by Tanith Lee
Lilith said nothing about the fire. Her hands and eyes, and the beads on the supper dress, glimmered peculiarly in the firelight.
“What’s the nearest town, Lily?” said Anna.
The fox maid said a name, but it was incomprehensible and unknown.
“How far are we from London?”
Lilith stared right at her. Her eyes seemed to leave the glim of her face and float luminously, like topazes in the air.
“Lonun? Oh thabee fur off.”
It was all very stupid, this, wasn’t it? Anna was a displaced person, but she did not need to be a prisoner.
One got into these habits, like carrying heavy laundry, the pressures of what was expected of you, forcing you round and round in a dull trance. Just so she had gone to school day after day, as a child, the school where she could barely speak the language, and the other children ripped her hair. Until the day it occurred to her she need not go, they would not bother, and so all summer, until the next flight, she sat on the hawk-swooped hills, where the olive trees anciently grew, twisted in adolescent gossamer, about the ancient fort. It was simple.
Lilian sat in her apartment. A dressing room opened from it, and two closed doors. It was all done in tones of cream and milk, but the bed was a strawberry.
She sat like a woman in a painting, her Chinese robe of embroidered ochre silk fallen wide open. She was naked.
Her body was plump but not very firm, the breasts drooping. At her belly’s pit the fleece of her hair was a ripe black, shining as if oiled and brushed, permed and even set, like her upper hair.
“Oh, Anna. Do sit. I wanted to talk to you.”
It was reminiscent of a harem. The black beetle-dogs of the maids, three, four of them, eddied about her. One did not fan Lilian with an ostrich plume, but instead stoked the fire.
Firelight played over skin and black dresses.
A girl sorting garments, another sewing something in a corner. One mixing cocktails at a lacquer table. There were even olives.
The air smelled of women, flesh and hair, alcohol, scent.
Anna sat down.
Her own dress was black, but the beads were malachite. She turned a little sideways, from the pouting collapsing staring breasts.
“Oh God. You’re not embarrassed, are you?”
Lilian laughed, and her vagina opened. Just a momentary glimpse. Like a rosy wink.
Anna shook her head.
“Oh good. I know you foreigners can be a bit stuffy. Oh for Christ’s sake…” Her voice lifted to a shout. “Haven’t you found it yet?”
“Noum.”
“Hurry up, you arse.” It was the maid sorting through the dresses. “Fucking useless,” said Lilian. This was another personality, or the inner life revealed. Abruptly she picked up her cigarette case, heavy gold, and threw it directly at the head of the maid bending to the drinks. “Hurry up, fuck you.”
The girl was struck. She reeled. But the cocktail did not spill, and after a second, she was in place again, setting an olive in each glass.
Anna swallowed. She felt dizzy from the blow.
They drank the cocktails.
(Margaret) Lilian began to talk.
She spoke about clothes, how it was impossible to get anything decent. She must go to London. Anna ought to come with her. Anna thought of Raoul’s pledge, which might be unmeant, as this almost definitely was, wasn’t it?
Lilian spoke as if Anna were quite a close friend. Almost as if Anna were of Lilian’s class, or status. Whatever her status was. Then again, she assumed Anna would be happy to accompany her, happy to listen. This demonstrated that Anna was an inferior in many ways, socially and humanly, eager for titbits from this more important table.
“Tommy’s hopeless.” said Lilian. Anna did not ask who Tommy was, for surely he must be the husband with the scarred eyebrow. Lilian went on, “All he cares about is the business.” What business? Anna did not ask. “And the Basulte land. He likes the land. That’s what he married, after all.”
“Do you know,” said Lilian loudly, raising her arms for the silk slip to be slipped on, since by now the maids were dressing her. “Our first night, I mean our wedding night, he was downstairs drinking until nearly six a.m. Six, I ask you.” But she was not asking, only telling. “Hopeless that way, too, of course. But most of them are. Don’t you find that? I need three or four gins even to feel like it nowadays. I keep saying, Slow down, Tommy, for Christ’s sake. It’s not the fucking Derby.”
She must be talking about the sexual act. Internally Anna twitched, not a flicker of pleasure or anticipation, uncomfortable actually.
The leering breasts had hooded their eyes in silk and lace, and now Lilian was being hooked into an old-fashioned cherry-coloured dress.
A maid came and held out a lipstick and a mirror coped in silver. Lilian crayoned her mouth on and on, as if she were eating something. Between layerings, she still spoke.
“I suppose you’ve had quite an exciting life, Anna.”
Was this a question? No.
“God, I almost envy you. They value women on the continent, make them into little goddesses. I bet you could teach me a few tricks. But I wouldn’t be able to use them. Wouldn’t be worth it, with bloody old Tommy.”
Was Tommy old? He hadn’t seemed to be.
“Raoul though. I suppose Raoul’s all right.” The lipstick was finished. Lilian stalked to a pier-glass and manoeuvred in front of it, smoothing down material over her hips. “Not so bad, old girl. Not so bad.” So that was the connotation of old here. “Oh. Raoul and I,” said Lilian. She thrust her empty glass at one of the maids, “Fill me up. Yes, Raoul… I’ve no doubt he told you. We’ve done a thing or two. When we wore nippers, you know. Nippers – the nanny used to call us that. The Nippers.”
Mystified, Anna visualised talons; clipping, pincing motions.
“He pulled down my knickers and had a damn good look and I undid his buttons. What a silly little pink shrimp. Probably not like that now. Oh, don’t get the idea we did anything much,” said Lilian, boastfully. “A bit of slap and tickle. God I’m starved.”
Anna glanced at the maids, as Lilian and she left the room. Were they faceless as eggs? Yes, how odd, truly they seemed to be. The way Orientals were said to be, all the same, except that, with Orientals, one instantly saw this statement was ridiculous.
The girl who had been struck by the cigarette case had the angry star of a bruise rising on her forehead. Anna had seen terrible things, disgusting things, but that action, so needless, heedless, had planted in her a seed of nausea. She could not forget, it. It would be wrong to forget it.
Even so, despite the bruise, bobbing, heads bent down.
There were vast cheeses, but without crusts, these had rinds. Their texture was like softish wax. And a cold ham, a salad, loaves, little pies, relishes. Beer.
The English ate such a lot, and so often.
Raoul was there. He spoke to her jollily. He was really and certainly changing, even physically, as if to be camouflaged among his kin. He had been pale and slender, serious and quizzical, all across Europe. His face had a sort of flush to it now and looked fuller, and smug. He laughed loudly, and punched the brother, William?, in the chest. “Dashed bugger.”
After supper the women played cards in the salon, some complex game, which they said they wanted Anna to join, and said they would teach her, and this she doubted. She replied she had a slight headache.
The men retreated away over the house, to put as much distance as was feasible between themselves and the women. In the Smoking Room they would drink port and brandy, apparently.
The servants moved on oiled runners.
Anna sat in a big chair. She read one of the old novels, which as usual she could barely grasp.
She heard Lilian say, “Anna and I had quite a chat. Oh, quite a conversation.”
Then Anna dreamed she had walked all the way to Lonun, as savage lower-class characters sometimes did in the novels. It was a conglome
rate of spidery towers craning on a purple sky. The Houses of Parliament – she had once seen their picture – floated in a river of zinc.
When she woke, the women played on, drinking whisky and swearing, but not as Lilian had sworn upstairs.
Anna stole cautiously from the room.
Opening her bedroom door, she found a piece of writing paper had been pushed under. On it, another map.
Raoul had not approached her for anything, scarcely to talk. Walks and congress no longer seemed to matter to him, and the phantom of the capital was forgotten.
Nor was the map Raoul’s. Nor Lilian’s. A new hand, which made sharp black unlinked edges, the writing a scrawl.
But she made out the direction. The way up to the greenhouse glass box on the tower, the place where she had sat with the man perhaps called William, and he had lied or informed her he had been her lover.
His map, then? His invitation?
Anna sat down at the dressing-table. Beyond undrawn curtains – strange, normally they were drawn by now – the cut lawns ran to the sculpted beeches, and then the river sliced the fields and the mountains, which were hills, cuddled the sky, but moonless night had extinguished everything. Out there – might be only an abyss.
Somewhere an English fox screamed. Anna started. It had happened before, and been identified to her. But the sound was frightful, agony or malediction. No wonder such creatures were hunted. They must be insane and very dangerous – worse than wolves. (She had heard strange noises in the park quite often.)
If she obliged William now, he might facilitate her going away, and even help her monetarily. She didn’t for a moment credit this. Nor did she think, if she ignored the challenge, she would be left in peace.
She took off the beaded dress, and fumbled, for she had absurdly already got used to the assistance of the maid.
Anna put on a wrap. If anyone found her in the corridors she would pretend she was sleep-walking. She had done this once, elsewhere, and got away with it.
She was a sort of sleep-walker anyway. There was always this compulsion to go forward, through cities, along roads, across the borders of countries. And into events, blindfolded, searching with her hands. How could you not turn the page? Even in the dark.
The corridors however were lit by the powerful electric lights. Anna had no difficulty, and soon enough there was the stair going up.
It occurred to her quite suddenly at this instant, she had not seen the main entrance hall since her arrival. It had a black and white chequered floor as if for a game of chess, and two fireplaces. The walls were hung by swords and other bellicose paraphernalia, and the heads of stags, floretted with antlers. For the country walk though, Raoul had taken her through back rooms with chests and guns. She could not recall the way at all to the front of the house.
Then she went up the stair and was in the green corridor.
No doors stood open.
When she came to the second small stair, an appalling odour drifted in gusts to her on the condensed air of the house, at first seeming imagined, then returning more solidly. It was sweetish, yet sour, wet – yet dry, dirty, unspeakable. She thought of a time in Paris, a dead rat under the floor…
From above, in the conservatory box, began a harsh restless crying and moaning. Someone in awful and relentless pain. Almost more distressing than the fox.
Anna moved up the stair, and the conservatory was before her. It was soft-lit, only an oil lamp burning against the glass, old light, from an earlier era. At first she did not reason out what she saw by its glow.
On the table the books were spilled. The decanter stood unstoppered in a puddle of liquid.
A girl in a black dress lay over the table, her head hanging off the table’s end, so Anna saw her upside down. The hair was undone, a tangle of honey straw. Her black dress, the buttons gaping, one round breast brought out, and the rest of her crushed.
She was howling in her delirium. Now and then she gave a mindless cry, not quite like a beast, the beast in the park.
The man lay over and worked on her, inside her. It was one of the Basulte men. In the lamplight, Anna could not be sure which of them.
At every thrust of his body, the girl, sobbing, whining, her eyes shut, her head tossing. Joy or pain? It was impossible to tell which.
She was one of the servants, the slaves. Her apron too flopped to one side, a gasping starched tongue, and the starched bonnet was caught, like a white insect, in the riot of her hair.
On the floor under the table, where they must have knocked them, kicked them, the two slices of gammon Anna had not eaten, nearly a week before, cotton now, putrid, crawled with little wiggling things.
Above the hubbub, his panting, her cries, the colossal roar of stench, the rain prickled delicately on the glass roof, in spangles and sequins, the saliva of moonless, watching, avid night.
Chapter Four: Then
Her life had been a series of bizarre little vignettes. There were so many of them, it seemed almost inappropriate to put them all together, and call this mosaic an Existence.
They were scenes from a play, perhaps. Now a child was dragged along a street, a woman running after the man who dragged the child, waving the man’s shirt and shouting. A procession with a band and a white goat led on a leash, and a girl standing at the roadside, smiling at the soldiers, her fur coat open slightly, revealing she was naked under it. And the soldiers too tired to notice. There was a woman with flowers in her black hair, or they might be ribbons, lying as if dead in a large rumpled bed whose pillows were decorated with lace. Women with baskets picking olives, fingers gnarled like the trees. A drunken man singing in an orange café.
Always, to everything, a background of movement. Of coming or going away. Train, boats on choppy water. Even a carriage drawn by horses, and mountains pointed up by snow.
Finally Anna came down like a deer to a river, and met Raoul Basulte. But that recent memory was different. It had been removed this side of a pane of thick glass, transparent but impervious. Behind the pane, the other memories, all the vignettes, the Past, crouched, bottled up together. And in the midst of them there grew up one tall, tall tree.
The tree cast its shadow away into the distance, back as far as Anna’s birth, or so it seemed to her. And forward, over and through the glass partition, into her present, and then again on, into her future, for ever.
Someone ran up the stairs and knocked on her door. The house where she lodged in Preguna was always full of changing people. She did not recognize the boy, which didn’t surprise her.
“There’s a fat woman downstairs.” Anna shook her head. “From your work-place.”
“Oh.”
“She says the old man’s taken sick. Wants you to come.”
Anna shut the door and dressed. She had been sitting in the chair smoking and drinking coffee, which the German woman brought her on Sundays. Outside the sun was climbing the delft blue sky. It was about ten o’clock.
The fat woman was the woman with the bun, who cooked at the professor’s house, and perhaps poisoned Anna’s strudel. Her face was sulky but frightened, and pale.
“He was taken ill in the night. He said you must go to him.”
Anna could not think why. She was an employee, sometimes a sort of toy. Now and then she had felt sorry for the professor, especially after his sad sudden little hiccup-orgasms. At other times she was rather envious. He had a pension, he had his comforts, and was always writing his book, which he seemed to think was important. He had even, after all, found an easy and successful way to vent the slight sexuality still in him.
Then again, if he was dying, which seemed likely, though the fat woman had not said so, she didn’t envy him at all.
The shutters were uniformly closed, and outside on the cobbles Anna saw something she had never seen except very occasionally, in her childhood, straw thrown down there, to muffle any noise of traffic.
When the woman saw the straw on the road, she put her hands over her face and wep
t. Anna waited. She wondered if she should say something. Finally she said, “I’m sorry. You’ve been with him a long time.”
The woman said, through her tears and hands, “He was the father of my child.”
Anna was startled.
“Yes, yes. It was long ago. The baby died.”
Anna thought, wondering what else she could say. The woman was the professor’s cook. Yet she had borne his child.
The woman wiped her face with a handkerchief. She said, “It wasn’t love, you understand. We were younger. One night. It was the summer carnival, when they wear the masks, here, and everyone goes mad. He was kind afterwards. He offered to marry me. But he would have lost everything, and I didn’t want to. He would have adopted the boy, but he’s in the cemetery. Only three months old. Not even a person.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“No, you are not. People say these things. It’s nothing to you. And I suppose when the professor is dead you’ll expect some money.”
Anna had not thought of this. A flickering passed over her mind and stomach, like faint lightning.
“He has nothing,” announced the woman damningly. “The house will go to the government. I shall work in my sister’s husband’s restaurant, in Bucharest. A long journey. And I hate trains.”
They went into the house, which now felt impermanent as a structure formed from pasteboard.
There was the vaguest medical smell, as if something had been swabbed with ether. The brown air was filled with slender lit columns of dust.
Upstairs, Anna found the door of the bedroom ajar. She had seen into it once or twice, sent to fetch something by the professor. It was a big room, but with a large fireplace, the bed canopied, and there were a massive chest and a wardrobe, bookcases, and so on, so that all the space had been claustrophobically filled. There were paintings on the walls, too, dull and sepia, like the rest, hunts and battles, and one of a depressed girl brooding over a letter, clearly marked, in French, His last words to her.