‘Oh, stop whining,’ I interrupted cheerfully, ‘and do sit down. I can’t bear to crane my neck to talk to you. I took no gamble. In that light, in that disguise, no-one could have recognized Effie. Especially not Henry. The idea of finding his wife in such a situation is beyond him.’
‘Maybe. But why take the risk?’
‘Sit down!’ I repeated.
Sullenly he obeyed, and I suppressed a smile of triumph. I had him!
‘Do you remember when we planned this?’ I asked. Mose nodded. ‘You asked me my reason for being involved in this.’
I could tell he was watching me intently.
‘Years ago,’ I explained, ‘Henry Chester…well, I shan’t tell you what he did, but it was the worst thing anyone has ever done to me, and ever since I have ached for revenge. I could have killed him, I know that; but I’m getting old. I don’t want to finish on the scaffold. And I want my vengeance to be complete. I want the man to be utterly destroyed. Do you understand?’
His eyes were bright with curiosity and he nodded.
‘I don’t want his life. I want his position, his career, his marriage, his sanity. Everything.’
Mose grinned reluctantly. ‘You don’t do things by halves, do you, Fan?’
I laughed. ‘Indeed I don’t! And our interests do coincide in this, Moses. Do what I ask and you’ll get your money, plenty of it. But…’ I paused to make sure he was listening. ‘If you decide to try to work on your own, or if you do anything to overset my plan, I’ll hurt you. I don’t want to, but this is far more important than you. If I have to, I’ll kill you. I warned you once before. Do you remember?’
Mose grinned his engaging, rueful grin, and I knew he was lying. ‘Do I? I’d know better than to cross you, Fan.’
A half-promise. His innocent expression rang as true as a lead sixpence, but it was better than nothing. Believe me, I was telling the truth. I quite liked Mose in spite of his patently two-faced nature—but I hoped he did know better.
‘I want Henry to meet Marta again. Next week.’
‘Oh?’ His voice was smooth and non-committal.
‘In fact, I want Henry to see a great deal of Marta.’
His sense of humour was beginning to reassert itself, and I saw him grin. ‘I see.’ He sighed. ‘At least, I see the entertainment value of the situation, but not how it will help either of us, especially as it will mean that I can’t touch Henry for any money.’
‘Be patient,’ I told him. ‘You’ll get the money soon enough. You see, Mose, my dear, thanks to a little forward planning and some simple chemistry, Henry is already half in love with Marta.’
He laughed at that. ‘That would be a joke,’ he said mischievously.
‘And one which, in a little time, you could turn to your own advantage,’ I prompted.
The sullen look was quite gone now: I could tell that Mose’s keen sense of the ridiculous appreciated the irony of the situation, and for that reason, at least, I knew he would go along with me. For a while, anyway. And as long as I had Mose I had Effie.
Effie, who was to be my Ace of Swords.
I once read—it must have been in a fairy tale—that every man is secretly in love with his own death, hunting it with the desperation of a thwarted lover; if Effie had not told me, in Marta’s voice, that Henry Chester was the Hermit, I should have known it as he stumbled home that night with that look of dark radiance in his eyes. Because I knew then that in some part of his guilty soul he had recognized her—no, not Effie, not the poor little blank thing waiting for a stronger mind to possess her, but Marta, my Marta, fluttering into life behind his Effie’s eyes…Yes, he recognized her, the old Hermit and he was drawn as a man is drawn to the grave’s cold seduction. I had ways of seeing in those days—I still do when I feel inclined to use them—and I felt his bleak longing and fed it. Oh, there are herbs to dim the mind and roots to waken it, potions to open the eye of the soul and others to fold reality into delicate shapes like paper birds…and there are spirits, yes, and ghosts, whether you believe in them or not, pacing the corridors of a guilty man’s heart waiting for a chance to be reborn.
I could tell you a tale of how I watched my mother breathe life into a clay man, whispering strange memories into his brainless head, and of the real man who went mad; or of the root the pretty girl ate to speak to her dead lover; or of the sick child who left his body and flew to where his father lay dying to whisper a prayer into the old man’s ear…all that and more I’ve seen. Shake your head and talk of science if you like; fifty years ago they’d have called your science magic. It shifts, you see, the uneasy tide of change. It carries us on its dark and secret waters. The tide gives up its dead, given faith and time. All we needed, the both of us, was a little time. For myself, to bring her closer. For Marta, time to grow strong.
We waited.
34
Strange, how time can fold in upon itself like linen sheets in a cupboard, bringing the past close enough to the present for events to touch, even to overlap. As I walked back from Crook Street to Cromwell Square I was suddenly smitten by a memory so intense that I could hardly imagine having put it out of my mind for so long: it was as if the red-haired girl had unlocked the sleeping half of my mind and freed the monsters of my past.
My exhilaration was a bitter thing, loaded with dreamlike images of damnation: the guilt I could bear—it was as familiar as the lines on my palms—but guilt was not all I felt. I felt a capering, Gothic joy. For the first time I revelled in my guilt, displaying myself as shamelessly as a penny whore before the stern image of my father in my soul. In the ochre light of the waning moon I ran, that hot, twisted nugget of joy burning my guts. In the silence I called her name, sacrilegiously: ‘Marta!’
I seemed still to feel her touch on my skin; her scent was still in my nostrils, the scent of mystery and sulphurous delight…I laughed for no reason, like a madman—indeed, I felt my sanity begin to elude me, as a shy virgin may hide beneath her veils.
And I remembered.
My first Communion, only four weeks after that secret, shameful act in my mother’s room…Summer had faded into a decadent, overripe autumn: fat brown wasps lurked treacherously around the apple trees and even the air had a yellowish, misty cast and a sickly, sweetish smell which told of heavy rains after the harvest and fruit left to rot on the branch.
There were six of us taking Communion that day, four boys and two girls: we had to form a procession from the village to the church while the choir followed, singing hymns, and the families brought up the rear holding candles. It was a proud day for my father—though my mother, who disliked the heat, would not be present—and I knew better than to complain; but I hated the white robe, so like a girl’s nightdress, and the surplice which went over it. I hated the hair-oil which Nurse had plastered over my head: the smell of it was as overripe and sweet as the rotten apples, and I was afraid wasps would come to hover around my head, silent and bloated. The day was hot and I felt sweat rolling from my hair and face into my surplice, prickling and trickling from my underarms, my stomach, my groin. I tried to ignore it; to listen to the sweet, slightly off-key voices of the choirboys (my own voice had broken only a week before: there would be no more choir for me) and the deeper, sterner notes of my father’s singing. I tried to remember that today was a special day for me; that today I would be accepted as a full member of the church, that next Sunday, when the adults stood to take Communion, to sip the wine from the jewelled chalice and to hold out their mouths for the mysterious white discs of the Host, I would be among them; I would taste the Blood and the Flesh of the Redeemer.
Suddenly I began to shiver. I had read about transubstantiation in my father’s books, about the miracle of the Blood and the Flesh. But only now did the terrible image return to me. What would happen when I bit into the clean white wafer and felt it turn to raw flesh in my mouth? Would the wine change to the thick consistency of blood as the goblet touched my lips? If so, then how could I stop myself from fa
inting cold on the steps of the altar?
I had a momentary, nightmarish image of myself, white as a corpse, spraying blood and vomit out in great, rasping gulps as the congregation watched in horror and amazement and my father stood in shocked silence with the plate of wafers in his hand.
I almost fainted there and then. Maybe I was being punished, I thought, with desperate, guilty logic. I thought no-one had seen me in my mother’s bedroom; I had not confessed it—could not confess it to my father, not even at the confessional—and I had thought in my wicked stupidity that I had escaped punishment. But God had been there all the time, God had seen it all and now He was going to make me drink blood, and I knew I was going to faint, really faint, because I could almost taste the dull slick of blood in my throat and if I defiled the Host I’d be damned for ever and ever…
With a tremendous effort I swallowed my terror. I had to go on. I had to go through with the ceremony. If I didn’t my father would find out what I had done because I would have to tell him—and the thought of what he would do to me then goaded me out of my paralysis and set me half running towards the church. It wasn’t blood, I told myself furiously. It was just cheap wine. And it wasn’t the dead flesh of some old, crucified corpse. It was wafers, wafers because bread went stale too fast; I’d seen them in the casket Father kept in his special vestry. I looked up and saw the church’s maw ready to engulf the six of us, dressed in white for all the world like six little white Hosts, and I suppressed a blasphemous urge to giggle. Mentally I thumbed my nose at it:
(I don’t care…I’m not scared…
You can put your stupid wafers you-know-whe-ere)
Then I really did giggle, so loudly that my father glanced sharply at me and I immediately turned the giggle into a cough. I was feeling much better already.
We waited for what seemed like hours as the service droned on and on, my father’s words like the heavy, sugar-soaked wasps in the apple orchard. I fixed my eyes on the two girls sitting opposite me to the left of the aisle: there was Liz Bashforth, plain and red-faced in a white dress several sizes too small, and Prissy Mahoney, whose mother had ‘lost’ her husband ten years earlier. Rumour had it that there hadn’t been any husband, only a fine-talking Irish good-for-nothing who had run away to London, leaving his ‘wife’ and daughter to fend for themselves. Either way, Prissy’s mother seemed to have fended for herself all right, because Priss was dressed in a brand-new Communion robe with lace and white ribbons, white gloves and little white shoes. As I looked shyly at her over my hymn-book I could see the way her hair fell loose in two neat sheaves over her breasts. The word made me blush a little, but I was at an age where my curiosity about girls by far exceeded the little real knowledge I had and I found myself looking at her again, my eyes creeping relentlessly towards the little swellings at her beribboned bodice. She looked back at me almost smiling, and I turned away hastily, blushing deeper. But I always looked again.
I was hardly paying attention when at last my father gave the signal for the Communion. I stood up hastily, taking my place in the line without taking my eyes off Prissy. As we made our way towards the altar I noticed that she was still aware of my looking at her, flicking her auburn hair over her shoulder with careless precision, her hips rolling in a childish parody of seduction.
I was so enthralled that for a moment I hardly noticed that the other boys were watching her too, with audible sniggers. For a moment I was genuinely bewildered; then I froze in shock. There was blood on the back of Prissy’s white communion dress, seeping through the shiny silk just at the point where her legs met her body: a small irregular keyhole where blood had trickled slowly through the fabric during the hours she sat on the bench. I felt a sour panic cramp my stomach and the whole of my body was suddenly coated in slick ropes of sweat. It was as if my blasphemous thoughts about the Host had taken shape; I stumbled in the aisle, fascinated and horrified at the bloody keyhole in the back of Prissy’s dress, unable to take my eyes from it. I was reminded in that nightmarish instant of my father’s musical toys and I imagined Prissy Mahoney as the dancing Columbine in her blue-and-white dress, set into perpetual motion by my own sacrilegious thoughts. I saw her begin to move, at first jerky and graceless, then with the inhuman fluidity of her awakened mechanism, her hair flying, her bare legs kicking obscenely at the air, her breasts jiggling loosely at the lacing of her bodice while all the time she smiled her parodic, gruesome smile and the blood flowed down her legs as if it might never stop…
Much later I learned about menstruation and, although I never lost my disgust of the thought, I came to understand that poor Prissy was not the monster my twelve-year-old self thought her. But then I was totally ignorant and I simply knew that God was watching me with an eye as huge and pitiless as the sky; knew I was damned for mocking the Host and for daring to come unshriven to Communion. The sign was blood, like the blood of the chalice and the blood in the heart of the wafer, blood which was the legacy of the Original Sin, blood, blood…
They told me later that I collapsed screaming to the floor of the aisle. My father was as icily composed as ever, ordering me to be removed to the vestry while the others took Communion and then carrying me home to bed without a single comment. I lay in bed for twenty-four hours while rumours chased from one end of the village to the other: I was possessed by devils (why else would I have fallen into a fit at the sight of the Host?); I was insane; I was dead.
No doctor came to see me, although my father sat by my side all the time with his Bible and his rosary, praying through my fever and delirium. I do not know whether I spoke in my sleep—if I did, I cannot remember, and my father never spoke of it—but when I awoke the next day he hauled me out of bed without a word, washed and scrubbed me and dragged on my Communion clothes. In silence we went to the church and, in front of a good-sized crowd of onlookers, I took the wafer and the wine without the slightest incident. Thus the rumours were—not silenced, for in a village community no scandal is ever really dead—muted, at least when my father was within earshot. The official story was that I had suffered a slight epileptic seizure, and this was judged an adequate excuse to keep me away from school and the influence of other boys. My father’s eye, like God’s, was on me all the time; but he never mentioned the episode in the church, and for the second time I felt an uneasy, contemptuous elation at my narrow escape. As I grew older I forgot the incident altogether.
Until now.
Prissy Mahoney had been dead for twenty years; my father was dead and I would never again set foot in the village of my birth…so why should I feel the events of that long-forgotten summer so close, so immediate? I was a fool, I told myself savagely; that was all. There was no-one to judge me now. No-one.
But my mood had changed, and although I tried to recapture my earlier feeling of carefree, shameless joy I could not, reaching Cromwell Square just before dawn with a sour stomach and heavy eyes.
I looked into Effie’s room as I came in and was shaken by the bitter depth of my reaction as I saw her, white and peaceful among her tumbled sheets, innocent as a child. What right had she to look innocent? I knew her, and that narrow, talismanic keyhole of flesh between her legs; knew her sickening impurity. The hypocrite! If she had been a real wife I should not have had to make my bed with a Haymarket whore tonight or walk home in the cold dawn pursued by the Furies of my remembrance…
But here my rage struck an obstacle: Marta was no Haymarket whore. I knew that, even as my mind tried to lash my temper into a greater frenzy. I remembered her touch, her voice, the taste of her skin with a lover’s intensity…
‘Marta…’ The sound of my voice made me flinch; I did not know I had spoken aloud. Anxiously I glanced at Effie. Alerted by my voice, she seemed to stir beneath the coverlet, turning restlessly on the pillow with a little childish sound. I held my breath at the door, willing her to sleep. For a minute or two I stayed there motionless, afraid to disturb her; then I pushed the door open, very gently, and stepped out into the p
assage.
Suddenly I felt something touch my leg and, in an absurd twist of near-panic, I thought of the Columbine doll with Prissy Mahoney’s face, reaching for me in the dark. I almost screamed. Then I saw the eldritch gleam of its eyes in the shadows and swore softly. Effie’s damned cat again!
I hissed at it, and it hissed back, then it returned to its element, the darkness, and I crept into the safety of my own room.
35
When I awoke, the sunlight was streaming through the open window and Tabby was sitting at my bedside with a tray of chocolate and biscuits. I reached within my memory for the dreams of the past night, but found nothing but a few intense, fragmented images: Fanny sitting by the fire with Meg and Alecto, my head in her lap; Mose’s face, ochre in the firelight; and Henry’s mouth smiling with a tenderness he never showed after our marriage…Bright images, disassociated as the pictures in a pack of scattered cards…and yet I felt a sensation of release and well-being I had not felt since the baby died.
I sat up abruptly, feeling suddenly ravenous. I drank the chocolate and ate all the biscuits, then I asked Tabby to bring me some toast.
‘I’ll swear, I’m feeling quite recovered this morning,’ I said gaily.
‘I’m very glad to hear it, ma’am, I’m sure,’ answered Tabby carefully, ‘but I hope you won’t go tiring yourself out before you’re well again. Mr Chester did say…’
‘Mr Chester? Where is he today?’
‘He said he’d go to his studio to work, and wouldn’t be back till tonight.’
I hoped my relief was not too apparent. ‘I see,’ I said, with a fair assumption of carelessness. ‘Well, I think today I’ll be well enough for a short walk. The fresh air will do me good, and it’s a lovely day, don’t you think?’