‘Not here …’ he mumbled. ‘Never know … the porter … the others …’
He stooped to pick up her raincoat; caught the scent of chypre and rain from her body, caught a dizzying glimpse of waterdrops on a slim thigh, and stumbled in his eagerness. She gave a low laugh of contempt.
‘My little gentleman,’ she murmured. ‘So much concern …’
She stepped lightly into the room, shedding her low shoes at the door, as graceful and as unconcerned of her nakedness as if she had been fully clothed. He shut the door hastily; not even lust could blind him to the possible consequences if she were seen; he did have his position to maintain after all; he had to be discreet. He hung up her raincoat by the sink, where the water could drip without harming the carpet, turned, almost afraid now that everything was ready.
She was sitting in his armchair, legs crossed, hands clenched wantonly in her hair, and smiling. Despite himself, he began to tremble, and he turned away to hide the movement.
‘Drink?’ His mouth was dry as he topped up his own glass.
‘Whisky, no ice,’ she said, and as he poured, he was suddenly certain that she was laughing at him, knowing that hers were the strings which set him dancing, that with her, he was always the whore.
‘There,’ he said, handing her the glass, thankful that his hands had stopped trembling.
She drank the filthy, oily stuff as if it were water, in quick little gulps, the thin reed of her throat moving up and down like a swan’s. Another of her tricks, he thought. Didn’t he know them all by now?
She was only a woman, almost a child; he had picked her up out of the gutter; she had been half-dead with starvation, half-poisoned with cheap gin and forbidden drugs. He had settled her in a nice little apartment where nobody would ask any questions … he had spent more than half his generous study grant on her, on her clothes, her lodging, her pills and powders, her doctors and therapists … had asked nothing more of her than this, this little comfort. Damn it, he thought: he loved her. She should have belonged to him body and soul.
‘Are you brave enough yet?’ Her voice roused him out of his reverie. ‘You stink of whisky. Have you managed to drown your bourgeois scruples?’
He cringed.
‘There’s no harm in a little drink,’ he said, hating the weak note of defensiveness in his voice. ‘You’re partial enough to it yourself.’
She laughed.
‘You don’t think I could bear you to touch me otherwise?’
‘Damn you, you’ve a wicked tongue.’
‘That’s why you want me,’ she said, stretching out on the chair like a cat. ‘You like to be punished. I know you intellectuals. I’ve had enough of them in my time, you know.’
‘Your time!’
‘Don’t raise your voice,’ she said. ‘Remember the porter, the others.’
‘Damn them!’ he snapped. ‘How old are you anyway? Seventeen?’ He tried to laugh.
‘Older than I look,’ she replied. ‘Old enough to know all about your kind. You’re such victims, all of you.’ There was venom behind the mockery.
‘Be quiet.’
‘Certainly. That’s what you pay me for, isn’t it? Do you want me to scream when I come?’
‘Be quiet!’ He grabbed her by the wrist, pulled her from the chair. Her small bones moved under her skin, and he knew he was hurting her, but still she seemed to be smiling. Whatever he did, she was still always in control. He held her wrists high above her head, pushed her towards the bed, flung her down with a brutality which both satisfied him and wrenched at his heart. Despite that, she landed gracefully, like a cat; in fact, if he thought about it, he had never seen her do anything without that natural grace; it was one of her obscure ways of taunting him.
‘Oh, God …’ he breathed her name. ‘I’m sorry … I … I love you so much. Please …’
The plea died on his lips. She could do as she liked, this child, could annihilate or exhilarate him at a whim; hers was the power of fairy tale, that gypsy sensuality which transcends reason. Her fathomless eyes were tunnels of rain. The light caught the curve of her neck, a perfect collar-bone, the white dune of a breast. Her beauty was more than bone-deep, it was eternal, white as the moon. She opened her arms, and he fell towards her with a long, soundless cry of joy.
She moved underneath him like a dancer, unconcerned by his touch, but pushed onwards by some strange unguessed-at lust of her own. Her lips moved over his face, his shoulder. Her cool hands found his neck. A rictus seized him, half-pleasure, half-pain, like biting into an unripe fruit … He felt her lips on his throat. He felt her teeth on him, small and sharp, her hands holding him firmly down.
‘Ouch! Stop it!’ His hands were off her body and his legs thrashed with the violence of his reaction, but still she did not let him go. Close against his flesh he felt her breath as she laughed. Then, with a sudden crunch, she bit. Blood rushed out as his head lolled; blood soaked the front of his shirt, blood rushed down the side of the girl’s face and dripped from the stray damp strands of her hair. He tried to scream, tried to move, but the pain, the movement, the sensation of her cool body against his, all these were at the end of a dark tunnel of feeling, receding to a pinpoint of light and heat in the icy dark. He tried her name; it burst in a bubble of blood and ran down the side of his shoulder, but he did not feel it. He was alone in the tunnel falling further and further away … and not unwilling to fall, either; in fact, very glad to escape from the memory, mercifully fading already, of that last crunch which tore him open like a peach, and the muffled, wet bubbling sound of the girl’s laughter against him.
When – some time later – she had sated her appetite, the girl wiped her face fastidiously on the dead man’s handkerchief. She always washed after meals.
Two
IT WAS NEARLY dark by the time they arrived, and the street-lamps were lit on Gwydir Street. Alice, watching upstairs, saw them coming long before they knocked at her door, and she had time to cast a final glance at her immaculate living-room, to tweak a cushion here, to straighten a picture there, before she let them in. She was as nervous as if she were on her first date; she had dressed with more than usual care. Maybe something inside her wanted Ginny to know she had a rival.
Surely not. Alice shrugged. She hoped she was not so primitive. But all the same, as the knock came she took a moment to straighten her hair in front of the mirror and put up her chin defiantly.
Friends, she thought furiously to herself. That was all. It had to be all. It had been she who decided they would be better off living apart. She had no more hold over him, could not hope to gain any now. So just enjoy it, she thought, as she went to open the door. Enjoy it if you can.
Joe stood at the door, flowers in his hands: white roses wrapped in clear, crinkly cellophane paper. The scent, and the moment, engulfed her.
‘Hello Joe,’ she said softly, and smiled.
‘Long time,’ he answered with a grin, and raised his fist to his shoulder in a kind of salute. Then he looked over his shoulder, almost furtively, and the moment was lost as a figure emerged from the shadows, a crescent of fiery hair, an arc of light following the line of a prominent collar-bone, the rest black with shadow.
‘Hey, Alice …’
His voice was slightly unsteady, like that of a child.
‘Alice … this is Ginny.’
The girl stepped out into the light.
Alice supposed that she made all the right noises; thanks for the flowers, invitations to come in, to sit down; polite commonplaces. But all the time, she was covertly looking at Ginny, taking in every little detail; every line, every hair etched into her remembrance in sharp little razor cuts of precision.
Imagination was nothing, she thought to herself.
She had imagined that she would not be a prey to jealousy, that she would not be primitive, and yet she had discovered within herself such depths of jealousy and … yes, almost hatred that she even frightened herself. She could feel the hairs on the b
ack of her neck rising.
The girl was pretty enough, she thought. Slight, without being too small, supple as a birch wand, light as a dancer, in a wide-skirted dress which reached almost to her ankles. Her red hair was rather short, artlessly pushed back from her face and her eyes were an unusual shade of lavender filled with lights and reflections. But her beauty was more than an accumulation of features. It was somehow abstract, ethereal.
There had been a picture on Alice’s bedroom wall in her student days, an indifferent reproduction of a Rossetti watercolour entitled The First Madness of Ophelia. It showed the doomed girl, wreathed in flowers, crowned in flowers, long hair loose, pale features a blur of dark eyes and open mouth as she sang, heedless of her friends’ concern, sang her sorrow and her madness, childlike in her self-possession. What had Joe said? That she had had a breakdown? That she had spent time in a mental ward? Alice could believe it. Ginny had that same look, reproduced in black-and-white on that half-forgotten poster. Her beauty was an abyss, an insanity all of its own.
For a moment Alice seemed to see herself through Ginny’s eyes, as that cool, appraising stare flicked over her; she saw herself as she knew she must seem before that little island of teenage self-possession. Over-tall, her eyes too small behind those wire frames, features too heavy, inelegant. She saw her own graceless movements, as she watched herself making coffee for them. She saw Joe watching her, making no comment, but noticing the weight she had put on in three years, the fine tracery of new lines around her eyes. And the worst of it was that Joe hadn’t changed at all; if he had, if she had been able to detect a hint of grey in his hair, new wrinkles around his mouth, extra flab on his thin arms, she might have felt more reconciled to her own imperfections, but she detected nothing. The same smile, the same endearing squint through the glasses, the same thin-as-a-rake body and slightly stooped shoulders. A half-expected jolt as she realized that even now she felt the same attraction.
Alice spent the rest of the evening in a haze of jumbled emotions. Places and faces passed without really registering: a pizza restaurant somewhere in the upper Backs, eating, for once without appetite, with the same dogged concentration she had seen in her mother; a path by the river, a bridge. A crescent moon throwing frosty shadows on to the grass and the river. A weir, looking down into the black night water, watching neon reflections in the scum.
She ate, drank, made conversation, without effort, without thinking. Joe sparkled; Ginny turning towards him smiling shyly, watching him. A late-night film at the cinema which Alice did not really see. Waiters. Usherettes. A student giving out leaflets. Ginny’s eyes reflecting light from the screens. Joe buying chocolate, his eyes bright … Joe happy, unsuspecting, his arm around Ginny’s shoulders, looking down at her with that intent look that Alice knew to be short-sightedness. Ginny smiling passively, her voice the barest whisper, like a child’s, glancing at Joe before she spoke, as if he somehow held the key to her words. Soundless pictures, their lips moving without meaning, their colours as random and exciting as a magic-lantern show. Themselves a part of the play, coloured shadows on a flat screen.
And only Ginny’s face through it all, watching her as if through glass, slightly distorted, the bones of her face seeming to change shape; here like the face of a woman looking into a fishbowl, there one eye magnifying suddenly, mouth twisting into curling, sneering shapes. Ginny’s face, and the beginnings of obsession.
For a moment, Alice had been so absorbed that she could not remember where she was. Colours rushed in upon her, jumbled sounds filled the soundless world. A face rushed towards her through fathoms of water … then normality, as if nothing had ever been different, as if the dark carousel she had ridden through all that evening had finally tired of her, thrown her back in disgust, while the fair continued, on some other dimension, maybe just across the water.
The face was Joe’s.
‘Thank you,’ he said, his hand brushing hers, raising the hairs on her wrist.
‘It’s really good to see you again. We should have done this a long time ago, but I expect I was too immature, or too bloody arrogant to suggest it.’
‘That’s fine,’ answered Alice mechanically. ‘I had a great time.’
‘I knew you would.’ His voice was warm. ‘I’m so glad you and Ginny got to know each other. I knew she’d like you, and I really hoped you’d like her.’ He lowered his voice slightly, glancing back at Ginny to make sure she did not hear him. ‘She needs someone like you, you know. This evening has really done her a world of good; maybe you don’t realize it, because you don’t know her very well yet, but I can tell how much she likes you.’
Alice nodded, feeling helpless. Already the violence of her previous emotions seemed to hold the logic of certain dreams, which appear to make sense at the time of dreaming, but afterwards dissolve back into the incomprehensible code of the subconscious from which they are born. She looked back at Ginny, who was sitting in a chair by the fire, and tried to recapture that certainty, that awareness of something malicious, something morally tainted … She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand.
‘Do you want a drink?’ she said, her feelings under control again.
Ginny shrugged, with a vague, sweet smile.
‘Why not?’ said Joe. ‘What have you got?’
‘Tea and coffee.’
‘Tea? Coffee?’
‘Cold beers in the fridge. It’s the best I can do.’ Alice smiled.
‘That’s better,’ Joe said, and went into the kitchen.
‘One for you?’ he called to Ginny, but she only shook her head, nervously twisting the flimsy fabric of her dress with long, pale fingers.
Alice was irritated. Perhaps it was the utterly passive, dependent persona Ginny adopted which grated on her nerves. It was the way she looked to Joe for every little thing; it was the modest lowering of her eyelids when she was not looking at him. Somehow Ginny, despite her shyness, made her very uneasy. She tried to overcome it, speaking to the girl directly for the first time that evening.
‘Are you new to Cambridge?’ she said, determined to elicit some response.
Ginny looked up, her strange eyes like cracked mirrors. Alice saw herself trapped there in reflection.
‘I used to know it, a long time ago.’
‘It never changes much, does it?’
Silently, Ginny shook her head.
‘What do you like best? The Backs? The colleges?’
Ginny smiled.
‘The graveyards. And the river of course,’ she said.
Alice muttered some reply, already feeling exhausted. Joe, however, did not seem to see anything amiss; but he had been drinking cheerfully for most of the evening already, and Alice had not expected him to notice the tension. He came back from the kitchen carrying a six-pack of beer and some glasses, but ended up drinking out of the cans, as usual.
‘Hey, Al,’ he said, between gulps, ‘I see you still have old Cat. I’m sure she remembers me. When I went to the fridge she came right up to me and started rubbing my leg with her nose. How’s that for memory? I always liked that cat. Even when she shat in my shoes.’
‘I think she just knows there’s food in the fridge.’
‘Oh.’ For a minute he was crestfallen, then, as a new idea came to him, he brightened again.
‘Tomorrow we’re playing the Corn Exchange. Big-time stuff. Benefit gig with three more bands. You’ll enjoy it. Ginny wants to hear us, too. Perhaps you two could come together; Gin’s a bit nervous of being there on her own.’
Ginny gave a little nod, Alice gave a strained smile.
‘I’d love to come. What sort of thing did you tell me you were playing?’
Alice knew that any reference to his precious band was enough to keep Joe talking for the whole evening. She knew that he would be satisfied as long as she smiled and nodded and looked interested; and for the moment, she was too drained to attempt any other conversation. Besides, there was Ginny; and her very presence inhibited Alice in so
me inexplicable way. This feeling was so intense that she answered Joe almost at random as he spoke, which earned her, despite his self-absorption, a speculative glance.
‘You’re very quiet,’ he said, laughing. ‘Has age mellowed you at last, or am I just boring you witless? You always used to have plenty to say for yourself in the old days.’
Alice flicked a glance at Ginny.
‘And you always used to say that women talked far too much.’
He grinned. ‘They do.’
‘Do you stand for this sort of thing, Ginny?’ said Alice, forcing herself to include the quiet girl in their conversation.
‘She doesn’t have to,’ said Joe, opening another can one-handed, ‘she’s the most restful female I know.’
‘Don’t be taken in,’ said Alice. ‘Beneath that charming exterior there’s a first-class chauvinist pig.’
Ginny gave a little, secret smile, raising her eyes to Alice’s, then dropped them again. She murmured something in a feathery voice, which Alice did not hear; but Joe gave a low laugh. Alice assumed that she had managed to counterfeit enthusiasm well enough to deceive him, anyway.
‘I’ll have to go now, I’m afraid,’ he said, with a quick glance at his watch. ‘I’ll be here in the morning as soon as I can. I have a practice at ten, and we’ve got another at about three, but I’m sure I’ll be able to find time to take you both out to lunch.’
Alice smiled automatically, grasping at the moment, understanding at last what this was leading to: soon he would be gone, and she would be alone with Ginny.
‘Coffee before you go?’ she asked, half in despair, because he was draining the last can of beer, because he had his coat on, because he was half-way to the door …