Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  Odd Tom’s wife had died, whether recently or long ago nobody was certain. He had drifted into the busy ants’ nest of Glifonis one day, observed the work being carried out, and edged himself in little by little. He was not on the regular payroll but the Greeks had taken a fancy to him and paid him to run errands and perform bits of drudgery. His battered old bicycle lived up in the car-park or down on the harbour. The cat Arkwright travelled perched in a fish-basket at the back. All Odd Tom’s tasks were performed with great care and diligence.

  “Can you oil my garden tools for me, Tom?” Elspeth said to him now. “They get rusty so quickly in this damp sea air. I’ll pay you a pound for the job, and I’ve made you a lardy-cake.”

  “Eye oo a’” replied Tom, and went up the steps to the tool-shed, which contained a complete record of the friends’ careers in sporting and outdoor equipment, from ice-hockey to archery, from golf to rock-climbing. Pat had been ladies’ golf-champion in Hampshire when younger, Elspeth had half a dozen silver cups for longbow and crossbow shooting; they were both early members of the Ladies’ Alpine Club.

  “Come along, Shuna,” said Elspeth. “Back to your computer.”

  But Shuna said, “I’ve finished all those problems. You’ll have to set me some more.” And she added to herself, in a tone of temperate judgment, “That lord is rather bad. Even Black Marby wouldn’t trust him.”

  Odd Tom, settling to his task on the ledge of land outside the tool-shed, looked up the track that Fortuneswell had taken, and spat.

  III

  THE FIRST FEW days of our honeymoon, Ty and I spent rechristening each other and talking about our mothers. Or anyway, about his mother.

  Venice in February? What folly! The climate is like an aspirin sucked slowly: harsh enough to make you shudder. The damp eats into you; you feel like an etching under construction. There is fog even inside the coffee cups; you want to rub your eyeballs every few minutes as if they were windscreens, the cats wear their fur in spikes, the pigeons huddle in crannies of masonry. Night falls immediately after lunch and the lights are so dim that you can’t see across the narrowest alley. Silence, too, everywhere; I had thought fog was supposed to carry sounds, but this is not so in Venice, where it acts as an insulator, like styrofoam. If you set light to that fog, it would give off black, dense smoke.

  All this suited Ty and me excellently well; we were, perhaps, somewhat ashamed of our precipitate wedding. We spent our days in bed, ignoring the cultural aspects of the city we had come to, and crept out only in late evening to dine in some tiny gourmet’s retreat among a few baggy-eyed millionaires and their popsies; they made us feel wonderfully respectable, being married, which neither of us had been before.

  At night we lay in one another’s arms in the almost palpable dark, listening to the faint clang of distant bells, or the wail of a boat feeling its way in from the Adriatic. Sometimes you could hear the wan water of Venice doing whatever it does. Lapping with low sounds by the shore. Sometimes nothing but the sound of torrential rain.

  The faint candle-power lights, the murky dim air, the swirling layers of sea-fog — all these things helped us maintain our mystery for each other. For we were still strangers. Our courtship had been conducted so swiftly, and most of it in public, that we had not the least notion of one another’s real essence. We had seen nothing of each other’s private lives. I had been ashamed to invite Ty back to my tiny room with the scrambling Hoya, the shell boxes marked “A Present from Ramsgate” and thin ancient rugs, and posters on the walls, and miscellaneous enamelware and books stacked on planks with bricks in between; while Ty, obviously, had so many domiciles that none could be said to represent his inner being. A rather formidable factotum called Parkson looked after all these dwellings, went on ahead and saw to necessities such as clean sheets and supplies of champagne, fresh coffee, and smoked salmon (Parkson was even here in Venice but keeping a low profile); a lifestyle such as mine, in which sheets were changed only every few weeks, when one had time to get to the laundrette, was evidently outside Ty’s experience.

  We groped around Venice like a couple of ghosts with invisible faces, touching only in bed, and then with our eyes shut.

  Looking back, the astonishing thing seems to be that we did not collide sooner; dozens, perhaps hundreds of times we must have brushed past within a hair’s breadth of each other like bats in a cave. If we had spent the time anywhere else but in Venice — in Paris, for example, with its unsparing grey light and sharp outlines, or Manhattan, windy and angular — the showdown must have come far sooner.

  Anyhow. On the first morning, Ty said, “I can’t call you Cat. That’s not a name — it’s a theatrical label. You must have a real name — what is it?”

  “You saw it. On our wedding certificate. It’s Catherine.”

  “I never read forms unless Ponsonby tells me to,” he said impatiently.

  Ponsonby was another factotum: a lawyer who followed around with a despatch case full of agreements.

  For a moment this struck me as odd — Ty’s whole financial empire must be entirely strapped together by forms — but then I realized that, like Sherlock Holmes banishing from his mind bits of unnecessary information about the solar system, my new husband was obliged to concentrate on essentials, and limit his form-perusal to absolutely basic ones, terms finally arrived at after negotiations between colossal interests. Judged on such a scale, our marriage certificate would scarcely rate higher than a bus ticket.

  “I shall call you Cathy,” he presently announced.

  Cathy? I didn’t care for that. Masha’s sisters, my aunts, had called me Cathy. I wanted no reminder of that lost incarnation. And other associations — Heathcliff, Thrushcross Grange — were on the gloomy side. But still, the way Ty said it — slowly, lingeringly, possessively — had power to run a prickle down my back.

  “For that matter —” I was not fighting the prickle, merely prolonging the exquisite anticipatory pause — “for that matter, I’m not mad about Ty, which sounds like one of those pithy, manly, jocular epithets that men clap on each other in pubs and clubs — known to his intimates as Cal, Mo, Tig — I think I shall call you Jas.”

  It was like poking your finger into the mountainside and starting off an avalanche. At first he said nothing. His face went totally blank. But in the silence that lay between us — we were on the Accademia Bridge just then, as it happened, looking down at a vaporetto swishing in through the gloom towards the landing-place — in that silence, audible even over the chug of the boat, I could hear whole huge fragments of his personality detaching themselves, moving about as in continental drift; gulfs opened in solid land, opposing sides of straits clashed together.

  “What is it?” I asked quickly, with an instinctive sense that if I didn’t leap across at once to that receding shore I’d never be able to cross the widening gap at all. “Don’t you want to be called Jas?”

  “Let’s not go into it here,” he said, looking round, as if the entire staff of Pyramid Television and all the shareholders of Fortuneswell Holdings and Obelisk Press were gathered about us on the high and empty bridge. “Come along, it’s cold, it’s wet, let’s go back to the hotel.”

  Our hotel, not large, was so luxurious that it seemed almost a sin to step outside it. Byron probably stayed there, and the Sitwells, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Among the current guests we seemed the only pair who were not minor royalty, but we saw little of the other inmates, only occasionally encountering them by the creaking gold-and-velvet-lined ascensore. We all, naturally, breakfasted in our suites where champagne was served with the orange juice as a matter of course, and little flasks of grappa nightly appeared on the bedside table, left by the chambermaid when she frilled out one’s nightdress into a decorative garland. (Thank heaven Joel, good friend Joel, had, for a wedding present, sent me from Paris, where he was taking pictures of Mme Chirac, six outrageously exquisite Campanillana nightdresses, Chi
nese silk and Valenciennes, so that, if the rest of my wardrobe was hopelessly inadequate, at least in the nightwear department I was properly equipped and able, if ever I had encountered her, to look the chambermaid in the eye. In fact I never wore them.)

  Now, Ty practically hurled me on to the bed, which, of course, was ducal in size. Our lovemaking had a decided element of hostility about it. We flew at one another like wild beasts. But liberating, oh yes. A l’outrance, no quarter. It does, as they say, take you out of yourself. I used to think of those deathbed reports, on record from people who have been fetched back at the last gasp, at the moment of dissolution, how they say they have found themselves detached, hovering six feet above the bed around which doctors, nurses, and relatives frantically work to avert the dying process; well, in just that way, many and many a time, did I seem to be hovering, disjoined and abstracted, several feet above the enseamed couch where Ty and I fought and grappled. I wonder if he felt that too? So many areas of his nature were sealed up in watertight compartments that it seemed not improbable. But that was one question I never asked him. Among the many.

  After midnight when we were lying, spent and tranquil, listening to the rain falling like a whole skyful of gravel into the canal outside, I returned, with some rashness, to my original point: “Why mustn’t I call you Jas?”

  So then he told me the story of his childhood. Or some of it.

  “My parents were horrible people. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t despise them.”

  “Why? Who were they? What did they do?”

  His father, it seemed, had been that Brighton police chief responsible for the tracking down and ultimate arrest of the woman who came to be known by the tabloid press in the late forties as Acid Annie, because of the things she did to her six husbands. So far no harm, though one can see that having a policeman for a father must impose all kinds of extra strain. Like having a clergyman. But then Tybold senior had retired, and sold his memoirs to those same tabloid newspapers for an enormous sum. There was a certain amount of outcry at this from the more serious press, and from people who were personally involved in his reminiscences, but it seemed that, legally, he could not be stopped. James, by now at prep school, began to notice the adverse reactions of his teachers and schoolmates; later on, at a minor public school, it was a great deal worse.

  “Tybold is not a common name, do you see; they always made the connection. I was treated like a plague dog. That was when I decided to get myself a title, so as to cover up the name with another.”

  “It didn’t occur to you just to change your name?”

  “That would have been cowardly.”

  Well, one had to respect him.

  “Where was your father, meanwhile?”

  “Oh, he had long since gone off with Mother to live in a tax dodgers’ haven: Jersey at first, then they moved to Malta.”

  “You never told him how you minded what he had done?”

  “Tell my father? You must be joking. Anyway, it was done, he had declared himself: a heartless profiteer who made a pile out of other people’s guilt and misery; who contradicted all that his career as a cop had seemed to represent. Police are supposed to be our guardians, aren’t they? He had demonstrated his cynical disbelief in all that.”

  “What was he like? Your father?”

  I knew that Ty’s parents had died some time back, killed in a motor accident, driving on Italian mountains.

  “Like?” Ty looked bleak. “Soap-faced. Sanctimonious. He was a horrible man. I loathed him. And my mother. Unlike our neighbours in Jersey, who at least made no pretence about the fact that they were there to get the most out of their money and have a good time, Dad and Mother seemed permanently angry and guilty. Mean as hell, too. Stingy. My father had a queer habit of always looking on both sides of a pound note before handing it away, as if it might have cheated him by being worth ten pounds on the under side. He’d spend ten minutes selecting the cheapest item on a menu, and then ten more, inching his way through the bill, to make sure not a penny had been added. And they were disgustingly righteous. Evangelical. On at me, all the time, about right and wrong, good and evil. Yet Dad despised the government — whichever party was in power, Labour or Tory, it made not the least difference to him — he detested any form of authority, automatically assumed it to be corrupt. He despised and mistrusted all laws, all justice, read a crooked motive into any piece of behaviour. My mother was exactly the same, they were perfectly matched. And they both disbelieved, flatly, as a matter of course, in anything they were told or read.”

  “How dismal.” And how odd, I thought, that Ty had turned out so different from his progenitors. Simple, I was, at that period. But a honeymoon is not an ideal time for balanced judgment.

  “You think I’m making this up,” he said angrily, “that I’m exaggerating, that such a pair couldn’t exist. You ought to have met them! You wouldn’t have a single thought in common with either of them. You’d have nothing — simply nothing — to say to each other. For a start, they totally disapproved of acting, films, plays, they never read fiction. Dad didn’t read books at all, ever — only the newspapers. He thought books were frivolous luxuries, and misleading at that. Mother read biographies of well-known people. ‘I only like facts,’ she used to say. ‘Don’t fancy made-up stuff.’ They made me learn the bible — from age four on — I had to learn and recite it, ten verses a day. Do you know how many verses there are in the Book of Genesis? One thousand three hundred and thirty-two. At one time I could say them all. By age twelve I could recite the whole of the Old Testament, including Joel, Habakkuk and Zechariah.”

  “Must have been good for your prose style. And your memorizing capacity. Terribly useful, too, when you can’t get to sleep.”

  “Oh, don’t always look on the bright side,” he said furiously. “Father used to beat me with a slipper when I forgot, or made a mistake.”

  “How did you survive?” I asked, riven by pity.

  “Then, when I got to boarding school —” the avalanche was really pouring down the hillside now — “when I got to school (it wasn’t a good school) I had far less pocket money than the others in my form, though Father was probably richer than any of the other parents. He’d invested his newspaper payments shrewdly in an electronics firm, and then he bought a chain of shops, Asteroid Radio, you’ve probably seen them, there’s one in every High Street now. I didn’t know he was rich, of course. They told me there was no cash to throw around, Father had retired and was living on his pension, and I must on no account be extravagant at school. Christ, I didn’t dare even take a bun or glass of milk at break-time . . . And if I asked for extra lessons, music, art, tennis-coaching, it was always ‘No, how can your father possibly afford that?’ I longed for drawing lessons, they did have quite a good art master at Morecambe, but it was extra, Father wouldn’t think of it.”

  I’d noticed Ty glancing askance at small drawings I had made, in a pocket sketch-pad, of people and buildings in Venice; now I understood why that irked him and resolved to do no more. Or at least, not in his presence.

  “Lies, of course, my parents regarded as a direct message from the devil. If I was caught in a lie, I was savagely punished.”

  “How?”

  “No pocket money for a month. Mouth washed out with soap. Made to mow the grass in front of the house with a placard that said ‘LIAR’ in big letters on my back.”

  “Suppose it happened to be winter?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “No grass to cut.”

  “Then I just had to walk up and down,” he said impatiently.

  “I could see why they had such an abhorrence of lying,” he went on after a few minutes’ frowning inspection of the past, “because they were both so completely unimaginative that lies, invention, would have been an impossibility for them. Mother didn’t even really like the parables in the New Testament. It was
her opinion that Christ would have done better to stick to plain facts — though of course she didn’t put it in so many words. The ability to make things up terrified her. Naturally I had no story books. Even going to the public library was suspect.”

  “Did you have any friends?” I said, aghast at this story.

  Only then — astonishingly, for the first time — did it occur to me to wonder whether Ty had any friends now, now that he was grown up — was he part of any group, did he have confidantes, boon companions? Our relationship had been so sudden, and so exclusive, we had dropped so completely from our own worlds into a kind of no man’s land, that I had formed no picture of the kind of people who might be his associates.

  All that, I supposed, must be faced on our return to real life. Not just yet.

  “I did have one friend — a boy called Lyndhurst. He used to help me with my English compositions, which I found impossibly hard. Naturally I’d not the least notion of how to set about them. In return I helped him with his maths.”

  “What was he like, Lyndhurst?”

  “A marvellous liar. That was what I admired about him. At the flick of an eyelash he could bring out the most amazing, plausible stories — plausible just because they were so wild, no one would believe they had been invented on the spur of the moment. ‘What were you doing out of bounds, Lyndhurst?’ ‘Well, sir, we saw this truck drive past and it went over a bump and a tombstone bounced out and fell in the road; the driver didn’t realize, he went on, and there was this tombstone with an inscription To darling Mum and Dad, we thought someone would be waiting for It —’ I was never allowed — of course — to have friends visit, but Lyndhurst’s parents spent a holiday in Jersey one summer, they met Dad at the golf club and brought their son to our house, and at first Mother believed all the things he told her, she listened with her eyes starting out —”