In the evenings she drank wine, too much, but then that did not ever help and so she did not drink wine any more.
Spring began to come through the overgrown gardens, and small birds appeared, making nests, singing, as if the world existed. There were sunsets and sunrises, too. Laughable.
When the week was over, as she dressed one morning, she saw she had grown thin, had lost perhaps eighteen pounds. And when she combed her hair, some fell in a rain.
She was driven across the city to the tower of glass, and went in, and rose up, and came out into the golden lobby, but it was not gold any more, the floor opaque, the mirrors misted, shadow in the air.
Isobel entered the mansion of her husband, Vessavion. She walked slowly through long rooms, and L-shaped rooms, and octagonal rooms. The fires were out, there was no light. Cobwebs hung on things. Dust spread over all. The invisible servants had vanished.
She found him in the blue bedroom that was a cave, on the blue bed that they had seeped in flame.
He was naked, lying on his back upon his own hair. His flesh and his hair, like hers now, did not have any luminescence. His light had gone out. She went close and gazed into his face.
Vessavion was quite dead. Quite blank. Empty. Useless. Over.
There was nothing about him to show what he had been. He was thin and worn, and there was already a line of gray in his hair. His face had fallen in. It was old. And it was very ugly, unnaturally so, hideous in fact. Like the face of some nightmare, some beast.
She wished that she could have said something, anything, to alleviate the awareness she had of the attenuated awfulness of pain, like an unfinished sentence caught up on nails in the atmosphere.
But it was no use at all. Nothing more could be said or done. She had loved him, she had betrayed him, she had killed him as no other had the power to do. And here he lay to rot on the bed of love. And he had the face of a beast.
The Beast and Beauty
WE SAW THEM married. We were all surprised, to various degrees; some of us were even shocked. She was so—we could hardly gloss over it among ourselves—so ugly, so graceless. And he was beautiful, such a handsome and couth young man, with his long, rich hair and slim, straight build. And this other—this object, standing there beside him.
To do her credit, if we can call it that, she seemed quite as amazed as we. But this only made her, we thought, less coordinated, more gauche and awkward. A parody. She was squat and short-legged, rather fat, and her wiry, frizzy hair hidden under a sort of exotic headdress, part hat perhaps, part bird’s nest. She had small, pale, dull eyes, all of us noticed this, so unlike his own, that were dark, large, and luminous.
We knew he had not married her for her money. She had none, and he was well-off. Had she then some terrible and inexorable hold over him? Some of us, I do believe, were constructing plots by which we could find out how she had suborned and captured him. But—and here the strangest thing of all—he seemed happy. And when they kissed—well, for a fact, he kissed her tenderly, sweetly. Even with—and we were worse horrified of course by this—with an element of actual physical desire.
We will never forget it, that day.
Not one of us.
• • •
They had a small house on the coast, which had belonged to him for two or three years. They went to the house at once. He had said, being by the sea, and the countryside there so appealing, they had no need of a honeymoon holiday.
There they lived then, the two of them. The town, quite a well-built and sophisticated place, was only a twenty minute drive from the house—or an hour’s walk. Sometimes they did walk, along the cliffs, with the brilliant shifting shelves of water below, and off across the sunlit meadow-paths, between the tall hedges, the fields, the banks of wild flowers and the woods. A cycle of perfect summers. Had either of them ever before been so wonderfully happy? They told each other, he most often in fact, that they never had.
And between the walks and luxurious meals, and everyday or eccentric duties of their house and gardens, between—others had to suppose—their times of romance and sexual love-making—they continued with their usual work, he creating his rather excellent yet very crowd-pleasing art, and she writing her rather—it was generally agreed—ordinary little novels. His successes had begun early and had continued but hers, though at first she had been quite popular and sold well, had fallen off. In the end she hardly published at all, but still went on writing. She was, it seemed, nothing if not stubborn. Had that been the secret of her success with him?
By the second year they did not often see people, beyond the occasional, normally unplanned meetings in the town, or the city inland. They seemed wrapped up in each other. No one else had or could fathom why. That was, the rest of the world could see easily how she might be wrapped up in him. While with him, naturally, it stayed a mystery.
He had never painted her, for sure. But then, he very seldom, or now ever, painted people. His subjects were landscapes, skies, seas.
Another year passed.
Another year.
Nobody genuinely had grown at all used to their extraordinary liaison. Now and then it was still commented upon in amused disbelief, or even in a type of moral outrage. But less and less. An unanswered mystery can be irksome when it unalterably persists.
• • •
He had had, and he was the first to admit it, a limpidly flowing and pleasant existence. Born into an emotionally and financially solvent family, blessed with great good looks, and strong yet accessible talent, he had prospered. His earliest memories, even, were nice ones. Happy: he grew up happily; popular, protected, yet independent, self-assured and enjoying his creative side, while reveling in friendships, not to mention love-affairs. Although, he would sometimes ruefully admit, the end of love-affairs, and exotic brief relationships, after say six months, a year, were often less delightful. He hated to hurt these women. But he had always had such luck with them. He need do very little more than be his handsome, charming, easy-going and gracious self, and girls cascaded from the boughs of earthly heaven into his life and bed. Saying good-bye was mournful, of course. It could sting. But quite frequently not only he, but a former lover, were soon established elsewhere, completely undamaged. He was never harsh, never cruel. He tried always to be kind. Kindness was—inherent in him, really. To distress another might distress him therefore. He liked the world sunny, even in rain. Intelligent, he knew he had a splendid time of it. And he honestly regretted the others, that he saw, heard of and read of, all about him, who did not. Things were unfair. Had he been able, he would have waved a magic wand, and put everything right. For this reason too, of course, he did not believe in a God. But then, it seemed he hardly needed one.
When he met her, the woman who would become his wife, he felt, immediately, compassion. She had just begun to work—actually her writing had for a while ceased to be lucrative enough to support her—in a small art shop in the back streets. He went in there occasionally for a particular primer not often available elsewhere. She served him politely and fairly efficiently, though she was slightly clumsy in her movements. Her body seemed uncoordinated and not properly to fit her psyche. He had noticed things like this before with plenty of people.
It must be said that the fact she was not herself attractive was not why he felt compassionate. Being himself so frankly beautiful, he did not, as some beautiful persons do not, bother very much with the looks either of others or himself beyond the obvious matters of grooming, hygiene, and sanity. But he could see she was miserable. And though this, he had found, was often the case with people generally, he discovered her dejection rather pointedly disturbed him.
Covertly, he watched her as she dealt with his purchase and its payment.
Then, something happened.
A flock of quite ordinary birds lifted from the street outside and flew upward through the last of the afternoon sunlight. As a painter, he li
ked the image, and watched it. Then, turning back to her, saw that she had, too. And—for a split second, already ephemerally fading—he saw her face had flooded with its own soft light. A look of—joy. Pure joy. At seeing something beautiful, however everyday, or transitory, or unmeaningful. As if, he thought at the time, she had looked through a window into some other world, more lucent, more lovely, and immediately recognized.
It was not until he was almost at his apartment that it came to him that, for just one single second, she had looked at him, also, in the same way. And in that second, as in the longer moments with the birds, the misery had of course quite vanished from her face.
Perhaps this was irresistible. He was, as has been noted, normally inclined to kindness. To be kind filled him with pleasure. He had now and then given away his toys as a child.
He did not need to go back to the shop, but found himself passing about a month later.
Going in, there she was. She seemed if anything even more worn down and melancholy. But when he greeted her and she glanced up at him—why, there it was again. The wonderful sunrise.
That then, her charm for him. Her enchantment. Better than any mirror, to which inanimate species he never paid much attention beyond obvious necessity. Unlike a human mirror, too, which only returns the object of desire as a sort of faulty replica.
It was not he thought: I can make her beautiful. It was more somehow I can make her happy. Besides, it was not, and never could be with him, a conscious thought. He was unincluded in that tribe.
Adamantly, at first she would not lunch or dine with him. When he asked, she seemed almost frightened. Yet, the glow of light in her face persisted, fluttering on and off as the wings of the flying, sun-fringed birds had appeared to. After about a week of his constantly entering the shop, buying something, trying to persuade her, she agreed to drink a cup of coffee with him.
The café was discreet and serene, the coffee it served very good. They were there for half an hour.
It became a habit between them once, twice a week. After four weeks they ate sandwiches and drank, each, a glass of wine. They knew each other’s names. They had started to discuss books, and plays. He took her to a play. He liked her reactions to such significant events.
She looked younger. Her cheeks had color and she had had her hair cut more becomingly. Her eyes on him were always wide. Radiance existed in them. Her voice, though very low, was of an even timbre, not inarticulate or unmusical when she became animated.
They took a little holiday, four or five days in a quiet but opulent hotel. She had told him, flat and downcast as she did so, that her room must be separate. She was a restless sleeper, she snored, so she told him. He replied, untruthfully, that he too was, and did. On the third night he joined her for a drink in her room. Presently she insisted that all light be extinguished. I hate to be looked at, she whispered. My body, I mean.
He wondered what injury of birth or life had maimed her—some swollen or shrunken part, hidden when clothed—a rampant birthmark—a disease of the skin—but in the darkness she was simply a woman of short stature, clad in flesh that was, depending on a companion’s view, heavy, or voluptuous. There were no deformities or lesions of scars of which he was made aware, nothing strange that, lacking full sight, the other senses stumbled on. Her skin was smooth and soft, her mouth tender, no part of her in any way offensive.
He knew as well, from her responses, what he would have seen in her face. Light transmuted to ecstasy.
He had painted the picture of a violin, once. She was like his violin. And her writing, too, for him, was like her music; he had given it back to her.
She began to live with him for large amounts of each month. Unreluctantly she left her job, no longer needing it, since by then he was funding all her expenses, both with and apart from him. She did not seem even properly to notice this, and he preferred that reaction in her, for gratitude would have grated on him. All he wanted in exchange he saw in her eyes and face, heard and held, and glimpsed finally, when he made love to her: by then, she would permit a vague lamplight. He had, in all his benign existence until this point, never so relished, so basked in, so needed anyone other than himself.
To marriage also she made, now, no objections. Perhaps, during the wedding ceremony and the lavish feast that followed, she did not fully notice anyone but her lover. And he, for his part, was lost in her. Or found.
• • •
She, until she met, and then lived with her husband, had never been with anyone. Which is to say, she had been thrown in among a huge number of others, but with none who were ever concerned about or interested in her, let alone loving toward her.
Her parents had been uncomely and loutish, and both inclined to violence. Her couple of older siblings took after them. At an immature age she was rescued, or so it was termed, and cast instead into a sort of state orphanage, where all the cruelties and bullying continued in more elaborate form, not to mention the physical hideousness of natures, ambitions, and surroundings, and the dearth of any food either for the heart or spirit; there was little enough for the stomach.
Somehow or other she had learned to read. Most probably this, and other more rudimentary knowledge, was beaten into her. But as she grew up, despite the menial factory work into which, at fifteen, she was processed, and the yet ever-expanding callousness of everyone about her, somehow she learned, of her own instinctive volition, to grasp at literature and to hold on. A fluke of circumstance put her, at the age of sixteen, into the position of entering a short story competition. She won it unrivaled, and was taken then under the wing of a quite prestigious publishing house.
Initially thrilled at her potential money-making ability, and her youth, they quickly lost momentum having once seen and met her. Gauche and awkward, clumsy and utterly unpretty, she had in herself no marketing power, as they were soon agreed. Only her writing had any worth which, in an age of instant visibility and supposed communication, would never be enough.
Some listless attempts were made physically to polish her up. But the smart garments and trendy hair-dos, the cosmetic specialists and speech-trainers soon gave up on her in impatient revulsion.
It was true, she had always seen about her, particularly on a screen, but even among her hair-dying and lip-glossing fellow citizens, persons who, lacking certain essential fleshly attributes, effected improvements. Some indeed underwent surgery, tooth-jobs, chin-jobs, face-jobs, body-jobs, gym therapy, hair transplants, wigs, waxes, revitalizations, skin-grafts. Though confused by all that, in her own muddled and entirely ineffectual way she had tried, or felt forced to try, to emulate the rest—who, she could see, did end up usually rather better for all the grueling, costly, painful work put in on them.
But it was soon clear to her, as to her publishers it had already been, and quite swiftly, that she was beyond assistance. A lost cause. A lump best left in a cupboard of unforced privacy.
Lacking any solid publicity, and all promotion therefore, soon enough her talent too slid from the World Stage. At twenty she was a has-been. She retreated to a narrow one-room flat and various ill-paid employment and gradually, in exhaustion, smothered under that universal bucket, her light faltered down into coma.
It was he who woke her.
She had somehow, even bereft of so much, never been robbed completely of her fundamental passion for true beauty. Even for such as ill-made and crushed as she, stars and waves, leaves and lamps, sunrise, moonset, and the faces of non-human animals—all such abrupt and extraordinary miracles would drench her, for a few seconds, in the glow of paradise. Although a paradise from which she herself was forever banned.
She had seen, too, some naturally elegant and attractive people before, if normally from very far off. Confronted by him, so close, so apparent, she had been stunned.
Only her naivety later allowed her to give in to his persuasion. It was all a dream. She must start up from i
t soon enough, to find herself lying on a hot raw ground of reality and fact. Otherwise she could never have trusted the circumstance, let alone him.
Perhaps, in reality, she did not trust him. You are alone in darkness—a God or an angel appears. What map-reference is there, in such a case, to guide one? You can only give in.
But time ran by and over her, a clear river, all at once delicious and gentle. Amazement followed on amazement. The dream did not dissolve. It must, after all be real.
Of course, she had known one previous astonishment with her success in the competition. Maybe, even subconsciously, it had been this which soothed and lured her to accept a second gift. Choosing, as few would not, to forget how the first glory had been drained to dust.
In legends, even in contemporary stories such as she herself might have written, the gifts of gods are often suspect. Even if no evil plan of harm has been hatched against the recipient, indigenous to the glamor and wonder of the gift is its lethal flaw. The molten gold sears off the hand, the exquisite ring imparts a poisonous disease, the peerless wings are over-strong and hurl their wearer up against the sun. The kiss breaks the mirror.
• • •
We heard of it in disbelief. Where the marriage had shocked some of us in itself, the outcome, those five years later, sent us staggering.
Obviously, there was a lot of publicity, not least since he was so well-known and fashionable a painter. To the general public, of course, the blow was minimized by emotional distance. For us, however, particularly those of us who had never lost contact with him—even where keeping, when possible, out of her proximity—a kind of cloud of mourning settled. There was some anger as well. How not?
Inevitably, all the while, some of us had entirely foretold a reversal. That he must, at some junction, emerge from his unreasonable trance and realize his peculiar mistake. Or, more likely yet, that he must see another, no doubt a woman, somebody gorgeous and couth, and fall in love more logically with her.