Amaryllis Night and Day

  ‘Where is it now?’

  ‘Gone. The good time went and that went with it.’ As she told me this her face became what it must have been when she was twelve or thirteen. ‘Ah!’ I said involuntarily, and looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. They hadn’t.

  ‘What?’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘Nothing. How did the good time go?’

  ‘My dad walked out, and nothing was the way it used to be. Sometimes I saw him in glims, just ordinary ones, and he would hug me and start to tell me something but I’d always wake up before he said it. Then this new thing happened to me; I’ve told you about when I was thirteen and I pulled my English teacher. I was just a scrawny little thing back then and boys had never paid much attention to me but they did when I started pulling them and doing what I’d done with the English teacher, only more. They all got interested in me then; they didn’t know I was pulling them, they thought they were having those glims because there was something about me that got them excited. Some of the bolder ones tried their luck with me after school in the unglim and I made their wildest glims come true. Pretty soon I had all the boys I wanted and the other girls were going crazy trying to figure it out. That’s not very Pre-Raphaelite, is it?’

  ‘Amaryllis, why are you telling me all this?’

  ‘Maybe I want to see if I can make you fall out of love with me.’

  ‘Why would you want me to fall out of love with you?’

  ‘Because being in love is something anybody can do hundreds of times. I’ve fallen in love and out of love over and over and it came to nothing. So now I want to find out what comes to something. I’m empty.’

  I went to the bar for whiskies and pints of bitter and salt-and-vinegar crisps. While I was waiting for the pints I listened to two men next to me. ‘They wanted to know how old I was,’ said one of them. ‘I told them I played late thirties which was what the part called for. They said they’d let me know and they gave me that look that means the phone will never ring.’

  ‘I’m thinking of opening a restaurant,’ said the other, ‘if I can find a couple of backers.’ Over the road St Mary’s Church was standing up under its whipped-cream steeple; the buses were running; Islington was doing its Sunday-afternoon thing and I appreciated that: if everything would do its thing at the proper time the world would be a safer place.

  When I got back to the table Amaryllis downed her whisky as if it were lemonade, took a long snort of bitter, and continued. ‘My mother got married again. There was a man who wrote a book called The Sixty-four Dramatic Plots; I don’t know if he included the one with the mother, the teenage daughter, and the stepfather with the hots for the daughter.’

  ‘Nabokov did that one.’

  ‘His name was Nigel and he used to pick his nose and eat it. Everybody draws the line somewhere. I cleared out and I haven’t seen my mother since. I haven’t simply been whoring around but I keep needing to be in love and maybe that’s the same thing. Now I haven’t told you everything but I’ve told you more than I’ve ever told anyone else.’

  ‘Maybe we could stop talking about love,’ I said, ‘and just think of being with each other.’

  She reached for my hand and squeezed it. ‘From here on out, you said once.’

  ‘I’m still saying it.’

  ‘I’m thinking about the shop where I got the pillow. I still remember the smell of it.’

  ‘Why’d you leave it behind?’

  ‘I was leaving my childhood behind and that was part of it.’

  ‘And you want to go back to that souvenir shop where you first saw it because you felt good there.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t want to go there, do you.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Is it a place you’ve been to?’

  ‘Yes, or one like it, but it would have been a long time before you were there. Who was behind the counter in that shop?’

  ‘A girl of eighteen or so. There was an old woman all in black in a rocking chair with a kitten in her lap.’

  ‘A black kitten?’

  ‘Yes. Do you think it was the same place?’

  ‘Could have been.’

  ‘Why don’t you want to go there?’

  I told her and she looked thoughtful. ‘I can understand how you feel,’ she said.

  ‘In my mind the ride in the car, the red sunset and the woman singing on the radio and the old woman in the souvenir shop, the black cat and the pillow are all part of the deaths of my father and mother.’

  She nodded.

  ‘On the other hand,’ I said, ‘I’d like to keep you company if you want to go there. Let me think about it for a bit.’

  We left the King’s Head and walked down Upper Street to the Angel. On the way we paused at Islington Green and the statue of Sir Hugh Myddelton. ‘Have you ever noticed,’ said Amaryllis, ‘that whenever you see a statue of a man in doublet and hose, he’s got really good legs? But men’s legs aren’t always that good, I’ve seen lots that would look terrible in doublet and hose. I wonder if the sculptors sometimes made them look a bit better than they were.’

  ‘I’m sure of it,’ I said. ‘You can’t trust artists.’

  At the Angel it takes two escalators to get down to the Northern Line platforms. The first one may well be the longest in London. Amaryllis stood in front of me as we escalated down and I looked over her head at the longitudinal lines on the pale-green arched ceiling and the fluorescent panels on each side all dwindling to a vanishing point somewhere below the floor at the bottom. I was remembering the vanishing points on the night roads I’d travelled with Lenore. Perspective being what it is, there are vanishing points wherever you look, it’s just that you don’t notice them so much unless you see parallel lines apparently converging in the distance. Lines from a Shriekback song came to mind: ‘One day soon you and I will merge – everything that rises must converge.’

  We went up to King’s Cross and changed to the Piccadilly Line for Earl’s Court where we got a Wimbledon train to Fulham Broadway and home. Travelling in three different trains with escalators in between, we were very quiet, holding hands and moving comfortably in a little house of unspoken, a cosy place that we hadn’t been to before.

  When we got home I could feel that Amaryllis was glad to be there. Until now in the unglim there had always been a varying hedge around her castle, sometimes high and sometimes low but always there. Now there seemed to be none, and I got us drinks as soon as possible to keep it that way.

  ‘Here’s how,’ I said, raising my glass.

  ‘Here’s how what?’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘I don’t know, it’s just something people say or used to say where I come from. Maybe it just means here’s how we do it.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Drink a drink, I suppose.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘What else did you have in mind?’

  ‘Mmmmhmmhmm,’ she said. ‘Here’s how,’ and we clinked glasses. She took her shoes off and sat on the couch with her feet tucked under her. As she made herself comfortable she was stretching and squirming languorously and looking at me in a way I’d seen before only in glims.

  I know I’ve mentioned the paintings of John William Waterhouse often enough before this but I don’t think I’ve done him justice in the matter of the depth and individuality of his women: they’re all beautiful but not uniformly so; sweetness they all have but darkness as well and a powerful sexuality; any one of them could lead a man to somewhere he’d never get back from.

  ‘I’m feeling a bit more like my glim self today,’ said Amaryllis. I took her naked feet in my hands and something like electricity surged through me.

  ‘Do you remember what I said on the dark road?’ she said.

  ‘Please refresh my memory,’ I said, kissing her feet.

  ‘Everything north and south of my tattoo is yours,’ she murmured. (Have I said how enchanting her murmur was?) ‘Also east and west. Front and back included. Do you know why?’
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  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Because I love you.’

  She said that! She said it in the unglim! I felt as the Wright brothers must have felt at Kitty Hawk when their frail machine for the first time took the air and, however briefly, left the earth behind.

  36

  Musical Interlude

  The allegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh might answer here.

  37

  It Happens

  ‘It happens,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘You can say that,’ I said. ‘You can be gracious and I appreciate it but you can’t feel how I feel. You’re the woman I love, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known; I’ve lusted after you since I first saw you in a glim; I’ve made love to you in glims; now here you are in real life and I couldn’t rise to the occasion.’

  She took my face in her hands and kissed me. ‘In a way it’s a kind of compliment – making love to me was so important to you that you were overwhelmed by it. But what didn’t happen this time will happen another time, so stop fretting and just be comfortable with me now.’

  Not for the first time I felt that I was the boy and she was the teacher. She held my head to her breast and cuddled me and all my cares seemed to slide away. ‘Does that feel good?’ she said.

  ‘It feels lovely, Amaryllis.’

  ‘Just let me hold you like this for a while. Shall I tell you a story?’

  ‘Yes, tell me a story.’

  ‘This is one that always makes me laugh; it’s from your country. Have you read Uncle Remus?’

  ‘Yes, I have. Which story are you going to tell me?’

  ‘This is the one about Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit and the Tar-Baby. Do you like that one?’

  ‘It’s one of my favourites. I’m surprised that you know it.’

  ‘It was read to me by a friend who owns the book.’

  ‘An English friend?’

  ‘Yes. Shall I begin?’

  ‘Do,’ I said. With my face against her breast I felt the vibrations of her voice as she spoke.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘as you must remember, Brer Rabbit had been outwitting Brer Fox in all kinds of ways for a long time. But Brer Fox had quite a good idea for getting the better of Brer Rabbit.’ Here she slipped into the dialect as she continued. ‘Brer Fox, he got ’im some tar, en mix it wid some turkentime, en fix up a contrapshun wat he call a Tar-Baby…’ She did the whole story faultlessly, right up to Brer Rabbit’s triumphant ‘Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer Fox – bred en bawn in a brier-patch’ pronouncing the words exactly as I did the last time I read it aloud.

  ‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘Where did you learn that pronunciation?’

  ‘I did it the way it was read to me. Are you sleepy?’

  ‘I am a bit.’

  ‘Maybe we could have a little kip and you could glim us a bit farther down that dark road past the Pines Motel.’

  ‘To the souvenir shop, Amaryllis?’

  ‘Peter …’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The bad places in the past, if you don’t go to them, do you think they come to you?’

  ‘Probably. Has that happened to you?’

  ‘Not yet but I’m afraid it’s going to.’

  ‘A very bad place?’

  ‘Very bad. That’s why I want to glim back to that souvenir shop where I felt so good, where everything was cosy.’

  ‘To build up your resistance?’

  ‘It would make me stronger, I know that. The places in childhood where everything is nice, they’re like strong magic. Is the souvenir shop a dangerous place for you or is it just depressing?’

  ‘No more than that – it isn’t dangerous. If glimming there will make you stronger let’s do it.’

  She hugged me. ‘You’re a real comrade, Peter. I’ve never had one before.’

  I kissed her. ‘You do now, Amaryllis. Shall we?’

  ‘First,’ she said, ‘have you got a pen and a bit of paper?’

  I gave them to her.

  ‘My name is Amaryllis Fyfe,’ she said as she wrote. ‘This is my address in Beaufort Street. This is my phone number. This time we can sleep in the same bed when we do it.’

  ‘Do you want to start the glim or shall I?’

  ‘I feel better when you do it.’

  When we were in bed I had nothing in mind except glimming but somehow having her name and address and telephone number put new spirit into me. One thing led to another, love made the leap from glim to reality and it was some time before we fell asleep.

  38

  Finsey-Obay

  We were on that dark road again. The Pines Motel was somewhere behind us, the souvenir shop somewhere ahead. The air seemed to quiver, the breeze on my face was cool; I breathed deeply, filling my lungs with the freshness of the pines. There was a full moon, white and serene like a goddess, wreathed in pearly clouds.

  ‘The globe of night is all around us,’ said Amaryllis, ‘and we’re inside it with all the colours of darkness. Maybe the wood-daemon is keeping pace with us through the pines.’ Her voice had taken on a timbre of the night. The hooting of an owl, the chirping of crickets, were sounds that I could almost taste. The feel of the road under my feet was like the beating of drums.

  Amaryllis took my arm, put it round her waist, and pressed close to me. ‘Our first time in real life,’ she said, ‘was it as good as our glims?’

  ‘Reality with you is better than my wildest glims,’ I said, and kissed her.

  ‘I’m a very unsure person, Peter. What we have, is it different from what you’ve had with others?’

  ‘Yes, it’s different in all kinds of ways – you’re not like anyone I’ve ever known and I’m not the same as I was before I met you.’

  ‘How are you different?’

  I needed a few moments to find the right word. ‘I’m more edgewise than I used to be.’

  ‘I’ve always been edgewise and slanty but I’ve been other things too. I hope I’m a different Amaryllis now.’

  Hearing our words I felt nervous – they seemed the sort of things people say just before their plane crashes into a mountain. I grabbed her and we hugged and kissed some more. Then I held her at arm’s length to read her T-shirt. It said:

  We gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic. Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  ‘What does it say?’ she asked.

  I told her.

  ‘Have you got a drawer labelled Doubts and Misgivings?’ she said with her eyes on my face.

  ‘You’re not the only unsure person in this outfit, Amaryllis.’

  ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Losing you.’

  ‘How do you think you could lose me?’

  ‘I don’t know; I think I’m afraid of losing you because not losing you is the most important thing in the world to me.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’d be that much of a loss, Peter.’

  ‘You don’t know what you are to me, Amaryllis.’

  ‘What am I to you?’

  I could see a light in the distance, yellow and pink and orange, like a Japanese lantern. I hadn’t meant to glim it and I tried to will it away but it kept coming. ‘Amaryllis,’ I said, ‘I know that you don’t think much of yourself; I don’t think much of myself either. But if the two of us, imperfect as we are, can be true to each other …’

  She made a sound as if the breath had been knocked out of her. ‘Peter,’ she said, ‘you know that I love you, but if this is truth time I have to say that the one thing I’ve never been is true to anyone.’

  ‘Neither have I, but if this whole thing is different maybe that can change too.’

  Amaryllis clung to me and murmured, ‘Do you remember, Peter, at the Brass Hotel that time, how you said we were together from here on out to wherever?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Where do you think wherever will be?’
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  ‘Forget wherever, Amaryllis – we’re together from here on out, no end to it,’ I said as the Finsey-Obay bus loomed over us, ‘but I don’t think we’ll get to the souvenir shop tonight.’

  When she saw the bus Amaryllis’s face twisted with anger and disbelief, I’d never seen that look before. ‘This is your glim, Peter; you were meant to be looking after me. Now you’ve finished us off.’

  ‘I didn’t set out to make this happen,’ I said, ‘but surely it’s not the end of the world – the last time we took this bus we had quite a pleasant evening at the Brass Hotel.’

  ‘You don’t understand: this is something else altogether – this is the big one; this time we didn’t wait at the bus stop, it came looking for me and your glim wasn’t strong enough to stop it.’ She shook her head and sighed. ‘Never mind, it’s not your fault – sooner or later it would have come for me wherever I was.’

  ‘It’s me that it’s come for,’ I said. I tried to pull Amaryllis away from the bus but we were already inside and she was climbing the stairs. I looked back towards the doorway but there was no doorway. ‘It’s only paper,’ I said, and kicked it as hard as I could. The paper gave like rubber but didn’t tear. ‘This is my glim,’ I said, ‘and I can’t do anything with it.’

  Amaryllis paused and looked down at me. ‘It isn’t your glim any more,’ she said. ‘This is something that was in both of us, waiting to happen. When you put us on this road you turned it loose and now it’s out, all because I wanted to visit that wretched souvenir shop.’

  We climbed until the stairs came to an end. There were seats, all of them empty. There were no windows in the paper sides of the bus, no way to see where we were. We sat down and felt the glim close in around us. The candle flames shook in the bamboo chandelier and the shadows jumped with the rocking of the bus as it gathered speed.

  ‘Weren’t there windows last time?’

  ‘No. Anyhow it doesn’t matter; we both know where this bus is going, don’t we, Peter?’

  ‘Finsey-Obay.’