by Tanith Lee
Before her lay a year of passage, quite like others she had known, yet different. She was the rain; she came, apocryphal, among the European cities, and in Prague, she beheld the clock with statues, and could not see it, only the rain she had brought with her, dropping down so sadly, from her eyes.
For, without the sorcerous protection of Margot and the Great Love, Anna was beset by winged demons of mystery and dislocation. And by the internal prison of loss.
Such agony was hard as iron, obdurate. She would have feared and fled it, if she had known.
But by that time, it was too late.
In a continent blacker than night, nightmared with beating pinions, she meandered. Like splinters of a mirror, some lights, some segmented scenes, coming and going, she and they, and everything.
Europe was so cold in winter. (Cellars, damp, snow, steel winds.)
And in spring, Europe was a hyacinth, her cities towered with blue. (Men. Flight. Men.)
At last there was a city and a river, and everything had gone. Wandering on the shore, she had a dream of food. Her willingness was to do or become anything, if only she might eat.
This tyranny of her flesh. She had denied her body. It had wanted other things to fill it up. Love. The child. Delight.
Instead she had already made up her mind to sell herself for one meal, gorging and slavering, cramming the void within, (where once her womb had waited like a rose, now withered hard and small), until she had made herself sick.
Chapter Nine: The Tea Ceremony
“Bet you know,” said Lilith throatily, “someone that can make me a star.”
She had said this as they lay spent in the grass of the Basulte park. And now later, again, in the room of three narrow beds, the third of which was empty.
They were drunk on ginny lemonade, and the sabbat. They had crawled under their separate covers, shivering with weariness, and spite.
“Yes,” said Anna. “I do know someone who might.”
This was too sweeping, she thought. She added, lying lightly, “He’s only in the offices, but he knows people. Oh, he’ll like you.”
“Never mind that. Will he do me good?”
“I’m sure he will, Lily. You can twist him round your finger.”
“Or,” said Lilith Izzard, “we could go to Paris. That’d be better.”
“Mm, yes,” said Anna. “But London first. London’s best.”
She imagined, going to Paris with Lilith, Lilith clinging to her like an envenomed vine, demanding, bullying, pinching, mocking, teasing, playing unpleasant jokes. And then, when nothing ‘good’ came of it, no sleek producer in a shining car, to coil Lily in mink and pearls, then Lily turning on her, yellow eyes blazing with vitriol.
“They uz their old tea tumorra.”
“What?”
“Them.” She meant the Basultes, the Family. “They has it all agether.”
Anna recalled, Raoul, the Basulte men, didn’t usually join in the feminine tea-times.
“They do it once a month,” said Lilith. She yawned, viciously. “Some old tradition of the granddad. All of them. In the saloon. They don’t call any of us back, serve themselves, toast buns on the fire, gollocky daft things, like kits. Be ready just after four, and we’ll slip off. I’ll have the car by the gate.”
Oh Christ. The car. The gate.
“Mm,” said Anna, sleepily, heart racing.
“That Raoul, though,” murmured Lilith, “he’s going to be that angry. Both of us, gone.”
Anna lay listening to Lilith sleep.
He had said, only tonight, I won’t let you go. I’d kill you.
Fury moved in her, very deep, a shark in shadows of water.
Why had she come here? Why had she gone anywhere?
She seemed to drift, anchorless and unable to steer, on endless ocean empty of land.
There had been mirages. But no one signalled to her, or answered her cries – her whispers. And she also, had none to answer to.
Down in Hell, the kitchen, they used a special kettle for the monthly tea. And into it went the water, and then came one of the footmen, chosen perhaps by lot, grinning and bursting, voluminously to piss.
“It’ll do ’em good, that.”
The iced cakes would be full of raisins and squashed flies. The great cakes had been cursed, as ever. Bread and butter and God knew what.
When the teapot stood ready, Anna said to the cook, “Can I have my turn?”
“You do, girl,” said Mrs Ox.
And the kitchen watched as Anna took off the teapot’s bone china lid, put her hands on the rim, and gathered herself and spat deep down among the carefully selected teas and boiling, urinated water.
A few of the maids laughed. This was nothing so enormous.
Shielded by her body, and her curved hand, the small bottle had let go two thirds of its contents. But they hadn’t seen. At least, none of them commented upon it. And now the bottle was slipped back into the pocket of her blue, lace-trimmed apron. She had managed to restopper it, too. There was one third left.
All across Europe, Anna had kept the medicine bottle. In case, as Árpád had said, she too ‘couldn’t go on with it.’ She had sat with the bottle sometimes, considering, if she was ready to die yet. No reply came to her. So, she kept it anyway. She had paid for the bottle, after all. Hadn’t she?
Only a small teaspoon was necessary – there was much more than that in the teapot. And some left over, too.
A footman and two maids went away with the ritual tea.
For these brief moments Anna was greater than all of them, godlike, knowing this thing which only she could know.
It was raining.
Anna sat in a corner of the kitchen, on a wooden chair, like the waif in the story, Cinderella. She wondered what she really felt. The godlike cognisance had evaporated.
How long would it take them to die, the six Basultes? (The mouse had curled up happily in its straw.) But this dose was so much stronger, perhaps.
The maids and footmen had returned about ten minutes ago. They did not ever wait on this tea. They had nothing to report.
Suppose Raoul after all had not gone in?
Anna thought of the rain streaming round the orangery beyond the salon, and hissing in the fire, if the fire was alight – which it must be, so that they could toast the buns and bread, as Lilith described.
A clock ticked. Had she ever noticed it before?
Anna had shortened her black dress, this morning. Lilith had advised this. Lilith said she had found other dresses, apparently the ones Raoul gave to Anna in Europe. But Anna herself had no proper shoes, no coat, no hat. Lilith offered Anna nothing at all, except their excursion.
Anna’s bag sat on the floor under the wooden chair. She had taken off the apron, with the poison bottle one third full in its pocket, and put the whole thing into the bag.
She was ready. Ready to go. To go on.
Anna thought of Árpád. The last time she had seen him had been in the seconds when he came at her like the tram, his face smeared with lipstick like the dye of the birthmark running. Somehow she hadn’t seen him after that.
She never cried now. She looked at memory only for a moment. Then she looked outward, round at the faces of the English servants.
The light was grey and gleaming, fractured by rain and fire, and the electric bulbs, which sometimes stuttered down here, winking in bursts, then settling. These sly pasty faces, with their fat lips and thin lips, and little polished eyes.
Disgusting, they had been made disgusting. And they hung, these people, these things, from the Basultes, like pendulous growths on a strong stupid stone wall.
More than escape Raoul Basulte and the Family, more than evade the pack of the servants, Anna decided she had mostly wished to pull down the wall, and let these parasitic victims tumble free. With the wall gone there would be nothing to hold them or clutch on to. They would slither and drop back into their pit. Yes, that was what she wished.
To sto
p this mutual dependency of filth and dearth, that had changed them all, masters, slaves, to vermin.
Anna got up. No one paid any attention. They had usually let her come and go as she wanted, within the house, letting her run about in the trap.
She went up the stair to the big door, and through into the Smoking Room. She crossed into the corridor, arrived outside the salon.
How silent. No teacups, voices, talk, laughter, swearing. Had it happened?
Anna’s hand, on the handle of the door.
If they were alive, she would bob, and say, did they require anything? It was perfectly simple.
But she did not knock.
The door undid the salon and Anna walked inside.
Really, it wasn’t such a large room. And the green was almost black, because they had not put on the lamps, or these had for some reason gone out.
The fire burned low. There was a cake lying in the hearth. An iced cake, one of the ones with flies. Just the cake, and the utter density of the silence.
Anna breathed. She saw them, as if they had not been there the instant before, and now they emerged, coming up from underwater.
They had all fallen asleep. They sat in the sage armchairs, leaning back, their hands limp on saucers, plates, all their faces exactly alike as they had always been alike, far too much so.
Only the woman with the lifted face, Raoul’s Mother, had let go her cup, and the dregs of her tea had run over the skirt of her white afternoon dress. And Tommy, the man who was the husband of Margaret Lilian, the Basulte with the scar in his eyebrow, he must have been standing up, for he had fallen right over on the carpet. But his face, turned sideways, was completely calm, nearly smiling.
Raoul, she identified him after William, had his mouth slightly open. Maybe he had been in the middle of speaking. He did look a little surprised, as if death had tapped him on the shoulder in mid sentence, making him jump. But not very much.
William – yes it was William – was smiling too, and Margaret Lilian’s face had sunk into her smile, like interrupted dough half-risen. Raoul’s Father leaned his head on his hand. He had just put out a cigarette, but not quite firmly enough, and a transparent wisp of smoke still twisted from it.
Anna walked over to the teapot. It had been emptied once, and refilled from the silver hot water pot. No one had had time, however, for a second cup of tea.
She stood, in the middle of the peculiar room, wishing that she could feel more. It was shoddy of her to react so inadequately to this quite monumental scene.
For she had murdered them, successfully. She should rail against them, or beg their pardon, suffused with glory and blame.
But something made her only lift the Mother’s teacup from her skirt, and dab with a napkin a crumb off the maroon lips of Lilian, and straighten William’s tie. Tidying for the ones who would come later, in an hour or so, and find them.
Anna couldn’t remember, even now, the way out through the front of the house. But that didn’t create a problem, actually. She went from the salon, shutting the door, and into the red dining-room. One of the long windows opened without difficulty. She stepped out, her bag under her arm, (and oddly, the Mother’s bone china cup, painted with birds, in her right hand) hatless, coatless, to the terrace and the veil of the cold summer rain.
Lilith drove erratically, but the car kept moving, like a wonder. Lilith chattered. She was excited, and a little tiddly, for she had stolen more gin from her mother’s pub, and they passed the bottle between them.
The car had been waiting at the gateway, as stipulated.
“You were a time,” had said Lilith.
Soaked through, Anna got into the car. She had stowed by then the teacup in her bag.
Initially the car wouldn’t start again. Then it did.
“Know the way? Of course I do.”
Miraculously, Lilith had thieved a map from her father, (men made roads, women dispensed beverages.) Lilith could read the map – yet also she seemed homing in on the capital, unstoppable. Anna never doubted her.
Trees in rain poured close about them, and sometimes broke apart on the blank tundra of a reaped field.
They did not pass the village. They seemed to pass nothing, other than trees and fields, and now and then some saturated black shed, or a cottage squashed back from the road in clumps of briars or apple trees, perhaps with a wet dog barking on a chain.
Then the day turned, a sort of limbo of partial darkness began, greenish dusk that did not lessen or increase.
In this, an occasional light now aqueously splashed, spilled down the windows and away.
Lilith told Anna many things. All her (eventless) life. Her dreams. How wild this was. What she expected Anna to do for her and produce for her, like a good fairy, out of thin air.
Anna listened placidly, and shared the gin.
Sometimes there were distant churches. They reminded Anna, for a reason she could not fathom, of lighthouses.
Darkness did come eventually, evolving like a new element, finding its way uncertainly at first, and then with total confidence.
In the dark there was nothing but night and rain, and lights like arrows now, fired right by them, or possibly at them, and missing.
Lilith stopped the car.
“Have to make a visit,” said Lilith.
Anna mystified, still benign.
“You know,” said Lilith primly. “It’s a long journey, this. I’ve drunk too much. Better not have any more.”
A fox, she got out of the car. She wore the green Paris dress, and a smart mackintosh Raoul had bought Anna. Lilith’s head was tied in a lurid scarf with two holes and one frayed end. But she was a fox, anyway.
The fox took herself into the rain-gusting bushes by the side of the road. The curtains of rain closed her behind them.
Anna put the gin bottle to one side, and opened her bag quietly. Presently she glanced at her own face in the hand-mirror they had left her. There she was. Anna Moll. Pale in darkness, curiously incomplete. It seemed to her that a feature had been rubbed out from her face. The nose, was it? Or the lips. Not, definitely not, the eyes, which had been filled up by the pupil, and become black.
Then Lilith returned from the bushes, glittering in headlamps and water.
Her eyes belonged to a witch. She was demon, fox, creature.
“Onna Lonun. Only a few miles. I seen them posts.”
I must try to understand her. Keep hold until we get there.
The car was persuaded again to start, and they drove on, through the tunnel of the dark. And soon, soon, there began, like the product of some scene-shifter’s art, to be streets, and short stacks of brick villas, and new masses of blinking spear-cast lights.
“Is it far?” Anna, softly.
“Not far. Where do we have to go to get with your friend?”
“Oh, he’s got a wonderful apartment near…” Anna tensed her mind, “near the Houses of Parliament – near the river. A huge drawing room, and a room full of dolls.”
Lilith sneered. A man with a room of dolls.
Anna explained the dolls were valuable. They had come from Russia before the great revolution which deposed the Czar.
“Worth a bit,” said Lilith.
“Oh, yes.”
Lilith began again to fantasise aloud about her famous fate. She was going to rule the world.
Anna was so cold. Her soaked dress hadn’t quite dried to her body. She felt feverish and lax. Inside all this, her brain ticked heavily like the kitchen clock.
She saw it was a city now. Even the rain was thinner, and catching the lights, sparkled.
Spidery buildings craned to a purple sky. And there – was that a river?
It was late, no one about. (Had they ever stopped for petrol? Had Lilith seen to it?) Things had rolled from Anna’s mind, but that didn’t matter.
There was only one more thing to do.
“Stop over there.”
“Pull over? What for?”
“Just to g
et my bearings. Look, there’s a pub there. We can go in and ask.”
Lilith grunted gracelessly. She pushed the fanfare scarf off her head. She drove into the side street, a sort of alley, with rotten walls rising up from it, and a lamp chilled blue, and the rain like sapphires…
“You go in that pub, Annie. Um nod gumma do it.”
Annie, Lilith’s slave. Her bitch dog.
“Of course I will, Lily. Oh Lily,” as the car pulled up with a deadly ending squeal, “we’ve done it. You’re so clever. And you’re going to be a queen. Let’s just have a taste of the gin.”
“Uv had anuff.”
“No, you must. To toast your future. Look, Lily. I brought one of their cups. I stole it. You mustn’t drink from the bottle, m’lady. You’re going to be a queen.”
Lilith’s face, stretched tight with unknowledge and disdain, bloomed in a foul, condescending little smile.
“A wull thun.”
And Anna drenched into the teacup painted with birds, the gin, which she had topped up with poison as Lilith made water in the rain.
Lilith did not even notice Anna didn’t drink. Anna was a bit-player, the Heroine’s servitor.
“Here’s to you, dearie,” said Anna. “All the best.”
And Lilith put the cup to her lips, and drank down all the gin.
Meaning To Continue
That was a strange day. Anyone might have thought so. The rain had stopped, and there had been a week of sunshine, and the city became, somehow, even more bizarre, threatening, in the heat, and the long dry evenings when the sun refused to go down beyond the sooty buildings. The birds here flew round and round, chirruping, as if they were insane. And this day concluded in a sunset that seemed never likely to stop, carmine and peach, and people were standing on the streets or hesitating getting off the buses; coming to windows; pointing, staring at the sunset, as if they had never seen such colours. As if never before had any day come to an end.
In the morning, she had tried to sell the diamond ring.
Until then, it hadn’t seemed absolutely necessary. From Lilith, Anna had taken clothes, the dress and raincoat, and also the money Lilith had brought with her in a cheap purse. Had she stolen the money, with the gin and the map, and, presumably, the car? Or was it only Anna’s money anyway, stolen originally by the servants.