A Lady Under Siege

by B. G. Preston

  “I have no interest in alcoholic beverages,” Betsy said haughtily. “To me they taste awful.”

  “Youth is wasted on the young, so the old get wasted,” Derek said.

  “Why do you like it?” Betsy asked.

  “You’re too young to understand, unless that homeroom teacher of yours is a drunkard too.”

  “No, only a bisexual. But he told us once he had a love-hate relationship with cocaine.”

  “Me too, still do,” said Ken. “Love it when I have it, hate it when I run out.”

  “You do know too much,” Derek said to Betsy. “Don’t be in a hurry to put away childish things.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Stick to lollipops and dollies as long as you can.”

  “I’m already past those things,” she said curtly. “I like online chat.”

  “Give her a beer, then,” Ken said, ripping open the flimsy cardboard case and handing Derek a cold can.

  Derek’s eyebrows lifted mischievously above a rogue’s grin. He held the can out toward Betsy. “Would you like one?”

  Just at that moment Meghan came out onto the deck. “She most certainly would not,” she said sharply.

  “We’re just joking around,” Derek smiled. In a teasing voice he added, “The young lady has already informed us she has no interest in alcoholic beverages.”

  “Hilarious,” Meghan scoffed. “Betsy, time for dinner.”

  IT WAS A WARM summer evening. As she ate her meal in the kitchen, Betsy strained her ears to eavesdrop through the open door on the conversation of the men outside, catching only fragments of phrases from the increasingly drunken rhythms of their speech. She ate quickly and got up to head back out, but Meghan stopped her. “I don’t want you going out there.”

  “But you always tell me I need more fresh air.”

  “It’s not so fresh. They’re smoking like chimneys, the two of them.”

  “Outside smoking doesn’t count.”

  “You can go use the computer if you want. Chat with your friends for a while, then it’s bath time, then bed.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I need to talk to Derek for a minute.” She felt a need to talk to Thomas, to tell him of Sylvanne’s plot to get a kitchen knife, and reinforce her insistence that Daphne’s bloodletting stop. She’d been researching the antiseptic and antibiotic uses of medieval herbs, and wanted to tell him to apply vinegar and lavender oil to the wound on her arm, and add garlic and onion to the vegetable soups prepared for her. She also wanted to raise the possibility of tuberculosis as the cause of Daphne’s sickly cough.

  Betsy trundled upstairs to the studio, and Meghan cleaned up the dishes. Occasionally she heard laughter from the men, and a loudly hooted expletive here and there. Better get out there before they’re incoherent, she thought. She wiped the counters and dried her hands, then went out the back door. There was only Ken in the back lawn, lazily swinging a golf club. He lifted his head and saw her, and stared at her quite brazenly, her long legs in particular, making her wish she was wearing something more concealing than short shorts and a tank top.

  “Where’s Derek?” she asked.

  “Gone out to get cigarettes and papers,” he replied.

  “Papers?”

  “Rolling papers. Come on over—I sold a bike today, one of my motorbikes. I got some serious cash for it, and now it’s like, Let’s Party!”

  “I’ll pass,” Meghan said. “Got things to do.”

  “Should I tell Derek you’re looking for him?”

  “Sure. Tell him it can wait until tomorrow.”

  “Will do.”

  She went inside, irritated that she had something important to say to Thomas, but couldn’t. There was an hour to fill before Betsy’s bath and bedtime, and what she really wanted to do was get back online and continue her research into tuberculosis, autoimmune illnesses, and medieval medicine, but with Betsy at the computer she decided instead to pick up her galley copy of Enemies with Benefits again, hoping a scene she’d somehow missed in her cursory skim-through would now jump out at her and beg to be illustrated. She spread herself out on the living room couch, but after a few minutes she realised she was sweating. The room was stuffy in the heat. She decided the best place would be out on the deck, but that meant putting herself on display to the drunks next door. It would have to be the lawn—the fence would grant privacy.

  There was no one in Derek’s back yard when she went out. She brought a picnic blanket to spread on the lawn, and flopped down on it with a couple of cushions from the patio chairs. In a few minutes she could hear, but not see, Derek and Ken emerge from the house and settle back into an evening of drinking beer around a picnic table ashtray. She perked up when she heard Ken say, “Your neighbour wanted to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “Didn’t say.”

  “Apparently she’s having dreams about me.” Derek said.

  “Sounds promising.”

  “Yeah. Some dude that looks just like me, some ancient prince in a castle.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Nice ass trumps craziness any day,” Ken remarked.

  “She truly believes there’s someone listening in my head, and she needs to talk to him. Thomas, his name is, and she’ll be like, ‘I’m talking to Thomas, not you.’ I’ve told her there’s no one else in there, it’s all private property, but she doesn’t care, says it doesn’t matter whether I’m aware or not, he’s there, all right. He’s in there.”

  “Don’t let her see the real you,” Ken advised.

  “Too late for that! Don’t you remember me yelling at her the other night? Up at her window right there? In spite of that I’ve landed in her good books. Christopher Hitchens to the contrary, there is a God. I’d do her in a minute. She’s gorgeous, don’t you think?”

  “Like I said, nice ass trumps craziness.”

  “Everything’s nice about her.”

  Meghan, now fully focussed on her eavesdropping, waited for more, but instead there came a prolonged silence. She pictured the two of them lost in thought, hiding in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Then Ken said, “Someone like her might be good for you.”

  “What do you mean?” she heard Derek say.

  “Well. It’s just. Well you know. She’d have been about the same age, now.”

  “Don’t even go there,” Derek said quietly. “Although I know you care. And I’m glad you care.” Then there was another prolonged silence. Then Derek broke the sombre mood with a sudden loud, elongated yowl—Meghan pictured him rising from the picnic table and stretching like a noisy cat. “You’re my best friend, old Ken,” he sighed affectionately. “It’s been a long strange journey and back through all of that, and here we are, still the best of buds.”

  “Smoking the best of buds,” added Ken.

  “Gimme a hug,” said Derek.

  “Fuck that.”

  “No, come on, do it. No one’s hugging me these days. Every human needs a hug.”

  “All right then, for charity’s sake. Lonely old Derek.”

  Meghan heard the beavertail claps of the manly backslaps that are inevitable when drunken men hug each other. She’d begun to worry about how she was going to sneak into her house without them realizing she’d been listening to them, and seized this moment to scurry up onto the deck unnoticed. She lingered by the door for a moment, taking in the sight of two middle-aged fools clenched together in that dishevelled yard.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Ken said.

  “It feels great. A human being, is only really being, when he is being, looooved,” Derek brayed.

  “That song sucked. You can let go now.”

  “No fucking way. I’m loving it.”

  “Small doses, man. Everything in small doses.”

  “But not love. Never say that about love.”

  22

  Sylvanne sat on her bed while Thomas paced her room. He’d been speaking for some time about his w
ife, most especially the history of her illness. “She suffered no convulsions, or twitching or spasms to serve as signposts of what was to come. No, it was just a gradual malaise, a sickly cough such as anyone might have in the winter season, only this one lingering into spring, and growing more bold with the lengthening days. Her pulse weakened till she could scarcely rise from her bed in the morning, and lay there much of the day. Some days, by sheer strength of will, she would pull herself to her feet, unsteady as a newborn foal, and make her way to the chapel for prayers.”

  Sylvanne tried to distract herself from his words, for she feared that such a sad story might arouse sympathy within her, and weaken her resolve. She encouraged her own mind to wander back to her former life, well before the siege, when she and Gerald had been newlyweds, when he had loved her keenly. He had written poetry for her, not only before they were married, but afterward as well, in fact the later poems became even more ardent and explicit in describing her charms, because by then he’d gained intimate and detailed knowledge of them. How she wished she had committed some of his poems to memory, for she knew not what had become of them in the siege. She hated herself for being able to recall only a handful of random lines in full, for it made it all seem so wasted, as if Gerald, the poems, her former life, none of it had ever really existed. She was lost in such thoughts when Thomas, in his pacing, stopped and stood directly before her, mouthing words she barely heard.

  “The soup and the vegetables are working wonders,” he said. “And now that we have ceased to open her arm for bloodletting, the infection grows less livid. The oranges I expect to arrive before dark tonight. If not, then tomorrow.”

  Sylvanne turned away from him and looked out the window. “Look at me when I speak to you,” Thomas ordered her. “I need to be sure this is heard. There’s been such vast improvement already, I wish there was some way I could thank you. I am of course addressing Meghan with these words. There’s an unreality to it, for although I address myself to someone who has already proven herself helpful, sweet, and kind, yet I speak these heartfelt words of thanks to the sullen face of one who can’t bear to look upon me.”

  Sylvanne met his eyes. “Why should I look upon you, when you speak not to me, but some imaginary creature?”

  “You have a point,” Thomas said. In softer tone he continued, “It’s my mistake—I should know by now not to expect much from you in the way of sympathy. I wish you would be helpful. Come along now Sylvanne, I wish to show my daughter again to the woman Meghan, who dwells inside you. Come, we’ll go see Daphne now.”

  Sylvanne made no effort to get up.

  “Come.”

  “No.”

  “Dear Meghan,” said Thomas, exasperation in his voice, “Forgive me if I resort to driving this uncooperative lady like a beast of the field. Know that my intentions are pure. Grant me one moment.”

  He left the room only briefly, then came striding back through the door straight to Sylvanne on the bed. He carried a fresh-cut switch in his hand, a whip suitable for herding cattle or goats, and without hesitation he slapped it down hard on the table next to the bed, so that a pewter goblet tumbled and fell to the floor. Sylvanne involuntarily jumped to her feet.

  “You’re a bastard,” she spat.

  “I’ll do whatever it takes to save my daughter,” he told her. “If you stand in the way of that, you will suffer. Do you understand? Now. Do I need shackle you, and drag you there, or will you walk beside me?”

  Sylvanne stood and walked toward the door. “This must be what hell is like,” she said wearily. “A place where all action is coerced by threat.”

  DAPHNE WAS FEELING MUCH better—she was sitting up on her bed, knitting with raw wool, attended to by a servant girl named Beth. As Thomas and Sylvanne entered she called out brightly, “Daddy, I’m knitting you a winter scarf.”

  “Wonderful,” said Thomas. “How has she been?”

  “Fine, Sir,” answered Beth. “Her fingers are much more nimble than my own, and she never drops a stitch.”

  “What colour shall we dye it?” Daphne asked excitedly. “Shall we use beetroot to make it red?”

  “I prefer a nice green,” said the servant girl. “It’s a colour not seen enough in winter.”

  Thomas leaned forward to give Daphne a kiss. “Red suits me fine,” he said. “Red as the blush in your rosy cheeks, my love.” But the smile on his face quickly disappeared, for Daphne began to cough violently. Sitting on the bed, he took her in his arms to comfort her, holding her until the cough subsided. “There there, my darling, you’ve overdone it for one day,” he said softly. “We can’t expect you to be fiddle-fit on a few days’ good soup. Full health will take some time.” He told Beth to fetch a drink of water, which he brought carefully to his daughter’s lips. Then he turned to address Sylvanne.

  “You can clearly see she’s looking so much better, and it’s all down to you, Meghan. I don’t know how to repay you. Words of gratitude are inadequate to the soaring feeling that has filled my heart these past days. I wish I could embrace you, but the woman who stands before me will have none of that, I’m certain.”

  “For once you know my feelings,” Sylvanne said.

  “I’ll make do with embracing my darling daughter, who needs love along with her vegetables.” He tenderly took Daphne in his arms.

  “Thank you Daddy,” she sighed. “It feels so nice.”

  “Poor dear,” he worried. “You’re so light and thin. As if made of feathers, not flesh and bone and skin.” He held her at arm’s length and looked searchingly into her eyes. “Promise us you’ll get better.”

  “I want to,” she said, her voice a whisper.

  “I’m glad. Keep wanting.”

  Daphne glanced over her father’s shoulder and met Sylvanne’s eyes. She took a sudden fright, chilled by the hostile glare that was returned to her.

  “Why does she stare at me so coldly?” she whispered in her father’s ear.

  “Don’t be frightened, my dear. There is someone who cares about you very much, inside her. Very much. She’s hidden from sight, but she is there.”

  “I wish I could see her.”

  “She sees you, and that is what matters. Trust me, darling. She is there.”

  23

  Betsy woke in the middle of the night to the angry wail of a car alarm. She parted the blinds to peek down at the street below and recognized Derek’s beat up old two-seat sports car, screeching back and forth to squeeze into a tight spot between two SUVs. The one in front had been bumped—aglow with blinking orange parking lights, it blared an angry cycle of blips, whoops and wails to wake the dead.

  Derek’s car lurched one last time and settled in place. Betsy saw him stumble from the driver’s seat, slam the door behind him and stagger toward the still-screaming SUV. With his palms squished protectively against his ears, he kicked ineffectually at the back bumper a few times. Meanwhile from Derek’s car a woman emerged and sauntered over to him, a little unsteady on high heels. Betsy couldn’t make it out, but whatever they said to each other made them laugh. Then the woman stepped up and laid her hands on the SUV’s sun roof, and in that very instant it stopped screaming, and for a moment the dark deserted street returned to an almost spooky calm.

  “You’ve got the magic touch,” Derek whooped gleefully. As she stepped to the curb, he held out a hand, and when she took it he pulled her to him, kissing her so roughly the two of them nearly tumbled.

  “Careful,” she playfully scolded him. “Not out here, let’s get inside where it’s private.”

  “I can’t wait to get inside,” Derek murmured, and the woman said something back Betsy couldn’t catch. She watched as Derek led her to his door, and heard it slam shut behind them. She stared at the shadows of tree branches swaying on the street for a moment before she lay back down to sleep.

  AT NOON DEREK WAS sitting at his picnic table in a threadbare housecoat, the Saturday Globe and Mail spread before him, smoking a cigarette and drinking coff
ee from a chipped mug. Betsy’s head appeared over the top of the fence, looking down on him like a mischievous angel.

  “Is that your breakfast—coffee and a cigarette?” she asked.

  “No. Coffee and a cigarette is what’s popularly known as a whore’s breakfast,” he answered irritably. “Throwing in a newspaper elevates it to an intellectual’s breakfast.”

  In a singsong Betsy asked, “How was your Friday night?”

  “If you want to be my friend, you need to learn something: Don’t bug me when I’m reading the morning paper.”

  “I saw you with someone last night,” Betsy said teasingly. “Is that your girlfriend?”

  “Did you hear what I just said?” Derek scowled.

  “Is she still inside?”

  “No. She turned out to be a head case and I kicked her out. Didn’t you hear the yelling?”

  “You kicked her out? In the night time?”

  “Screw off, little girl,” Derek muttered. “You hear me? Get lost. I’m sick of looking at you.”

  Betsy’s mouth fell open, and the tiny gasp that came from it was the sound of her heart shattering. She dropped from sight behind the fence; seconds later Derek saw her scuttle up the steps to her deck and dash tearfully inside the house. He felt a pang of remorse, and almost called out to her, but in his hung-over mind the urge to apologize was trumped by a fierce desire for peace and quiet, caffeine and nicotine.

  AN HOUR LATER HE was still in his housecoat, stalemated against a brutal hangover, stretched out atop the picnic table using his rolled up newspaper as a pillow, snoozing in the sun.

  “Hello Derek. Are you awake?”