by Tanith Lee
A bird trilled in a cage, hopped a few steps, and flew up to its perch to trill again.
The scent of dust and sweating trees came from the long windows, stagnant yet energizing in the thickening yellow light.
Nanetta half turned her head. Again she had heard something far away. She did not know what it was.
“Shall I wear the emerald necklace tonight?” asked Antoinelle, sleepily. “What do you think?”
Nanetta was used to this. To finding an answer.
“With the white dress? Yes, that would be effective.”
“Put up my hair. Use the tortoiseshell combs.”
Nanetta obeyed deftly.
The satiny bright hair was no pleasure to touch, too electric, stickily clinging to the fingers – full of each night’s approaching storm. There would be no rain, not yet.
Antoinelle watched as the black woman transformed her. . Antoinelle liked this, having only to be, letting someone else put her together in this way. She had forgotten by now, but never liked, independence. She wanted only enjoyment, to be made and remade, although in a manner that pleased her, and which, after all, demonstrated her power over others.
When she thought about Vonderjan, her husband, her loins clenched involuntarily, and a frisson ran through her, a shiver of heat. So she rationed her thoughts of him. During their meals together, she would hardly look at him, hardly speak, concentrating on the food, on the light of the candles reflecting in things, hypnotizing herself and prolonging, unendurably, her famine, until at last she was able to return into the bed, cool by then, with clean sheets on it, and wait, giving herself up to darkness and to fire.
How could she live in any other way?
Whatever had happened to her? Had the insensate cruelty of her relations pulped her down into a sponge that was ultimately receptive only to this? Or was this her true condition, which had always been trying to assert itself, and which, once connected to a suitable partner, did so, evolving also all the time, spreading itself higher and lower and in all directions, like some amoeba?
She must have heard stories of him, his previous wife, and of a black mistress or two he had had here. But Antoinelle was not remotely jealous. She had no interest in what he did when not with her, when not about to be, or actually in her bed with her. As if all other facets, both of his existence and her own, had now absolutely no meaning at all.
About the hour Antoinelle sat by the mirror, and Vonderjan, who had not gone out that day, was bathing, smoking one of the cigars as the steam curled round him, Jeanjacques stood among a wilderness of cane fields beyond the house.
That cane was a type of grass tended always to amaze him, these huge stripes of straddling stalks, rising five feet or more above his head. He felt himself to be a child lost in a luridly unnatural wood, and besides, when a black figure passed across the view, moving from one subaqueous tunnel to another, they now supernaturally only glanced at him, cat-like, from the sides of their eyes.
Jeanjacques had gone out walking, having deposited his itinerary and notes with Vonderjan in a morning room. The clerk took narrow tracks across the Island, stood on high places from which (as from the roof), coves and inlets of the sea might be glimpsed.
The people of the Island had been faultlessly friendly and courteous, until he began to try to question them. Then they changed. He assumed at first they only hated his white skin, as had others he had met, who had refused to believe in his mixed blood. In that case, he could not blame them much for the hatred. Then he understood he had not assumed this at all. They were disturbed by something, afraid of something, and he knew it.
Were they afraid of her – of the white girl in the house? Was it that? And why were they afraid? Why was he himself afraid – because afraid of her he was. Oh yes, he was terrified.
At midday he came to a group of hut-houses, patchily colour-washed and with palm-leaf roofs, and people were sitting about there in the shade, drinking, and one man was splitting rosy gourds with a machete, so Jeanjacques thought of a guillotine a moment, the red juice spraying out and the thunk of the blade going through. (He had heard they had split imported melons in Marseilles, to test the machine. But he was a boy when he heard this tale, and perhaps it was not true.)
Jeanjacques stood there, looking on. Then a black woman got up, fat and not young, but comely, and brought him half a gourd, for him to try the dripping flesh.
He took it, thanking her.
“How is it going. Mother?” he asked her, partly in French, but also with two words of the patois, which he had begun to recognize. To no particular effect.
“It goes how it go, monsieur.”
“You still take a share of your crop to the big house?” She gave him the sidelong look. “But you’re free people, now.”
One of the men called to her sharply. He was a tall black leopard, young and gorgeous as a carving from chocolate. The woman went away at once, and Jeanjacques heard again that phrase he had heard twice before that day. It was muttered somewhere at his back. He turned quickly, and there they sat, blacker in shade, eating from the flesh of the gourds, and drinking from a bottle passed around. Not looking at him, not at all.
“What did you say?”
A man glanced up. “It’s nothing, monsieur.”
“Something came from the sea, you said?”
“No, monsieur. Only a storm coming.”
“It’s the stormy season. Wasn’t there something else?”
They shook their heads. They looked helpful, and sorry they could not assist, and their eyes were painted glass.
Something has come from the sea.
They had said it too, at the other place, further down, when a child had brought him rum in a tin mug.
What could come from the sea? Only weather, or men. Or the woman. She had come from there.
They were afraid, and even if he had doubted his ears or his judgment, the way they would not say it straight out, that was enough to tell him he had not imagined this.
Just then a breeze passed through the forest below, and then across the broad leaves above, shaking them. And the light changed a second, then back, like the blinking of the eye of God.
They stirred, the people. It was as if they saw the wind, and the shape it had was fearful to them, yet known. Respected.
As he was walking back by another of the tracks, he found a dead chicken laid on a banana leaf at the margin of a field. A propitiary offering? Nothing else had touched it, even a line of ants detoured out on to the track, to give it room.
Jeanjacques walked into the cane fields and went on there for a while. And now and then other human things moved through, looking sidelong at him.
Then, when he paused among the tall stalks, he heard them whispering, whispering, the stalks of cane, or else the voices of the people. Had they followed him? Were they aggressive? They had every right to be, of course, even with his kind. Even so, he did not want to be beaten, or to die. He had invested such an amount of his life and wits in avoiding such things.
But no one approached. The whispers came and went.
Now he was here, and he had made out, from the edge of this field, Vonderjan’s house with its fringe of palms and rhododendrons (Blue View), above him on the hill, only about half an hour away.
In a full hour, the sun would dip. He would go to his room and there would be water for washing, and his other clothes laid out for the dinner.
The whispering began again, suddenly, very close, so Jeanjacques spun about, horrified.
But no one was there, nothing was there.
Only the breeze, that the black people could see, moved round among the stalks of the cane, that was itself like an Egyptian temple, its columns meant to be a forest of green papyrus.
“It’s black,” the voices whispered. “Black.”
“Like a black man,” Jeanjacques said hoarsely.
“Black like black.”
Again, God blinked his eyelid of sky. A figure seemed to be standing betwee
n the shafts of green cane. It said, “Not black like men. So black we filled with terror of it. Black like black of night is black.”
“Black like black.”
“Something from the sea.”
Jeanjacques felt himself dropping, and then he was on his knees, and his forehead was pressed to the powdery plant- drained soil.
He had not hurt himself. When he looked up, no one was in the field that he could see.
He got to his feet slowly. He trembled, and then the trembling, like the whispers, went away.
The storm rumbled over the Island. It sounded tonight like dogs barking, then baying in the distance. Every so often, for no apparent reason, the flames of the candles flattened, as if a hand had been laid on them.
There was a main dish of pork, stewed with spices. Someone had mentioned there were pigs on the Island, although the clerk had seen none, perhaps no longer wild, or introduced and never wild.
The black girl, who was called Nanetta, had put up her hair elaborately, and so had the white one, Vonderjan’s wife. Round her slim pillar of throat were five large green stars in a necklace like a golden cake-decoration.
Vonderjan had told Jeanjacques that no jewellery was to be valued. But here at least was something that might have seen him straight for a while. Until his ship came in. But perhaps it never would again. Gregers Vonderjan had been lucky always, until the past couple of years.
A gust of wind, which seemed to do nothing else outside, abruptly blew wide the doors to the terrace.
Vonderjan himself got up, went by his servants, and shut both doors. That was, started to shut them. Instead he was standing there now, gazing out across the Island.
In the sky, the dogs bayed.
His heavy bulky frame seemed vast enough to withstand any night. His magnificent mane of hair, without any evident grey, gleamed like gold in the candlelight. Vonderjan was so strong, so nonchalant.
But he stood there a long while, as if something had attracted his attention.
It was Nanetta who asked, “Monsieur – what is the matter?”
Vonderjan half turned and looked at her, almost mockingly, his brows raised.
“Matter? Nothing.”
She has it too, Jeanjacques thought. He said, “The blacks were saying, something has come from the sea.”
Then he glanced at Nanetta. For a moment he saw two rings of white stand clear around the pupil and iris of her eyes. But she looked down, and nothing else gave her away.
Vonderjan shut the doors. He swaggered back to the table. (He did not look at his wife, nor she at him. They kept themselves intact, Jeanjacques thought, during proximity, only by such a method. The clerk wondered, if he were to find Antoinelle alone, and stand over her, murmuring Vonderjan’s name, over and over, whether she would fall back, unable to resist, and come, without further provocation and in front of him. And at the thought, the hard rod tapped again impatiently on his thigh.)
“From the sea, you say. What?”
“I don’t know, sir. But they were whispering it. Perhaps Mademoiselle knows?” He indicated Nanetta graciously, as if giving her a wanted opening.
She was silent.
“I don’t think,” said Vonderjan, “that she does.”
“No, monsieur,” she said. She seemed cool. Her eyes were kept down.
Oddly – Jeanjacques thought – it was Antoinelle who suddenly sprang up, pushing back her chair, so it scraped on the tiles.
“It’s so hot,” she said.
And then she stood there, as if incapable of doing anything else, of refining any desire or solution from her own words.
Vonderjan did not look at her, but he went slowly back and undid the doors. “Walk with me on the terrace, Anna.”
And he extended his arm.
The white woman glided across the salon as if on runners. She seemed weightless – blown. And the white snake of her little narrow hand crawled round his arm and out on to the sleeve, to rest there. Husband and wife stepped out into the rumbling night.
Jeanjacques sat back and stared across the table at Nanetta.
“They’re most devoted,” he said. “One doesn’t often see it, after the first months. Especially where the ages are so different. What is he, thirty, thirty-two years her senior?”
Nanetta raised her eyes and now gazed at him impenetrably, with the tiniest, most fleeting smile.
He would get nothing out of her. She was a lady’s maid, and he a jumped-up clerk, but both of them had remained slaves. They were calcined, ruined, defensive, and armoured.
Along the terrace he could see that Vonderjan and the woman were pressed close by the house, where a lush flowering vine only partly might hide them. Her skirts were already pushed askew, her head thrown sideways, mouth open and eyes shut. He was taking her against the wall, thrusting and heaving into her.
Jeanjacques looked quickly away, and began to whistle, afraid of hearing her cries of climax.
But now the black girl exclaimed, “Don’t whistle, don’t do that, monsieur!”
“Why? Why not?”
She only shook her head, but again her eyes – the black centres were silver-ringed. So Jeanjacques got up and walked out of the salon into Vonderjan’s library across the passage, where now the mundane papers concerning things to be sold, lay on a table.
But it has come, it has come through the sea, before star-rise and dawn, through the rifts and fans of the transparent water, sliding and swimming like a crab.
It has crawled on to the sand, crouching low, like a beast, and perhaps mistaken for some animal.
A moon (is it a different moon each night? Who would know?), sinking, and Venus in the east.
Crawling into the tangle of the trees, with the palms and parrot trees reflecting in the dulled mirror of its lid, its carapace. Dragging the hind limb like a tail, pulling itself by the front legs, like a wounded boar.
Through the forest, with only the crystal of Venus to shatter through the heavy leaves of sweating bronze.
Bleumaneer, La Vue Bleu, Blue Fashion, Blue View, seeing through a blue eye to a black shape, which moves from shadow to shadow, place to place. But always nearer.
Something is in the forest.
Nothing dangerous. How can it hurt you?
5
Yse is buying food in the open air market at Bley. Lucius had seen her, and now stands watching her, not going over.
She has filled her first bag with vegetables and fruit, and in the second she puts a fish and some cheese, olive oil and bread.
Lucius crosses through the crowd, by the place where the black girl called Rosalba is cooking red snapper on her skillet, and the old poet paints his words in coloured sand.
As Yse walks into a liquor store, Lucius follows.
“You’re looking good, Yse.”
She turns, gazing at him – not startled, more as if she doesn’t remember him. Then she does. “Thank you. I feel good today.”
“And strong. But not this strong. Give me the vegetables to carry, Yse.”
“Okay. That’s kind.
“What have you done to your hair?”
Yse thinks about this one. “Oh. Someone put in some extra hair for me. You know how they do, they hot-wax the strands on to your own.”
“It looks fine.”
She buys a box of wine bottles.
“You’re having a party?” Lucius says.
“No, Lucius. I don’t throw parties. You know that.”
“I know that.”
“Just getting in my stores. I’m working. Then I needn’t go out again for a while, just stay put and write.”
“You’ve lost some weight,” Lucius says, “looks like about twenty-five pounds.”
Now she laughs. ‘Wo. I wish. But you know I do sometimes, when I work. Adrenaline.”
He totes the wine and the vegetables, and they stroll over to the bar on the quay, to which fresh fish are being brought in from the Sound. (The bar is at the top of what was, once, the Aquat
ic Museum. There are still old cases of bullet-and-robber- proof glass, with fossils in them, little ancient dragons of the deeps, only three feet long, and coelacanths with needle teeth.)
Lucius orders coffee and rum, but Yse only wants a mineral water. Is she dieting? He has never known her to do this. She has said, dieting became useless after her forty-third year.
Her hair hangs long, to her waist, blonde, with whiter blonde and silver in it. He can’t see any of the wax-ends of the extensions, or any grey either. Slimmer, her face, hands and shoulders have fined right down. Her skin is excellent, luminous and pale. Her eyes are crystalline, and outlined by soft black pencil he has never seen her use before.
She says sharply, “For a man who likes men, you surely know how to look a woman over, Lucius.”
“None better.”
“Well don’t.”
“I’m admiring you, Yse.”
“Well, still don’t. You’re embarrassing me. I’m not used to it any more. If I ever was.”
There is, he saw an hour ago – all across the market – a small white surgical dressing on the left side of her neck. Now she absently touches it, and pulls her finger away like her own mother would do. They say you can always tell a woman’s age from her hands. Yse’s hands look today like those of a woman of thirty-five.
“Something bite you, Yse?”
“An insect. It itches.”
“I came by in the boat,” he says, drinking his coffee, leaving the rum to stand in the glass. “I heard you playing that piano.”
“You must have heard someone else somewhere. I can’t play. I used to improvise, years ago. But then I had to sell my piano back then. This one... I haven’t been able to get the damn lid up. I’m frightened to force it in case everything breaks.”