the big, bad peacock frighten you?”

  She was shocked by his stupidly superior tone. She had not thought him capable of that kind of automatic condescension. And because she was annoyed and disappointed with him, she decided not to wait. She would broach her question now. Leap now, as he had leapt, mocking her as unthinkingly as a callow boy.

  “Is keeping the peacocks a family tradition, Murdo? Or was it Kirstie or Miranda who brought them here?”

  “Kirst –.” Murdo spat out a piece of bread; then secreted it inside his napkin. He pulled back his chair from the table. He sat rigidly erect, a pharaoh on his throne.

  “Please,” he began, the word more order than request. “Do not let me hear you speak their names. They are dead, gone. We live now. You and I. They can no longer matter. That is the way with the dead.”