I had my hair tinted at Suzanne’s, Maureen wrote. The old place has gone downhill a bit since the last time I was there. They never seem to sweep the floor between the customers these days. The highlights have come out a bit funny too. Perhaps I’d better get rid of them before I see you again next month, Len darling.
Alison Murray, far away in the Balkans, sat up late, long after Len Wincobank and Maureen Kirby and even Anthony Keating had fallen asleep. She could not sleep, these days. She sat at her hotel window, and stared out into the darkness, trying to write a letter to Anthony, thinking. Inactivity and sleeplessness and impotence were driving her insane. Her hotel room was small, and bleak. On her arrival, before the hotel manager had worked out who she was, mistaking her perhaps for the film star she still dimly resembled, she had been given a splendid apartment, with vast rubber plants, a bedroom, a drawing room, a luxurious bathroom with crystal vases of the district in a glass cupboard and Balkan icons on the walls and picture books of the country’s attractions by the bedside: doubtless one of their new specially rigged specially bugged suites for visiting businessmen and diplomats. When they had discovered that she was of no importance whatsoever, indeed more of an embarrassment, she had been moved to the back of the hotel, to a small, square, prisonlike room with a bed, a table, a hard-backed chair, and no hot water. Its chief advantage was that by Western European standards it was amazingly cheap. The British community of Wallacia, such as it was, had made various offers of halfhearted hospitality, but Alison had declined them: she preferred to be independent, she did not like to be an encumbrance, and she did not want to have to talk when she had nothing to say. At times, as now, she regretted this decision, particularly on account of the consul Clyde Barstow, who was a nice and interesting man. But Mrs. Barstow would not have liked it, she had known instinctively, and she did not want to be more of a nuisance than she anyway was.
Things were not going well. The psychiatrist had agreed to see Jane, but held out no hope that his word would be of any use. He had not been amiable. When told that Jane refused to speak to her mother, he had looked at Alison with undisguised hostility. He had not been impressed by Alison’s statement that she could not herself say what had caused the accident, as she had not been there: he seemed more impressed by the fact that two people had been killed.
As, indeed, was Alison herself. Jane had refused to speak at all about the event, beyond a curt remark—“It wasn’t my fault”—but as Jane had been saying that things were not her fault, in precisely that tone of voice, since early childhood, when they very evidently were, Alison could not place too much reliance on this statement. Maybe the shock had silenced her: who could say? Whichever way, a man and his son were now dead, who had been alive and driving themselves home from work, whereas Jane was alive, and her boyfriend and fellow traveler had disappeared. It was not even clear whether or not he had been in the car at the time of the accident. It had occurred on an empty stretch of road: there were no witnesses.
It was all too clear that the Wallacian police considered Jane Murray an irresponsible fool who should never have been allowed into their country in the first place. There were some unfortunate precedents. An English student who was driving a tourist coach for his vacation job the year before had been involved in an incident with a truck, and had been sentenced to ten years in prison. Three years earlier, an English businessman had suffered the same penalty. Students were now regularly jailed if caught carrying drugs. Some had been imprisoned, albeit for short stretches, for having insufficient currency on them.
Alison, who felt herself to be a thoroughly English person, reflected on the way in which other nations had turned against England in the last few years. England was a safe, shabby, mangy old lion now: anyone could tweak her tail. So the Indians imprisoned schoolteachers and writers, the Ugandans threatened to execute British offenders, schoolgirls were tried for currency offenses in Kenya, a mere child was jailed for drug smuggling in Turkey. Malice and justice united to persecute the once so prosperous, once so arrogant, once so powerful of nations, the nation on whose empire the sun had never set. Powerless, teased, angry, impotent, the old country muttered and protested and let itself be mocked. And it served it right, Alison could not but think, in many ways. For too long, the English had assumed they had a monopoly not only of money but of morals: who could blame the new nations of the world for wishing to take their revenge? Alison herself did not approve of dirty, idle, parasitic British teenagers who thought they could smoke and strum their way around the world on their grass and their appalling guitars, preaching freedom and idleness to those who believed in work: no wonder they found themselves unwelcome from time to time. The vagaries of the rich and powerful are permitted; the vagaries of the poor are not. If her daughter Jane had, in fact, through careless driving, killed two innocent men, Alison would be the last person to say that she should not pay the penalty for it.
But a vindictive penalty, an anti-British penalty? This was clearly what the British consul feared, although he tried to conceal his foreboding.
Whatever was England going to do? Alison, far from home, thought of home with sorrow and yearning, but also with a deep dismay. She did not see what could be done to salvage so much that had been so good, and sometimes she felt herself to be one of the last generation that could remember what the good had been; it would all be forgotten. She would not like to trust the future to people like Jane. And she herself was too old: weak, ineffective, impotent. So was Anthony. They had planned to retire, early, from the scene, because they no longer had the energy to deal with daily life. Had that been it?
England, sliding, sinking, shabby, dirty, lazy, inefficient, dangerous, in its death-throes, worn out, clapped out, occasionally lashing out.
She thought, at last, of Kitty Friedmann. News was slow to reach Wallacia on the whole, but anti-British news always seemed to arrive with unnatural speed: the Times was only delivered to Alison’s room when the headlines were spectacularly bad. Fortunately or unfortunately, these days that was quite often, so Alison had read of the bomb that killed Max and wounded Kitty Friedmann only two days after it had gone off. The pleasure which the Wallacians took in the Irish problem, coupled with their refusal to believe that it had anything to do with religion, had for weeks been causing Alison acute spasms of patriotic despair, and now it had come home to her, in so violent, so gruesome a way. She tried hard not to think of Kitty, but now, in the small hours, there was no way of getting away from it. She lit herself a cigarette: she had moved onto local cigarettes, and, like the local wine, they were good.
Kitty Friedmann had lost her foot.
I think, thought Alison, that I would rather die than lose my foot.
But of course, she could not die yet, because of Molly, who was still only ten, and whom nobody else would ever love.
Her horror of physical injury had always been extreme. To die a violent death seemed to her the worst of all things, except perhaps the survival of a violent death.
How had Max died? What parts of him had been blown up? With what? Had he died instantly? Of a recent bomb explosion an eyewitness had said, in a large headline, “I SAW A WOMAN BLOWN TO PIECES.” Horrified, compelled, Alison, like a million others, gripped by the poetry and language of violence, read on: the same witness had carried the blown-to-pieces woman into the airport lounge. How? Which pieces? How, if blown to pieces, could a woman be carried?
How had the two men hit by Jane’s car died? Nastily?
She had never seen a dead person.
There are those who rush to the sites of air disasters, bomb disasters, to catch sight of a corpse, of a piece of corpse. Why?
And what had happened to Kitty’s foot? Where was it? Incinerated? And had it been blown off, or cut off? And if cut off, what with? A knife? Leaving what? A stump? And what did one cut through? Bone, tendon? Or did one find the joint, as in a chicken?
I would sooner be dead, thought Alison. But I know why. It is because I am a vain,
a wicked woman, who thinks too much of this world, and of her own body. I am not humble, I cannot face old age, I cannot face ugliness and decay.
She shivered. She was afraid. A large, a terrible fear gripped her. Of death? No, not of death. To die in one’s sleep, to fade away, seemed easy enough, as a prospect.
Of mutilation? Why, of mutilation? Nobody had ever threatened her with it, so why, so unnaturally, so wastefully, at least so prematurely, face it, fear it?
Slowly, Alison Murray rose to her feet, and shut the curtains, and crossed to the wardrobe mirror. Slowly, she inclined her face toward her face. The harsh unshaded light fell without mercy. Yes, there were wrinkles. At last, after years of grace, there were wrinkles. There would be more. There was strain around the eye, the mouth, the nose. The neck was slightly ringed. Rings, dark and grave, lay also beneath her eyes: dark red, weary. She bared her teeth at herself: yes, her gums were receding, slightly, they were creeping back in distaste from her too-large, too-old, nicotine-stained teeth. Her face felt stiff; it woke stiff, took all day to soften, then stiffened again each evening. Her hair was touched with gray: she had always admired young women with gray hair, with white streaks in the black, had not minded her genetic inheritance. But a young woman with gray hair was one thing, an old woman with gray hair another. Meditatively, she untied her wrap and stared at her body. There it was, source of so much pleasure, so much self-congratulation. And still lovely: hardly a mark upon it, hardly a sign of wear, the body of a young woman. But for how long, she said to herself, panic beating noisily in her ears; for how much longer? When will it collapse? Will it collapse overnight, like Dorian Gray? It is unnaturally preserved already, as it was unnaturally endowed in the first place. When will I cease to be able to look at myself naked in the mirror? And God, oh God, what then, what then will I do? What will I do, in five years, in ten?
For Alison Murray, beauty had for years been identity. She had no other. How could she ever make another, for the second half of her necessary life?
She sat down again, at her chair by the window: lit another cigarette. Watched her hands, holding it. She had pretty hands, long fingers, two of them adorned by rings: an engagement ring, a cluster of pearls and tiny rubies, and a huge topaz which Anthony had given her, when things were going well. But the veins showed, and would show more. The knuckles were wrinkled, would wrinkle more. She remembered an evening with friends, years ago: laughing, mercilessly, over a touched-up press photograph of a fifty-year-old actress of their acquaintance; laughing, unkindly, because she claimed in the interview to be only forty, and could have been, from the face, but that clever bitch Helen had said, “Look at her hands, though, you can always tell from the hands”—and it was true, the photographer, courteous though he had been, had forgotten to touch up the hands, and there they lay, on the elegant actress’s elegant little coffee table, the hands of a woman of fifty. Ribbed, veined, corded. Alison raised one of her hands into the air, let the blood run down out of it, leaving it thin, pale, pretty. How long can one stave off death and ugliness with these ancient little tricks?
Alison Murray had an elder sister. Her sister was called Rosemary. A year ago, Rosemary had gone into the hospital, with a lump in her breast, and had woken to find the breast removed, for the lump had been malignant. The night after this news had reached her had been one of the worst of Alison’s life. She had been unable to sleep for fear. Her own breasts had felt ill with terror: for months afterward, she had not dared to look at them, to touch them. The knife slice through the soft innocent tissue haunted her nights for weeks.
Alison and Rosemary had not been particularly close, saw one another rarely, so why should the news have upset her so much?
Rosemary had always been jealous of Alison. Because Alison was admired and beautiful. Rosemary was good-looking herself, but did not think so. Rosemary’s ill will had made Alison feel guilty, sick. And when she herself produced two daughters, one beautiful, one remarkably not so, she had insisted that Jane should love Molly, had insisted that Jane should be kind, affectionate, loving. She knew too well what jealousy and ill will do to the jealous one and to the object of jealousy.
At the same moment, at the birth of Molly, she had retired from her profession, she had ceased forever to compete, had ceased to contend, had withdrawn herself and put herself away.
Jane had never been unkind to Molly, in any evident way. But she had no feeling for her. And she expressed her resentment in a hundred other devious ways: by complaining about her own trivial illnesses, by rude remarks about cripples and the deformed, by an excessive revulsion from any sight of physical malady or infirmity, by a stubborn refusal to engage in any physically unpleasant activity—scraping plates, cleaning shoes, emptying dustbins. Guilty, confused, Alison had let her get away with it; as long as the resentment was not expressed directly against Molly, let Jane abuse the wretched and maimed of the earth as much as she liked. Unfortunately, Jane was reared in an age and an environment where black humor was considered chic, where defects, long tenderly exempt from mockery, had become legitimate targets, where clever young men cracked jokes about the blind, the deaf, the limbless, the speechless: she was a child of the times.
Alison, sitting alone thinking, thought: I should have told her that it was wrong. Whatever she thought of me, however she hated me for telling her, I should have told her she was wrong, and that such jokes must not, must never be made. Such thoughts must not be thought. There is nothing healthy about their expression. They must not be thought.
I loved Molly too much, Jane too little. God knows what that effort cost me.
Anthony had said to Alison, after the property crisis and his heart attack—poor Alison, poor darling, what a bad choice you made again in me.
She had not, at the time, thought it in any way a relevant remark. But maybe it was? Choice was not a simple matter. Was it a matter of choice that Jane, who could drive perfectly well, had chosen to kill two men in the country which possessed the most stringent penalties for traffic offenses in Europe? Choice. Bad luck. For years, for ten years, Alison had striven to believe in accidents, in the possibility of bad luck, for that would exonerate herself, her husband, Jane, Rosemary, her parents—they would all be exonerated by such a belief from the guilt of Molly’s sacrifice. But if it were not so? She glimpsed for a moment, in the dark night, a primitive causality so shocking, so uncanny, that she shivered and froze. A world where the will was potent, not impotent: where it made, indeed, bad choices and killed others by them, killed them, deformed them, destroyed them.
I gave Rosemary cancer of the breast, said Alison to herself, aloud, to see how the words sounded. They did not sound very foolish. She held her hands over her own breasts. Shivering. Well, they would get her in the end. Age and Death would catch her, if their forerunners did not.
PART TWO
On Thursday the nineteenth of November, Anthony Keating’s guests rose in good spirits, for it was a fine pink morning, with a mauve blush over the hills: shepherd’s warning, said Anthony, but nobody could believe it. How could so lovely a color foretell bad weather? Giles was more impressed by the house in daylight than he had been in the dark, and Anthony and Giles strolled around the grounds together, leaving Pamela to wash up the breakfast dishes. Anthony pointed out the features: the finials, the small rose window, the pond with its little gray rim, its modest little dolphin. “I always wanted a pond with a statue in it,” said Anthony. “It’s not exactly a Bernini, but it’s pretty enough, don’t you think?” Giles nodded, staring, without seeing, at the gray stone, the iron-red and yellow lichen, the little cups and plates and velvet cushions of the green moss.
They wandered on, and paused by an overgrown bed of persistent yellow roses.
“Well,” said Giles, “what do you think?”
“About what?”
“What are you going to do?”
Anthony shrugged.
“What can I do? Wait for you to pull off some new coup, I suppose.
There’s nothing much I can do. You don’t need me, in town, do you? I’d come, if you did.”
Giles felt in his pocket, opened his cigarette case, took out a cigarette, lit it, stared at the damp grass.
“I was thinking,” said Giles. “Rory and I were thinking—maybe you’d be happier if you could get out of this whole business?” He looked around. “You’ve got such a fine place here, it seems a pity to risk it.” He stared, innocently, at the house, at the great gray barn with its overgrown roof. “And you’ve had a bad time. Being ill. And then, Alison. It can’t be doing you much good, worrying about the Riverside debacle.”
“I don’t worry myself to death, you know,” said Anthony, staring also at the grass, at Giles’s square brown polished city shoes, at his own unpolished city shoes.
“No, I daresay not. You’re looking fit. But Rory and I were thinking . . . ” And, slowly, Giles expounded what he and Rory had been thinking. They had been thinking of offering Anthony a get-out, a release from the company. Of course, he said, the company being in such a sorry state, they couldn’t offer much money, but they could release Anthony from all of the company’s liabilities, and perhaps arrange for a capital sum to be transferred, in exchange for Anthony’s share.
He was too delicate to mention a sum, and Anthony too delicate to inquire, but he hinted that they could come to some agreement in the light of Anthony’s personal finances, with regard to his old house, his new house. “It would be nice, for instance,” said Giles, “if you could feel that this house was your own, wouldn’t it? I’m not saying we’d ever be able to cover all you borrowed on it, but we could go some way to making sure you didn’t lose it. If anything happened to the company.”
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