Personal Darkness (27 page)

When they had exhausted themselves, Stella for Star had made bacon and egg, which she served with a hollan-daise sauce. She did not cry or carry on when he left. She did look wistful. She did not reckon he would come back.

He called her in the middle of the night, from his office in the annex.

"Nobbi," she said, "I wish you were here."

"Don't wish that, Star."

"No, I don't mean… I just mean, if you could have stayed the night."

Outside the grapeleaves, young and tender, rustled on the pergola. With the year the grapes would bud and turn to green and purple. The cleaning woman would pluck them and take them home. By then, Star and he would be an established thing, but he did not know this, then.

"I just wanted to tell you," he said, "you were lovely."

"Was I, Nobbi?"

"You was wonderful, Star."

"Was I?"

At the caress of her voice, his erection strove upward, longing for her hands and lips, the velvet tunnel of her loins.

"Sleep tight, Star. I wish—I wish I bloody well was in there with you too."

At the checkout was a dowdy woman with her handsome husband. He spoke to her in knife cuts.

He's ruined her
, thought Stella for Star.
So many shits of men
.

Her own father had not been much. They had been happier after he was gone, her mother and she.

Star had loved her mother. But she loved Nobbi more. She loved sex with Nobbi. She loved sleeping with Nobbi, back to back. His hard bare buttocks against her own.

She loved his goodness. His shyness. His loyalty to Marilyn and
Tracy
. Yes, she even loved that.

She paid for the food.

One day.

One day she would go home, and Nobbi .would be there, working on his accounts at her table. They would have a big dog, and a cat, bought together in infancy so each believed the other was a version of itself, a meowing dog, a barking cat.

And, it might be, if it did not take too long, that she could give him a child.

Why not? It happened all the time, mothers of forty-five and more. She was fit and strong.

A girl. He would want a girl.

Another Tracy, but better. A Tray brought up to appreciate him.

She thought of Nobbi pushing a little girl on a swing. And stopped herself.

She had to wait.

God knew, she had waited long enough for love.

The bus came, and she lugged the heavy bags of food, merrily in her strong arms, aboard.

"Foggy old night," said the woman beside her.

"Terrible," agreed Star. She had not noticed.

CROSSING THE RIVER, THE FOG lessened. Lights hung in the night water like reflections in a mirror that had been breathed on.

For a moment it might have been anywhere. Torch poles above the Tiber. Brands on the living bank of Thebes. Or some stretch of medieval water lit for an occasion.

But past the river, the fog closed in again.

Rachaela remembered the days of the fog, years ago, when the Scarabae first reached out for her.

"Of course," said Althene, "this is nothing. Hardly a London Particular."

She sat away along the seat of the taxi, the traveling lights catching her colors. She wore a blue velvet coat, and under that a tunic suit of ash-blue silk. Around her neck was a spray of green cut-glass vivid as crystallized angelica, and on the middle finger of her left hand a large polished emerald.

Rachaela had put on the olive-green dress Althene had bought her. It was her concession to the evening. She felt vaguely angry, uncomfortable. Why had she come? Perhaps to see the film, or merely to escape the house.

But there was never any escape now, and she had accepted that, surely.

Areas of her emotions had opened out. She seemed to have another sense. This constant awareness of other places, times, feelings… different lives, previous centuries. It was insidious, and pleasing in a bittersweet way. Perhaps it had even been there from the beginning, and her mother had successfully driven it under. When she listened to music, maybe it had come then, in another form.

Althene did not say very much.

She too seemed to be deriving some sensation or thought from the foggy city. Once, she sighed. Her perfume was light yet brunette, cinnamon with something darker.

Her perfection was slightly, as always, intimidating.

/
don't really like her
, Rachaela thought.
She only fascinates me
.

No, she makes me angry.

Althene had said that Rachaela should come with her to see the film. An old film, made in 1916, Griffith's
Intolerance
.

The restaurant was in a tiny side street with old-fashioned lamps that gave a greenish cat's-eye glow through the fog.

Rachaela noticed that Althene did not pay the driver.

The room was small with high wooden screens. There were only seven tables.

An impeccable, short, swarthy man stepped out and led them to the seventh, behind the highest screen of all.

On the cream tablecloth a single thick white candle burned.

"For you, madame, madame," he said, holding their chairs.

Then he went and a young girl, plump and rosy in a black dress, came and brought them each a glass of palest red wine in long goblets without stems.

Rachaela made no comment. They drank the wine. It was slaty and very soft.

The meal had been ordered, apparently, already. Rachaela was not offered a choice, but she could hardly object, for everything was—naturally—perfection again.

They had a fennel salad, and then a bourride singing with garlic. With this had come a bottle of water-clear Macon.

When they had finished the bourride, the girl cleared their plates. The restaurant had filled up quietly and was now full of murmurs and the muted clink of glass and knives behind the screen.

An old woman arrived next, with two thimbles of some golden liqueur. She set these down, and then she spoke to Althene in a strange rounded French. Althene answered her.

Rachaela drank her liqueur, which tasted of the smell of roses. God knew what it was made from. Cyanide, perhaps.

The old woman took Althene's hand, and then she went away.

"Forgive our speaking in another language," said Althene. "Her English isn't good. It should be. She's been here since before the war."

"Which war was that," Rachaela inquired archly, "the one with Napoleon?"

"Oh, no." Althene behaved as if the question were unprovocative, ordinary. "The last."

"But you knew her then."

"Yes. She was younger. She was pretty. She still is."

"The meal was wonderful," said Rachaela grimly.

"There's just one tiny dessert which you must eat."

"I can't, I'm afraid."

"A mouthful," said Althene. She drained her liqueur in a single immaculate gulp. Her eyes were on Rachaela, intensely dark, depth under depth. The eyes of the seducer.
Is that what she wants
?

Rachaela recalled Michael and Kei in the garden. Michael had not looked elderly anymore. Was homosex-ual love, then, permissible among the Scarabae, with their obsessions of continuance?

Rachaela realized that Althene did make her feel beautiful in turn. And was this too the root of her unease? Even her annoyance?

An image of Jonquil barged into Rachaela's mind, her employer of earlier years, mannish and earringed in steel or bone. Jonquil had been rather fond of her, but very careful. Althene was the antithesis of Jonquil. And Althene's aura, sexual, exquisite, alarmingly unflawed, had no caution to it at all.

When she wants, she will ask me, that's all. She'll ask and I'll say no. And that will be that.

The dessert came, borne by the owner, who had seated them. Miniature tarts amber with apricots.

Rachaela tried hers, and finished it.

She was becoming greedy, like all her kind.

They had coffee in painted white cups, and Calvados in curious squat wooden goblets.

"Don't hurry," said Althene. "There's plenty of time. I hope you'll like the film. Not all of it, perhaps. But there are marvelous things. The ancient past seen through the lens of the early 1900s. Glimpses of authenticity that astound, and moments of utter abandon impossible before, or since."

She refilled Rachaela's cup from the coffeepot.

"I saw this film once, with a terrible audience. They must presumably have known when it was made, and that there would be touches of melodrama or naivete no longer usual. They must have known too it was a landmark, the matrix for very much else. And they laughed uncontrollably. High-pitched, silly laughter, to show they knew, had grown up, progressed. Worst of all, an actress from the film had come to introduce it. She was lovely, tiny, and charming. They laughed, as she sat among them. I would have turned a machine gun on them all."

"Yes," said Rachaela. "Well, I won't laugh."

"Obviously. You have no need."

When they left, Althene paid.

The owner saw them to the door. The other diners were too discreet to stare.

Outside, another cab was waiting, which took them to the cinema.

As predicted, not all the film concerned Rachaela.

She found the biblical sequences interesting, or delightful, or remotely sad. The Babylonian scenes astonished her, the reeling walls and spinning sunwheels, the elephants and eagles of stone (which was not), the staircase of lions, where beautiful women embraced, lip to lip.

The audience did not laugh. It observed a reverential silence.

All dreamers then, those with memories.

Rachaela found the film had played upon her incoherent nostalgia, as if Althene knew, and had chosen purposely.

Rachaela felt a little stunned. It was a long film, of course. It was midnight when they emerged from the cinema.

To her surprise, no car was waiting.

"Shall we walk in the fog?" said Althene. "I know a little club, only a few streets away. We can have something to drink."

Rachaela was not sorry. She did not want the intimacy of a car. She pulled her coat closed against the thick dankness of the air. The fog had grown woollier, and the city… was unspecified heights and shapes of dark, with here and there a streaming diluted light that might be made of anything… a candle, a shallow lamp of oil—

The women on the stairs. Flowers that kissed. How had the censor passed it? Had they missed those mouths in the alabaster deluge of shoulders, arms, lily faces ringed by black curls?

They had turned into an alley. The fog pressed gray about them.

Anywhere. They might be—

Shadows massed. What was it?

Rachaela heard, after all, a laugh. Male.

Five men came out of the fog in front of them.

After the siege of Babylon, the violence of reality.

They were young, between eighteen and twenty-five. The fog dimmed them, giving them vegetable faces with paint hair and big white trainered feet. Between were quilted jackets, baggy cords, tracksuits like adult rompers.

" 'Ere," said one, "two fucking dykes."

"Never had a porking," said another.

"Like it," said another.

They hovered in the fog, stupid as the carcasses of butchered meat, but solid, alive.

Althene too had halted.

Rachaela thought,
Never before
—

"I'll have that one," said the voice in the blue track-suit. "She looks fucking hot."

Rachaela saw his eyes, as if from miles away. They were blind, yet they could see.

Where was the road, where were the cabs and the protection now?

/
was raped before
.

I'll just have to put up with it.

Althene said, musically, "Run along, boys."

The boys stood there, looking at them, not laughing now, and not running.

ALL CITIES WERE THE SAME. The first was the blueprint for them all. There were the high places, lighted and mobile with traf-fic, the sumps of darkness where the thick mist crawled. Through them ran rivers, to which steps sloped down, and under the rivers lay the dead, as they lay under the streets.

Malach walked.

He was silent, but behind him, more silent still, the two ghosts of the dogs padded. Sometimes they would pause to examine some odor or essence. Sometimes they slipped a little ahead. Then they would wait for him, nose his hands, and fall back once more.