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 conte
mpt, 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.
A black cat crossed my path. It paused for a moment, one paw raised, then I saw its jaws open in a soundless hiss, and it was off into the bushes. My stomach grinned, and I realized that I was hungry again. Oh, not with the desperate, stabbing sickness of that first time, but with a clenched anticipation which began at the root of my groin and spread, with a quick burst of warmth, to my stomach. Appetites, she had said.
I cursed myself for having waited so long. I should have left at midnight, when the bars closed; I might have found a drunk on a bench, alone, a waitress coming home from work. My mind recoiled from the thought, but my stomach kept on grinning as I quickened my step. Suddenly, I needed Rosemary, I needed the touch of her cool lips, her absence of passion, her purity. I wondered that not half an hour earlier I had actually considered killing her … and for what? I could have no loyalties, no jealousies; I sneered at myself and my bourgeois values; she belonged to all of us, we belonged to each other. From my earlier state of elation I was plunged into a sudden blackness. My hunger was no longer pleasant; my grinning stomach twisted and cramped. My erection felt knotted, cancerous. Tears of repentance clouded my eyes; I had betrayed her in my thoughts, and she had turned away from me. I felt like Judas.
Later I began to recognize this frame of mind, and I took measures to avoid it, but at that time I really had very little knowledge of what had happened to me, and I became very frightened. I suppose that users of certain kinds of drug must have experienced this kind of reversal, but until I met Rosemary I had really been very sheltered, and I had not been prepared in any way for the hurricane of conflicting passions into which she had swept me.
It was then that I felt a touch at my elbow, and my nostrils caught a sudden, half-pleasant odour of weeds and damp. Someone whispered my name, and I turned, with a joyful terror. It was Elaine, one of my companions of the previous night, the waiflike, wan girl with the child.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ said Elaine softly, ‘I’ve been looking for you.’
‘Why?’
‘I knew you’d be like this.’
‘Like what?’
‘We call it “the little death”,’ she explained. She had the gentlest voice I had ever heard. ‘You get used to it after a while.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘I don’t expect you do,’ said Elaine, ‘but you will. You have to eat, you know.’ She gave the word ‘eat’ a bizarre inflexion which made me shudder; it was as if she had said: ‘You have to die.’
I looked up, my face wet, and noticed her for the first time. She was not especially beautiful, and when Rosemary had been there, I had not spared her a glance. My first impression had been one of long, tangled hair like that of a storybook witch, and giant, dark eyes in a smudgy face. Looking at her again, I saw that she did have a kind of passive beauty, not the beauty of Rosemary, but something deep in the bones of her face. Starved, I thought; she looks starved.
‘How old are you?’ I asked.
She laughed, softly, without joy. In the shadows, her face was paper-white, and seemed to hover, disembodied, above the collar of the black coat she wore. She looked terribly young.
‘Seventeen? Twenty?’
Elaine turned her face away with a tiny sound, and I realized she was crying.
‘How old are you?’ I cried, realizing as I did that my meaning was different from the first time I asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Who are you?’ Suddenly my need to know was very urgent. ‘Where do you come from?’
She stared at me, as if she did not understand my question, or as if the whole concept was ludicrous. ‘No one. Nowhere.’
‘You have to eat,’ she repeated. It was the uppermost thought in her mind, and from the pocket of the coat which dwarfed her, she drew out a package, wrapped in cellophane paper. It was warm and loathsome to touch. I slipped it into my pocket.
‘Thanks.’
Elaine stared at me, and smiled, looking like a frightened child.
‘You don’t understand, do you?’ she said.
‘You love her. We all love her.’ She looked unhappy, as if repeating a truth in which she had long since ceased to believe.
‘I love her.’ It was nearly true.
‘I was a model. People painted me. At first I used to work in a milliner’s shop, you know, serving customers … I helped to make the hats, too; I used to be good at that … then some men came one day, and they saw me. They said I was a stunner. They paid me really well, just to sit, with a book or a harp, while they painted me. I was sixteen. Then I met Rosemary. She wasn’t called Rosemary then, she was called Maria. But that wasn’t her real name either.’
‘When?’
Elaine ignored me. ‘She was a model, too,’ she went on. ‘The most beautiful thing I ever saw. She was engaged to be married to a young man; another painter, William. I liked him. She was seeing a married man, too. She called him Ned. He was crazy about her as well, but he wouldn’t leave his wife. She didn’t care about either of them, really; she would create scenes you can’t imagine, threaten suicide, but inside she was just playing games. She told me, made friends with me, taught me.’
‘She chose you.’ I was beginning to understand.
‘The young man, William,’ Elaine looked at me pleadingly. ‘He went mad. He burned all his paintings. He went for her with a knife.’
‘Yes?’
‘Then he killed himself.’ Elaine looked at me bleakly. ‘He thought he was free of her,’ she said. ‘But she came back. She always comes back.’ Elaine turned away, and I knew that she was crying again.
‘Elaine,’ I began clumsily.
She did not look at me; her face was lost in the rags of her hair. Despair emanated from her like a darkness. I was helpless in the face of it; she was like a damned soul, and the keening sounds which came from her mouth were bleak as winter wind.
‘Elaine.’ I turned her, forcibly, to face me; pushed back her hair. Streaked with dirt and tears, her face looked unmistakably erotic, and I began to see the beauty there, which had caused men to call her a ‘stunner’. I opened up my arms and held her; light and thin as a child, she was, huddled up in that man’s coat, and the new appetites which Rosemary had awakened in me stirred greedily. I almost expected her to draw away from me; but as I unbuttoned her coat, drawing my own around her body so that she should not be cold, then her dress, leaving her standing in only a torn and dirty shift, she melted towards me with a sigh and a sob. Her white skin was smooth as ivory, and her limbs were like ice, but there was warmth there too, warmth upon which I gorged myself, there on the road, heedless of who might see us. She remained passive throughout our lovemaking, childlike, without passion, but I sensed her despair abate a little and when I had finished, my face flushed, she leaned towards me and kissed me, very gently, on the cheek.
‘I was beautiful once,’ she said.
‘You’re beautiful now.’ I said it because she wanted me to, but she ignored me.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Help me.’
‘How?’
She looked at me. ‘Kill her.’
I stared.
‘Kill her. Please. I can’t bear it, every night the same. Do it while you still can. God! It’s been such a long time. I was glad he killed her. I thought I’d be free. But she came back. She found me again. Since then—’ Her voice broke, and I felt despair flood from her again. ‘So long and she won’t let me die … so long with nothing but blackness and blood. She won’t let it end. Oh, kill her, pl
ease …’
I shrugged, once more in control. My meeting with Elaine, as well as the presence of the parcel of food in my pocket, had restored my feeling of power, my ambition. I might kill Rosemary, I thought. But not for Elaine. She would be mine, then, as she was Rosemary’s now; she and the others with her.
I looked down at her, but she was crying again, her face hidden in her hair. Without a second glance, I turned and walked away down the road to Cambridge, my shadow, faint in the greenish dawn, spindling before me. My hand crept to check that the package in my pocket was still there; it was, and despite the cellophane wrapping I thought I caught the ripe and dizzying scent of meat. I quickened my pace, instinctively. I didn’t want to be on the road when the sun came up.
One
WHEN I RETURNED, Robert was still asleep, sprawled helplessly across my bed. Behind his eyelids, the blur of his eyes moved restlessly from side to side. I latched the door behind me, feeling light-headed from hunger and lack of sleep, and made myself comfortable in the chair, keeping my eyes on Robert.
Elaine’s package was still warm in my pocket, and I drew it out, feeling queasy with hunger. It was easier the second time; the meat was rich and flavoursome, its texture at the same time appealing and repellent. I ate it quickly, watching Robert all the time. A few times, he twitched, cat-like, his eyes moved, but did not open, and I finished the meat, cleaned the cellophane wrapping with my fingers, and licked them like a greedy child. I waited for him to awaken, refreshed and strengthened by the food, and once again perfectly certain of what I was going to do, and as I watched and waited, my thoughts turned again, compellingly, to Rosemary.
What Robert had seen the night before, whatever it was that had distressed him so much that it had sent him running to me to be comforted, he had not been able to tell me, except in broken, breathless phrases. He thought he had seen Rosemary having some kind of an attack, he had said, had thought he had seen her change somehow, had glimpsed – or thought he had glimpsed – blood. I had heard enough to guess, however, that whatever it was, he had no proof, no certainties which might endanger either Rosemary or any of the rest of us. But I could not let him go without knowing that for sure. Strange, the ease with which I slipped into my new role; strange, how easy it was for us to become them. As I looked at my sleeping friend, I felt nothing of friendship. I looked into the face of the stranger who had been my best friend, and all I saw was Rosemary.