She held on to the mouse for dear life, trying to keep the vehicle steady over the pocked crust of a star.
‘What is this?’ she’d laughed.
‘Some nerdy idea to bring a little fun to the deskbound life.’ Kim had put his hand over hers to steer the careering machine. ‘No magic involved, swear to God, Miss. It lies just underneath the surface – you just have to know the steps to take to find it. It’s a bit like the past, you see? Whose memories are being remembered, what story’s being told? Under one, there’s always another.’
He was clearly barking mad, and she was an idiot to think that she could deviate so far from her day-to-day existence: she’d never even mentioned to Daniel that she was meeting Gramercy Poule – the idea of trying to explain such a deviation from her routine to her conscientious husband defeated her.
In the attic bedroom, she burrowed further down under the duvet, but the absence of Kim, whom she had been expecting at least to knock on her door before . . . she wouldn’t spell that out to herself . . . To her fury, she was wideawake, on the spike of waiting, wondering, wanting. She tried to curl up into a tighter ball, but still sleeplessness had her in its white grip. And now she was thirsty. The red wine had parched her till her limbs seemed to catch and scratch at the bedclothes and her eyeballs and nostrils were scuffed and rough inside her skull. If she went to the kitchen, Kim and Taffy might still be there, Aguecheek and Belch, carousing, sprawling, and she long-faced, reproving, erect, a spoilsport Malvolio.
Two-thirty a.m. She’d pin up her hair again, and have a look outside.
How was it that the whole bloody world seemed to be having sex all the time, and she wasn’t in a position even to worry about getting AIDS?
She couldn’t go down, not as she was, with no make-up and bare feet; but if she did, she wouldn’t appear to be coming on at him . . . She began to need badly to see if anybody was still about; she wanted to know which way they were jumping, before she knew what was left for her. Her dilemma presented itself to her, even in her unsettled state of exhausted, fading inebriation, with a strange coldness: should she let this opportunity slip, when Gramercy Poule probably came straight out with her desires, no inhibition, singing them loud and clear, Girls just want to have fun, Don’t you tell me nothing, Daddy. I wanna be me. Making snarling faces and pulling tongues, and giving details about their underwear to the papers.
She was the older woman, hah. He must have been waiting for her to take the initiative. She should have known, acted on her own account, made it clear. Outreach, it was her job, after all.
The photograph from the brochure of the sea view from the hotel where she was due to meet Daniel, soon, rose up before her; she found herself cringing from the idea of being there with her amiable, hardworking husband, trying to make love.
There was nobody in the kitchen. The thirst that had seemed to rage now faded; the kitchen seemed cavernous and desolate. Still, she reminded herself of her first needs, and went to the fridge; it was soothing, the pool of blue light, the draught from the bottle.
‘Hetty?’ Kim was calling to her, softly. ‘Come and see this.’
He was sitting in front of the monitor, in the office.
She went halfway to the door. ‘I was thirsty.’
‘I’m so glad you’re awake. Why did you leave us?’
She hovered. ‘More messages from the beyond?’
‘Look!’
‘I’m tired.’
‘Not too tired to look at this.’ He pointed the cursor, clicked and the images expanded, changed, spiralled and swirled upwards, plasma spreading in purpleised aureoles, heat-coded pillars of cloud, pixillated sheaves of stars. Kim went on, eyes on the screen, ‘That’s beauty, that’s the real thing – and it’s all out there. This is state-of-the-art image definition. God I wish I could fall through the screen and disappear – spontaneous combustion back into the galaxy.’
‘Isn’t that what you do anyway?’
‘We’re stardust – look.’ He paused, took his eyes away from the screen. ‘Doctor Fernly, I’ve wanted to be alone with you all night.’
Hortense involuntarily put a hand to her throat as if he’d clutched it. ‘Oh, don’t start that again,’ she said, ‘You know it’s absurd.’
‘Why is it absurd?’
‘Because . . . I’m a woman with a full life, a husband, a job I like that keeps me busy.’
‘And that means you won’t come to bed with me?’
She was struggling to meet the moment she’d never been able to envisage with any clarity: so his wild words on her e-mail weren’t simply the currency of some kind of out-of-body state, like saints enraptured before their visions, having their souls ravished and spouting the metaphors of the Song of Songs. He was coming closer now and seemed to be vibrating as he took her by the shoulders. She felt a lick of fear rise inside her.
‘Hetty, be soft—’
She was trying to look at him, but something was preventing her, pinioning her from another, scared, muddled place inside her. She wasn’t made of the stuff of adventure; he might hurt her – she saw him mauling her, spread over her, and stifling her; what if he was dirty underneath that neat, tight exterior? What if he battered her? Then there was afterwards, too. What happened afterwards?
He was coaxing her, with his face very near hers. ‘Not just to me. Be kind to yourself.’
All the conflict of first hoping, then planning, then finding the situation slipping out of her control, then finding him so coolly playing with the computer, as if he knew she’d come down for him, then the fear coursing so wilful and turbulent, exploded in hot gusts inside her; she didn’t know the codes of courtship, she wanted to be wooed, not expected. So she found herself storming at him, ‘What the hell do you mean? It’s not enough you’ve set yourself up as some sort of fucking messiah for the human race, you think you’re god’s gift to womankind too, you think I need you?’
‘I didn’t say that. But I just think sex makes me happy, Hetty, and it might do the same for you.’
‘What?’ Hortense was enraged. ‘Sex? Happiness? What the hell do you mean? If you think you’re talking to me in the language I understand, you’ve bloody well got another think coming.’
Upstairs again, she certainly couldn’t sleep now; she was struggling with the realisation that she’d made a false move, that she’d somehow defected from the pact they had – whatever it was. Her anger began to look unwarranted, overbearing. Then she regretted her regret; how foolish it had been of her to be so incapable of rational decision-making that she’d lost her temper.
Uncomfortably, she lies there, thinking how she’ll scrape away this encounter to reveal another one underneath it, how she and Kim’ll replay this bungled sequence through another set of variations, how tomorrow, or the day after, they’ll be allies again, still conjoined by the enigmas of the past, not pulled apart under the strain of choosing between the bifurcating paths of the turbulent present.
Gramercy’s bedroom was upstairs, but sometimes, she’d move her duvet and her pillow (and the dogs) to the cushioned bergère she loved in the orangery, because then she could look at the sky through the glass roof. She liked being close to the old vine inside with its pebble-hard grapes, and to the trees in motion outside in the shadowed garden, breathing out deeply, long exhalations of cool oxygen. Their nocturnal vitality encouraged hers, restfully.
She’d get a recording of the vampire bats, she was thinking as she lay there; and she’d slow it down till its frequency became audible to human ears, then use it in a song, though she wouldn’t tell anyone where the music came from – except maybe Kim. He’d given her the idea, after all. In the morning they’d all be leaving – Monica was taking them to the station, or maybe Taffy would be driving them later to Enoch. But even so, at this rate, she wasn’t going to be up and about to see them off.
She wondered what time it was, for she’d like to ring Bobby Grace, to talk. She’d roll a joint and tell her mum all that was happen
ing. But what was happening?
Nellie didn’t want to come and live at Feverel, she knew, because of that queer daughter of hers. The plan to renovate the cottages on the moor was still blocked, and Nellie and Phoebe had been moved from the railway station buildings to a flat on an estate on the edge of the town. Gramercy hadn’t seen it, but she could imagine it. Yet Phoebe packed so much power in that tiny body, it was hard even to begin to try and persuade her; there was something goblin-like, preternatural about the tight, strong set of her shoulders. She looked pristine, but you felt if you glanced away and then back again, you might catch her crumpled and wrinkled, like a dry apple under that integument they’d crafted to cover her. Did Kim have that peculiar quality too, at times? Of looking split off from himself, as if underneath his eyes and mouth and skin there was silicon or mica or chitin or krypton, eerie, shiny, radioactive?
But Nellie declared she couldn’t be parted from Phoebe, not while she was still studying; when Gramercy invited them both to stay with her, to try it for only a week in the holidays, Phoebe stamped on the proposal, outright.
In Gramercy’s mind’s eye, Phoebe was hanging upside down from a rafter while Nellie was giving her little sips of blood from her mouth.
Maybe Phoebe would take off, to Enoch, in that stroppy way of hers, and then Nellie would be left on her own and then she could come to live at Feverel and start feeding Gramercy with bloody kisses from her lips, too.
But tonight, she was a prisoner of circumstances; no means presented itself to make any comforting relation with the things she wanted – so self-pity reared up and gripped her as she lay there in her lovely orangery with the chandelier drops of the bunches of grapes above her. She stroked one of her hot-pelted dogs, who was lying by her feet like a hound on a tomb effigy; the bitch’s eager, kind responsiveness cheered her. She’d go out, into the garden, and find the setting moon, for she couldn’t see it up in the sky any longer.
She found the window lock keys and let herself out of the orangery, snapping her fingers softly to the dogs to follow. When the moon reappeared between a gap low in the trees, it was a smoky orange and lying on its back in drifts of cloud; it was a barque in someone’s system, Gramercy remembered, ferrying souls. The flaring sun of yesterday – or was it tomorrow’s? – which was shining on the other side of the world was caught in the floating ribbons of clouds through which the moon glided; under just such a volatile summer moon the garden was stirring with the industry of unseen things, with a scurry and skittering, with the composting and distillery of underground hunters and hoarders, airborne flitters and darters. Gramercy felt afraid of their invisible business, but pulled irresistibly towards the thought of them beneath her, around her; a little owl’s distant hoo-hoo sounded reassuringly human by contrast to the white fluttering of moths, the sprinkle of nocturnal gnats, the bony mandibles chewing.
Hook was bristling, then gave a bark. Bonny joined in, then Jonty, who always followed his two siblings but never initiated anything, added to the alarums. She hushed them; she had a moment of excited hope, that Agnes Feverel would rise up and speak to her. But this hope was quickly followed by fear’s usual thrilling clutch, that an intruder would materialise in the star shadows and pounce on her, or that bats, folding and unfolding in the trees, would dip the pipette of their fangs into her.
Above, the trunks of trees inclined towards one another in confidential conversations of leaves and branches. They seemed to join hands like the crowds of fans reaching up to her on stage; only the trees’ dark arms were giants’ limbs, and their roots were pushing far far down below, forking through the glinting schist of Fellmoor on which Feverel stood. Such a thin layer of soil, every garden hand she’d ever tried to keep complained. Shale a foot under the surface, too hard for flowers not used to resistance, but turning to mud under the driving force of the water-seeking roots of the trees, cracking it and crumbling it to get at what they needed. It made her dizzy to think how the root system ran as deep below as the topmost crowns swayed above her: the earth was swinging open like a silent strongroom door to admit her to its damp, interior ventricles, where the busiest of all the living things were combining and recombining to keep the cycle of growth continuing.
She was lying down now, in the meadow, too heavy in her head to stay on her feet, and her surroundings were gradually turning light, while still remaining monochrome, as if a divine photographer were dipping the night in a developing tray and pulling out its wet and shining images printed in a dozen pulsing velvet tones. The grass was prickly on her cheek and cold, but its touch refreshed her and the earth gave her moorings; she could feel her anchor line tugging fathoms down where the crown of the trees, mirrored in the roots, dipped and soughed like weed on the ocean bottom.
She felt him approach her then, or rather come upon her, and the dogs snarled and crouched back to tuck themselves into her corners. Her heart bucked inside her and knocked loudly: so loudly she couldn’t hear him or the trees or the nocturnal busyness of all things underground.
‘It’s only me,’ Kim would whisper, but penetratingly enough to carry. ‘I came out to look at the sky. You can’t see it in Enoch, not like this. There, it’s dirty mustard from the lights.’
‘I know,’ Gramercy would whisper back. She’d be stepping out, across the wet turf underfoot: ‘Remember, I’m a city girl, born and bred.’
She was trying to still her blood so she could make sense, and she managed to scramble to her feet; that skunk she’d smoked was powerful stuff, she knew, as she felt the deck of the earth heave and skew again.
She managed to stay upright to wait for him to reach her, and had to call the dogs to heel; they were whining at the flickering darks and lights out there on the lawn.
‘I couldn’t sleep, my head was so full of things,’ Kim would be saying quietly. ‘I’m on a kind of endless rush – and I thought, Why not go out? So I came out – and I frightened you.’
‘I wasn’t asleep.’
He’d then fall silent with her, in contemplation of the end of the night, and then, she’d add something about the film, how she was going to stir people up . . . and he would say, perhaps, ‘I don’t think I’ll leave tomorrow. I want to think about things.’
‘Oh,’ Gramercy would let out a cry she couldn’t help; and with express clumsiness, she’d reach out to throw her arms around his neck. To her surprise, she’d feel his tight body pliant to hers, returning the gesture that she’d made in the spirit of a child who’s been at long last promised a longed-for treat by a stern parent, but with the tip of a pointed tongue slipping past her lips, altering its course and its nature.
In her fantasies, she’d been the active one; she’d imagined that he would want this or that and she would meet his desires so quickly she’d appear to be anticipating them, even leading them. But now that she felt his warmth steal through her, that part of her that held the traces of motion and gesture, of caress and kiss, flew out through the holes of her ears and the tips of her fingers with the breath of her body. Leaves rustled in her hair and tendrils trailed from her hands and wreathed her ankles and from their entangled mouths flowed roses and berries as he pressed his fingers into her cleft limbs; she twisted to unwrap herself and comb out the knots that were binding her will, but every flexion wound her closer to him, every step tightened the stems that were shooting round her legs, her arms, her torso.
‘Who are you, Kim?’ she’d ask him, but her voice would come out like the wind in the topmost branches, as she’d give herself up, night-blind, efflorescing, to his warm and slithering coils.
Ella has been to the duck coop, to rake out the straw, and she’s bringing up in a shallow straw basket three lumpy, thick-shelled, pale green-blue eggs, to leave in the kitchen. It’s early, and the sun hasn’t yet burned up the dew on the ground or the mist rising as it begins to evaporate. On her way across the meadow, she spots a pair of Gramercy’s shoes, lying on their sides one step in front of the other, as if Gramercy had stepped out
of them in mid-stride. Ella doesn’t pick them up, as Monica will be up and about soon; Ella does not want to trigger any recognition in her mind: restoring one pair might revive memories of that earlier loss.
Then she sees one of the Indian silk cushions from the orangery, tossed to one side, so this she does pick up, balancing the basket of eggs on it, and comes through the side door.
Hortense is sitting at the table, having an orange juice; Monica is brewing coffee and examining the train timetable; Kim is cutting some bread near the toaster, and asking Hortense if she’d like a piece of toast. She nods, in response, and then groans.
Ella hears the murmur about headaches and pills and rehydration. But she isn’t listening to it. Though she’s standing upright, the floor seems to tilt and fall away, as on board ship in a high wind. There he was, at last, a little taller than her, but more compact and well-knit than Phoebe, with his pointed ears; grown-up. He’s lived in step with the time here, she thinks, he hasn’t dropped through rents in the proper continuum of one day after the next.
Monica exclaims, ‘Nellie, it’s you! Put them in the larder.’ To Kim and Hortense, she announces, ‘Here she is, our treasure, as Gram was saying yesterday, that is if you remember anything of what transpired . . .’ She chuckles. ‘Nellie’s the one from Tirzah via . . . well, various other points east of here.’
Kim looks tranquilly through his tiredness at the small, weathered, stringy woman with the eggs on the cushion in front of her, and asks her, with a kind of politician’s courtesy, ‘I was adopted – and you, what happened to you?’ Very steadily, controlling the pricking tears filling her eyes behind her large new glasses, Ella answers Kim with a summary of her story, about the siege and Dr Martin, about Phoebe and the operation. She ends. ‘Can you remember anything?’ She tries a few words, but Kim shakes his head. ‘I remember a boat, and confusion, artillery fire, smoke. Someone playing a penny whistle. Sometimes, something seems to tug at me, especially when I’m talking to . . . when I’m researching the Bundle.’ He looks across at Hortense, but she is keeping herself turned away from him. ‘I feel something, but then it fades, I think I’m seeing a face I know, and then I find I don’t remember a thing.’
The Leto Bundle Page 41