The Evil Seed (25 page)

Robert shook his head. ‘Thanks.’
He took another sip of the strong coffee (he drank it black, with a lot of
sugar), then set the cup down. ‘I’m sorry, Dan,’ he said, in a more normal
tone. ‘I’ve been a fool. I’ve behaved very badly to you over all this, and I
hope you’ll accept my apology.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘There’s
no need. Now why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?’

He nodded, began to
speak, paused. ‘I don’t know where to begin,’ he said, ‘or whether you’ll
believe me when I’ve told you. It all sounds completely mad.’

‘You’d be surprised at
what I can believe,’ I said.

‘All right,’ said
Robert, and as the fire died down, I heard his tale in snatches, incoherently
but only too familiar. I listened in silence, only prompting occasionally and
it was then, listening to that tragic little story, that I reached a decision
which was to influence all my later actions, and may still cost me my life.
Chosen or not, I had a loyalty to my friend, and I would keep faith with him. I
would protect him, even from her. Even from Rosemary. Though at that moment, I
still had no idea of where that decision would lead me, and into what fateful
realms I would have to travel before I could call my soul my own again.

From the very first
moment, Robert said, Rosemary had bewitched him. Robert was very much a ‘man’s man’;
with his public-school, army and university background he had had little
contact with women, and revealed himself to be surprisingly innocent, an
ideally susceptible candidate for Rosemary’s special kind of seduction. He had
never been in love before, nor had he ever thought he was the type, but he
realized immediately that Rosemary was the woman he would love for ever, and
though he was torn at the thought of stealing her from me (for he knew how much
I had been dazzled by her), he hoped that I would not bear him a grudge. In her
taunting way, she had led him to believe that she could love him, and there had
followed a few weeks of idyllic happiness. He had forgotten everything but
Rosemary, working at the university with growing reluctance, ceasing to write,
neglecting his friends. I guessed how cleverly she had contrived to isolate him
from the world, to make him wholly dependent on her; that was how she worked,
eliminating everything which might interfere with her domination of his life,
setting herself up as his witch and his icon. Her mystery tantalized him;
sometimes she failed to arrive at their meetings, and when he demanded an
explanation for this, she would simply look at him from her bruise-coloured
eyes and say, ‘There are things in my life that you will never imagine or know.’

Sometimes, as their
intimacy deepened, he began to glimpse new facets of her. On certain days she
would not leave her rooms, refusing to see even him, and occasionally, when he
came to see her regardless and would not go away until he had seen her, her
face was unaccountably pale and drawn, as if she had not slept, and her movements
were sluggish, almost drunken. She never gave any reason for her strange
behaviour or her mysterious illnesses, but looked at him with those sad, steady
eyes, and told him that he would never understand.

He grew jealous — then
angry. He made promises and broke them immediately, was tormented by jealousy
and the fear of losing her. When he glimpsed her one evening in the company of
two men, his jealousy knew no bounds: he challenged her to deny that she had a
lover. She ordered him out of her house. For a whole week, he was racked by
guilt and shame at what he had told her; he tried to find her, but was told by
her landlady that she had moved away.

Robert began to feel
afraid; he became convinced that Rosemary had committed suicide in her despair
at his rejection. He began to haunt the river, he drank far more than he ought,
both in public houses and at home, advertised in the papers for information concerning
her — all without success. Six weeks had passed already, and Robert was in a
state of near-breakdown. He was afraid to come and see me in case I blamed him
for his treatment of Rosemary; such was his sense of guilt that when he saw me
on the bridge, and later, when I found him in the tavern, he was unable to tell
me anything. He slept little, ate less, and was willing to do anything to
ensure her return.

She knew it, of course.

He found her late one
night in a cheap drinking-house, looking ill and dazed. Her glorious hair was
loose and tangled, her face thinner and paler than ever. Her dress was grey,
enhancing her frailty and her wraithlike appearance, her head thrown back
against the greasy wall and her eyes closed. Robert felt his heart turn to
water, and for a moment he was paralysed, scarcely able to believe that he had
found her at last. His next reaction was panic; she looked so ill, so wretched.
He took her back to his rooms; she was unresponsive, as if she had suffered a
shock, or taken an overdose of some hallucinogen. She was barely able even to
walk, and he half-carried her up the stairs, laid her on the bed, and forced
hot coffee between her white lips until she seemed to recover a little.

I always knew Rosemary
was a marvellous actress; her story was superb, and Robert, susceptible as he
was, believed it absolutely. She told him that she was a drug addict; that she
had been one for several years, since, in fact, she had left home at the age of
sixteen. It was this, and not her affair with the married man, that had driven
her to attempt suicide, and though she had tried many times to rid herself of
this pernicious habit, she had always failed, either due to a lack of willpower
on her part, or, more likely, a lack of friendly support. Her few friends were
all in the same situation; they had derived, in the past, a little comfort in
being together, but it was a dangerous comfort, which sapped the willpower even
more, and which made outcasts of all of them.

She had begun to take
drugs under the influence of her first landlady and her husband, who had given
her pills to combat her sleepless nights. Then she had progressed to stronger
doses, and had finally discovered that she could no longer manage without them.
The landlord and landlady, who had at first provided the drugs free of charge,
began to demand larger and larger sums of money for their services, until
Rosemary was giving them all the money she earned. She began to take on other
work, to make more money. At first she was selective, taking sewing and
knitting jobs or helping in public houses, then less selective, accepting
cleaning and scrubbing jobs in disreputable bars. She was noticed, of course;
it was impossible for a girl of Rosemary’s looks not to be noticed, and,
several times, she was solicited. She rebuffed these offers with proper
disgust, but the two people who had once been her protectors began to
pressurize her into being ‘agreeable’ to various guests who frequented the
house: uncouth types for the most part, who drank heavily and played cards for
money late into the night. Rosemary found out that her landlord and his wife
were running a private gambling parlour under cover of their boarding house,
and her presence at their parties was considered an asset and a lure. From that
point to accepting to offer her favours for money, there was a terrifyingly
small step, which Rosemary, nevertheless, quite properly shrank from taking,
and the poor child was reduced to a state of almost perpetual wretchedness and
nervous prostration, harried from all sides, and never with enough money to
make ends meet. On the scene then appeared the married man of whom she had
previously spoken, giving her, for the first time in her life, hope that she
might once and for all escape the fate which seemed to threaten her; and when
even this hope was denied her, she saw no other solution than the river to end
all persecution for ever. Enter the god from the machine: myself, who at the
eleventh hour saved her life and gave her the hope of a better world, and then,
in the person of Robert, the unhoped-for dream of true love, at which she
clutched like the drowning infant she was.

But fear had chilled her
idyll for her before it even began; she was tormented by fear that if Robert
ever found out what she had been, he would leave her, as the other had left
her. She had tried to combat her addiction in solitude, afraid to ask for
Robert’s support, and, predictably, she had failed. She had sought out her
erstwhile friends in secret, and paid them to procure supplies for her, and
when she had been caught out in their company by Robert, she had not known what
to say to convince him of her innocence. Terrified that, if told the truth,
Robert’s love might turn to disgust, Rosemary had gathered her pride and told
him to leave her house, hoping that he would come back and promise to trust
her; but he left, in his rage and jealousy, and Rosemary, believing him to be
lost to her for ever, had succumbed to despair, and returned to the only source
of comfort she had ever known. She had sold the jewellery which Robert had
given her, grieving bitterly for every trinket, but unable to help herself,
each day which passed a new link in the chain which drew her closer to the
abyss. The friends, all people of ill-repute, pimps and prostitutes and other
addicts and the like, became all the more necessary to her in her isolation.
She became involved in strange dealings, hinted that members of her circle
might have turned to crime to finance and protect each other and, though not
directly involved, seemed afraid of the police; afraid that she might be
accused of being in league with criminals.

It was at this point
that I had encountered them again, Rosemary looking ill and drained, and Robert
in fine fettle, their roles seemingly reversed. But this state of affairs had
not lasted for long. Rosemary had become less careful with Robert; knowing that
whatever she did he could no longer make any move to challenge her, she began
to show the underlying cruelty of her nature. She introduced him to Rafe and
Java and Zach, insisting that as her friends they should always be welcome in
his house. Sometimes they openly spent the night at her rooms. At this point I
don’t suppose Rosemary could have known whether Robert was infatuated enough to
accept this, but I don’t think it mattered to her. Perhaps the cruelty of it alone
was enough to afford her the entertainment she craved.

Robert was unable to
deal with the situation. He tried on several occasions to leave her, but never
managed; her personality changed by the hour, childlike one moment, perverse
the next. He attributed this to the drugs she was taking. But even he could not
help feeling suspicious of the large amounts of money Rosemary was spending; he
himself had been giving her a small allowance from his own savings and his
study grant, neither of which were particularly vast, but it soon became obvious
that she was receiving large amounts of money from elsewhere. She had already
hinted that her friends were involved in some kind of crime, and Robert became
convinced that she knew more than she admitted to. And tonight, when he had
finally come in search of me, drunk and panic-stricken, he had seen something.
At this point his story became so garbled that I could only conjecture as to
what he had actually seen, but he mentioned blood on Rosemary’s clothes; lots
of blood, he kept saying. Even then he refused to admit that he believed
Rosemary to be implicated; she was innocent, he maintained, a victim of
circumstances. He knew it.

Oh, yes, she had told
him a fine story. I knew Rosemary’s stories of old, had been fooled by them
once before, and I knew what an actress she was. I knew her, you see; not as my
poor friend believed he knew her, not as Robert believed in her tales of persecuted
innocence, the doomed maiden crying for love. And I loved her too, loved the
darkness and the danger of her, loved her hate and her destruction and her
promises of death. I was insane with love of her; but it was then, despite all
of that, that I knew I would kill her.

Poor Robert, to be so
much in love, and never to have seen her face. All he ever saw were the stars
in her hair; he never felt the heat of her or tasted blood against her lips, he
never knew her, the dread of her, had never taken the fruit from her hand. He
never loved her enough to know that the only solution was indeed to kill her,
to bury her deep under stone where she would be for ever trapped, unseen and
unguessed-at.

As I listened I grieved
for his folly, but there was something in me which laughed too, scorned his
childish sentiments. After all, I was chosen, and he was one of the cattle. I
pitied him, but with no tenderness. Rosemary had bled me dry. I wish it had
been love which prompted me; I wish it had been loyalty. I do not think it was
either. If it had been Robert in that bar, where I had fed not twenty-four
hours earlier, if it had been his blood spraying, I do not think it would have
made any difference to the greed with which I fed; the chosen have no
loyalties. There was coldness in me now. I was not afraid. I knew then that I
would not be like Robert, would not be the deluded fool feeding from her hand.
She had opened chasms all around me, had dazed me with her glamour, but
somehow, I, the bumbling fool, had shown another face too. Do not mistake me, I
never acted out of remorse or loyalty. I accepted the gift she had given me —
the appetites. I am still not certain why I acted; maybe it is that each man
kills the thing he loves. The truth is, I wanted power. To be free of her, so
that I could taste the cup she had offered me.

So that
I
could
be Rosemary.

One

I LEFT HIM SLEEPING; CURLED UP IN THE
MIDDLE OF MY crumpled eiderdown, face pressed childishly against his hands. My
poor friend. I watched over his sleep for a while, not ungently, but with my
new contempt, and at about half past three, as the night ticked away, I went
out, locking the door behind me. The night was still, the silence filled with
hallucinations. My breath was a genie coming from my mouth and hovering
nimbus-like around my head. I walked the deserted streets like a lord,
relishing the cold, the darkness. As I left the town, automatically veering
towards Grantchester, in the absence of street-lamps I glimpsed the dawn
hitherto only guessed-at, a thin line of pale phosphorescence at the edges of
the horizon.