When Buzz stole his first camera, the flat was given over entirely to the cult of appearances. Buzz used the camera as if to see with, as if he could not trust his own eyes and had to check his vision by means of a third lens all the time so in the end he saw everything at second hand, without depths. He developed and printed the pictures in his back room and pinned them on the walls until he was surrounded by frozen memories of the moment of sight; to have them in a condition where he could hold them in his hand gave him a sense of security. He took innumerable photographs of Lee and Annabel and obtained some relief by means of this kind of voyeurism so the atmosphere in their home grew less strained, though they often woke up in the morning to find him perched on the end of the bed, clicking away. And he padded round after them, continually catching them unawares, so they were caught in all manner of situations and often wore expressions of startled irritation in the completed photographs. Cardboard crates of prints and negatives slowly accumulated in Buzz’s room.
Lee had two old photographs which were precious to him. Neither brother had anything left from their childhood besides these photographs. One showed a line of clean children carrying letters which together formed the exhortation: DO RIGHT BECAUSE IT IS RIGHT; the other was of a large, stern, middle-aged woman outstaring the camera with a brother on either side of her. She was their aunt. The brothers looked themselves already, though one was eleven and the other nine, and leaned back on their heels in characteristic, defensive/aggressive stance but the aunt stood straight enough to outface a battalion and shame them. Annabel looked at the photograph of the aunt and then at Lee. Putting her finger to his cheek, she removed a tear but he did not want her to think he was really crying.
‘That’s no authentic tear, love: my eyes, they water easily.’
In fact, this tear both was and was not authentic. His eye disease rendered his tears ambivalent. But, since he had the simple heart of one who boos the villain, when, as he often did, he found he was crying, he usually became sad. Whether his tears were the cause or the effect of a grief or if this grief, when it was experienced, would define itself to him as a reaction to some arbitrary stimulus such as the picture of the dead woman whom he had loved or as a reflection on common mortality – these were questions he had not yet chosen or chosen to need to ask himself. So he usually pretended he was not crying although he had the habit of crying easily.
These were his two iconic photographs, that of a child named Michael and that of a family group. Buzz gave him a picture of himself and Annabel in bed asleep and that made a third, an image of a lover. Lee and Annabel looked like Daphnis and Chloë or Paul and Virginia; Lee, tangled in her very long hair, lay in the crook of her naked shoulder for she was taller than he and they looked as beautiful and peaceful as if made in heaven for one another. Lee kept these photographs in an envelope with their three birth certificates and, later, his marriage certificate. But he could find no causal connection between his three photographed faces. The infant, the child and the adolescent or young man whose face was still so new, unused and incomplete seemed to represent three finite and disconnected states. Looking in the mirror, he saw the face of a stranger to any of them with features which had been filtered through his wife’s eyes and subjected to so many modifications in the process that it was no longer his own. There seemed no connecting logic between the various states of his life, as if each had been attained, not by organic growth but by a kind of convulsive leap from condition to condition. He felt no nostalgia for the innocence he found upon his old, cast-off faces, only a fierce indignation he should ever have been innocent enough to surrender his freedom. For now his once desert room where he had lived as aridly alone as Crusoe on his island with only Buzz for a sullen, undutiful Friday – now this room was choked with things, painted out in thick, dark colours and filled with such a rich, sombre gloom one took a deep breath before stepping over the threshold, knowing one was about to plunge into another, heavier kind of air.
In this cavernous, mysterious room, he hugged her tightly for he knew that duplicity thrives on physical contact. Here, where she and her furniture were sunk together in the same dream, she had at least a shape and an outward form; she had the same status as a thing, as her sofa possessed, or her sideboard with the lions’ heads. Here, she was an object composed of impervious surfaces. But when she walked beside him down the street in her randomly assembled clothes, she was quite wispy and tenuous, like a phantom rag-picker. She was tall and very thin. Her hands were long and the veins stuck out from them in thick bunches like the veins on the freckled hands of old women. Her feet, also, bulged with swollen and protuberant veins. Because of her meagre build, she seemed still taller than she was, a sparse, grotesquely elegant, attenuated girl with a narrow face and hair so straight it fell helplessly down around her as a mute tribute to gravity. She had prehensile toes that could pick up a pencil and sign her name. She stole.
Lee was horrified to find she stole. She stole food from supermarkets and books from bookshops; she stole paints, ink, brushes and small items of clothing. Her parents were wealthy and gave her a large allowance but still she stole and Lee had always regarded thievery as the legitimate province only of the poor. He thought it morally proper the poor should steal as much as they could but, since money was given one only in order to buy things with and so keep the wheel of the economy in motion, then it was the duty of the rich (the hub of the wheel) to purchase as much as they were able. Nevertheless, she continued to steal in spite of his stern disapproval and this proclivity proved one of the many things she and her brother-in-law held in common.
They married when her parents found out she and Lee were living together. Lee had taken his final examinations, obtained a mediocre degree and registered with the university’s department of education for a teacher training course. His brother greeted this action with snarling derision but Lee was forced to support his household, who were either unable or unwilling to support themselves. Annabel informed her parents of her change of address without giving them any further details and they assumed she shared a flat with another girl. She visited them occasionally and, towards the end of the summer, they happened to be passing through the city on the way to Cornwall and came ringing the door bell early one morning.
Buzz was awake and working in the dark room he had improvised from his own quarters. It was a warm day and he wore nothing but a pair of filthy white sailor trousers holed, here and there, with acid. His Apache or Mohawk hair hung past his shoulders and he reeked of incense and chemicals. He went to answer the door and found a man and a woman in casual, expensive clothes who smelled of soap and money, odours alien to him. Because of his perversity, he led them into Lee’s room through his own, past walls papered with pictures of their only daughter frequently unclothed and often in the arms of a man but they managed to retain their equanimity although Buzz’s room was packed full of his fetishes, which included knives, carcasses of engines salvaged from the scrapyard and all his tanks of chemicals. He had also boarded up the windows to keep the light out. If Lee’s room was like a fresh sheet of paper, Buzz’s was like a doodling pad but the many objects which filled it were so eclectic in nature and lay about so haphazardly where he had let them fall that it was just as difficult to gain any hints from it towards the nature of whoever lived there.
Though Lee’s room was already less pristine than it had been. A forest of trees, flowers, birds and beasts had invaded the walls so Lee and Annabel lay together on the narrow mattress like lovers in a jungle. She had already bought a red plush sofa, a round table and a stuffed fox in a glass case so the general effect, since it was that of transition between one extreme state and its polar opposite, would have been peculiarly disturbing if Annabel’s parents had not had eyes only for their daughter and the gardener’s boy, the covers pushed off them for the heat, sleeping.
‘Wake up,’ said Buzz. ‘It’s her mum and dad.’
Annabel shivered but stayed fast asleep. Lee, however, prised o
pen his seccotined eyes and gave his tribute of tears to the glorious morning. When he saw a man in a dark suit looking down at him, he thought the worst had happened and it was a plain-clothes man come to look for hash or appropriated property. He rolled over and extended his wrists.
‘It’s a fair cop,’ he said.
Immediately they took Annabel away with them and the brothers sat brooding in a room which seemed so under-furnished without her they knew they both would not be at ease in it again until her return. They felt incomplete without her presence; without any conscious volition of her own, by a species of osmosis, perhaps, since she was so insubstantial, somehow she had entered the circle of their self-containment. When her parents discovered that Lee was a graduate, in spite of appearances, they decided he might be a rough diamond and became a little more conciliatory but they still refused to let him see her unless he married her which at last he agreed to do, out of pride. Her mother wanted a white wedding and a church.
‘My aunt would turn in her grave,’ said Lee.
It was finally arranged the wedding should take place in the registry office of the town in which the brothers lived. A date was fixed and a licence obtained. Annabel remained with her parents in the Home Counties for the interim period and the brothers stayed where they were. As soon as he became aware that he was about to do something irreversible, Lee began to drink heavily for he could not have gone through with the marriage unless he passed the time before it in a state of oblivion. Annabel was quite incomprehensible to him and he already knew she was unbalanced; yet his puritanism demanded he should be publicly responsible for her. He was overcome with conflicting apprehensions.
One January morning, Annabel woke up and found it had been snowing so there was no apparent difference between the world outside and the world inside. Snow lay thickly on top of the wrought-iron curlicues of the balcony and caked the bare branches of the trees in the square; yet still the grey sky was full of soft, whirling flakes and every sound was silenced as if the snow pressed fingers in the ears. The room was full of white light reflected from outside and the only difference was that here it was not snowing for everything was as white as the extreme, unimaginable North except for the red enamel alarm clock, which now rang. Lee, still asleep, flung out one arm to depress the button; she took a technical pleasure in observing the musculature of his shoulders and the play of snowlight on the golden down which covered them for he was of a furry texture. He was colourful to look at and also reminded her of Canova’s nude, heroic statue of Napoleon in Wellington House. She was grateful for his warmth. She watched the daily struggle to open his eyes and then he smiled to recognize her, hugged her, kissed her cheek and rooted about on the white floor beside him for his discarded clothes. She was especially pleased when she caught a glimpse of his leonine left profile. She found him continuously interesting to look at but it hardly occurred to her the young man was more than a collection of coloured surfaces and she had never learned to think of herself as a living actor, anyway. She did not even think of herself as a body but more as a pair of disembodied eyes – when she thought about herself at all, that is. She was eighteen, secretive and withdrawn since childhood. Her favourite painter was Max Ernst. She did not read books. Lee got her breakfast and built up a roaring fire.
It was too snowy to think of going to the art school. She lay against his very white pillow and drank her tea peacefully. She had chosen an old white flannel shirt of his to wear in bed and he thought this wilful and perverse attire was a simple, sexual defence, for which he forgave her. It was unnecessary to have forgiven her for she did not know it defended her. Though she had shared a bed with him for three weeks, she never thought of it as a place for anything but sleeping in. Therefore she did not know she had anything to protect while Lee assumed all manner of virginal hedging on her part and, unconcerned, waited for her to make up her mind. He picked up his books, put on several layers of clothing and went out into the snow for he was a conscientious student. For a while she watched the flames in the grate. Then she crept from the bed and, like Bluebeard’s wife, sneaked into the forbidden territory of Buzz’s room, where the air struck damp and chill.
Even before it became officially a dark room, it was very dark for the window opened on to a blank wall and, since his avocation was trading, it was also cluttered up with many odd objects as well as his ongoing fetishes. Everything was cold, miserable and arbitrary, a rummage sale presided over by many pictures of Red Indians cut out of books.
‘What is your brother like?’
‘An Apache, sometimes.’
She wandered about picking things up and putting them down again. She examined Buzz’s clothes which were kept spilling out of a tea chest, selected a ragged vest dyed purple and a pair of orange crushed-velvet trousers, took off Lee’s shirt and donned these garments to find out what Buzz felt like or what it might feel like to be Buzz. But his old clothes felt like any other greasy and unwashed old clothes and she was disappointed. She already felt a vague interest in him, just as she felt more comfortable in his room than she did in Lee’s, although she now returned to it for warmth. She opened his neat cupboard, took out the box of pastel crayons she kept on his shelf, knelt on the mattress and, out of boredom, began to draw the tree Lee so seriously misconstrued as, perhaps, a tree of life when it was more nearly related (for him, at least) to the Upas Tree of Java, the fabulous tree that casts a poisoned shade.
Lee came home at lunchtime, glowing with cold and his hair full of snow. Removing his shoes and socks in the kitchen, he padded silently into his room to find it strewed, still, with bedclothes and breakfast dishes and a figure, now on tiptoe, adding a gaudy parrot to the topmost branch of a colourful tree. Dark hair hung down the back of a familiar vest and for a moment he thought his brother was back unexpectedly but the draughtsmanship was infinitely superior to anything of which Buzz was capable and she turned to him, offering him an unemphatic smile.
‘Well, well,’ said Lee.
The crumbling pastels had showered the bed with polychromatic grit and Lee was annoyed to see such a mess, though pleased she had at last been sufficiently moved to do something, whatever it was. So he thought the time was right for, at the back of his mind, he had always intended to lay her some time or other. He knelt on the mattress beside her and put his arm around her waist. She took this for only another of the small caresses he often gave her. When he buried his face in the cool flesh of her belly, she pretended to herself she was preoccupied with the position of the parrot which, she judged, should have been, perhaps, an inch or two further to the left but this pretence could not protect her for long because he kissed her breasts and the red crayon dropped from her hand.
Seized with intimations of an invasion of privacy, she looked down at his rough blond head with bewilderment for the sensation of his touch had no effect on her. The castle of herself was clearly about to be invaded and, though the idea of it surprised her, the actual indifference of her response told her she would submit indifferently and she thought: ‘Why not? Why not?’
She made no effort to undress herself, to see what he would do, so he took his brother’s clothes off her; he had to raise her limp arms to draw off the vest and part her legs to remove the trousers. She watched him all the time without appreciating the extraordinarily erotic effect of her passivity, her silence and her enquiring eyes, comforted by memories of the nursery because he undressed her as if she were a little girl. Then he took off his own clothes. She was half perplexed and half amused at the sight of his erection but somehow affronted by his general air of insouciance for she knew this was supposed to be an event of some significance for her. He lay down beside her again and she examined his face for some indication of what he would do next. He seemed to expect some advance on her part so she tentatively put her arms around his neck, or perhaps she did this because she had read somewhere, in a magazine, perhaps, that this was what she was supposed to do. She would have liked some instructions on how to behave
for it is a hard thing to make love when one has few, if any, ideas of common practice. He seemed to be experiencing some private kind of pleasure from these contacts of surface upon surface and the interaction of skin and she bemusedly resented his privacy since she felt privacy was her exclusive property and nobody else had much right to it. When he kissed her, she knew enough to open her lips and allow him to explore the interior of her mouth; at the soft pressure of his tongue on her own, she let out a muffled, involuntary moan which was, rather, a question although Lee paid it no heed and nudged open her legs with his knee. She made no movements either of complicity or denial and was surprised how mysterious his actions were when he put his hand between her legs.
Then, unexpectedly, they had a conversation. He asked when she would have her next period and she told him, in two or three days’ time, and he said: that’s perfectly splendid, ducks, and gave her an honest and unpremeditated smile. In the deep focus of the embrace, he was more interesting to look at than she would ever have imagined and this never previously encountered smile enchanted her so much she kissed him of her own accord. She felt rather than saw his pleasure when she did so and this bewildered her even more for she was accustomed only to seeing.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘you won’t get much out of it this time, probably, but I’ll try not to hurt you. Anyway’ (he added puritanically) ‘you ought to have had it by your age; whatever do they teach you at them schools.’ She felt it served him right when she saw he was nonplussed at so much blood.
Lee wondered if it were one of those cases, well-known in medical literature, where rupture of the hymen brought on a fatal haemorrhage? And still she could not understand the function of it, nor see how, with one thing and another, he began to be very much afraid though she soon saw she could hurt him as badly with her silences as he could ever afflict her by any other means. After the blood dried, she also learned that, if she concentrated very hard, the touch of his hand released infrequent but marvellous images inside her head. So she gazed at him with wonder, as if he might be magic, and he looked at her nervously, as if she might not be fully human.
Love Page 4