The Horned Man

by James Lasdun

  ‘Geraldine’s son,’ he added.

  Mother and daughter looked at me blank-faced.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, immediately noticing a look flash between all three Lloyds.

  ‘Emily, I was hoping you might show Lawrence around. Introduce him to your friends. He doesn’t know anyone here. Would you do that?’

  The girl seemed stunned, almost benumbed, by the situation. But she said ‘yes’ with an obedient simplicity as though it would never have crossed her mind to oppose her father’s will.

  ‘Good. Well then. I’ll see you on Sunday dear. Lawrence, I’ll pick you up at six.’

  To his ex-wife he merely nodded, receiving the faintest of nods in return.

  Emily was true to her word. After her mother left, which she did as soon as was civilly possible, she gave me a tour of the building and grounds, introducing me to various teenage acquaintances on the way. She made no attempt to converse with me, and was largely unresponsive to my remarks. Even so, I felt that I was making a favorable impression on her. I was intensely smitten by her. The thick, reddish-brown spill of her ringlets, her agate eyes, her sharply chiseled nose and pointed, elfin chin, were altogether too close to my image of that longed-for but hitherto entirely elusive entity, a girlfriend, for me to be capable of separating her from my fantasy. Her prolonged presence by my side as we strolled through the club began to acquire a meaning of its own in my imagination; something more than just duty and circumstance could account for. In some ineffable way we were ‘together’ – a fact that seemed further cemented every time she introduced me to someone new. Her voice was soft and clear, with a faint, nascent edge of imperiousness. She wore a perfume that rapidly insinuated itself into the deepest cortical centers of my brain: even today, when I catch it in a store or lobby, I am instantly back in her sweetly enchanting aura.

  By the time we finished our tour, I was feeling distinctly proprietorial about her. Doubtless she expected me to wander off by myself now, but the thought didn’t even cross my mind, and she was too well brought up to say anything.

  Some friends of hers came up, and as I persisted in lingering by her, she introduced me to them. These, it turned out, were her particular set, and over the next three days I got to know them well. The mere fact of Emily’s introducing me appeared to be enough to gain their acceptance. No doubt she found a way of quietly explaining who I was, but she must not have conveyed any particular antipathy on that score, because they included me in all their activities as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  Like her, they were extremely polite and superbly confident. The boys were constantly standing up and offering their seats to older women. The girls – Fiona, Rosamond, Sophia, Lucy – were miracles of deportment and elocution, their adolescent bodies always under perfect control. Their facial expressions had the sophistication of seasoned matrons – little nuances of irony, moues of mock petulance, casting a wonderful allure over the most neutral of remarks. But nothing off-color or spiteful was ever intimated. They seemed almost conscious of a responsibility to set an example of gracious conduct, whether they were lobbing an easy ball to a weaker player over the tennis net, or complimenting the dinner ladies on the rhubarb pie in the dining room.

  Among the boys was one I immediately identified as a rival. His name was Justin Brady. He was good-looking – tall, with a supple athletic build, wavy black hair and a cheerful, animated face. There was some kind of understanding between him and Emily. At first I thought he might actually be her boyfriend, but they never held hands or kissed, as some of the others did, so I ruled that out. But when we first played doubles he seemed to take it for granted that he would partner Emily, and later, when she mentioned that she wouldn’t mind going out on the river for a sail, he seemed to assume this meant she wanted him to go with her.

  In both instances I managed to ward him off by sheer force of will. I simply stuck by her at her end of the court, creating a standoff, until, with a pleasant grin, Justin retreated to the other end. And when it was decided that we should all go sailing, I preempted him by asking Emily outright if she would come in my dinghy. She did hesitate a moment, looking at Justin, but he merely gave his pleasant warm smile again, and told her to go ahead.

  Out on the river a mild breeze, scented with the flowers that grew on the banks, puffed out our sails and sent us rippling across the water. Emily said nothing, barely looked at me, but I felt that I was in paradise. To the extent that I even noticed her unresponsiveness, I put it down to shyness and her generally subdued manner. This was almost enough; almost all I wanted of love at that moment, to be gliding silently across the river with this bewitching girl. My own sails were filled! There had been talk of the upcoming Easter Dance, some preliminary discussion of partners and costumes. It seemed to me an inevitability that Emily would come as my partner, that we would dance all evening, and seal our budding romance with a long, tender kiss out on a balcony.

  By the second day I had half-intoxicated myself with the imagined taste of her kisses, the sensation of plying my hands through her wondrous mass of ringlets. I spent the day waiting for opportunities to gaze into her eyes. On the rare occasions when she looked back at me, it was with a curious, dazed expression, as though we were meeting in a dream.

  The next day her mother had to pick her up earlier than usual. On the spur of the moment, a general invitation to tea was issued. It didn’t cross my mind that I might not be welcome at Robert’s former home, and I ran to get my things along with the rest of them. When I turned up at her Land-Rover, Mrs Lloyd frowned slightly. Wasn’t Robert expecting to pick me up at the club later that afternoon? she asked. Gently, with the effusive politeness I had learned from my new friends, I assured her she needn’t worry – I would ring him from her house and he could pick me up there instead. Since she appeared to operate at a fairly cool temperature at the best of times, I didn’t think anything of the frostiness with which she received this, and I piled into the car next to Emily.

  The home was a dilapidated Elizabethan manor. Dwarf apple trees stood blossoming through lichenous old limbs in a garden enclosed by a crumbling brick wall. Inside, fragrances such as only the action of long centuries can distill out of worn stone, polished elm, dust, silver and old glass, hung in the tall rooms. I wandered through with a sense of having gained admittance to some inner precinct of existence, where every sensation was rarefied to an almost melancholy sweetness and purity. My spirit seemed to open here. I felt that I was converging with some design deeply inscribed in my own destiny; one that had been guiding me toward this place for many years without my knowing it, and that intended to connect me to it with the strongest, most intimate bonds.

  We had tea in the drawing room. Emily’s younger brothers joined us. They stared at me, not saying a word. I didn’t mind: there was all the time in the world, I felt, to befriend them. Mrs Lloyd kept coming in with cakes and sandwiches. We boys stood up for her every time she entered, pressing her to sit down and join us, but she wouldn’t.

  After tea we trooped up to Emily’s bedroom to listen to records on her new stereo. Her bed was an old four-poster with a carved wooden canopy. I felt a kindliness emanate from it; a sense that it and I were going to become old friends.

  We sat around on cushions, chatting, laughing, listening to music. I couldn’t help feeling that it was for me in particular that this event had been orchestrated. I smiled indulgently at the others, interred so blissfully in my own folly that I half-expected them to start leaving one by one so that Emily and I could finally be alone.

  Justin took charge of the stereo without being invited to. I tried not to let this interfere with my expansive mood, but after a while it started to bother me. I felt uncomfortable more on Emily’s behalf than my own. I stood up, and with what I thought was a friendly but firm decisiveness, changed the record he had just put on, and stationed myself by the controls. With his usual good grace, Justin backed off at once. I noticed a few looks being excha
nged among the others, but I felt that all they signified was a growing acknowledgment of the intimacy developing between Emily and myself.

  The beat of the music went through us, binding us together as we nodded our heads in time, or sang along with snatches of the melody. I felt the surging happiness you only ever experience at that age – the euphoria of being part of a group of friends traveling together into the future. Love overflows your heart; you feel an almost religious joy, as though some divine emissary had alighted right there in the midst of your little congregation.

  Emily was quiet, but the rest of us were animated – talking about our lives, our schools, our families. The subject of mothers came up. Fiona’s mother was a Tory councillor. The mother of one of the boys raised some rare breed of sheep. ‘What about your mother, Lawrence,’ somebody asked me, ‘what does she do?’ I was just thinking how best to answer, when Emily spoke, her voice quiet but clear as a bell above the music:

  ‘She’s sort of a high-class prostitute, isn’t she?’

  What I felt at first was simply a loss of bearings, as though some natural disaster had just occurred. The euphoria was still inside me, still surging on its own momentum, and in the hush that followed Emily’s remark, I heard myself blurt with what I thought was tremendous quick-wittedness, ‘Actually no, she’s a low-class prostitute,’ whereupon a strange ballooning light-ness seemed to raise me up to my feet and carry me involuntarily out of the room and downstairs, where Mrs Lloyd informed me that Robert was on his way to pick me up, and that I would be doing her a great kindness if I would leave immediately and wait for him at the end of the driveway so that he wouldn’t have to come to the house.

  As I stumbled off, the magnitude and horror of what had just occurred – what had been occurring, I grasped dimly, throughout the past three days – broke on me in little astounding illuminations. It was more than I could absorb all at once. Little dazzling glimpses of it burst inside me. The effect was largely physical. I didn’t know whether I wanted to sob or throw up.

  I’ve had my share of snubs and insults since then, but nothing has ever had such a decisive effect on me. My own part in it dismayed me more than anything else. For years afterwards I could make myself writhe in undiminished pain at the thought of my obnoxious behavior during those three days. How clearly I could see in hindsight the growing hatred I was arousing in Emily’s friends as I strutted about among them. Yet how sure I had been of their love at the time!

  Was it really possible to be so catastrophically wrong in one’s reading of a situation? The discovery that it was disturbed me profoundly. I have distrusted myself ever since. Any time I begin to feel comfortable with people, I immediately conjecture a parallel version of myself arousing their secret loathing. Pretty soon it gets hard to tell which version reflects reality, and I find myself splitting the difference; withdrawing into an attitude of detached neutrality.

  I sat there in Room 106 remembering these things. I hadn’t dredged them up for years, but every detail was as fresh and vivid in my memory as ever. A plausible hell, I have often thought, could be made out of such incidents, relived ad infinitum.

  While going over them, I had swiveled my chair around and put my feet up on the shelf behind my desk, so that I was in a reclining position. Lying that way I was in the same relation to Trumilcik’s lair as I was to Dr Schrever’s chair when I lay in her office. Had I in some way been substituting Trumilcik for Dr Schrever as I relived these moments? Perhaps I thought that as a European he might understand better than she the structure of inhibitions and concealed hierarchies that made such an event possible. At any rate, by the time I was finished, I felt the pleasantly calm, spent sensation I sometimes felt at the end of my sessions with Dr Schrever.

  With that in mind, I took a couple of twenty-dollar bills from my wallet and left them on the desk by Amber’s pages: an offering for Trumilcik, should he come tonight. I had formed the idea that he was living pretty much hand to mouth, and I felt I owed him something for co-opting his spirit as a stand-in for Dr Schrever. I also wanted to demonstrate to him my good will; my solidarity with him as an ex-pat from the old world trying to plant his feet in the new.

  Then I set off for Elaine’s.

  CHAPTER 6

  It was getting dark. Treetops made shatter-line patterns against the glassy strip of horizon. I was in a state of deliberate suspension: suspended judgment, suspended feeling. I was following a plan of my own devising, but passively, in a state of deliberately suspended will.

  In a women’s clothing store on Mulberry Street, I saw a V-neck sweater of gray wool with flower-embroidered cuffs. It was exactly the kind of thing Carol wore: austere, with an impishly begrudged femininity. I’d have bought it for her without hesitating if we’d still been living together. I did things like that, and she seemed to appreciate them. I was beginning to move reluctantly away, when I decided to buy the sweater anyway. It was expensive, but just having it in my possession seemed to bring me a step closer to some hypothetical moment in the future when I would have the opportunity to give it to her.

  Strange, at the station, to move off in the opposite direction from usual. Out in the twilight a row of shacks went by. Zigzagging white Christmas lights – a new type that had taken over the country like an invasive weed – fringed the plastic-roofed decks. Beyond them was an old assembly plant with a row of truck cabins – just the cabins – moldering in front of it like gigantic skulls in some dinosaur graveyard. Then after that, stranger still in the dregs of the daylight, a ghostly fairground, abandoned decades ago by the look of it; the blown husks and bracts of some bygone era’s little flowering of fun. A radial of horseless spokes was all that survived of the merry-go-round. Over a small wooden booth I made out the capital H and M of two otherwise illegible words in faded circus lettering. Whatever came next the scrub had knitted a snarl of creepers over, obliterating all but a few dark forms that looked like ruins in a jungle.

  Elaine’s station was a lonely strip of platform in a near-empty parking lot. As I got in a taxi, I discovered I had left the scrap of paper with her directions on it behind, presumably in my office. Oddly enough, given my recent forgetfulness, I remembered the address without difficulty, even though I had only looked at it once, as she wrote it down. I took this to be a good omen.

  The town was just a series of new residential developments; twenty or thirty identical houses in each, with identical blobs of shrubbery out front and big signs offering units for sale. I had seen these kinds of places on summer days. The people you saw drifting around them wore pajama-like clothes, as though their conception of leisure was inextricably bound up with the idea of sleep. Lincoln Court, where Elaine lived, was still partly under construction. Plywood-covered frames stuck up out of the raw dirt, and between some of the houses there were still patches of old, scrubby farmland, not yet reprocessed into manicured lawns. The cold air smelled of pressure-treated lumber. I paid the taxi and went up the short path to Elaine’s door.

  Perfume billowed up at me as she opened it. There she was, a look of ardent joy spilling from her eyes. She wore a lemon-colored chemise, and a brown, calf-length, hip-hugging skirt.

  Before arriving, I had made up my mind that I would greet her with a light kiss on the lips. For a moment now I baulked: there was something softly overpowering about her; her indefinite features rendered somehow daunting by the formalised glamor of her outfit. I braced myself however, plunged my head into the cloud of scent, and brushed my lips against hers. She seemed surprised by the gesture, but not displeased. She led me into a gray-carpeted room with prints of semiabstract flowers on the wall. At the back was a tile-floored dining area with a glass table set for two.

  The place felt brand-new: unpenetrated, yet, by its human inhabitant.

  I sat on a denim-covered couch, oatmeal in color, while Elaine poured me a drink. It crossed my mind that I should have brought something – flowers, or at least a bottle of wine.

  Handing me my drink, Elaine lo
oked hesitantly at the space next to me on the couch. I patted it, and she lowered the sweetened weight of herself into the cushion beside me. I took her hand and gave it a squeeze.

  ‘I’m so glad you could come,’ she said.

  I had given up trying to figure out what it was I could have said or done to bring this situation into being. I accepted it in all its strangeness: looked on it as a premise rather than a result. The question in my mind was where to go from here.

  I hadn’t slept with a woman for some time – long enough that my thoughts and dreams had started decomposing into erotic fantasies with a frequency I hadn’t experienced in years. Theoretically the idea of leveraging my apparently substantial credit with Elaine into some kind of fling had a certain appeal; or would have, if I had felt the slightest physical attraction to her, which so far I had not.

  But that indifference, related as it was to a similarly unqualified emotional indifference, was possibly not the end of the story. Whenever I had denied to Dr Schrever that I was attracted to her, or missed her between sessions, or had tried to hurt her by not showing up, she would suggest that I wasn’t necessarily able to experience the reality of my own feelings. I had always privately dismissed this as an example of the kind of cant her profession was prone to, but in view of some of the things that had been happening recently, I had begun to wonder if there mightn’t really be some kind of interference between the feelings I had, and my ability to register them.

  Was it possible, I had wondered, that I was attracted to Elaine without knowing it? Such a thing seemed beyond the bounds of likelihood, but I found I couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. My unconscious choice of her name for the mistress in S for Salmon, was surely an indication of something. Perhaps if I placed myself in her presence for long enough, I had thought, my feelings might become sufficiently focused to make themselves known to me.