Love (6 page)

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.

They rolled all over the pastel crayons scattered on the sheets so her back was variegated with patches and blotches all the colours of the rainbow and Lee was also marked
everywhere with brilliant dusts, both here and there also darkly spotted with blood, each a canvas involuntarily patterned by those workings of random chance so much prized by the surrealists.

She was fortunate in her first lover in so far as he was kind, gentle and experienced; she was unfortunate in that soon he began to love her and, after that, could not leave her alone. As for Annabel, she was like a child who reconstructs the world according to its whims and so she chose to populate her home with imaginary animals because she preferred them to the drab fauna of reality. She quickly interpreted him into her mythology but if, at first, he was a herbivorous lion, later he became a unicorn devouring raw meat and she never saw him the same twice, nor did these pictures have any continuity except for the constant romanticism of the imagery. She had no control over them, once they existed. And, as she drew him, so she saw him; he existed for her only intermittently.

Waking in the middle of the night, she sometimes saw white birds, perhaps albatrosses, frozen in the middle of the ceiling; if she could not make out their outlines, precisely, that made them even more terrifying and there was no comfort to be got from the man sleeping beside her for he had undoubtedly become another, some other thing. She lay immobile under the covers listening to the menacing thunder of his breathing and did not dare stretch out her hand to touch him for fear of encountering the leathern surfaces of a dragon’s wing. One night Lee woke in the grip of a dream and reached out for her while she was asleep. She screamed so loudly Buzz sprang awake and darted to defend her.

‘I thought you were an incubus,’ she said to Lee when the ensuing confusion had died down. Then they had to make tea and so on, in the false cheerfulness of five in the morning. Still, whatever he was, he grew necessary to her and she even played with the idea of bearing his children, though these children existed solely in the terms of her mythology, were purely symbolic and quite undemanding, related not to fantasies of motherhood but to certain explicit fantasies she
had of totally engulfing him which she occasionally experienced with extraordinary intensity when he penetrated her, as if, drawing him through her hairy portals, he could be forever locked up inviolably inside her, reduced himself to the condition of an embryo and, by dissolving in his own sperm, become himself his own child. So, by impregnating her, he would cease to exist.

Because she gave Lee so large, if so ambiguous, a role in her mythology, she wished, gently, to reduce him to not-being.

She allowed her parents to take her away but she knew she would come back in the end. It was all the same to her whether she married Lee or not though he regarded it as a legal contract. Her parents bought her a white dress to be married in but she forgot to put it on that morning and dressed herself as usual in jeans and tee shirt, although her mother made her change her clothes and brushed out her hair for her. Annabel stood beside her parents in front of the registry office, kicking at the plaster in the wall with a bored air, wearing a thin, pretty dress of white silk she had not chosen for herself while she waited for things to continue as they had done before. It was a hot day in July and the courtyard was full of the suave perfume of lime trees. The mother wore a suit of coffee-coloured lace. Lee was twenty minutes late, blanched, shaking and still fairly drunk. The ragged brother sat cross-legged outside during the ceremony as immobile as a veritable Apache with his camera slung round his neck like a talisman.

‘Oh, my darling,’ said Annabel’s mother. ‘It’s not what I would have wished for you.’

Lee wrote his name in the register.

‘What an unusual name,’ said the mother with a faint note of hope. ‘Leon.’

Lee realized that if they were foreign, some of their eccentricities might be excused so he bared his teeth in a snarl and said: ‘I was named for Trotsky, the architect of the Revolution.’

At that, he remembered his aunt and thought his heart might break as he stood in the cool, bright building for
he had abandoned all the hopes with which his aunt had named him, if he had ever understood them at all. ‘Betrayed to the bourgeoisie!’ he thought and, once outside, lurched against the wall as if to face the firing squad. The brilliant morning shot him through the eyes with darts of glass and he was crushed by the conviction that he had done something irreparable. He saw the man and the woman grimacing at his brother and his new wife, their daughter, and all transmitted signs and messages not one of which any of the others could interpret. Words flew out of their mouths like birds, up and away, and all were behaving well, even Buzz, though he looked fresh from a visit to the tomb of Edgar Allan Poe for he had found a black suit somewhere.

No wonder the daughter saw only appearances. Despite the eccentricity of his behaviour, the uncouthness of his accent and the length of his hair, the parents were so impressed at the sight of the camera they thought Buzz might be a respectable Bohemian and would, one day, grow rich for they had read how photographers were the new aristocracy. So the camera was sufficient justification for the boy’s wild appearance and both cast strained glances at the drunk, sick and shattered bridegroom as if they thought their daughter had made the wrong choice, if she was going to marry into Bohemia anyway, that is, and since she was so good at art, they might as well resign themselves. After all, they had let her go to art school. But Lee looked like a seaman after a week’s leave in a rough port and could be incorporated into no tender system of dreams or hopes. Annabel lifted up her hand which wore a wedding ring. The morning fell apart. Overcome with nausea, Lee ran inside the registry office. He found the lavatory and vomited for a long time.

When he crept back nervously into the sunshine, shielding his hurt eyes with his hand, he found his abrupt departure had broken the frail bond of the wedding group who now stood each one far apart from the others and looked abstractedly outwards in different directions. The white carnation in the father’s buttonhole would have brought
tears to Lee’s eyes if his eyes had not been full of tears already.

‘You’re covered in white,’ said Buzz. ‘How bridal, how apt.’

‘There was a window.’

‘I suppose you tried to climb through it and run away, then.’

‘You bet.’

Buzz laughed and brushed the whitewash off Lee’s shoulder. Lee was white as the plasterwork and running with sweat but he said: ‘Nothing personal, love,’ to Annabel and she took hold of his clammy hand where her parents had insisted he, too, should wear a ring.

Soon the parents drifted wanly away and the Collinses, now legally augmented by their third, returned to their quarter, up the hill, past the university, attracting to them a procession of chance acquaintances on the way so the boisterous party which arrived at the house was more Réné Clair than Antonioni and Lee, who thought it was immoral to be unhappy, soon regained his good humour. But that night Buzz had a paranoid
crise
because he smoked too much and Lee fought with him for about an hour, to keep him still.

Annabel folded herself up in a corner in her wedding dress which was very grubby by now and covered her ears with her hands for Buzz was screaming dreadfully. The light was that of a church at Christmas for they had lit a great many candles and the flickering room smelled of melted wax. The people who came to celebrate the wedding drifted out into the night for most of them knew from experience to leave the brothers well alone when they were wrestling with demons and, at last, Lee got a handful of sleeping tablets down Buzz’s throat, half led and half dragged him to the safety of his narrow cot and held him till he went to sleep.