Blood and Water and Other Tales (15 page)

That night my uncle set out for London, arriving shortly after noon the following day. He told Mrs. Digweed he would not need her until further notice, and though she protested “with some vigor” he was adamant. “It’s too crowded here,” he writes in that last journal entry;

the entire Weimar Congress is with me. Khrushchev has not appeared, and I fear the worst.

Yes, the entire Weimar Congress is with me. I am

in my study now, working on this narrative. I have closed the curtains, and I am wearing my tinted spectacles. There are psychoanalysts everywhere
—
perched on my bookshelves, curled up in the drawers of my desk, crawling over the furniture—one is even squatting on my globe. I am infested with psychoanalysts. A number of them are flying about the room, for they have wings, filmy brown things, gossamer-thin, like the wings of flies, and the air is thick with their buzzing. They’re all chattering volubly, but so far they’ve not interfered with my writing. I’m a little disturbed, though, to see Freud and the rest of the committee standing under one of the African maps talking about me again. Ernest Jones has got some cord.

I it was who found him. I remember that when the call came through from a distraught Mrs. Digweed, saying that though he was very unwell, and his head was heavily bandaged, my uncle had
dismissed
her, I was turning a skewer over in my fingers, a metal skewer for pinning meat. I remember that I allowed the light to glint upon the facets of its sharpened point and catch the ridges of its twisting thread as I promised Mrs. Digweed I would take a cab to Hampstead as soon as I could get away.

The light was fast failing when I came through the garden, and a great stillness had settled on the house. The front door was open, and I crossed the hallway and knocked on the study door. There was no answer, so I entered.

The study could really be called a library, and the upper shelves of the bookcases are reached by a spiral staircase of wrought iron which gives onto a gallery. The railing of this gallery is also of wrought iron, and to it Neville had attached the cord. The room was dark, for he had drawn the curtains, but the windows were open, and a breeze from the heath crept in and gently turned Neville where he dangled. He had removed the dressings from his eye, and I glimpsed them scattered across his desk at the far end of the room. I righted the fallen chair beneath him, and stood upon it to cut him down with a kitchen knife. I loosened and removed the noose from his bruised throat and opened the collar of his shirt.

What I did next may surprise you; but I had, as I mentioned earlier, for a year known the truth about the airplane crash and its effects upon my uncle’s style of life, indeed about his very identity; and I think you will agree I was justified in committing what in different circumstances might have been an unpardonable breach of good manners: I undressed him. And as I removed his garments I remarked again the quality of the materials he wore, and the fineness of their cut. Carefully I placed his dark suit upon the chair, and then the gaily patterned silk cravat, the white silk shirt... I had locked the study door and turned on all the lights. My uncle lay naked on the floor, and I marveled then at the deceit that had been practiced for so many years. The skin of face and hands still bore testimony to the flames of that airplane wreck: it was stretched horribly tight and shiny, it was hairless and unlined. His eyes had no lashes and no brows, and his mouth had no lips. I removed the expensive toupee, flowing silver, which concealed his baldness. These, of course, were the old wounds, the disfigurement he had spent his life with, which had constrained him to darkened rooms, seclusion, a profession of private, aesthetic pleasure, an existence celibate and withdrawn. None of this surprised me, nor did the suppurating wound to the right eye. I was not even surprised that the body lying before me was not the body of Neville Pilkington.

It was not the body of Neville Pilkington. It was, rather, the body of a slender old woman. For it was Neville who died in that burning wreck at Nairobi airfield in 1938. Evelyn had survived, and on the transatlantic crossing had assumed her brother’s identity, for only thus could she transcend the most debilitating disfigurement of all, her womanhood, and make something of the suddenly narrowed range of possibilities that life offered her. I attempted to persuade the coroner that none of this be brought out at the inquest, out of consideration for my uncle’s distinguished reputation, but I was not successful. Nordau did not learn of it until quite late in the day. His reaction to the revelation is of no interest to me at this point; an eye for an eye, I say.

Have you ever eaten monkey? The Cajuns have long considered Louisiana spider monkey a great delicacy. I should know: my husband was a Cajun. They serve it in the traditional manner, heavily spiced with Tabasco. It’s probably for this reason that the creatures move so soundlessly; all you hear is an occasional soft “swoosh” as they swing through the trees, and then the tell-tale patter of falling water droplets. I was once lucky enough to observe a group of them gathered for the night. What a charming spectacle of domestic tranquility they presented! Clustered along a stout bough, they were engaged in mutual grooming when I came drifting down the bayou. I saw them all huddled together, with their tails twined and dangling beneath the branch in a great thick furry knot. It’s been suggested that tail twining enhances balance, but the primary function, in my opinion, is social. Then they went to sleep, and I shot them—with my camera.

Slavers brought them up from Brazil in the 18th century, is my conjecture. When the ships docked at New Orleans, a few of the creatures slipped off into the wilderness and adapted to conditions there. Nature was bountiful and predators few; in fact, their only real predator is Man, which accounts, as I say, for their shyness today and the infrequency of sightings. But they’re there, all right, way back in the dankest region of the Charenton Swamp, and all you need is a boat, and a great deal of patience, and you’ll find them. I did; I went out to photograph them for a book called
Our Endangered Species.
It was in the course of this assignment that I first laid eyes on Marmilion.

Marmilion! How sweet the sound—and yet...!

I came upon it one warm evening in early September after crossing a blind lake. I had located through my binoculars a wharf on the far shore, and I hoped to find somewhere nearby a fisherman’s shack in which to spend the night. The water was as flat and still as a sheet of glass; behind me the ripples from the boat spread out in long furrows, and only the buzz of the outboard broke the deep silence of the evening. On every side the water was fringed with trees, black against the crimson-streaked sunset.

I reached the far shore. After securing the boat I clambered up the levee and found myself, to my astonishment, at the foot of a great avenue of spreading oaks, from the branches of which hung sheets of fleecy, drifting moss. At the far end, white and shining, stood a pair of pillars flanking the deep-set doorway of what appeared to be a large plantation house. The avenue was thick with shadows and formed a sort of arboreal tunnel. The glimpse of those shining pillars was strangely dramatic, in that lonely place. I shouldered my pack and set off into the obscurity.

It was indeed a plantation house, a massive structure in the Greek Revival style, though in a state of advanced decay. It stood in the center of a patch of cleared ground, and the last light caught it in such a way that the pillars literally
glowed
against the darkened galleries, with such a lovely soft luminosity that they seemed almost to be immanent with a life of their own. Everything was disintegrating but for a pair of stout brick chimneys, thrusting up through the rafters on either side.

A feeling of great desolation clung to the house, but I decided nonetheless to shelter for the night beneath its roof, such as it was; and coming again to the front, I ascended a short flight of crumbling steps, crossed the lower gallery, and so over the threshold.

I am not a superstitious woman. But as soon as I crossed that threshold I felt something in the house react to my presence, and I stood dead still. But nothing stirred, nothing at all, and after a few moments I went cautiously forward into the gloom.

It was foul with the smell of nesting rodents and rotting plaster. Directly ahead of me, at the far end of the hallway, reared what had once been a grand staircase. I turned off into the front room, which was full of dust and shadows, and in which I found an open fireplace with tall brick pillars on either side. I dared not use it, for fear of setting ablaze the rubbish with which the chimney was undoubtedly clogged. I built a fire on the hearth instead, and cooked a simple supper. Then I leaned my back against the bricks and drank my bourbon in the firelight.

By this time it was completely dark outside. The birdsong of the evening had died away, and the only sounds were those of the insects, a sort of low, steady hiss produced by the rubbing together of thousands of gossamer wings. Nothing else.

The fire burned down, and I must have drifted off. Then suddenly I was wide awake, frozen with fear and with every sense straining into the darkness. The insects had ceased their hissing, and a profound silence lay upon the house. And then I heard it: a scratching sound, close to my head. It lasted for a few seconds, and then fell silent. It was like a nail being scraped by a very feeble hand against a brick. Slowly my terror subsided. The sound persisted, intermittently, for about an hour. By that time I was not so much frightened as perplexed. Was there some sort of creature in the chimney? Was it—absurd question—the creature that had stirred when I crossed the threshold at dusk?

Before I left the house the next morning I crawled into the fireplace and lit a match. The flame threw a brief flickering glow upon blackened bricks crusted with the droppings of birds and bats. A couple of feet above my head the flue sloped away sharply, leaving me only an oblique glimpse of the mouth of the chimney. I crawled out again, still puzzled, and made my way back down the oak alley, where sunlight sifted through the murmuring leaves and splashed in golden puddles on the grass. I was soon upon the water once more, and heading back toward the Charenton Swamp, and its elusive simian residents. I was ill at ease the rest of the day, and had scant success with the monkeys. You see, I had the bizarre impression that something had been trying to
communicate
with me in the night.

When I got back to New Orleans I spent a morning finding out what I could about the ruined house. Its name, I discovered, was Marmilion, and it was built by a planter called Randolph Belvedere. Randolph had settled the land in 1820 and founded a great fortune on sugar; then in middle age he became a prominent figure in Louisiana politics. A stout man, he was apparently endowed with huge reserves of energy and imagination, and Marmilion proudly reflected his appetite for ostentatious splendor. By the time the house was finished, he had spent six years and $100,000 on it. All the building materials were manufactured on the spot, the bricks baked from local river clay and the great framing timbers cut by slaves from stands of giant cypress in the Charenton Swamp. The furniture was imported from Europe, and was said to have cost as much as the house itself.

Randolph did not have a large family, which struck me as unusual, given the man’s temperament and class. Perhaps the delicacy of his wife, Camille, was the reason. She had been a legendary Creole belle, and apparently retained into old age a petite and fragile beauty. I was intrigued to learn that her correspondence with a sister, Mathilde, in Virginia, had survived, and was stored in the Louisiana State Archives, in Baton Rouge; and I resolved that when I next visited the state capital I would look them up, those letters of the long-dead mistress of Marmilion.

But in the meantime, the publishers of
Our Endangered Species
were so impressed with the work I had done that they decided it merited a book of its own, to be called
The Spider Monkeys of Louisiana.
I was delighted, if for no other reason than that it justified another visit to Marmilion. For my casual interest in the old ruin was becoming, I could feel it, somewhat obsessive; you see, I had come upon a very curious fact about Randolph Belvedere’s death—the fact that nobody knew anything about it.

What happened was this: late one afternoon in the summer of 1860 a stranger galloped up to the front door of Marmilion and, without dismounting, announced to a houseboy that he must speak to the master. Randolph was doing plantation accounts in his study; he came to the door in his shirtsleeves, and there the two men whispered together for some minutes. Then Randolph called for his horse, and without a word to anyone, without even taking his coat and hat, he rode away with the stranger. He was never seen again.

It did not take me long to find a pretext for going to Baton Rouge; and once there, it did not take me long to realize that Camille Belvedere was, like the wives of so many planters in the Old South, a deeply unhappy woman. (Perhaps this accounts for my intuitive attraction to her.) “
These lines
,” she wrote in one of the last letters to Mathilde, “
are the effusions of a pen directed by the Hand of a Woman whose life has been occupied solely with drudgery
.” Much of the correspondence concerns the unending round of domestic chores that were the lot of the plantation mistress, and with those I need not weary you. What also emerges is that Randolph was away for long periods, and to combat Camille’s “disposition to despondency” the family physician, a man called Oscar de Trot, prescribed laudanum—tincture of opium—the effects of which were little understood at the time. In a letter written several months before her husband’s disappearance, Camille tells Mathilde: “
I resort nightly to a liberal dose of the black drops. It so relieves my mind, I fear it is impossible for me to exist in tolerable comfort without it.
”