by Tanith Lee
‘They’re superstitious,’ Vonderjan, dismissive. ‘This sort of business has happened before.’
It was four in the afternoon. Mornings here were separate. They came in slices, divided off by sleep. Or else, one slept through them.
‘Is that – is the piano still on the terrace? Did someone take it?’ said Jeanjacques, giving away the fact he had been to look, and seen the piano was no longer there. Had he dreamed it?
‘Some of them will have moved it,’ said Vonderjan. He paced across the library. The windows stood open. The windows here were open so often, anything might easily get in.
The Island sweated, and the sky was golden lead.
‘Who would move it?’ persisted Jeanjacques.
Vonderjan shrugged. He said, ‘It wasn’t any longer worth anything. It had been in the sea. It must have washed up on the beach. Don’t worry about it.’
Jeanjacques thought, if he listened carefully, he could hear beaded piano notes, dripping in narrow streams through the house. He had heard them this morning, as he lay in bed, awake, somehow unable to get up. (There had seemed no point in getting up. Whatever would happen would happen, and he might as well lie and wait for it.) However, a lifetime of frantic early arisings, of hiding in country barns and thatch, and up chimneys, a lifetime of running away, slowly curdled his guts and pushed him off the mattress. But by then it was past noon.
‘Do they come back?’
‘What? What did you say?’ asked Vonderjan.
‘Your servants. You said, they’d made off before. Presumably they returned.’
‘Yes. Perhaps.’
Birds called raucously (but wordlessly) in the forest, and then grew silent.
‘There was something inside that piano,’ said Vonderjan. ‘A curiosity. I should have seen to it last night, when I found it.’
‘What – what was it?’
‘A body. Oh, don’t blanch. Here, drink this. Some freakish thing. A monkey, I’d say. I don’t know how it got there, but they’ll have been frightened by it.’
‘But it smelled so sweet. Like roses –’
‘Yes, it smelled of flowers. That’s a funny thing. Sometimes the dead do smell like that. Just before the smell changes.’
‘I never heard of that.’
‘No. It surprised me years ago, when I encountered it myself.’
Something fell through the sky – an hour. And now it was sunset.
Nanetta had put on an apron and cooked food in the kitchen. Antoinelle had not done anything to assist her, although in her childhood she had been taught how to make soups and bake bread, out of a sort of bourgeois pettiness.
In fact, Antoinelle had not even properly dressed herself. Tonight she came to the meal, which the black woman had meticulously set out, in a dressing-robe, tied about her waist by a brightly-coloured scarf. The neckline drooped, showing off her long neck and the tops of her round young breasts, and the flimsy improper thing she wore beneath. Her hair was also undressed, loose, gleaming and rushing about her with a water-wet sheen.
Stronn too came in tonight, to join them, sitting far down the table, and with a gun across his lap.
‘What’s that for?’ Vonderjan asked him.
‘The blacks are saying there’s some beast about on the Island. It fell off a boat and swam ashore.’
‘You believe them?’
‘It’s possible, mijnheer, isn’t it. I knew of a dog that was thrown from a ship at Port-au-Roi and reached Venice.’
‘Did you indeed.’
Vonderjan looked smart, as always. The pallid topaz shone in his ring, his shirt was laundered and starched.
The main dish they had consisted of fish, with a kind of ragout, with pieces of vegetable, and rice.
Nanetta had lit the candles, or some of them. Some repeatedly went out. Vonderjan remarked this was due to something in the atmosphere. The air had a thick, heavy saltiness, and for once there was no rumbling of thunder, and constellations showed, massed above the heights, once the light had gone, each star framed in a peculiar greenish circle.
After Vonderjan’s exchange with the man, Stronn, none of them spoke.
Without the storm, there seemed no sound at all, except that now and then, Jeanjacques heard thin little rills of musical notes.
At last he said, ‘What is that I can hear?’
Vonderjan was smoking one of his cigars. ‘What?’
It came again. Was it only in the clerk’s head? He did not think so, for the black girl could plainly hear it too. And oddly, when Vonderjan did not say anything else, it was she who said to Jeanjacques, ‘They hang things on the trees – to honour gods – wind gods, the gods of darkness.’
Jeanjacques said, ‘But it sounds like a piano.’
No-one answered. Another candle sighed and died.
And then Antoinelle – laughed.
It was a horrible, terrible laugh. Rilling and tinkling like the bells hung on the trees of the Island, or like the high notes of any piano. She did it for no apparent reason, and did not refer to it once she had finished. She should have done, she should have begged their pardon, as if she had belched raucously.
Vonderjan got up. He went to the doors and opened them on the terrace and the night.
Where the piano had rested itself against the wall, there was nothing, only shadow and the disarrangement of the vine, all its flower-cups broken and shed.
‘Do you want some air, Anna?’
Antoinelle rose. She was demure now. She crossed to Vonderjan, and they moved out on to the terrace. But their walking together was unlike that compulsive, gliding inevitability of the earlier time. And, once out in the darkness, they only walked, loitering up and down.
She is mad, Jeanjacques thought. This was what he had seen in her face. That she was insane, unhinged and dangerous, her loveliness like vitriol thrown into the eyes of anyone who looked at her.
Stronn poured himself a brandy. He did not seem unnerved, or particularly en garde, despite the gun he had lugged in.
But Nanetta stood up. Unhooking the ruby ear-drops from her earlobes, she placed them beside her plate. As she went across the salon to the inner door, Jeanjacques noted her feet, which had been shod in city shoes, were now bare. They looked incongruous, those dark velvet paws with their nails of tawny coral, extending long and narrow from under her light gown; they looked lawless, in a way nothing of the rest of her did.
When she had gone out, Jeanjacques said to Stronn, ‘Why is she barefoot?’
‘Savages.’
Old rage slapped the inside of the clerk’s mind, like his mother’s hand. Though miles off, he must react. ‘Oh,’ he said sullenly, ‘barbaric, do you mean? You think them barbarians, though they’ve been freed.’
Stronn said, ‘Unchained is what I mean. Wild like the forest. That’s what it means, that word, savage – forest.’
Stronn reached across the table and helped himself from Vonderjan’s box of cigars.
On the terrace, the husband and wife walked up and down. The doors stayed wide open.
Trees rustled below, and were still.
Jeanjacques too got up and followed the black woman out, and beyond the room he found her, still in the passage.
She was stood on her bare feet, listening, with the silver rings in her eyes.
‘What can you hear?’
‘You hear it too.’
‘Why are your feet bare?’
‘So I can go back. So I can run away.’
Jeanjacques seized her wrist and they stood staring at each other in a mutual fear, of which each one made up some tiny element, but which otherwise surrounded them.
‘What –’ he said.
‘Her pillow’s red with blood,’ said Nanetta. ‘Did you see the hole in her neck?’
‘No.’
‘No. It closes up like a flower – a flower that eats flies. But she bled. And from her other place. White bed was red bed with her blood.’
He felt si
ck, but he kept hold of the wand of her wrist.
‘There is something.’
‘You know it too.’
Across the end of the passageway, then, where there was no light, something heavy and rapid, and yet slow, passed by. It was all darkness, but a fleer of pallor slid across its teeth. And the head of it one moment turned, and, without eyes, as it had before, it gazed at them.
The black girl sagged against the wall, and Jeanjacques leaned against and into her. Both panted harshly. They might have been copulating, as Vonderjan had with his wife.
Then the passage was free. They felt the passage draw in a breath.
‘Was in my room,’ the girl muttered. ‘Was in my room that is too small anything so big get through the door. I wake, I see it there.’
‘But it left you alone.’
‘It not want me. Want her.’
‘The white bitch.’
‘Want her, have her. Eat her alive. Run to the forest,’ said Nanetta, in the patois, but now he understood her, ‘run to the forest.’ But neither of them moved.
‘No, no, please, Gregers. Don’t be angry.’
The voice is not from the past. Not Uteka’s. It comes from a future now become the present.
‘You said you have your courses. When did that prevent you before? I’ve told you, I don’t mind it.’
‘No. Not this time.’
He lets her go. Lets go of her.
She did not seem anxious, asking him not to be angry. He is not angry. Rebuffed, Vonderjan is, to his own amazement, almost relieved.
‘Draw the curtains round your bed, Anna. And shut your window.’
‘Yes, Gregers.’
He looks, and sees her for the first time tonight, how she is dressed, or not dressed.
‘Why did you come down like that?’
‘I was hot … does it matter?’
‘A whore in the brothel would put on something like that.’ The crudeness of his language startles him. (Justus?) He checks. ‘I’m sorry, Anna. You meant nothing. But don’t dress like that in front of the others.
‘Nanetta, do you mean?’
‘I mean, of course, Stronn. And the Frenchman.’
Her neck, drooping, is the neck of a lily drenched by rain. He cannot see the mark of the bite.
‘I’ve displeased you.’
Antoinelle can remember her subservient mother (the mother who later threw her out to her aunt’s house) fawning in this way on her father. (Who also threw her out.)
But Vonderjan seems uninterested now. He stands looking instead down the corridor.
Then he takes a step. Then he halts and says, ‘Go along to your room, Anna. Shut the door.’
‘Yes, Gregers.’
In all their time together, they have never spoken in this way, in such platitudes, ciphers. Those things used freely by others.
He thinks he has seen something at the turn of the corridor. But when he goes to that junction, nothing is there And then he thinks, of course, what be there?
By then her door is shut.
Alone, he walks to his own rooms, and goes in. could
The Island is alive tonight. Full of stirrings and displacements.
He takes up a bottle of Hollands, and pours a triple measure.
Beyond the window, the green-ringed eyes of the stars stare down at Bleumaneer, as if afraid.
When she was a child, a little girl, Antoinelle had sometimes longed to go to bed, in order to be alone with her fantasies, which (then) were perhaps ‘ingenuous’. Or perhaps not.
She had lain curled up, pretending to sleep, imagining that she had found a fairy creature in the garden of her parents’ house.
The fairy was always in some difficulty, and she must rescue it – perhaps from drowning in the bird bath, where sparrows had attacked it. Bearing it indoors, she would care for it, washing it in a tea-cup, powdering it lightly with scented dust stolen from her mother’s box, dressing it in bits of lace, tied at the waist with strands of brightly coloured embroidery silk. Since it was seen naked in the tea-cup, it revealed it was neither male nor female, lacking both breasts and penis (she did not grossly investigate it further) although otherwise it appeared a full-grown specimen of its kind. But then, at that time, Antoinelle had never seen either the genital apparatus of a man or the mammalia of an adult woman.
The fairy, kept in secret, was dependent totally upon Antoinelle. She would feed it on crumbs of cake and fruit. It drank from her chocolate in the morning. It would sleep on her pillow. She caressed it, with always a mounting sense of urgency, not knowing where the caresses could lead – and indeed they never led to anything. Its wings she did not touch. (She had been told, the wings of moths and butterflies were fragile.)
Beyond Antoinelle’s life, all Europe had been at war with itself. Invasion, battle, death, these swept by the carefully closed doors of her parents’ house, and by Antoinelle entirely. Through a combination of conspiracy and luck, she learned nothing of it, but no doubt those who protected her so assiduously reinforced the walls of Antoinelle’s self-involvement. Such lids were shut down on her; what else was she to do but make music with herself – play with herself …
Sometimes in her fantasies, Antoinelle and the fairy quarrelled. Afterwards they would be reconciled, and the fairy would hover, kissing Antoinelle on the lips. Sometimes the fairy got inside her nightdress, tickling her all over until she thought she would die. Sometimes she tickled the fairy in turn with a goose-feather, reducing it to spasms identifiable (probably) only as hysteria.
It never flew away.
Yet, as her own body ripened and formed, Antoinelle began to lose interest in the fairy. Instead, she had strange waking dreams of a flesh-and-blood soldier she had once glimpsed under the window, who, in her picturings, had to save her – not from any of the wild armies then at large – but from an escaped bear … and later came the prototypes of Justus, who kissed her until she swooned.
Now Antoinelle had gone back to her clandestine youth. Alone in the room, its door shut, she blew out the lamp. She threw wide her window. Standing in the darkness, she pulled off her garments and tossed them down.
The heat of the night was like damp velvet. The tips of her breasts rose like tight buds that wished to open.
Her husband was old. She was young. She felt her youngness, and remembered her childhood with an inappropriate nostalgia.
Vonderjan had thought something might get in at the window. She sensed this might be true.
Antoinelle imagined that something climbed slowly up the creeper.
She began to tremble, and went and lay down on her bed.
She lay on her back, her hands lying lightly over her breasts, her legs a little apart.
Perhaps after all Vonderjan might ignore her denials and come in. She would let him. Yes, after all, she had stopped menstruating. She would not mind his being here. He liked so much to do things to her, to render her helpless, gasping and abandoned, his hands on her making her into his instrument, making her utter sounds, noises, making her come over and over. And she too liked this best. She liked to do nothing, simply to be made to respond, and so give way. In some other life she might have become the ideal fanatic, falling before the Godhead in fits whose real, spurious nature only the most sceptical could ever suspect. Conversely, partnered with a more selfish and less accomplished lover, with an ignorant Justus, for example, she might have been forced to do more, learned more, liked less. But that now was hypothetical.
A breeze whispered at the window. (What does it say?)
That dream she had had. What had that been? Was it her husband? No, it had been a man with black skin. But she had seen no-one so black. A blackness without any translucence, with no blood inside it.
Antoinelle drifted, in a sort of trance.
She had wandered into a huge room with a wooden floor. The only thing in it was a piano. The air was full of a rapturous smell, like blossom, something that bloomed yet burned.
She ran her fingers over the piano. The notes sounded clearly, but each was a voice. A genderless yet sexual voice, crying out as she touched it – now softly, excitedly, now harsh and demanding and desperate.
She was lying on the beach below the Island. The sea was coming in, wave by wave – glissandi – each one the ripples of the wire harp-strings under the piano lid, or keys rippling as fingers scattered touches across them.
Antoinelle had drained Gregers Vonderjan of all he might give her. She had sucked him dry of everything but his blood. It was his own fault, exalting in his power over her, wanting to make her a doll that would dance on his fingers’ end, penis’s end, power’s end.
Her eyes opened, and, against the glass windows, she saw the piano standing, its lids lifted, its keys gleaming like appetite, black and white.
Should she get up and play music on it? The keys would feel like skin.
Then she knew that if she only lay still, the piano would come to her. She was its instrument, as she had been Vonderjan’s.
The curtain blew. The piano shifted, and moved, but as it did so, its shape altered. Now it was not only a piano, but an animal.
(Notes: Pianimal.)
It was a beast. And then it melted and stood up, and the form it had taken now was that of a man.
Stronn walked around the courtyard, around its corners, past the dry Spanish fountain. Tonight the husks of flowers scratched in the bowl, and sounded like water. Or else nocturnal lizards darted about there.
There was only one light he could see in Gregers Vonderjan’s big house, the few candles left undoused in the salon.
The orange trees on the gallery smelled bitter-sweet.
Stronn did not want to go to bed. He was wide awake. In the old days, he might have had a game of cards with some of the blacks, or even with Vonderjan. But those times had ceased to be.
He had thought he heard the white horse earlier, its shod hoofs going along the track between the rhododendrons. But now there was no sign of it. Doubtless one of the people of the Island would catch the horse and keep it. As for the other animal, the one said to have escaped from a passing ship, Stronn did not really think it existed, or if it did, it would be something of no great importance.