On the seventh round of the bare rooms, kitchen with bread ovens, mess room with fire, interconnecting rooms off, he began to wonder if such a thing as a night-watchman was necessary.
There was nothing to steal except the fabric of the building, which was undoubtedly solid enough to resist larceny. The wretched woman would come back after she had given the child her tea. What a strange way of describing what must be dinner, and the thought reminded him that he was hungry.
He lost count of his circumnavigations and repetition did not improve the view. He sat down by the fireplace and dozed for a while. When he came round, stiff an chilled, a dull anger began to settle into a kind of mental indigestion, combined with boredom and a sense of being completely ineffectual, a person who was simply a suitable candidate for a practical joke.
The worst that could happen was a hungry night alone and a touch of hypothermia. He could go upstairs and deface the portraits, or form them into a shelter in the middle of the room and play at camping. Pity he could not borrow their garments. It was beginning to become colder. Then he considered the prospect, not of the night, but the morning, when the door would creak open and he would be seen, abject and stupid. She might gather a crowd to jeer at a tourist who could not tell the time; she might send a posse of name callers to bait him like a dancing bear in a medieval illustration. The poor, captive bear who did not even try to bite or release himself from his chains.
Who did not consider the affectionate solicitude of his hosts in this town enough to be concerned about them and their possible anxieties. The dummy who just sat there, and found a corner to urinate, and in the middle of that friendly crowd there would be Maggie with her metal hair and sweet, sardonic smile and it was Maggie's opinion which mattered most.
Time had moved on: Henry tried to recall what he had read about the castle in the relative comfort of the library and what he had learned from the map which he could no longer read. None of it helped, but it stood to reason that a place designed to house so many men must have a dozen exits, even if they were also designed to repel those who wanted to enter. Go down to the level of the moat area. Henry, where you saw all those little windows. You aren't too fat to squeeze through, find a door, get out, and once out, holler. Better the contempt of a single passer-by who might throw him a rope than that of the Mayor and the other inhabitants next morning. They would not beg leave to approach him with feelings of devoted loyalty and affectionate attachment.
Besides, he was sick of the sight of these particular walls. Any other set of walls would be an improvement. He took the downward slope from the fireplace room, marked the runs, with enough of his sense of humour intact to notice how uninviting this description was. What a crass lot they are, he reflected. Way out via The Runs. The slope was shallow, and then became steeper, suddenly, so that he stumbled to a halt in front of glass in a wall and a painted arrow telling him go left. What was this? A political instruction? He was feeling slightly hysterical and followed the sign.
Henry entered a narrow passageway which curved away to his right. There were narrow windows recessed into the deep walls and, out of habit, he began to count. One, two ... five, six, twelve, thirteen. Some of the windows were framed in crusty metal; he had stopped to touch, recoiling from the cold and the dampness of the condensation. The last security light had faded into memory. Now he touched each window; some stood open, level with his chin, but most of them were closed. The fifteenth window had no glass at all and cold air breezed over his forehead.
He wanted to go back, but surely he would be round the other side in a minute. His right foot hit shallow water. In this lack of light, he did not know if was encountering a flood or a puddle, and in the pause, as he began to step carefully rather than hurry, he heard the rustling ahead.
Loud. A furious, fluttering sound which arrested and then accelerated the motion of his heart and made the blood it pumped turn into boiling water.
Then a noise of furious knocking, tap, tap tap, TAP ,TAP, tap tap tat, tap tap tap TAT. He looked behind him and could not see from where he had come around the curving wall, looked ahead and saw the promise of another security light. The tapping ceased; the rustling, like the frantic shuffling of a hundred garments moving towards him, increased.
Became still, for a moment.
Henry could not see the ceiling and he could feel the walls squeezing him. It was less of the fear of what lay ahead than the fact that he no longer knew where he was and did not know the way back out. Fool, fool. There were all the symptoms: the desire to smack his head against the bricks so that at least pain could distract; the impulse to run, moan, lie down, the sensation of some massive blow to the solar plexus, the acute lack of breath and the madness. The overpowering imperative to fight, kick, beat his way out, the inability to breathe or even to shriek.
If the window had been wide enough and the drop a thousand feet, he would have jumped; if there had been knife, he would use it to mutilate himself, anything to stop it. Anything. And it would not go; he knew it could not go. Claustrophobic agony, each time a little taste of death so full of excruciating panic, he would cut off his hand to avoid it. Then he screamed and screamed and screamed, tried to stumble back in the direction he had already walked, tried to be logical, but he could not move; panic forbade. He braced himself against the narrow walls to get his breath, bashed his hand against the window, stuck his fingers inside his mouth and bit so hard he tasted blood.
Crouched in a heap in the puddle of water, he struggled for breath and began, manically, to chew his fingernails. The sounds were irrelevant. He could hear nothing.
Whatever he could see, was doubled. There was fungus on the wall; it reached out and.
touched Henry fainted.
A second. Maybe an hour. Came round, deafened by his own breathing, UHUH, UHUH, uhuh, uhuhy UHUH, and the scream coming, unable to emerge.
Apart from the thunder of his own breath, the silence was total, a background only to UHUH, UHUH, and the horrifying wheeze creeping out of his mouth in a desperate, gulping sound, like his father, close to death, ownuff, ownhuff, ownfuff, with the whole body of him involved in the effort.
Henry fixed his eyes to the patch of indigo sky visible from the high slit of window above his head only because it was different from the black of the wall. Forced himself not to blink until his eyes watered from the strain. The cold of the water seeping through his jeans began to have some remote meaning. He was lying in cold water and he must get up. He managed that, but the panic did not subside. He could get himself upright and know he was cold, was all. Then the fluttering sound began again, came towards him and retreated. He took two steps forward. One of Neil’s silly ghosts.
Harry is here to see you, kill you. He took one more step. The only way forward was towards the next light. The bird struck his outstretched arm, flew away and began battering, pecking, fluttering at the next barred window.
A bird; a captive bird in a futile dance.
He could not quite tell what type of bird, A starling perhaps; a tiny creature in relation to the noise it made. He moved towards it, unsteadily. The bird sensed him and moved to flutter madly at the next window, and the next. His presence terrified; the loud movement of the wings grew more frenetic. When Henry stopped, it stopped; when he moved, the bird moved. Once more, it forgot and flew towards him, encountered his forehead, flew back to batter at the next window. Gradually fascinated, Henry made himself stay still. His breath slowed down. He watched the outline of it, a confused, demented bullet of being.
There were open windows; he remembered them, back there. Remembering the glassless windows made him remember, too, that all he had to do, keeping his eyes shut if he needed, was to turn round and go back, one step after another and finally, even if he crawled, he would be in the larger spaces where he could breathe.
The bird was an idiotic bird which could not go back, only forward, instead of seeking the route which had brought it inside and using the same route to get out. Ham
mering again, at a narrow slit of metal-framed glass it would never open. How exhausted it must be, poor, desperate thing. More exhausted than himself. And if he had not appeared, it might have rested. Henry could not bear the thought that the bird might break its wings because of his presence, or that it would kill itself out of panic, die before morning. He was furious with pity for it ‘Hush; he said softly,
'hush.'
If he approached, the noise of his boots would set it off. He would be freakishly lucky if he were able to catch it in his hands. He would have to catch it with something else; something to throw over it. Henry stood as still as the walls, thinking out the problem. It was the only problem.
The only thing that mattered was to catch the starling and set it free.
Take these chains from my heart and set me free ... She did not like his choice of music and it had not been a successful day, or not in the way Neil had hoped.
Perhaps he simply was not used to the prolonged company of a female and a whole day together was a strain. Angela and himself had never been big on outings, even when their relationship was new; ah shit, he must not think of Angela. In the days when she had loved him, she had reassured him again and again that sex really did not matter and anyway, would improve in time if only his temper would do the same.
There was the occasional, almost successful coupling, and he knew how to please her but it was not the orgasm she wanted as much as the child which should result. He could have been a king, a millionaire mogul, an artist, an international athlete and still be nothing but a controlled diabetic with a low sperm count and erectile dysfunction. Perhaps the strain of a whole day with the new girl lay in the fact that he could not tell her about all that; could not yet entrust her with the worst aspect of his history, and somehow she knew he was hiding something. Women never did like that, but she would like it less if she knew.. One coupling achieved only-made it worse; it was the second that counted.
It had made him a thief, and not even a successful thief. A day trip to France, slightly marred by his anxious hopes for the evening, and his feeling of shame for the evening before. She sat across the table from him in his own house, smiling at him and admiring his cooking and drinking the wine they had bought. Or at least she drank, to please him, because he pressed it on her in the hope of relaxing the tension which seemed to have developed, while he himself drank sparingly, afraid it might interfere with the little blue pill he was going to take, soon.
Try 50mg, the doctor said. 100mg is average. It followed, in Neil's anxious way of thinking, that 300, the whole of the stash, might be even better. Three little pills and bugger the paucity of supplies. All gone by tomorrow, but tomorrow was another day and the rest of his life could take care of itself, if only he could keep her for a few hours.
'I got a present for you,' he said, coming back from the bathroom. The wine and the food had worked; she was languorous and mellow and leaned back against him as he draped the shawl round her shoulders. Against the background of his small, nondescript room, she was lovely; her skin soft and warm, and he never wanted her to think, I could do better than this.
'I can't stay all night,' she said. 'I'll have to get back, eventually.' She lived with her parents.
He liked the eventually. It would not take all night.
Maggie passed an hour in the most anonymous public house on the seafront, talking to old men about their dogs, drinking a glass or three of indifferent wine until she decided she could do better than that, caught the off-licence before closing time and exchanged cash for two bottles of chilled Sancerre and three packets of nuts. She hauled this booty indoors, beaming vacantly at Timothy and Peter, who both wanted to chat but backed away when they saw how the land lay.
She went upstairs, inflicted a manic tidying up on her room in order to give herself some sense of control, and then sat down to think. There was the nagging memory of Uncle Joe, but that was largely irrelevant, like a fly buzzing in the corner of a room, since most of all, she wanted to savour a feeling of triumph and read his letter for the third time. Could I please come and see you?
Not what he might have said: Why don't you come up to town and see me? He was suggesting that he make the effort to visit a scrubby little town he had always despised. Men are so blind, Francesca had said. I can't stand the way they leave and then have to come back later and tear the heart out.
Look, Philip, I have a modus operandi here, Maggie wanted to say. I live a small life with none of your entertaining; remember how we entertained, Philip? As elaborately and generously as the proprietors of my guest house cook for guests, Philip, only they do it at a fraction of the cost, treble the effort and with a genuine desire to please rather than impress. You tried to make me into a sophisticated clone of yourself but my favourite vegetable is still frozen peas and I prefer the kind of man who can enjoy an overcooked pizza and not notice. I let you dictate the whole progress of our lives, so that when you decided I was superfluous, I became a spare part.
She crunched on the nuts and reached for pen and paper; the wine scarcely pleasant. He had been a wine snob, messed and tinkered with the stuff and agonized over labels. Dear Philip, other people have better things to do and drink what they're damn well given, so they can get on with talking. Why did I let you distract me from anything that was ever really important? Why do I waste my time on lousy choices? She would write him a tremendous letter if only she could find the pen, not any of the old ball points that littered and clogged her bag, but the fountain pen which gave some dignity to her handwriting. Oh yes, she would let him have it in words, a verbal battering fit to shake him out of his own peerless prose and make him feel the rat he was.
Then she remembered another of those poems she had memorized so easily, long before the marriage days. '
When I loved you, I can't but allow
I had many an exquisite minute;
But the scorn that I feel for you now
Has even more luxury in it.
Thus, whether we're on or we're off,
Some witchery seems to await you,
To love you is pleasant enough,
But Oh! tis delicious to hate you!
The nuts were finished and she felt a vague, nauseous hunger, temporarily sated by another glass of wine. They would fret about her a little downstairs, but these locked-in evenings others were not without precedent, although they had been far less frequent, lately. ' Oh, tis delicious to hate you!' she wrote again, noticing how the writing was not steady. The fountain pen was running out of ink and she had no idea of where she had put the refills. Or whether she wanted Philip to come and see her and look at her life and what she had made of it in fifteen months sitting in a closet.
But the one thing she did know, even as she underlined the word, was that she did not hate him. She had never hated anyone for longer than a day; she did not have it in her; she might be absurdly hurt by the slightest hint of rejection, but she could not hate. Perhaps that meant she did not have the capacity to love men either. Of course you do, Francesca said, but only if they look at you. Recognize what you are. Anything else is insulting.
That was what she was, insulted. It was too soon for sleep; the wine was winning and by now Maggie did not want anyone to see her in this indecisively maudlin state. She washed, cursorily, in the upstairs basin, thought with a token guiltiness of all the other business of the day, brushed her hair until her scalp hurt as much as her head ached, tidied up rigorously and went to bed. Confused thoughts scuttling like rats, Angela, Harry, Henry, Harry, Neil, was Neil fishing on the beach with that dog. Henry. Fishing. Philip and how she had glibly explained the demise of that marriage.
Not quite the success we hoped. Not quite the success he had hoped. Not the answer to a girl's prayer, or even a man's. A bit thorough and brutal, if Neil remembered it right. Not as prolonged as it might have been, although he had rather lost touch with the passing of time.
Marvellous to fuck but not so entirely pleasant to be fucking and wonder
ing all the time how long it could last. The erection, the relationship, the fierceness of her embrace which had gradually turned into rather more dutiful gestures of fatigued encouragement as he went on and on, culminating in a noticeably timid curling away from him after the final groan. She kissed him in response to his smothering of grateful kisses and choked, heartfelt thanking her and telling her how wonderful she was, but it did not seem so long afterwards that she said she had to go, you know the way it is, becoming insistent about it.
And when he rose, with difficulty, to dress and escort her the short distance, she had kissed him again, more hurriedly and said, what nonsense, it was only a spit away down lit streets and she would not hear of it. This was no London, it was Warbling. She was chattering a bit, slipping away and gathering her clobber with twice the speed of his dressing, and then, before he could insist, was gone.
She was running away. She left behind the stolen shawl, folded over the kitchen chair. This hurried escape would have alarmed and worried him intensely, if the symptoms did not alarm him more. Neil lay on his bed, considering the implications of a foul headache and dizziness not lessened by closing his eyes. When he opened them, all that he could see appeared to be tinged with pink, giving him the impression of a mildly fluorescent evening or the colour of the sinking sun on the sea in summer.
He blinked to dispel it, but the pink tinge remained and when he turned on the overhead light, the brightness of it attacked his eyes. He was trembling and his mouth was dry.
The bleeper was going on his pager. Some bugger was in the castle and he could not see.
The only priority was to catch the bird. It fluttered at the next window and the sound of its fatigue was so cruel. Henry wanted to weep. He retreated two steps, very slowly, bent down and fumbled with his shoelaces until they were undone and he could slip off his boots. He shed his jacket quietly; it was too heavy to use as a snare; the little thing would be crushed to death. His cashmere pullover, because Henry had a weakness for fine woollens, was light and fine for all its protective warmth. The ground was cold and damp, soaking his socked feet as he tiptoed forward blindly.
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