There’s something unnerving about a big strong persona that abruptly shrinks pale and frail. It duly unnerved me, literally in fact, and my nerves went away. Whatever had happened, I was in command.
I shut the door and followed her into the room. She was on the settee sitting forward. Daniel still wasn’t there. For the first time it occurred to me Daniel might be involved in this collapse, and I said quickly: “Something’s wrong. What is it? Is it Daniel? Is he okay?”
She gave a feeble contemptuous little laugh.
“Daniel’s all right. I just had a bit of an accident. Silly thing, really, but it gave me a bit of a turn for a minute.”
She lifted her left hand in which she was clutching a red and white handkerchief. Then I saw the red pattern was drying blood. I put the shopping on the table and approached cautiously.
“What have you done?”
“Just cut myself. Stupid. I was chopping up some veg for our dinner. Haven’t done a thing like this since I was a girl.”
I winced. Had she slicked her finger off and left it lying among the carrots? No, don’t be a fool. Even she wouldn’t be so quiescent if she had. Or would she?
“Let me see,” I said, putting on my firm and knowledgeable act, which has once or twice kept people from the brink of panic when I was in a worse panic than they were. To my dismay, she let go the handkerchief, and offered me her wound unresistingly.
It wasn’t a pretty cut, but a cut was all it was, though deep enough almost to have touched the bone. I could see from her digital movements that nothing vital had been severed, and fingers will bleed profusely if you hit one of the blood vessels at the top.
“It’s not too bad,” I said. “I can bandage it up for you. Have you got some TCP?”
She told me where the things were in the kitchen, and I went to get them. The lights were still on, the curtains were still drawn. Through the thin plastic of the kitchen drapes I could detect only flat darkness. Maybe the prison wall around the garden kept daylight at bay.
I did a good amateur job on her finger. The bleeding had slackened off.
“I should get a doctor to have a look at it, if you’re worried.”
“I never use doctors,” she predictably said.
“Well, a chemist then.”
“It’ll be all right. You’ve done it nicely. Just a bit of a shock.” Her color was coming back, what she had of it.
“Shall I make you a cup of tea?”
“That’d be nice.”
I returned to the kitchen and put on the kettle.
The tea apparatus sat all together on a tray, as if waiting. I looked at her fawn frizzy head over the settee back, and the soft coal-fire glows disturbing the room. It was always nighttime here, and always nineteen-thirty.
The psychological aspect of her accident hadn’t been lost on me. I supposed, always looking after someone, always independently alone, she’d abruptly given way to the subconscious urge to be in her turn looked after. She’d given me control. It frightened me.
The kettle started to boil, and I arranged the pot. I knew how she’d want her tea, nigrescently stewed and violently sweet. Her head elevated. She was on her feet.
“I’ll just go and check Daniel.”
“I can do that, if you like,” I said before I could hold my tongue.
“That’s all right,” she said. She went out and I heard her go slowly up the stairs. Big and strong, how did she, even so, carry him down them? I made the tea.
I could hear nothing from upstairs. The vegetables lay scattered where she had left them, though the dangerous knife had been put from sight. On an impulse, I pulled aside a handful of kitchen curtain.
I wasn’t surprised at what I saw. Somehow I must have worked it out, though not been aware I had. I let the curtain coil again into place, then carried the tea tray into the room. I set it down, and went to the room’s back window, and methodically inspected that, too. It was identical to the windows of the kitchen, both had been boarded over outside with planks of wood behind the glass. Not a chink of light showed. It must have been one terrific gale that smashed these windows and necessitated such a barricade. Strange the boarding was still there, after she’d had the glass replaced.
I heard her coming down again, but she had given me control, however briefly. I’d caught the unmistakable scent of something that wants to lean, to confess, I was curious, or maybe it was the double gin catching up on me. Curiosity was going to master fear. I stayed looking at the boarding, and let her discover me at it when she came in.
I turned when she didn’t say anything. She simply looked blankly at me, and went to sit on the settee.
“Daniel’s fine,” she said. “He’s got some of his books. Picture books. He can see the pictures, though he can’t read the stories. You can go up and look at him, if you like.”
That was a bribe, I went to the tea and started to pour it, spooning a mountain of sugar in her cup.“You must be expecting a lot of bad weather, Mrs. Besmouth.”
“Oh yes?”
“Yes. The windows.”
I didn’t think she was going to say anything. Then she said: “They’re boarded over upstairs too, on the one side.”
“The side facing out to sea.”
“That’s right.”
“Did you build the wall up, too?”
She said, without a trace of humor: “Oh no. I got a man in to do that.”
I gave her the tea, and she took it, and drank it straight down, and held the cup out to me.
“I could fancy another.”
I repeated the actions with the tea. She took the second cup, but looked at it, not drinking. The clock ticked somnolently. The room felt hot and heavy and peculiarly still, out of place and time and light of sun or moon.
“You don’t like the sea, do you?” I said. I sat on the arm of the red chair, and watched her.
“Not much. Never did. This was my dad’s house. When he died, I kept on here. Nowhere else to go.” She raised her elastoplasteed hand and stared at it. She looked very tired, very flaccid, as if she’d given up. “You know,” she said, “I’d like a drop of something in this. Open that cupboard, will you? There’s a bottle just inside.”
I wondered if she were the proverbial secret drinker, but the bottle was alone, and three quarters full, quite a good whisky.
She drank some of the tea and held the cup so I could ruin the whisky by pouring it in. I poured to the cup’s brim.
“You have one,” she said. She drank, and smacked her lips softly. “You’ve earned it. You’ve been a good little girl.”
I poured the whisky neat into the other tealess cup and drank some, imagining it smiting the gin below with a clash of swords.
“I’ll get merry,” she said desolately. “I didn’t have my dinner. The pie’ll be spoiled I turned the oven out.”
“Shall I get you a sandwich?”
“No. But you can make one for Daniel, if you like.”
“Yes,” I said.
I got up and went into the kitchen. It was a relief to move away from her. Something was happening to Daniel’s mother, something insidious and profound. She was accepting me, drawing me in. I could feel myself sinking in the quagmire.
As I made the sandwich from ingredients I came on more or less at random, she started to talk to me. It was a ramble of things, brought on by the relaxation of spilled blood and liquor, and the fact that there had seldom been anyone to talk to. As I buttered bread, sliced cheese and green cucumber, I learned how she had waited on and borne with a cantankerous father, nursed him, finally seen him off through the door in a box. I learned how she weighed meat behind the butcher’s counter and did home-sewing, and how she had been courted by a plain stodgy young man, a plumber’s assistant, and he was all she could come by in an era when it was essential to come by something. And how eventually he jilted her.
The whisky lay in a little warm pool across the floor of my mind. I began irresistibly to withdraw inside myself, comparing her hopeles
s life with mine, the deadly job leading nowhere, the loneliness. And all at once I saw a horrid thing, the horrid thing I had brought upon myself. Her position was not hereditary, and might be bestowed. By speaking freely, she was making the first moves. She was offering me, slyly, her mantle. The role of protectress, nurse, and mother to Daniel—
I arranged the sandwich slowly on a plate. There was still time to run away. Lots of time.
“Just walking,” I heard her say. “You didn’t think about it then. Not like now. The sea was right out, and it was dark. I never saw him properly. They’d make a fuss about it now, all right. Rape. You didn’t, then. I was that innocent, I didn’t really know what he was doing. And then he let go and left me. He crawled off. I think he must have run along the edge of the sea, because I heard a splashing. And when the tide started to come in again, I got up and tidied myself, and I walked home.”
I stood quite still in the kitchen, the sandwich on its plate in my hands, wide-eyed, listening.
“I didn’t know I was pregnant, thought I’d eaten something. The doctor put me right. He told me what he thought of me, too. Not in words, exactly, just his manner. Rotten old bugger. I went away to have the baby. Everybody knew, of course. When he was the way he was, they thought it was a punishment. They were like that round here, then. I lived off the allowance, and what I had put by, and I couldn’t manage. And then, I used to steal things, what do you think of that? I never got found out. Just once, this woman stopped me. She said: I think you have a tin of beans in your bag. I had, too, and the bill. What a red face she got. She didn’t tumble to the other things I’d taken and hadn’t paid for. Then I had a windfall. The old man I used to work for, the butcher, he died, and he left me something. That was a real surprise. A few thousand it was. And I put it in the Society, and I draw the interest.”
I walked through into the room. She had had a refill from the bottle and was stirring sugar into it.
“Do you mean Daniel’s father raped you?”
“Course that’s what I mean.”
“And you didn’t know who it was?”
“No.” She drank. She was smiling slightly and licked the sugar off her lips.
“I thought you said he was a sailor.”
“I never. I said he was at sea. That’s what I told people. My husband’s at sea. I bought myself a ring, and gave myself a different name. Besmouth. I saw it on an advertisement. Besmouth’s Cheese Crackers.” She laughed. “At sea,” she repeated. “Or out of it. He was mother naked, and wringing wet. I don’t know where he’d left his clothes. Who’d believe you if you told them that.”
“Shall I take this up to Daniel?” I said.
She looked at me, and I didn’t like her look, all whisky smile.
“Why not,” she said. She swallowed a belch primly. “That’s where you’ve wanted to go all along, isn’t it? ‘How’s Daniel?’ ” she mimicked me in an awful high soppy voice that was supposed to be mine, or mine the way she heard it. “ ‘Is Daniel ookay?’ Couldn’t stop looking at him, could you? Eyes all over him. But you won’t get far. You can strip off and do the dance of the seven veils, and he won’t notice.”
My eyes started to water, a sure sign of revulsion. I felt I couldn’t keep quiet, though my voice (high and soppy?) would tremble when I spoke.
“You’re being very rude. I wanted to help.”
“Ohhh yes,” she said.
“The thing that worries me,” I said, “is the way you coop him up. Don’t you ever try to interest him in anything?” She laughed dirtily, and then did belch, patting her mouth as if in congratulation. “I think Daniel should be seen by a doctor. I’m sure there’s some kind of therapy—”
She drank greedily, not taking an apparent notice of me.
I hurried out, clutching the sandwich plate, and went along the corridor and up the stairs, perching on two wobbly sticks. If I’d stayed with her much longer, I, too, might have lost the use of my lower limbs.
Light came into the hall from the glass in the door, but going up, it grew progressively murkier.
It was a small house, and the landing, when I got to it, was barely wide enough to turn round on.
There was the sort of afterthought of a cramped bathroom old houses have put in—it was to the back, and through the open door, I could see curtains across the windows. They, too, must be boarded, as she had said. And in the bedroom which faced the back. A pathological hatred of the sea, ever since she had been raped into unwanted pregnancy beside it. If it were true . . . Did she hate Daniel, as well? Was that why she kept him as she did, clean, neat, fed, cared for and deliberately devoid of joy, of soul—
There was a crisp little flick of paper, the virtually unmistakable sound of a page turning. It came from the room to my right: the front bedroom. There was a pane of light there too, falling past the angle of the half-closed door. I crossed the door and pushed it wide.
He didn’t glance up, just went on poring over the big slim book spread before him. He was sitting up in bed in spotless blue and white pajamas. I had been beginning to visualize him as a child, but he was a man. He looked like some incredible convalescent prince, or an angel. The cold light from the window made glissandos over his hair. Outside, through the net, was the opposite side of the street, the houses, and the slope of the hill going up with other houses burgeoning on it. You couldn’t even see the cliff. Perhaps this view might be more interesting to him than the sea. People would come and go, cars, dogs.
But there was only weather in the street today, shards of it blowing about. The weather over the sea must be getting quite spectacular.
When she went out, how did she avoid the sea? She couldn’t then, could she? I suddenly had an idea that somehow she had kept Daniel at all times from the sight of the water. I imagined him, a sad, subnormal, beautiful little boy, sitting with his discarded toys—if he ever had any—on the floor of this house.
And outside, five minutes’ walk away, the sand, the waves, the wind.
The room was warm, from a small electric heater fixed up in the wall, above his reach. Not even weather in this room.
He hadn’t glanced up at me, though I’d come to the bedside, he just continued gazing at the book. It was a child’s book, of course. It showed a princess leaning down from a tower with a pointed roof, and a knight below, not half so handsome as Daniel.
“I’ve brought you some lunch,” I said. I felt self-conscious, vaguely ashamed, his mother drunk in the room downstairs and her secrets in my possession. How wonderful to look at the rapist must have been. Crawled away, she had said. Maybe he too—
“Daniel,” I said. I removed the book gently from his grasp, and put the plate there instead.
How much of what she said to me about my own motives was actually the truth? There were just about a million things I wouldn’t want to do for him, my aversion amounting to a phobia, to a state not of wouldn’t but couldn’t. Nor could I cope with this endless silent non-reaction. I’d try to make him react, I was trying to now. And maybe that was wrong, unkind—
Maybe I disliked and feared men so much I’d carried the theories of de Beauvoir and her like to an ultimate conclusion. I could only love what was male if it was also powerless, impotent, virtually inanimate. Not even love it. Be perversely aroused by it. The rape principle in reverse.
He wasn’t eating, so I bent down, and peered into his face, and for the first time, I think he saw me.
His luminous eyes moved, and fixed on mine. They didn’t seem completely focused, even so. But meeting them, I was conscious of a strange irony. Those eyes, which perhaps had never looked at the sea, held the sea inside them. Were the sea.
I shook myself mentally, remembering the whisky plummeting on the gin.
“Eat, Daniel,” I said softly.
He grasped the sandwich plate with great serenity.
He went on meeting my eyes, and mine, of course, filled abruptly and painfully with tears. Psychological symbolism: salt water.
/> I sat on the edge of the bed and stroked his hair.
It felt like silk, as I’d known it would. His skin was so clear, the pores so astringently closed, that it was like a sort of silk, too. It didn’t appear as if he had ever, so far, had to be shaved. Thank God, I didn’t like the thought of her round him with a razor blade. I could even picture her producing her father’s old cutthroat from somewhere, and doing just that with it, another accident, with Daniel’s neck.
You see my impulse, however. I didn’t even attempt to deal with the hard practicality of supporting such a person as Daniel really was. I should have persuaded or coerced him to eat. Instead I sat and held him. He didn’t respond, but he was quite relaxed. Something was going through my brain about supplying him with emotional food, affection, physical security, something she’d consistently omitted from his diet. I was trying to make life and human passion soak into him. To that height I aspired, and, viewed another way, to that depth I’d sunk.
I don’t know when I’d have grown embarrassed, or bored, or merely too fired and cramped to go on perching there, maintaining my sentimental contact with him. I didn’t have to make the decision. She walked in through the door and made it for me.
“Eat your sandwich, Daniel,” she said as she entered.
I hadn’t heard her approach on this occasion, and I jerked away. Guilt, presumably. Some kind of guilt.
But she ignored me and bore down on him from the bed’s other side. She took his hand and put it down smack on the bread. “Eat up,” she said. It was macabrely funny, somehow pure slapstick. But he immediately lifted the sandwich to his mouth. Presumably he’d recognized it as food by touch, but not sight.
She wasn’t tight anymore. It had gone through her and away, like her dark tea through its strainer.
“I expect you want to get along,” she said.
She was her old self, indeed. Graceless courtesies, platitudes. She might have told me nothing, accused me of nothing. We had been rifling each other’s ids, but now it was done, and might never have been. I didn’t have enough fight left in me to try to rip the renewed facade away again. And besides, I doubt if I could have.
Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep Page 44