Nightspawn (14 page)

‘Do you like it here?’ I asked.

He nodded swiftly, then lowered his eyes and shyly smiled. It was never easy for him to smile. His solemnity was intriguing. Helena said,

‘We shall come here very often.’

The meal ended. None of us had been very hungry. I lay down on the soft new grass with my hands behind my head. The voice of summer whispered around us.

‘Julian is going to have a party,’ Helena said.

She sat with her legs folded under her, examining the tips of her hair. The sunlight flickered on her lowered lashes. The boy was lying in the same position as me, with his hands behind his head. Emulating his hero. Ha.

‘He mentioned it to me, yes.’

Helena smiled, but shook her head.

‘I am not sure that I approve of the idea,’ she said.

Far calls; some animal complaining.

‘What idea?’

‘Of a party.’

‘Ah.’

Indolent pauses lay between our remarks. Nothing was
important
.
I could not believe that anything would ever again be important except this sunlight, this peace.

‘Do you realize,’ I asked, ‘I’m supposed to be giving an English lesson to Yacinth.’

‘You can start tomorrow.’

‘Or next week.’

‘Next year.’

‘Never.’

Music somewhere. Pan piping under the leaves in an olive grove. She tickled my ear with a blade of grass, and, to oblige her I pretended that I thought it was a fly, and flapped my hands. She laughed. I told them about Botticelli, and of Dante’s first meeting with Beatrice, of his love for her, a child. I fell asleep for a moment, and wakened trying to remember a word.

‘What is that word?’ I murmured. ‘It means fragrant, full of fragrance.’

‘What?’

‘That word. It’s on the tip of my tongue.’

‘Perfumed?’

‘No. The air was blank of roses. What is it? Damn.’

There were birds, lizards, flowers burning in the wood. We stayed for a long time. The sun declined.

‘I think I shall dye my hair red,’ said Helena, pulling forward a yellow strand and considering it with a critical eye. I laughed. Yacinth at last plucked that word from my tongue.

‘Redolent.’

‘Yes, of course. Full marks. Perhaps, Helena, your brother should give me lessons.’

I raised myself on my elbow, and frowned. Yacinth was gone.

‘That’s strange,’ I said.

Helena glanced at me.

‘What?’

‘I thought … it doesn’t matter.’

Suddenly she leapt forward, and fell on top of me. The light cut jewels from her hair. We explored each other’s faces with our fingertips.

‘I’ll never leave you, Helena.’

She smiled.

‘Oh yes you will.’

‘No.’

We went to look for the boy. I picked some of those flowers, his namesakes, and gave them to her. She put one in her hair. What matter if that bloom was too large, and made her look silly? It was something of mine which she wore. A little further on, among the trees that smelled so sweetly, I found that she had left me, and I was alone. I knelt and put my fingers to the flowers. Her voice came to me, calling her brother.

‘Yacinth, O Yacinth, Hyacinth, where are you?’

The slow clear calls fell about me like petals, settled softly on the leaves, the branches, on the flowers, and I was assailed by something which I cannot define, a feeling of the nerve of that day perhaps, redolent of sunlight and happiness, of tiny creatures stirring, and the air singing, like the hollow call of muted horns heard distantly across the sweltering fields of summer. No, I shall never forget.

When, in late evening, as dusk was gathering, we got back to the house, we found a note from Julian to say that he would be away overnight. There were mornings I shared with her, evenings, afternoons, long hours stolen from the nights, but one dawn, and one dawn only, which we saw together. This was to be it, I knew. The scrap of paper on which he had written, like so many other scraps I was to see, for Julian was a compulsive note-leaver, shook in my fingers. I looked at Helena, but she refused to meet my eyes, and turned away with Yacinth toward the stairs. When she came down again, trailing a pale hand on the polished banister and picking a fragment of leaf from her pullover, I was sitting on a straight-backed chair in the hall, pouring a generous dose of brandy into my face.

‘Well?’ I asked, my voice thick. The heat and rarefied air of the mountains had left me slightly drugged, and now the brandy was punching my lungs as it passed them by on its downward journey. She paused on the last step, her head bowed.

‘Do you want to stay?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

She took my hand and led me up to the master bedroom, an enormous, vulgar, and vaguely frightening room. She sat before the mirror of the dressing table, combing out her long hair. The long gold strands were dark at the roots, dark on dark, gold light, mirror, crystal; I was lacerated by her beauty. She stood up, and took off her clothes.

I had such acrobatics planned for the occasion, a whole gymnasium of crippling and outrageous postures, but when finally we made it into that acre of bed, I was exhausted just on the thought of all we were going to do to each other. We lay in each other’s arms in the darkness. She was such a tiny creature, as delicate as a bird. Her breasts were hardly noticeable when she pressed against me. I kissed her shoulders, her ankles, her tiny gleaming cunt. Ah, she said, ahh.

‘I love you,’ I murmured, wishing there were better ways of expressing that ancient lie.

Something touched my arm. It was a tear, with a perfect, tiny miniature of the lamp on the dressing table trapped inside it. She was weeping silently, terribly, without a sound. I moved my arm so that those stars could freely fall, but they were extinguished so brutally by the sheets, and turned into grey smudges, that I put back my hand and caught a whole sky falling. I had no wish to probe the well from which the tears sprang, but understood in silence that they were a tribute to this little precious thing which we had found. We knew that it would not live long. It was sickly. I would leave her, or she would leave me, or we would leave us, or they would leave them, or it would leave you … bah, we knew nothing of the kind. She probably had a pain, and I was too tired to bother asking her where it was. We fell asleep, as chaste as children.

It was a long, restless and exquisite night, filled with the intimation of future pain. I had a foul and garrulous dream in which hulking giants did disgusting things to little boys. I woke to find Helena clinging fiercely to me.

‘I thought you were gone,’ she cried. ‘I thought you were gone away already.’

What wounds these moments inflict. They do not heal, they never heal. Get your fucking claws out of my throat and let me be tender for a while, there is enough cruelty, is your thirst for blood never sated?

‘No no,’ I murmured. ‘I’m here, Helena, I’m here.’

And we fell asleep again, weeping in each other’s arms. Later she sat up suddenly and gaped at me, her teeth flashing.

‘Julian?’ she whispered.

I said nothing, pretended to sleep. In a moment she lay down again, and with a great sigh turned her back to me. I smiled. She had turned her back on him, yes, on
him.

I wakened for the last time just as the first crippled fingers of light were crawling into the room. Helena lay beside me with her eyes wide.

‘There is someone outside,’ she said, terror-stricken.

‘Don’t be silly, there’s no one.’

There was. I left the bed and went silently to the door. Came a rustle of cloth from the corridor. I looked out. Yacinth stood on the landing holding up the trousers of his pyjamas with one hand, and the other thrusting one of its knuckles into the corner of his eye. We stared. His lips curled slowly away from his teeth, and he made a hoarse hissing sound deep in his throat, which chilled my blood. He turned abruptly and scurried away. I closed the door, went back and covered myself to the nose under the sheets.

‘Who was it?’

‘Only the dog,’ I said.

She was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. She nibbled the nail of her little finger thoughtfully. I put my head against her shoulder and closed my eyes.

‘Ben. Ben.
Be-en,
wake up.’

‘What?’

‘This must stop.’

‘Helena.’

‘Well it must.’

‘For Christ’s sake.’

‘I’m afraid of you — I mean for you. If Julian discovers —’

‘He won’t.’

‘But he might.’

‘What would he do?’ I asked. ‘Have me assassinated?’

She pushed my head away and stared into my eyes, biting a lip which would not be kept from trembling. I laughed at her.

‘I’m not afraid of Julian.’

‘You don’t know,’ she muttered. ‘There are things that you do not know.’

‘Aye, and things you don’t know either.’

Oh yes, I knew my part well, the gay pirate with a cutlass in his teeth, laughing heartily in the face of the king and his justice. What a fool, what an incredible fool. I kissed her mouth to silence her, and soon we were making violent and lunging love, causing the bed, the window panes, the very walls to rattle. But afterwards, that sadness returned, and we lay captive in a fearful silence, our wide eyes watching the light grow in the window. Helena touched a bruise on my throat, and said,

‘I want so much to be happy, and I never will.’

For once I believed one of her stricken sayings, and gazed at her for a long time. She curled herself up and lay against me like some small pale injured animal. A petal broke from a blossom, but did not fall.

I picked my way down the stairs, knees unsteady, nerves
jangling
, to Yacinth’s study where the boy sat calmly waiting for his lesson. He had a desk by the window which looked into the courtyard, and caught any sun which made its way there. He opened a book, before I had time to sit down, and pointed to a word.

‘What does that mean?’

I scratched my ear and frowned.

‘Well, it means that people, close relations, you know, it’s when they, ah, like a sister and brother … sister and brother …’

He looked at me with that intelligent gaze of his, and I looked down at the fountain.

‘When they what?’ he inquired.

‘I’ll tell you when you’re older. Here, study this poem.’

He bent his head over the page I had selected at random, a bright tip of tongue between his teeth. A ray of dusty sunlight took his cheek bone and moulded it into an exact replica of hers, and there I was, suffused with her again, sodden with her. One night, with the black rain hammering on the roof of her car, Helena came rearing up at me to ask what the hell did I mean by muttering at her about tigers burning in forests. She had, by some osmosis through the porous walls of my brain, received half of a lesson, meant for the boy, panted into her ear. Yacinth began to read aloud, startling me in the midst of my reverie.

He paused, and glanced at me. His English was perfect. I watched him suspiciously.

‘Go on,’ I said.

He broke off, and threw down the book.

‘I don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘What crisis? What does he mean?’

Helplessly, I showed him my hands.

‘I don’t know, Yacinth.’

‘You are my teacher.’

‘But I don’t know everything.’

‘No, you don’t.’

We sat motionless, our eyes downcast, and listened to his watch ticking tensely. I was terrified. Our eyes met. Then he laughed, and turned his face away from me.

‘Tell me about Dante again,’ he said, very softly, and yet venomously, his voice loaded with derision. ‘Tell me about him and Beatrichy.’

His mispronunciation of sweet Bea’s name was, for some reason, unbearably touching, like listening to a child trying to fit his mouth around ill-learned obscenities. I began to wonder, for the first time, about the manner of his life in that strange house. Never once had he spoken to me unless in answer to a question, but a few moments ago he had offered me a
revelation
, and I had refused it, out of reasons that were too
frightening
to probe. I recalled, with extraordinary vividness, how he had stood on the landing in the grey dawn hour and bared his teeth at me.

At that moment we were, mercifully, interrupted by the sound of an engine beyond the archway. It died in a moment, and then there was the sound of a car door being slammed.

‘Julian is back,’ I said, and could not keep the disappointment out of my voice. I think I had hoped, in some insane recess of my mind, that he might get lost in the great world and never be seen again, but now there he was, crossing the courtyard, looking despicably alive, with a stupid little trilby hat pushed jauntily down on his curls. Yacinth left the room without a word, and he had not been gone for a dozen seconds when Helena came in to take his place. What a house, my god, like an amateur
theatrical
with all these comings and goings.

‘Hubby’s back,’ I said.

I think I must have been grinning, with my teeth bared and eyes starting from their sockets, hating someone, everyone, furious with the world. She laid a hand with maternal concern on my wrist. I snarled at her touch.

‘Ben,’ she said. ‘You must be careful. He has planned
something
for you, I know it.’

‘Listen, what age is he?’

She frowned.

‘Who?’

‘Never mind.’

It must have driven her crazy, the way I ruined her best scenes. I asked,

‘What plan, what are you talking about?’

She took her hand away and looked at me closely.

‘What has happened to you, Ben?’

‘Nothing, nothing, for the love of god leave me —’

There the door opened, and Julian came breezing in, all smiles, and smacking his hands. He took off his ridiculous hat and flicked it away. It settled softly on a chair.