Women in the Wall

by O'Faolain, Julia

“Are you … all right?” she asked. Silence had never been natural to him. In that he was like a child or hound. Waking hours were for action: eating, laughing, fighting, loving. Radegunda’s flesh did react now, but she had aroused herself. Experimenting. She made a quick aspiration for forgiveness. Jesus, Mary …

  “I’ll tell you,” said Clotair whose actual presence she had forgotten. He was more compelling in memory. “I can talk about it to you. To you I can. It was an outrageous thing. Terrible!” He turned an outraged face to her, pink under the hair which still hung loose and long as only the king might wear it, but thinner now and inclined to gather limply in rats’ tails. Pale hairs, some white, some still ginger, sprang in tufts from his nose and ears, blazing and dimming as he moved his head in and out of the sunlight. “Outrageous!” What could have outraged Clotair who was outrage itself? Stories of his choicer murders were as popular on a dull evening as any ghost or werewolf tale.

  “My own leudes,” he was saying. “My own men turned on me.” He spat an angry gobbet of spittle on the gravelled path and Radegunda felt something like relief to see that his juices were not dried nor his indignation tamed.

  “Tell me,” she encouraged.

  It was a long story, sour and, she suspected, not often admitted. A story of defeat for Clotair whose warriors had forced him to engage a battle against his judgement.

  “They attacked me. Physically. Can you imagine! Me. Their king. They burst into my tent, made ribbons of it and destroyed some of my most precious possessions. An embroidered saddle I was fond of disappeared and hasn’t been seen since. Byzantine it was. If I ever see it I’ll rip the backside off the thief. I’ll put my scramasax up his arse-hole. What was I saying? Yes. They were mad for loot, you see. Rabid. They forced me to fight. They’d have killed me if I hadn’t agreed to lead them. So what could I do? I said ‘Yes’ though I knew it was mad. As I say, a lot of good it did them! So far from their getting loot, the crows got many of them. I had to sue for peace and creep home with my tail between my legs. Yes. Well, you don’t have that sort of trouble in convents, do you? No. No troubles at all.” Staring around him, angry with the anger he had been unable to vent on his rebellious leudes. “Here you’re under God’s wing,” he said, “and I suppose you’ll have no troubles in the next life either!” He wiped spittle from his lips with the back of a hand and she noticed the large, pale freckles of old age. “You”, he said, “have the advantage of me now, haven’t you?”

  “I don’t …”

  “You understand me and I don’t you. That’s the way it is. Like in the hunt when the huntsman knows how the boar or stag is going to react but the boar doesn’t know about him. Only with you and me it’s the other way round. I’m coming after you. I’m the huntsman—and I don’t understand you. I can’t soften you. To another woman—to you if you were like other women, I might say: ‘Radegunda, do you remember when we were young, how we did this or that? Do you remember the mare I gave you, a Thuringian like yourself, with a silver coat, spotted, beautiful and hard to tame?’ I might say: ‘Radegunda, I see you young again and cosily mine when I see the way your shoulder twitches. Even under that hideous habit your shoulder is talking to me, and your foot when you sit there and it begins to move on its own. It’s reminding me of things, moments when things were good between us.’ They were, you know. Sometimes they were. You’ll deny that though. You’ll deny it to yourself—so how can I move or soften you? I can’t, can I?” Staring at her from a blunt, astonished face. Had Clotair often acknowledged such a puzzle?

  Softened after all, she decided to touch him, reaching out a wooden hand awkwardly to his knee. But he didn’t notice. It was too late, too wooden or—if he had observed it—too unpleasantly pitying. He took no notice and she pulled it back, letting it hang, as though now misplaced, across her thigh.

  “Then I think,” said Clotair, “‘she’s a religious woman. Duty is something she knows about. I’ll remind her of her duty to me.’” Stepping backwards, he surveyed the convent. “This is a fine place you built yourself with my morning gift? The finest in Gaul I’m told. With my morning gift! Ha! There’s a joke all right! You give your wife a good morning gift after your first night of love. A generous, outsize one to show you appreciate the pleasure she brought you—and what does she do? Thanks you kindly, uses it to build herself a convent and leaves you alone in your bed. I must be the fable of Gaul. Horny Clotair grew a horn to match his wife’s halo. Give me a tune and I’ll sing it.” His laugh was a bark, loud and desolate. Why did he want her? “I sometimes think”, he said next, “that my luck left me with you. I’ve had knocks, you know. Mmm—mind you,” a quick swaggering grin, “I’ve had luck too. My brothers died and I got their land. That turd, Childebert, croaked in the nick of time. He was conspiring against me while my back was turned. While I was fighting the Germans, can you imagine. But God smote him!” Satisfaction lit the old blue flame for a moment in Clotair’s eye. “He was a turd right to the end,” he remarked. “May his soul rot!”

  “My lord, he’s dead!”

  “Are you trying to cross me?”

  “He was your brother!”

  “God smote him! His judgement spoke. You’ll agree about that, won’t you. You’re a religious woman. You agree with God’s judgement, don’t you?”

  Clotair’s eyes popped. Like stones in a sling, they looked ready to fly at her: wild, protuberant, restrained only by a frail network of bloody lines. He had often thrown her religion into their fights. Fighting was his talent. He could make a weapon of anything. “A religious woman,” he’d roar—she could hear him now—“and a lousy wife! A nun in bed. Wears a hair-shirt but can’t come to table on time. The shirt rubs others more than it does herself. Religion’s a convenient cover for obstinacy and getting one’s own way.” He wasn’t such a fool, Clotair. Some of his shafts hit home.

  “It’s easy for you,” he said now. “What temptations have you here? None. And if you do commit some sin—eating sausage or whipping your nuns too hard, well, repentance is easy for you, as easy as swearing is for me. It’s a habit. Now I can’t repent at all. I haven’t got the knack. I try. I tell myself I shouldn’t have done something and I try to feel sorry for it and then, thinking of it, don’t you know, I get carried away. I start doing the thing all over again in my mind. Again and again. I feel the desire to do it gnawing at me. My palms begin to itch. My belly tightens with expectation. My muscles tense. I commit the sin in fancy, over and over as often as I think of it. Then do you know what happens? I laugh. I can’t help it. It’s funny. I roar laughing and I have to creep out of church with a cloth over my nose pretending I’ve got an attack of sneezing. My only hope is that God thinks it’s funny too. On my good days I think he does.”

  “I heard you made a pilgrimage of repentance to Tours, to the tomb of the Blessed St. Martin.”

  “Yes. That’s why I’m here. I was so close.”

  “Ah, you just wanted to see the convent?”

  Clotair was silent for a moment. Then: “You know why I made the pilgrimage to Tours?”

  “I can guess.”

  Clotair nodded. His shoulders slumped. “Chramn!” he said slowly. “My eldest boy Chramn—you must have heard how he rebelled against me?”

  “Yes. He visited me here at the time. I tried to talk sense to him.”

  “Peugh!” Clotair blew her remonstrances into the air. His lips clapped like a snorting horse’s. “Wasting your breath! He was conspiring with that turd, Childebert. You heard that too of course! Bad news travels fast. While my back was turned. I had to have him murdered. Did you know he took the field against me? Spread the rumour that I was dead—that was when I was in Germany. Hoping to get some of my own men to join him. Some of them did too! Grabbed my lands. Then, when that turd Childebert died, he ran off to rouse the Bretons against me. The Bretons! He’d have allied himself with Lucifer if the fiend had made the offer. I had to have him murdered. You kill a mad dog, a dog who has the rabies, no matte
r how you loved it when it was sane. Don’t you?”

  The nun did not reply. Clotair bent forward and caught her wrist. “Don’t you?” he heckled, “kill a mad dog?”

  “You did not”, she said, “have to kill his wife and children too. You did not have to shut them up in a labourer’s cottage and burn the lot like wasps in a nest!”

  Clotair roared: “Hornets! They were worse than wasps. The children too. His blood was in them. It was bad.”

  “You had him tied to a bench with a cloth over his mouth and then fired the house. They were helpless.”

  “Hornets! Hornets! You said it yourself!”

  “Clotair,” the nun put her hand on his arm, gripped it and pulled him to a sitting position beside her on the bench. His body was shaking, his skin sweating. “Listen,” she said firmly. “Calm yourself and think. You said you wanted to repent. You went to Tours to repent, didn’t you?”

  Clotair leaped up. “I can’t repent,” he roared. “How can I? I hate him. I’m sorry I didn’t pull his heart from his stinking, treacherous body with my own hand!” He spread five fingers, grabbed a heart-sized measure of air and wrenched his arm furiously backwards. “I loved him,” he yelled. “I was a good father to him. There was no reason …”

  “Clotair!” She was standing, straining to control his glance. “Suppose. Just suppose it’s Judgement Day and you are before the throne of God. Imagine God looking at you. Suppose God were to ask you, ‘Clotair, my son, why did you murder your own son, Chramn, with his wife and little children? Why did you burn them to a slow and painful death when they were already your prisoners and could do you no harm? You have often sinned against me, but I have been forbearing! I never struck you down in your sin as you did Chramn. Why did you do it?’ What answer could you give to God?”

  Clotair stiffened. He stood, very erect, very serious but avoiding Radegunda’s glance. “I would say,” he stared unblinkingly at the sun as though addressing it. “I would say …” He paused a moment, then burst out angrily: “I would say, ‘why, oh God, did you put them in my power when my temper was up? You knew how I’m made and what I’d do! If you delivered them up to me it was because you wanted me to do it! It’s your fault!’” Clotair turned to Radegunda. “That’s what I’d say,” he told her. “What could he say to that? Tell me. What?”

  Radegunda was silent, then: “We’ll pray for you, Clotair,” she promised. “The whole convent.”

  “Radegunda,” turning to stare into her eyes. “There’s a better, quicker way than prayer. I haven’t got much time. I need help. I need someone with me whom I can trust, talk to. You know I’ve never been one for prayer or talk. I hadn’t time. It wasn’t … the thing expected. I’m a king. I command. I demand. I take. I fight. I force respect. That’s what I’ve done for fifty years. Fifty years I’ve been king. How can I learn to do the opposite now? Unless you help me, Radegunda. You know that’s why I’m here, so why pretend? I need you.”

  Radegunda was moved. He saw this.

  “Not the flesh this time,” he promised. “That’s not what I need. Anyway, women …” he waved dismissively, “are never scarce: servant girls, slaves, ambitious little virgins … I have to push them away. They’re like the puppies who tease my old hound when he wants to sleep. He bites them but they come back for more, disturbing his rest.” He leaned forward. His once arrogant, lean, young man’s face was still discernible, still present in the basic bone beneath the half-shucked pod of loosening skin. She scrutinized the map of that skin, but lines tell little. This might have been an old ascetic. If she had not known him, she might have taken the deep dents for the track of suffering. Old men strip off the evidence of dead passions. His cheeks, once bold and bellying like sails in a tailwind, were now trimmed down.

  “After all,” he argued, “it would be an act of … mercy. I know you don’t want to leave your convent, maybe you don’t want me to have the best of both worlds—or any of the other world at all. Maybe you don’t think I deserve it? Maybe I don’t. But shouldn’t you leave that decision to God, Radegunda. Shouldn’t you do your best by me? Return good for evil—if that’s what you think you got from me! Your nuns can carry on without you. How do you know God wants you here anyway?” he urged, and, seeing a sign of weakening in her, struck: “It’s your duty!” he asserted. Triumphantly.

  “My duty is here,” Radegunda told him with a perceptible tilt of her chin.

  “How the devil do you know?” Clotair dropped his suppliant’s pose. “You’re a proud, obstinate female. Always were! So sure, always so sure, so right, so much in love with yourself! You say you are giving up the world for God but you only give up what you don’t want. Your ‘charity’ is all for lepers and people who have no claim on you. That impresses people. Kissing the sores of disgusting old beggars makes a good story. It does the rounds of Gaul and turns up in every harpist’s repertory. God’s belly, but I’m sick of hearing about you and your lepers! I tell myself it must be a vice! You made more bones about performing your conjugal duties than a wild mare brought to stud! But when it came down to it you liked it well enough! You were a sexy woman, Radegunda, sexier than a lot of whores I’ve known and I’ve known plenty. You just liked to be forced! You’re not unique. I’ve known other women like you, only they weren’t clever enough to make use of religion to salt their sex. You liked the forcing!” roared Clotair. “That was the best part. Now that you haven’t got me to force you, you force yourself—to kiss lepers!”

  “I see, my lord,” Radegunda spoke in an icy, toneless voice, “that I would still have to suffer your abuse if I were to return to you. At least you are not attempting to get me back under false pretences. Now!”

  “Oh I,” roared Clotair, “am honest.”

  “Not so honest about Chramn!”

  “I am! I am honest about Chramn! I’m sick about Chramn, sick but not sorry, can’t you see that, you cow? I vomit, I bring up my guts when I think of my own son turning on me and of all the things he did and how I had to fight a battle to vanquish him! It was him or me! And how can I be sorry it wasn’t me? How? Huh? I’d kill him again if I had to and I’d be right. What kind of a king would I be else? The bishops agree with me, do you know that? They know how the world is run! They said it was like God’s judgement on Absalom! Absalom, have you heard about him?”

  “Yes,” said Radegunda wearily. “But you still went to Tours to try to repent.”

  “Because,” howled Clotair, “God is unreasonable.”

  “His reason …”

  “I know. I know. It’s beyond us. That’s what the priests say, damn them. Well then it’s beyond us and I can’t be expected to repent! I’m stifling. I can’t breath! How can I live? I have all of Gaul to govern and every town is full of conspiracy. Traitors spring up like ragweed in a field. I have to have eyes in the back of my head. Whom can I trust? Tell me that. My men assault me. My brother and son conspire against me. I have to survive, don’t I? Gaul needs a king—any king is better than a pack of smaller men tearing at the kingdom like dogs at a carcass! How can I survive and repent! How? How?”

  “My lord, you’ve been shouting. People are frightened. Look!”

  Clotair turned and saw a row of nuns’ heads along the top of the garden wall. Terrorized eyes peeped.

  “Ha!” he roared in amusement. “Frightened, are they? Frightened for you?” He walked over to the wall, stared silently at the veiled heads for a moment then suddenly let out a yell: “Boo!” he cried and the heads bobbed down and up again like gulls on a wave. Clotair laughed and slapped the wall. “Don’t worry,” he told them. “I’m an old dog now. I bark. I don’t bite.” He turned back to Radegunda. “See,” he said, “they were anxious about you. The protective instinct survives, even in a convent.”

  “All the instincts, my lord.”

  “All? Would they kill for you?”

  Radegunda closed her eyes.

  “All right, all right. I’m sorry. Now, you see, to you I can say that. I
really am sorry I upset you. You can go,” he shouted to the nuns. “Your foundress is safe. I’m not going to take her off. Go off now. Shoo!” The heads disappeared. Clotair laughed more quietly, nodding his head. “It’s an old feeling,” he said, “one I hadn’t felt since you left. You were always making me sorry! Do you know, Radegunda, why I remember you more fondly than other women? Not for the reasons you might think.” Clotair sat back down beside her on the stone bench. “No, the reason, Radegunda, is because you had no children. Are you surprised? I am. I was so proud of my children. Once. I was like a farmer who plants seeds and sees them come up: a good feeling. It doesn’t last though. The seeds turn into plants. The plants are alien. They’re not you, not the farmer and not the old plant. They’re a new thing: a rival and they claim the mother’s love. I knew that long before Chramn turned on me. I knew my children were my enemies. A woman who has no children mothers her husband. Even you, Radegunda!”

  “I”, said Radegunda, “have my nuns. They are my children.”

  “Then they’re my enemies. I’ve been robbed again! You took my morning gift and made rivals for me! Ah, the sour old joke! What a lot of gifts I gave you. I suppose you remember none of them. Mostly I gave them to you to make up for some row—when I was feeling sorry. Every sort of gift. But you’ve forgotten them! You don’t remember where they are! I can tell you about one. It is in the Church at Tours. I saw it when I was there on my pilgrimage. On the high altar. I was trying to pray, standing, trying to collect my thoughts, feeling wrong, somehow, out of place. And then, right in front of me, I saw something familiar. It was a gilt lace altar-cloth hung with pearls and bits of gold, very intricate, very costly and it brought something back, some memory of years back. Where had I seen that lace? There couldn’t be two pieces like it. It was of very special workmanship—and then I remembered. It was a tunic I’d given you and which you’d offered the saint. I suppose your dresses are hung on half the altars of Gaul? My gifts! Think of the memories if I were to go on a pilgrimage along your track, Radegunda! Well, maybe they’ll do me some good when the time comes that I need it.”