‘Please pour yourself a drink,’ hissed a voice behind me, and suddenly she was there—strange how inconspicuous she could be when she chose. Her black hair (how could I have thought it was red? It was crow-black, black as the Queen of Spades) fell straight as rain between her spread hands. She was pale as smoke in the deathly light, her mouth a blur, her eyes a startling cobalt in the Gothic pallor of her face. Her dress was made of some stiff, panelled fabric which stood out against her vulnerable flesh, and its opulence was somehow disturbing in the bleak surrounding, as if she were a forgotten Coppélia in a deserted workshop, just waiting to be set into motion.
Mechanically I poured myself a glassful of the liquor in the cornflower-blue decanter—it was tinselly and sharp, with the stinging taste of juniper—and struggled once again to overcome my sense of unreality. For a moment I wondered if there were chloral in the drink, for I felt myself sink in watery abandon, the figure of Marta a swaying ghost in that undersea light, a drowned mermaid with the smell of weed and decay in her floating hair. Then her cold arms folded around me and I felt her mouth fleetingly against mine, her voice whispering inaudible obscenities in my ear, and I collapsed against her, clutching her dress, pulling her down with me on to the floor, on to the dim sea-bed, her blood a rushing in my ears, her flesh a welcome suffocation of my sense of sin.
When at last I was spent we lay together on the soft blue rugs and she whispered a long, dreamlike tale to me of a woman who changed with the moon, growing from young girl to beautiful woman to hideous crone as the month went by…then I wanted her again and I plunged into her like a dolphin into a wave.
‘I have to see you again. I have to see you again soon.’
‘Next Thursday.’ Her whispering voice is matter-of-fact, passionless, almost coarse: the voice of a penny whore planning business.
‘No! I want to see you sooner than that.’
She shakes her head abstractedly. The dull brocade of her dress clings to her knees and ankles and above that she is naked as the moon, her nipples the most delicate azure against her powdery skin.
‘I can only see you once a week,’ she says patiently. ‘Only on Thursdays. Only here.’
‘Why?’ Anger spills out from me like acid. ‘I pay you, don’t I? Where do you go for the rest of the week? Who do you go with?’
Flawed Columbine smiles gently among her damp ringlets.
‘But I love you!’ Hapless now, clinging to her thin arm tight enough to raise bruises, and hungry, so hungry. ‘I lo-ove…’ (Revelation.) ‘I love you!’
A shift in the light; chloral eyes reflecting my pleading face. Her head tilts slightly, like a child listening.
Flatly she says: ‘No. You don’t love me. Not enough. Not yet.’
She cuts off my anguished negative with a gesture, beginning to pull on her discarded dress with graceless grace, like a spoilt child dressing up in Mother’s clothes. ‘You will, Henry,’ she says softly. ‘Soon you will.’
For a long time I am alone in this blue room, coiled tightly around my longing. She has left a silk scarf lying on the floor at my feet; I crush it and twist it in my hands as some primitive in me would like to crush and twist her pale throat…but Scheherazade has gone with her wolves at heel.
Marta. Marta. Marta! I could drive myself mad with that name. Marta, my penny succubus; my waxing, waning moonchild. Where do you go, my darling? To some dim underwater crypt where undines drift? Some stone circle, to dance till dawn with the other witches? Or do you go to the riverside with your mouth painted red and your dress cut low? Do you roll in filthy alleys with the dregs and the cripples? What do you want of me, Marta? Tell me what it is and I’ll give it to you. Whatever it is.
Whatever.
38
We were alone together, quite alone as Henry rattled about the house like a grain in a gourd, knowing only his own wan dreams…We were alone together.
She followed me like a flawed reflection in a cat’s eye, pale retinal imprint of myself, whispering to me in the dark. Marta, my sister, my shadow, my love. At night we talked softly underneath the blankets, like children full of secrets; by day she followed me invisibly, taking my hand under the dinner-table, murmuring reassuring words into my ears. I did not see Mose—he thought that our meeting might be dangerous to his plans—but I was not lonely. Nor was I afraid: we had accepted each other, she and I. For the first time in my life I had a friend.
I faked illness so that we could be together, taking laudanum and pretending to sleep. My dreams were magical ships with sails like wings high in the clear air. For the first time in years I felt free of that hateful, anguished edifice of guilt Henry had constructed around me, free of Henry, free of myself. I was clear as glass, pure as spring water. I opened the windows of my chamber and felt the wind whistle through me as if I were a flute…
‘Why, ma’am!’
Tabby’s voice jolted me from my euphoric reverie and I turned, feeling suddenly dizzy and shaken. She put down the tray she was carrying and ran towards me; in the abrupt doubling of my vision I could see she was shocked and concerned. Her arms locked around me, and for a moment I thought she was Fanny, come to take me home, and I began to cry again.
‘Oh, ma’am!’ Supporting me with one arm around my waist she half carried me towards the bed. ‘Just you lie down here for a minute, ma’am. I’ll have you right in no time.’ Clucking to herself in tones of dismay she had the window closed in an instant and was heaping blankets over me before I could say a word. ‘Fancy standing there in the cold, with hardly a stitch on—you’ll catch your death, ma’am, your death! Just think what Mr Chester would say if he knew—and you’re so light, just like a feather; you don’t eat enough, not half enough, ma’am, why, just—’
‘Please, Tabby!’ I interrupted with a little laugh. ‘Don’t worry so much. I feel quite recovered now. And I like the fresh air.’
Tabby shook her head vehemently. ‘Not that nasty blustery air, you don’t, ma’am, begging your pardon. It’s fatal to the lungs, just fatal. What you need is a nice cup of chocolate and some food, not what that Dr Russell of Mr Chester’s says, but some real old-fashioned country food—’
‘Dr Russell?’ I tried to keep the edge from my voice, but I heard my words rising shrilly, helplessly: ‘He said he wouldn’t send for a doctor! I’m quite well, Tabby. Quite well.’
‘Don’t take on so, ma’am,’ said Tabby comfortably. ‘I dare say Mr Chester was anxious about you, and called for the doctor for advice. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you.’
‘Oh yes, Tabby, you should. You were quite right to tell me. Please, what did the doctor say? When did he come?’
‘Oh, yesterday, ma’am, when you were asleep. I don’t rightly know what he said, seeing as Mr Chester talked to him alone in the library, but he just told me to make sure you kept taking your drops, and to give you plenty of hot drinks and light food. Chicken broth and jelly and the like. But to my mind’—here her face darkened again—‘it’s good nourishing food you need, nice puddings and red meat and maybe a glass of stout with it. That’s what you need, not broth and jelly. That’s what I told Mr Chester.’
‘Henry…’ I murmured, trying to quell my agitation. What did it matter that he had spoken to the doctor? Soon it would be too late for him to do anything. All I had to do was to stay calm, not to give him any excuse for dissatisfaction. Soon Mose would be ready to put his plan into action. Till then…
(Shhh…sleep. Shhh…)
Tabby was holding out a cup of chocolate. ‘Shhh, ma’am. You drink this and lie down. It’ll do you a power of good.’
I forced myself to take the cup.
‘And your drops? Have you taken them yet, ma’am?’
In spite of myself I smiled. The thought of not taking them was, suddenly, hilariously funny. I nodded, still smiling. ‘You’ll have to go to the chemist’s soon, Tabby, to buy some more. I’ve almost finished the bottle.’
‘Of course I will, ma’am,’ replied Tabby rea
ssuringly. ‘I’ll go this very morning, don’t you fret. Now you drink that chocolate and I’ll bring you up some breakfast.’ With mock severity: ‘And see that you try to eat some of it this time!’ I nodded again, closing my eyes as a sudden wave of weariness broke over my aching head. I heard the door close after her and in a moment I opened my eyes again. Tizzy jumped lightly on to the coverlet beside my hand and I reached out mechanically to stroke her. Purring, she came to curl up on the pillow as close to me as she could manage and for a time we both slept.
I awoke to find my cup of cold chocolate and Tabby’s promised breakfast tray beside me on the bedstand. Tea—long since gone cold—and toast with bacon and scrambled eggs. I must have slept for at least an hour. I poured the tea out of the window and gave the eggs and bacon to Tizzy, who ate them with delicate relish—at least poor Tabby would be pleased that for once my plate would not be sent back untouched. I dressed myself in an old grey housedress, pushing back my hair under a white cap; then I washed my face, noting in the mirror how pale and worn I looked. Even my eyes seemed colourless, and the bones in my face seemed to stand out with unaccustomed sharpness beneath the severe cap. I didn’t care. I never thought of myself as beautiful, even in the days when I was Mr Chester’s Little Stunner. Marta was always the pretty one. Not me.
Henry was at his studio as usual: he was spending almost all his time there nowadays. The Card Players was finished and had already received praise from Ruskin—he had recommended that Henry exhibit the painting at the Royal Academy, and had promised to write a glowing article on Henry for the newspapers—but Henry seemed distant, almost uninterested in the whole thing. He told me he was working on a different project now, a large canvas entitled Scheherazade, but he was oddly reticent about it. In fact I noticed that he was reticent about everything: our meals were eaten mostly in silence, the sounds of cutlery against china horribly amplified in the echoing dining-room. Several times I pleaded indisposition to avoid these terrifying meals, Henry chewing, my nervous fingers tapping my glass, my voice scratching at the silence in a desperate attempt to break it. A few times Henry emerged from his blank contemplation to launch into a violent, unsolicited tirade and for the first time I actually understood Henry Chester: I knew that he hated me with a bleak, hatefully intimate passion beyond reason or logic, something as elemental and unconscious as a swarm of wasps mindful only of the overpowering urge to sting…And in my new-found understanding I realized something else: Henry didn’t know that he hated me. It was latent in him, something which grew in darkness, biding its time…I hoped Mose would act soon.
I spent the next four weeks in the drugged, dislocated half-sleep of a caterpillar in its chrysalis. I found that my body had acquired strange new tastes: I ate quantities of sweets and cakes, much to Tabby’s uncritical delight, although I had never been fond of such things before, and instead of tea I began to drink lemonade. I was not allowed out of the garden—the servants saw to it that if I wanted fresh air there was always someone to keep me company as I sat by the pond or on the terrace, Em with her light-hearted babble or Tabby, inarticulate but unfailingly kind, the sleeves of her flowered smock turned up to reveal her thick red arms, her chapped, agile fingers busy with sewing or crochet. As the weather turned grim I spent hours at the window watching the rain and working at my embroidery: for the first time I actually enjoyed the tedious task of setting stitches. Sometimes the whole day passed without my noticing it and without my having formulated a single coherent thought. There were vast spaces in my mind where I remembered nothing at all, and between these spaces spun fragmented images which sometimes caught me unawares, blinding me with their sudden intensity.
One morning when Henry was out Aunt May called with Mother; my senses were so confused that day that for a while I hardly recognized them. Mother was resplendent in a pink coat and bonnet of ostrich-feathers, talking animatedly about a Mr Zellini who had taken her for a ride in his gig. Aunt May looked older and, as I kissed her, I found myself half crying for no real reason, remembering with a sudden nostalgia the old days in Cranbourn Alley.
She looked at me shrewdly from bright black eyes, holding me tightly against her hard, flat chest and murmured, so low that I could hardly hear her: ‘Oh, Effie, come home. You know you’ll always have a home with me, whatever happens. Come home with me now, before it’s too late.’
And a part of my tears was the knowledge that it was already too late. I had a new home now, a new family. At that moment a terrible sensation swept over me, of drowning in alien memories…perhaps if we had been alone I might have tried to tell Aunt May what was happening to me; but Mother was there, happily cataloguing the virtues of her Mr Zellini, Tabby was polishing in the hall, her voice raised in a lusty rendition of a music-hall song…it was so far away from Crook Street that I could not find the words to begin.
One night, as I was preparing for sleep, I thought of Mose with an abrupt, hurt longing: stunned to realize that fully two weeks had passed since I had thought of him at all. My head began to spin and I sank helplessly on to the bed, filled with a tremendous confusion, loneliness and guilt. How could I have forgotten the man I loved, the man I would have died for? What was happening to me? If I had forgotten Mose, my mother, Aunt May, what else might I have forgotten? Perhaps I was losing my mind. What happened to me at night, when I seemed to sleep so deeply? Why had I found my cloak hanging in my wardrobe dripping wet one morning, as if I had been out in the rain? Why did the level of laudanum in the bottle diminish regularly, although I never remembered taking any? And why the growing knowledge that very soon something was going to happen, something momentous?
I began to keep a diary to remind myself of things, but when I reread the written pages I found that I could not remember having written half of what I saw there. Scraps of poetry, names and scribbled drawings punctuated the rest; in some placees the writing was so different to my own that I doubted I had written it at all. My own hand was neat and rounded; this stranger’s hand was a shapeless scrawl, as if she had only recently learned her letters.
Once I opened my diary and read my name, euphemia madeleine chester written over and over again. Another time it was the names of Fanny’s cats: tisiphone, megaera, alecto, tisiphone, megaera, alecto, tisiphone…covering nearly half a page. But at other times my mind was a diamond-point of precision and clarity and it was at one of these times that I realized that Henry hated me. In the panic which followed the revelation I was able to accept, with something like joy, that I had to fight him, with all the cunning I possessed, using his own contempt for me against him. I waited, watching, and began to see what he was planning.
Tabby had warned me without meaning to, of course: as soon as she mentioned Dr Russell I knew; but the fear which had flooded me then had long since subsided. I would not let Henry win. I wrote it in my diary in blood-red capitals, so that if I suffered one of my memory-lapses I would be reminded: I was going to escape from Henry; I was going to run away with Mose; Fanny would see to that. When Henry was there I always pretended to be especially vague and somnolent…but my eyes were razor-sharp beneath my drowsy eyelids and I waited.
I knew what I was looking for.
39
Four weeks passed with the aching slowness of those summer afternoons when I was twelve and all Nature’s treasury lay flung outside the schoolroom’s dusty green windows. I waited, deliberately working myself to exhaustion in the studio so that when I eventually had to come home I would be able to present at least the semblance of sanity. The studio walls were covered with studies: profiles, full-faces, three-quarters, hands, details of hair, eyes, lips. I worked at a pace bordering upon mania; I littered the floor with sketches in watercolours, chalks and inks, every one perfect, infused with the clarity of my lover’s memory.
On Saturday I went to my Bond Street supplier and bought a superb canvas, stretched and treated, the largest canvas I had ever thought to use. It was fully eight feet high and five feet across, and because it was
already pinned to its frame I had to pay two men to transport it from the shop to my studio. But it was worth every penny of the twenty pounds I paid for it, for as soon as I had it set up against my easel I began to sketch feverishly, directly on to the beautiful creamy surface the monstrous, sublime figures of my fantasy.
I suppose you have seen my Scheherazade: she hangs at the Academy even today, queening it over the Rossettis and the Millaises and the Hunts with all the colours of the spectrum in her cryptic eyes. She is rather taller than life; almost naked against a background of blurred Oriental drapery. Her body is barely mature, hard and slim and graceful; her skin is the colour of weak tea, her hands long and expressive with raking, green-painted fingernails. Her hair falls nearly to her feet (I have bent the truth a very little, but the rest is real, believe me) and there is a suggestion of a strut in her posture as she stands watching the watcher, defiant in her nakedness, mocking his guilty desire. She is gloriously immodest, reaching out to include the spectator in some exotic tale of perilous adventure; her face is flushed with the excitement of the tale and there is mockery and a wild humour around her mouth. At her feet lies an open book, the leaves fluttering randomly, and in the shadows two wolves lie waiting, teeth bared and eyes like sulphur. If you look at the frame you will find a fragment from a poem inscribed there:
Who goes to find Scheherazade
By land or air or sail?
Who dares to kiss her crimson lips
And lives to tell the tale?