by Tanith Lee
Here, with red lips and nails, powdered arms and face, Anna stalked in fine high-heeled shoes that had marcasite buckles or gilded bows, the tea gowns and evening dresses clinging to her slender new-moon curves. Not even knickers could be worn under such clothes, let alone a brassiere or garter-belt. The trick was to damp the body first with the wet sponge, next sliding the silk and satin home, so that it dried to the body like a second skin.
She discovered soon why she had been hired. The blue woman liked herself to look at slim young girls dressing or undressing, or simply sprawled, smoking, and bare but for their cosmetics. However Peepy, as the other three models called her behind her back, seldom touched and never propositioned.
“Oh, she’s quite safe,” said the brunette, “she lives with some old woman lover who’s madly jealous. Peepy loves her, but likes to tickle her own fancy a bit with us.” The redhead was coarsest. She would flaunt and tempt Peepy, approaching her to ask if Peepy would help with this dress or that, asking if she had a pimple on her bottom – yes, just there, it felt sore, or letting slip a strap to display one breast. Afterwards it was she who would call the woman other rather bestial names.
Anna did not mind Peepy. Even if Peepy had asked for more substantial favours, Anna would probably have granted them. She had usually granted them to men.
Perhaps it would have been a relief. Her mind was full of Árpád, her body was full of him. It fluttered and twanged, and sometimes, when she had not thought of him for half an hour, something would recall him to her, the hot sunlight falling on the backstairs of the shop, the tilt of a man’s hat in the street, and her stomach would turn itself over, not quickly, but like a heavy, sinking wave. Alone, she would look at herself in a mirror, and she would think, If only you could see me, just like this.
Remembering things he had said, she heard his voice. He had a beautiful voice.
The idea of him passed over and over her, like the reflections of clouds. He was always with her.
She had never felt this way for any man. It was not desire, or not only desire. Sometimes she thought of him moving alone about Preguna, and her eyes stabbed with tears. Sometimes she felt a wild rage that echoed away through her brain, shouting his name, and she wanted to tie him to a post and beat him – but this image was a sexual one, and would soon resolve itself in arousal, and so to compassion and tenderness.
She tried to see how it must be for him. But she was only afraid he did not want her. So she looked into a mirror, turning her face to catch the light, widening her eyes until she was perfect, and then thinking, If only he could see me as I am now.
Now and then the other girls ‘borrowed’ dresses, for personal use outside the shop. They boasted of this to Anna. Presently she realised, from certain snide remarks, that they distrusted her, since she now knew their habit and had not succumbed as they had. This might lead to trouble. In another country, a petty pilferer had got Anna the sack because she had not wanted, or thought, of also companionably pilfering.
So Anna told the other girls she would like to wear the white silk gown one night, but she would wait until her friend took her somewhere suitable.
“Once she got a spot of red wine,” said the brunette of the other blonde, “on one of the jackets. It was moile velvet. Guess what she did? She had the sewing girl sew a flower in gold beads over the stain. It cost a lot of money, but better than the cost of a whole jacket.”
“And that woman from the cathedral street bought it,” said the redhead, “and the silly cow said, Ooh look, what a cunning place to put a flower. It just makes the jacket.”
Having staked a claim to the white dress, Anna began to study it, stroke it sometimes. She had modelled it twice, but it was very expensive, and cut only for the most svelte body. Women admired, but did not buy.
The white silk clung, then fell loosely below her knee to the ankle. Its low bosom described the breasts, the silk ending in two diamante straps. The back was even lower, where the diamante strands ran down to the waist, forming there a sparkling butterfly.
Anna, privately, had no notion of ever wearing the dress, except for the shows at the shop.
The last show, although Anna did not know it, was late on a thundery afternoon, the sky as low as a collapsed ceiling which seemed likely to fall down on the streets.
Anna put on the white silk dress in a cloud of powder, the sticky smells of women, their scent and clean sweat, in her nose.
Beyond the curtain, which the shop coyly put up between the models’ entrance and the waiting customers, all the velvet chairs were full. The high buzz and squeaks of female voices. The fan whirring round and round, like a spider, in the roof.
Peepy sat very upright in a coal-dark dress in the front row. Beside her was another woman, much older, with a wonderful raddled face and huge eyes, ringed in kohl. She had brassy earrings like a gypsy’s.
“Look, look,” said the girls, “it’s Peepy’s old loveress. She’s forced her way in.”
At first nothing happened. The redhead, then the blondes (including Anna), then the brunette, emerged, displayed the shop’s finery, and retreated.
The old lover – she might be seventy – sat crouched and baleful. Her mouth was stony, and her great eyes carved from ink and pain. She ceaselessly smoked; her cigarettes were brown and poked into a holder of cloudy jade. She consumed them as if she hated them and paid them out.
When Peepy got up to indicate some frill or accessory, the old lover glared at her.
Such hatred, such malevolence. Such absolute concentration.
Anna recognized a burning and devouring, awful, magnificent love.
Do I feel this – any of this – for him?
Yes – she thought – yes – and as she stepped out on the walk, now in the white silk dress, (which someone had apparently wanted to see), she raised her head like a fierce horse scenting battle. She wanted to run to him at once, to tear him open with her teeth and nails, to touch his heart, to drink his blood…
It was at this instant, as Anna was halfway along the walk, that the lover sprang from her seat. She pushed out into the space before the chairs, and turning, faced the audience of well-bred, wealthy women.
“I have seen enough. She is harlot. She is faithless. Honour – what is honour to her? We grow old. Even this one – this lily of white in her skin – she too – she too – Once I was this. I – better. But now I am nothing. Quick! To graveyard with me. Harlot! Harlot!”
Peepy had risen. The room was still as deafness, only the resonance of the maddened voice yet tolling in it like the clapper of a brazen bell.
The old lover wept. Black streamed down her face. She was the essence of a tragedy ancient as the world.
And Peepy, first white with shock, then flushed with shame, then everything forgotten, rushed to her and caught her in her arms, smothering her with kisses and cries before them all.
Anna, made drunk by their passion, and no longer noticed by anyone, went briskly back along the walk.
Even the girls took no note, and the women who sewed were crowding to the front to see.
Anna seized her bag, her clothes. She flung over herself the nearest thing, like a dust-sheet, and half ran from the shop by its back way.
It was about six o’clock.
Anna sat on the tram, clutching her bundle, wrapped in the black silk evening cloak, the white silk glimpsing under it, the silver shoes, a diamanté clip in her hair, her stockings invisibly held by white garters, and not a stitch otherwise on her.
She was glanced at.
During the carnival, she had heard, here in Preguna, they wore evening-dress, and masks, and other means of disguise and facial decoration. But Carnival was not yet.
When she reached the street like a rope, a storm had begun.
She left the tram and walked through space, the wind whipping the black cloak. Thunder tumbled like masonry from clouds of purple plaster, and dust spun.
Everything was in motion. The thunder chanted in her
blood.
She could not decide which was his lodging house. How stupid. Then she saw the white curtains blowing behind a half-opened window.
Perhaps he wasn’t here. Had gone away for a year.
Anna opened the outer door, and climbed up the stairs, which now were black, or spirited by lightning. The rain began in a burst of shattered glass.
I shall never be old, thought Anna. I can’t imagine I will. Something will happen to me, before then.
This buoyed her up.
She reached the landing, and the door. She stood there.
Thunder crashed. The rain smashed. Light and shade raced over and through her. The house might collapse, and she would not have touched him.
She beat on the door insanely, calling.
It was flung open.
He was there, in shirt-sleeves. How tall he was. His eyes so luminous. The cannonade of the thunder made it seem Preguna was under siege.
“Anna…”
In the war zone of life she cried desperately: “I’ve lost everything! I stole this dress! I’m a thief! I’ve nowhere to go!”
Árpád took her hand, and led her gently in through the door, to the blown and storm-tossed room beyond.
Chapter Five: A Reasonable Attempt
The morning after she had seen the Basulte male making love to, or raping, a female servant in the roof conservatory, Anna got up early, about seven, before any of them arrived in her room.
She dressed in the plain chic dress from Paris, and filled her largest handbag with anything she had left, that was of use.
Then she put on her coat and hat, and the galoshes which had somehow been abandoned here following the wet walk with Raoul.
She had some money, in English currency, which Raoul had given her idly, on their reaching the country. It had never, of course, been utilised. Anna had no idea if it would be enough, but she thought so, these substantial crackling papers, and the bright burnished coins.
She descended through the house, prepared to say that she was going for a ‘turn about the gardens’, a phrase she had found in a book.
Only two of the maids passed her, eyes down, bobbing and cowering, scuttling on.
Because she could not recall the way to the front of the house, she went down to the orangery and the salon, from which a passage led away to the storage and gun rooms, the route Raoul had taken her.
At eight, the men would use the breakfast room, but that was somewhere across the house. The women took their breakfast in bed. Unless, for some reason Raoul had also lied about this.
But no one was about, though the salon curtains had been folded back, and a maid was kneeling in the fireplace, clearing up the evening fire.
The door to the gun room stood ajar, smelling of gun lubricant and tinders.
A mouse – or perhaps a maid, reduced to Lilliputian size – scuttled by behind the wall.
Outside, and down the damp mossy steps, Anna surveyed the sea of mud that was the path up and around to the drive.
A cedar, frosted blue, towered on a lawn. There was a walled kitchen garden. An elderly man with a wheelbarrow full of cabbage toiled along, and seeing her, bowed his head, and touched his brow with one arthritic claw.
But the rain only sparkled, shed like dew, on every blade and leaf. The far-off hills seemed cut by a knife. The sky was clear, pure as glass. The sun shone, young and pale, flashing among the Basulte trees.
As she was walking through the park in the morning sunshine, a rider on a black horse went galloping by, so near she felt the heat, and off among the historic oak trees.
If he saw her she couldn’t have said. It was Raoul, probably. She thought it was. Behind him sat Lilith Lizard, her sandy hair flying free, her goat eyes narrowed.
She was clinging to Raoul, her face pressed into his back. Her expression, but for the narrowed eyes, was unfathomable.
Actually, Anna might have been invisible. Maybe she was. Though the mud of their going had lightly splashed her coat, she had entered another universe.
His brother – William? – had said Raoul had a woman here.
It didn’t matter now. Anna was leaving.
She had not cared anything for Raoul. It had been an error. But she always made mistakes. Her forté.
To proceed, she had thought she must go to the village. Here she might be able to persuade someone to take her to the nearest town or station. She had seen no cars she could recollect in the village. She might have to ride on a cart, or something like that. Elsewhere she had done this, from time to time, over the long white dusty roads, through groves of orange trees and figs and apples. In another life, the past.
Anna believed she had memorized, inadvertently, the way Raoul had led her to the village.
But soon she was lost, as in the Basulte house.
Brilliant sunlight too, seemed to change things. There were more colours; birds sang or squeaked, and butterflies danced on the green stalks of the fields.
In one of the lanes, an old brown man came stooping out of a field, with a lean tan dog on a piece of string. When he saw her, the man touched his cap, and made the bowing motion. But his back was bent anyway, perhaps from decades of such ghastly grovelling.
The dog only stared, then lifted its leg against the stile.
“The village,” said Anna, “is it…?”
“Yooum Mus Animal,” said the old man.
Anna contemplated this version of her name: Anna Moll, Miss Animal.
“Yooum gum frotha ouse.”
“Oh… yes. A walk. The village.”
“I knows,” said the ancient man, “byee hair.”
“Do you know the way?” Anna said.
The old man began to crawl along the lane, talking to her, with the dog trotting at his side. Did this mean the man was taking her to the village?
“Thold sunce out,” said the old man.
“Yes,” said Anna.
“Byar oll sumba.”
Anna kept silent.
The chestnut trees overhung the lane, nettles and wild parsley flourished. The dog constantly snuffed things and made water over them. The pace of the old slow man allowed ample space for that. The man talked on and on, now mostly incomprehensibly.
Anna wanted to run away.
“Is the village this way? Down there?” she asked in the end.
The old man lifted his old face to the old sun. She had seen such faces on peasants everywhere. Baked so hard, a hundred wrinkles worked in leather. He looked one hundred, and might be sixty-five.
Running downhill, the lane grew narrow. Cows stood motionless yet with mechanically swishing tails. A small wood enveloped the road.
From shadow, yesterday’s rain dripped, sprinkling lights. The dog shook itself.
The old man had not answered any of her questions, that was, her repeated question, but as they left the wood, the lane turned, and a rundown cottage appeared, with burnt green paint and a rickety water-butt.
“Here are,” said the old man. He moved through the broken fence, and by the door let the dog free of the string. “G’dee, Mus Animal.” The door shut. The dog bolted into a hedge.
Deserted on the track, Anna frowned. She wanted to shout invective after the man, but really it wasn’t his fault, she supposed.
Dismally she went on down the lane, and found, beyond the next bank of trees, the village was before her, spangled in the sun, all its doors and flowers open wide.
Anna paused, undecided. There were women about mostly, with baskets, or pegging out washing in their little grassy yards, where roses grew in hearts of blood.
But the first woman glanced at Anna, and then, strangely, quickly away.
Anna crossed to the low wall. “Excuse me, please…”
The woman dropped a sort of curtsy, not quite the house bob, scattered her clothes pegs and trotted away indoors, Across the gardens, the width of the village street from her, was the public house, with its sign of the knight and the dainty dragon.
Anna we
nt there.
The interior was now not so dark, sunlit from the door and the little pebbly windows. Red blooms stood in pots, and there were brown jugs with round hips gathered on the counter. The ceiling was low, and a bird cage hung from the beams, without a bird.
The room was full of men, Anna saw, huge brown men. Some smoked pipes, and most drank glasses of beer, and there were plates of bread and ham and cheese, and dishes of yellow mustard and jars of magenta pickles.
Over all floated a clock, with its hands at eleven.
Had she been so long wandering about? How could that be? Yet it had seemed several hours, at least.
There was only one woman in the bar-room, but for herself, Mrs Izzard-Lizard, who leaned on the counter with her fat tawny arms. She wore over her dress a blue pinafore dotted with sprigs of flowers. Her eyes were today the colour of water in which such flowers might have died.
“G’dee. Muz,” said Mrs Izzard, showing her selected teeth. “Can I gee a drink?”
“Thank you,” said Anna. She felt the eyes of the giants on her fragile back, piercing through her too-hot coat.
Mrs Izzard did not ask what Anna would have, and Anna was quite glad. She thought there would be nothing but beer or strong ale, for women were not entitled to drink here. But after all there were some large gleaming bottles set to one side and from one of these a colourless fluid was poured, into a long-stemmed glass.
This was placed before Anna, but when the woman specified money, Anna could not understand the sum. She put one of the crackling notes on the counter.
“Thassa take all my till, my dearie,” said Mrs Izzard. “But Mas Rarl issa sum.”
She took the note and put it away, and brought back to Anna a cupped palm of overflowing shining coins.
“You gwon fur the ladies’ perlor,” said Mrs Izzard, and coming out from the counter by means of a flap, showed Anna into a small back room.
Here was a single table, with a crocheted mat, and three chairs upholstered in something like sackcloth. A vase without anything in it stood on the windowsill, where lay also an exquisite dead moth with tissue wings. There was a painting on the wall of a girl child in old-fashioned dress, and with a pig’s face.