Killing Violets

by Tanith Lee

  The professor lay propped up on pillows. Beside him a draped table massed with little bottles, spoons, a glass. A fly buzzed against the shutter. Anna wanted to go and let it out, but the man’s old grey lids groped up and he saw her.

  “You’re here,” he said.

  Anna realised drearily that she must now sit down in the chair by the bed. She did not know why he had wanted her presence, and yet she dreaded a long vigil, perhaps confessions of some sort he could not reveal to anyone else.

  Anna sat in the chair. Was he dying? Did he know?

  “She brought a priest,” he said, showing he did. “But I sent him away. No good to me.” Then he struggled forward and to her amorphous horror, caught her hand. “Anna, Anna – I needed you so badly. Only you.” A cold wash passed over her skin. What did he want? Oh God, please let it not be he had fallen in love with her. There had been that other time, when she was only fifteen, and having to lie in those arms to comfort, until death came and she was able to pull free… “Anna, listen.”

  “Yes… what is it?”

  “My book…”

  She found she was breathing after all. “Your book.”

  “Take all the pages, Anna, and throw them over a bridge into the canal. Don’t miss any.”

  “The canal.”

  “Yes. Oh, someone may find one or two. That doesn’t matter. They’ll be ruined quickly, the canal’s so dirty.”

  She thought how he had worked endlessly, diligently, all the typing, the re-typing, the swathes of pages added.

  “If it’s what you want.”

  “Yes, yes. I shouldn’t have presumed. If there had been time – but not like this. No one must see.”

  It was as if he had written something scurrilous or terrible, which might bring down the state.

  “But when you’re well again,” she said, carefully.

  “I’m done for,” he said, with all the tragedy of a young hero dying in the arms of his lover or most faithful friend. He added, as if to confirm her notion, “The rest is silence.”

  And then, extraordinarily, she thought he had died on that perfect cue. His head fell back, and his mouth opened as his eyes shut.

  She got up and ran to the window, and flung aside the shutter and undid the catch, and the fly flew out like his Roman soul.

  But downstairs the fat woman was standing with a doctor, pompous in a black coat, and when Anna said she believed the professor had died, the doctor stared at her with sceptical scorn, since only a doctor was able to recognise a death.

  In fact, in this instance, he was correct, but by then Anna had gathered up all the manuscript from the typing room. It was remarkably heavy, and she tied the bulging bundle with string, as if for a publisher.

  As she came out of the room, she heard the doctor and the professor talking in low elderly voices along the corridor. This jolted her, but she didn’t go to see. She carried the manuscript down and out of the house, and walked directly to the canal.

  Although it was indeed filthy, under a blue sky the water was like cracked sapphire, and children were sailing small boats. She had to find another bridge, not to sink them. Here she heaved the manuscript over, and a woman in a garden on the farther bank glared at her suspiciously. She thinks it’s my stillborn baby wrapped in newspaper.

  Anna read of the professor’s death in just such a journal two days later. It was a patronising and miniature mention. She did not go back to the house and had no further communication from it. He had not paid her on her last two or three visits; now she had no employment at all.

  But she ate very little, smoked cigarettes only as a luxury, and had already put by a small sum for stockings and the rent.

  Every so often she had gone back to the café near the public gardens where the young man had come in and walked over to her table, the young man with the warrior’s stain of birthmark. She didn’t think she did this for any particular reason. It was a café she frequented from time to time, on the days she did not go to the professor’s house.

  Now she would not be going to the professor’s house, presumably, ever again, Anna walked to the café every day, although at different times. She would drink coffee and scan the journals for innocuous work, typing, or the walking of rich people’s pet dogs, posing even for artists. She had always done these things.

  Ten days after she had read of the professor’s death, she was sitting in the café in the late afternoon. She had found no work at all, despite once going to a shop which required a typist. (A shop woman in a beige dress to her ankles had told Anna she was too slow and her spelling was ‘old fashioned’.)

  With no prospect of an upsurge in her finances, Anna had ordered coffee and also chocolate bread, which she spread with white butter and sprinkled with cinnamon.

  As she finished the last piece, the café door let in the young man.

  He was as she recalled, slim, and a little more than average height. He had a clear, quite beautiful skin, just tanned from summer, and the mark shone like a cornelian in the shade of his hat tilted to hide it.

  Either he did not see Anna, or did not remember her, or wished to forget her. He sat across the room in a corner, the birthmark to the wall.

  Anna licked her fingers, and watched him covertly. Then she lit a cigarette. But the flash of the match didn’t attract his eye. Of course, people constantly struck matches.

  Her coffee was all gone. She ordered a brandy.

  Visitors to the café came and went. The young man sat in his corner. He drank two long drinks, and read a book. When the drinks were drunk, he closed the book and put it in his pocket. Then he put down some coins on the table and walked out.

  He passed Anna’s table. He did not see her. She was sure he didn’t. His idea of making himself invisible appeared to be to see no one else. She recollected this from the tram-ride where she had first met him. The tram had lurched and he had bumped against her, uttering a low, stifled apology in his musical voice. This was how they had begun to talk.

  Anna swallowed her drink. She got up and went to the door, and looked along the street.

  Children were running and laughing in the gardens, and birds sang. Somewhere there was what sounded like a hurdy-gurdy playing. The sunlight had left the lower trees, which were draped in shadow, and hit their tops like golden powder.

  She hadn’t been quick enough, for he was gone. His footsteps didn’t show on the street.

  Anna returned inside the café. “That gentleman who just left…”

  “Which gentleman?”

  Anna said, awkwardly, “He has a mark on his face.”

  But the girl shook her head. “I didn’t see.”

  Anna stood a moment by his corner table. The coins and the glass were gone, but he had deposited the ashes of a cigarette. Anna put her finger into the ash, then brushed it away in irritation.

  That night she dreamed she was talking to the corner table. “Which book was he reading?”

  “Oh, a clever book. But I can’t tell you. I can’t read.”

  “When will he come back?”

  “Oh, any day.”

  “Where did he go to?”

  The table said, “Try clocks.”

  When she woke up, this odd sequence was paint-fresh in her mind. She considered if it had any meaning.

  But she had nothing to do, and when she was washed and dressed and had powdered her face, she went out and walked about, first to the armillary clock on the wall of the museum, and then to the black clock on the cathedral over the square.

  She thought of the clock-tower at the end of the professor’s street, and wondered if that was what had prompted the dream-table’s oracular message. Anna did not want to go this way. She imagined meeting the fat cook in the street, and the woman striking her, saying she would get no money from the dead. Or even that at the last the professor had wanted his manuscript, and died in despair because Anna had thrown it in the canal.

  Instead Anna wended back towards the café where she had seen t
he young man yesterday. En route, she entered a narrow passage, whose upper storeys overhung the path. Here, was a dark jeweller’s, with silver watches gleaming in the window like ticking eyes.

  He stood in the doorway, his hat tilted, the birthmark turned from the sound of her approaching steps.

  “Hallo,” said Anna. She added softly, because the dream had been magical and therefore it must be all right, “I knew where to find you.”

  He half turned back, then darted his head away.

  “Who are you?” he said. But she knew now he remembered her.

  “Aren’t the watches strange,” she said, “they all say a different time.”

  “Yes,” he said. The clear side of his face had faintly blushed. Something moved in Anna’s heart, and something ached a moment in her spine, first behind her head and then at the base of her pelvis.

  “Were you buying a watch?” she asked.

  “No… no. I do the old man’s books. His takings. His eyes aren’t good.”

  Anna was always impressed by people who could add up, subtract. She collated the other remark more slowly. He did not like to be seen, so poor eyesight might be of great use.

  “But you were leaving,” said Anna.

  “Yes. I’d finished.”

  “It’s so hot,” said Anna. “Shall we have a drink?”

  “No. I have to catch the tram.”

  They walked together, not hurrying, along the passage.

  Neither spoke, like shy children. But some water had been spilled across the way, and when they came to it, he took her arm gently. Only for a moment. His hand, she saw, tanned, with long expressive fingers, trembled.

  Then the day was there and across the street the tram lines glinted, hard as nails.

  “I’ve lost my job,” said Anna.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind. I like walking about. And I can easily find something.”

  “I thought,” he said, “you might be an actress. Or a dancer.”

  Anna was amused, pleased. “Oh, no.” These occupations had always seemed to her to require talent.

  “You move so gracefully.” he said. He blushed again.

  Anna took his arm, and they walked down the street, and went to where the tram was already rolling towards them, separating as a knife.

  But Anna got on the tram with him.

  He didn’t remonstrate or comment. He paid their fare and they sat together, near the back. Now the hat, tilted for utterly hopeless concealment, did manage to conceal his face from her. She wanted quietly to push the hat up. They spoke desultorily now, the words awkward. People might hear.

  She wondered where they were going.

  They got out in a sun-drenched rope of street, and then there were houses, stacked together like cards, and a door was open on a space and a stair.

  “I live here,” he said.

  Anna was nonplussed, she couldn’t quite see why. They had gone so far and so fast, and all at this hesitant, leisurely, halting pace.

  Of course, she had gone directly with men to their rooms and lain down on their floors and beds with them. But those encounters were not this one.

  “I’d love a glass of wine,” Anna said, for there was a café she could see, with tables.

  “I have some wine,” he said, “in my room.” He would not look at her, and now the left side of his face was stone white, like marble and the dead in books.

  “Yes,” said Anna.

  They went up the stairs, and she wondered what she would see, and thought she had been unwise again. But the sun smashed through the narrow windows on to the treads of the stairs, and a clean threadbare carpet, and she could smell geraniums and furniture oil, coffee, and her own powder roused by the heat.

  His room was very bare, with a table and some chairs, a cupboard, one cabinet without doors, full of books, a bed behind a curtain – a white curtain, like the white curtains at the windows. There was a wash-stand, and in cool water, the bottle of yellow wine. And on the table, a bowl of dark pink fruit that she did not identify for a long while as peaches, they seemed so curious, and new.

  “Do you always have wine? How civilised.”

  “No. It was for you. I knew – I’d meet you.”

  Her heart slowed until she thought it had stopped. But it had been gathering itself for a leap.

  “Oh, how?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I saw you yesterday,” she said, “in the café by the gardens.”

  “Perhaps it’s that, then. I saw you too, and didn’t know.”

  “You mean, you didn’t remember me.”

  “No. I mean… It wasn’t you, yesterday.”

  Anna laughed. She understood just what he meant, without understanding him at all.

  They sat on the hard chairs at the table, and drank the wine. He had taken off his jacket, and the hat. She was fascinated by the pale shirt against his brown throat and hands. The fair hair whitening above the scarlet. Although, he kept his hand mostly over his right cheek.

  She too took off her hat, her shoes.

  They began to talk seriously, as if beginning on a very complicated meal, which it had taken them all their lives to prepare, and which must be approached with respect.

  During this feast, of dialogue, she told of her childhood, her itinerant father hauling her from city to city. That she had never had the presence of a mother, but once, when she was twelve, was shown a most beautiful dead embalmed corpse, that she was informed had been her mother. And that she had not been able to make any connection between herself and it, though old women in black stood sobbing by her, urging her on to lament.

  She mentioned borders crossed at night through woods and thorns. Olive groves, and a sea like turquoise. She explained her father had eventually disappeared. That she had made her way by herself.

  (The peaches were from a hothouse, expensive. He cut them open, and they ate them, the syrup pouring back into the plates. And they licked the plates like cats, shamelessly.)

  He told her, he had been intended to be a priest. “Because,” he said, “of my face.” When she seemed shocked, he laughed abruptly. Only God could put up with him, but then, God had done it to him in the first place. He passed from curtailed childhood to the loaf-thick walls, where he was beaten and starved, along with all the other boys. Here he grew up, seeing the village sometimes, on the side of the hill, where he had been born, far off as something viewed from the sky.

  Then the priests had taken him aside. It seemed he wasn’t fit for God either. The other boys were superstitious of him. The laity would be distressed by his appearance, when they should be fixing their minds on the Infinite.

  Cast off, he too had made his way. He was clever with figures, that is, most people were so bad with them, his slight aptitude seemed like a talent.

  The day had passed over like the amber sail of a windmill, altering the shadows in the room.

  Blue scents now came through the half-parted windows.

  “It’s so late,” he said. “You must go, Anna.” And when she stared at him, stunned as if he had suddenly slapped her, he said, “It’s been a wonderful day you’ve given me. I don’t deserve it. I won’t forget. But it’s evening.”

  She said, her voice very little in the dusk, “But we could go out for a meal. I have lots of money saved. Let me pay for it.”

  “No, Anna. Thank you. You said…”

  “But I have. Really. My last employer left me something, you see.”

  “I’m glad. But I have enough. And anyway, I don’t like brightly lit places, unless I must.”

  “Well, I can go to a shop and buy some food, some more wine…”

  “Anna, Anna,” he said.

  There was a long silence.

  Uncannily she heard the clang of a tram, down in the street, which all afternoon she must have done, and had not.

  He said, “We have nowhere to go, Anna.”

  She knew his name, too, by this time. She used it. �
�Árpád,” she said, “I’m not – it isn’t – but I should like…”

  Árpád rose. Against the window, his face was opalescently dark, like a jewel with one or two darker facets.

  He went with her down to the street, and waited, his hat tilted, turned from the street lamps, for the tram to rush roaring up.

  In the scuffle as other passengers got on, he pressed his cool mouth to her fingers.

  “I will never forget you, darling.”

  As she sat on the tram, she saw raindrops had stained her skirt. There was no rain. Like the noise of the trams that afternoon, she had not heard the quiet sound of her own crying, until that moment.

  As she walked Preguna, Anna saw an advertisement in the window of a fashionable shop. In Paris, or Athens, such a shop would be laughed at. Here it was quite important.

  Anna went home, and manicured her nails, she put on her best summer dress, the sleeves of which she had had altered, like little gossamer wings. She combed her hair starkly and put on a hat of straw and net, and her reddest lipstick.

  At the shop she was interviewed by another sharp woman, this one in a sharp dress of dark blue muslin.

  Anna spoke succinctly, checking herself, watching every word. She dropped mentions of other cities. She had been working with a professor, a friend of her father’s, on a historical work. But that was done now, and she was bored. It was either find something of interest to occupy her, or move on quickly to another place.

  Probably the woman did not believe very many of these lies. She looked at Anna shrewdly.

  “The assistant’s post is filled. But we give a couple of little shows most weeks, for some of our clients, to display the nicer, more costly gowns. You have the right figure. You’d be surprised, the number of fifty-year-old women who think they’ll look just the same, once they’ve seen a dress on a slim young girl.”

  So Anna was engaged as a model.

  The work involved her only two or three afternoons a week, but she was paid much more than the professor had ever offered.

  The shows were held in the large back premises of the shop, a big chamber of velvet chairs and a raised walk.