Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  “Going out would take your mind off it,” I suggested hopefully.

  “What do you want to go out for?”

  “Not for anything. We could ride around in a gondola.”

  “It’s raining.”

  It had been raining for the last five days; hitherto that had not deterred us. We had gone in and out like birds, regardless of the weather. In many ways we had hardly been conscious of our whereabouts. Now, all at once, I felt imprisoned by the luxurious, overheated, untidy room, and realized for the first time that I had no reading-matter. I longed to find a bookshop and buy a paperback, no matter what. But manners restrained me. I did not wish to suggest dissatisfaction with Ty’s company.

  “Come back to bed,” he said yawning. “Last night was too fidgety. Champagne after three is a mistake. Gives you dreams . . . God, that was a ghastly dream about the cave. I thought he was going to pull me right down into it.”

  “Meanwhile you nearly garrotted me,” I said, climbing in beside him. “Look at the bruises on my neck.”

  “You’ll have to wear one of those high lace collars,” he said, turning to the financial page of the Herald Tribune. “Anyway we shan’t be going out tonight.”

  Then he made some phone calls, to Ponsonby and Mirthes, and the architect, Rupert Vassiliaides, who was masterminding the Greek village in Dorset.

  “Yes; and tell them that I want the harbour completely dredged out. They can use what they scoop out from the harbour to put on the beach; why not? And proper sand on top of that. Very well, then. And a mole built round. No, I know that can’t all be done this winter, but there must be a mole. You must work out costs. It has to be a viable harbour, Planning permission? Oh, very well then. Tell him to get on with it. There is? That’s civil of them. Say thanks, will you? Oh well, I’m not sure about that. We’ll see. Yes; thanks; quite. Yes I will. Right. Goodbye.”

  A long way from poor downtrodden little Jim who had to clean the shoes and cut the grass, I thought, as he replaced the receiver.

  “Vass asks to have his respects sent to you.”

  I had met Vassiliaides at the Knoyle party: a tall, lanky lantern-faced man who looked more English than Greek; a gifted and valuable architect, Joel had told me. Joel! Momentarily I felt homesick for his undemanding, easy company.

  “Rupert says,” Ty went on, “that the weather in Dorset is perfect, mild and sunny. Says we ought to go and finish our honeymoon there.”

  “At Knoyle?” I tried to keep the eagerness from my voice. Venice had been Ty’s plan, and up to now it had been wonderful, yes it had. But the thought of the plunging swooping green Dorset countryside — and the beach down below, and Yetford only thirty miles away — and there was a splendid nineteenth-century library at the Manor, I had browsed through its titles a couple of times while waiting for the lighting experts to get their wattage right — and we could take walks —

  Ty quelled those hopes by saying, “Not at Knoyle, no. That’s let to a seminar on ecology and enimonics.”

  “Enimonics?”

  “Not a clue. Ponsonby arranged it. Anyway we can’t stay at Knoyle, but Rupert said one of the finished houses at Glifonis had been permanently set aside for Lord and Lady Fortuneswell on their visits of inspection.”

  “How charming of them.”

  I had not become used to being Lady Fortuneswell yet, and probably never would. Of course, in Venice one was continually addressed as Miladi, or la Contessa, or Signora, and one took little notice, knowing it meant nothing; but to be called my lady by English voices — that would be strange indeed? Would Masha approve? Or be scandalized? Titles meant nothing to her. She had once given a frightful scolding — in Edred’s surgical days — to a visiting European royalty who offered a bonbon to a crying little girl in a children’s ward.

  “How could you do such an irresponsible thing?” she shouted at him, pouncing to whisk the sweet out of harm’s way and nearly precipitating an international incident. Papa had thought it all a great nuisance. No, my being Lady Fortuneswell would cut no ice with her.

  “Do you think it would be fun to go and stay in this Greek house?” I suggested, keeping my voice so uninflected that it seemed to come out of my ears.

  “Are you mad? In midwinter?”

  He returned to his financial reading, and I took a short nap.

  When I woke, it was because he was prodding me to open the door and admit lunch while he beat another tactical retreat to the bathroom. Lunch over — a rather drunken lunch, to celebrate the rain, and Ty’s black eye, and a certain shift in our relations that we both, I think, sensed the possibility of, but were not able to express, either to ourselves or to each other, or take any measures to avert — after lunch we returned to lovemaking; like sports addicts we were bent on refining our technique to the uttermost edge . . . And if we were beginning to regard each other a thought warily, our bodies at least were friends. They found nothing amiss with our relationship and hung together like two old drunken boon companions.

  “I’m going to call you James,” I announced into one of those peaceful blank pauses that occur from time to time in bed, negative time; like negative space between the more important shapes in pictures, space which is itself equally important and must be taken into account; negative time probably adds months if not years on to one’s life expectancy. “James is a good name, I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before. Sonorous, well connected with saints, and with literature; and it has a sober domestic sound too. ‘I must ask James,’ I can hear myself saying, about all kinds of minor issues.”

  “God, what a relief to get that settled,” he mumbled with his face in my neck.

  We began biting each other like professional sharks.

  “You can buy videotapes of this sort of thing,” I suggested, “It might save a lot of trouble.”

  “Oh, hush . . .”

  “Do you like what I’m doing?”

  “Hush . . .’’ And he added, “You are the fulfilment of all my dreams.”

  This should have charmed me but it didn’t. It sounded too like a line from a bad novel. He went on: “Go to sleep, now, while I do this . . .”

  I didn’t want to go to sleep. But in the end, both of us did.

  Next day Ty’s eye had gone from black to green, a livid, iridescent green, shading out of olive into dead spinach. Still he refused to go out. So the hotel produced chess and mahjongg and, at my request, Paradise Lost and Shakespeare’s sonnets. Ty never seemed to have done much reading for pleasure; if he was going to begin now, I reckoned he might as well begin at the top. So we lay in bed arguing about Milton’s God and his behaviour to Adam. I had always considered this perfectly outrageous, and expected that Ty, in the light of his attitude to his own father, would do so too, but to my surprise he took the opposing, authoritarian line.

  “Adam had to accept the conditions that were laid down for him. Raphael had told him quite plainly what they were. You can’t survive, or make any success of your environment, unless you accept your limitations.”

  “But why did God have to be so arbitrary and tyrannical? Why have a Tree of Knowledge in the first place? Or, if it was there, why forbid Adam to eat the fruit?”

  “Because, once he had, Adam would be as great as his creator.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “You need to have a hierarchy,” pronounced Ty, “or society falls apart.”

  “But anyway, he did eat it, and he didn’t become as great as his creator — how do you account for that?”

  “Don’t ask me! God somehow managed to shuffle things, I suppose.”

  “Characteristically! To suit himself! I wonder what would have happened,” I pondered, “if, in Book Nine, Adam hadn’t eaten the fruit; he only seems to have eaten it out of British decency, because his wife had done for herself and he felt obliged to back her up — not because he w
anted to know about good and evil; suppose Eve had been the only one to eat it? She might have been better off on her own.”

  “And what would Adam have done then?”

  “Gone back to his first wife.”

  “It doesn’t say anything about her in this book.”

  “No, but I read about her somewhere else. Her name was Lilith; and after he left her she turned into a vampire and tried to put a curse on his subsequent relationships. As you’d expect of a first wife. And, I suppose, succeeded.”

  “I’ve had enough literature,” said Ty suddenly, “Pour me another glass of grappa. And come here . . .”

  “Tell me some more about Jas and Jim,” I suggested, procrastinating. “Did Jas never, never get out? Not even for half an hour?”

  “What makes you ask that?” His tone was sharp. He looked at me as if he had discovered me with a bloodstained skeleton key in my hand.

  “I don’t know. Thinking about Adam and Satan, I suppose. Eve and Lilith. Our other aspects. Surely you can’t always have been so dismally irreproachable?”

  “Well, there was once . . .” He refilled his own glass and topped up mine, then rolled over and lay brooding, chin on fists. “There’s a zoo in Jersey, run by that naturalist fellow, and I got a job there in my teens, cleaning out cages, things like that. My parents, for once, approved. Good healthy money-earning activity . . . I was paid five pounds a week and I had to give the money straight to my father.”

  “Good god, James! In your teens?”

  “I know, I know, you think I must have been retarded or mad, not to rebel. But when you are in a prison situation, your whole personality becomes so shrunk and reduced that rebellion doesn’t occur to you as a possibility.”

  “Yes. I suppose that must be true. Look at the examples in history. So what happened?”

  “One Saturday I’d just been paid and I was holding my five-pound note, and stopped for a moment outside the chimpanzee cage — he was a big untidy beast called Jerry, quite a friend of mine, I used to take him apples from our tree. And he reached out calmly through the bars, and removed my five-pound note and swallowed it, before I could stop him. When I told the story to my parents — I thought it was quite funny myself — they simply didn’t believe me, thought this was like one of Lyndhurst’s inventions, my sneaky way of hanging on to the cash and blaming a poor dumb animal that couldn’t speak up for itself. So I got a thrashing, besides hell in various other ways.”

  “But why in the world didn’t you tell someone at the zoo — your boss — get him to speak up for you — there must have been other people who saw what had happened?” I was choked with indignation on his behalf.

  “Well — I didn’t. It was a Saturday. I was given assorted penalties. I forget what. Dad and Mother went off, he to play golf and she to sit with her knitting in the sun-room of the golf club. One of my jobs at home was to kill weeds with a flame-thrower, a blowtorch that Father kept for burning down groundsel and stuff on the drive. Mother had sets and sets of cherished ornamental table-mats that she practically never used — because we hardly ever had guests to meals — with deep borders of real lace. Two or three times a summer she’d wash them and put them out in the sun to bleach. Using the blowtorch — with a fearful, terrified satisfaction — I burned the lot.”

  “Heavens! What happened?”

  “Oddly enough, she never found out. Or not that I had done it. There was next to no ash left, and a breeze blew away what there was . . . And I suppose it just didn’t occur to them that I would do such a thing. Mother was convinced that gipsies must have come by and stolen her precious doilies. And that satisfied Jas, for the time at least.”

  “He never got loose again?”

  “Well; there was one other time. But that was years later, quite a different kind of thing.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He tipped more liquor into our glasses, carelessly, spilling a trail across the sheets — which were remarkably sticky and creased already.

  I loved the feeling of unconcern about that. Somebody else would remake our bed with clean sheets this evening. Somebody else would do the laundry . . . “Tell me about it,” I repeated, rolling over on the puddle of grappa and propping myself comfortably against his shoulder.

  “The religion in my family goes a long way back on both sides,” he said. “Hedge preachers — deacons — Methodists — Baptists. Cantankerous, argumentative bastards. There was a moneymaking streak, too. They were a canny lot. The piling up of property never seems to have interfered with their religious views — or vice versa. Until it came to me — maybe the split had slowly been growing wider and wider until it became total.”

  “I’m not sure that I’m with you, but go on.”

  “When I was a kid, the girls wouldn’t look at me. For one thing, I was terrified of them. For another, I was a mess. I was continually biting my nails, and my fingers; for years they were always ragged and bloody and tattered. Couldn’t leave scabs alone — anything like that. I used to worry at myself as if I was a goddam bone. If there was anything wrong with me, I made it more so by picking and scratching.”

  “Self mortification.”

  “Uh huh. I used to get scabs on my head, and pulled quite large tufts of hair out, getting them off. And then they’d come back, only bigger. So I had bald patches. The hair came out in handfuls. And I had ghastly pimples and suppurating spots, some on my face, some on my knees, that I couldn’t resist squeezing . . . I was a total mess. You wouldn’t have taken a second look at me,” he said with triumph. “‘Leave yourself alone!’ Mother used to screech at me, but I never did. Pulling myself to pieces was my hobby. You simply cannot imagine what a moth-eaten, unhealthy, rat-nibbled little monster I was in those days.”

  “When did all that change?”

  I did indeed find it difficult to imagine him as he must have been. He was so sleek now, so smooth, prosperous and impressive in appearance. Just at present the black eye slightly impaired this high-quality image, but in a way I was glad of that, because a little imperfection gave him more reality; he was wilder, more natural. Even a black eye could not detract from his stunning good looks. (During the days of courtship, when my influence was at its strongest, I had persuaded him to shave off those side-whiskers.) Intermittently I still felt that it was a privilege to be in bed with him, here, in one of Venice’s most expensive hotels, listening to the rain belting down outside.

  “Oh, when my parents died,” he said as if this were the most natural consequence. “Then I went to a hypnotist. My spots and chilblains began to clear up at once, I made better headway with the girls. The first one, up in Manchester, she was at the university, reading economics. She was pretty wild . . .” His voice trailed away as if he rather wished he had not mentioned her.

  It must have taken a fairly wild girl, I reckoned, to breach the defences of poor Jim as he was then, with his history of spots and chilblains, that upbringing of poverty and obedience, his mother’s ghost looming over him like the three Eumenides rolled into one.

  “Her name?”

  “I don’t remember.” Plainly he did, but never mind. “She’d been smoking pot for a couple of terms and then she went on to acid. I tried it one night at her place. Awful gloomy dark bedsit she had in Eccles Gardens.”

  “What happened?”

  “I didn’t enjoy it much. Other people have told me what wonderful visions they had, how they felt the whole world opened out like a flower, all that sort of thing. Nothing of the kind happened to me.”

  “What did happen? Was it bad? Frightening?”

  “N-no,” he said slowly. “But not good, either. I was outside of myself. Have you ever had that experience?”

  “Once or twice.” And more recently than you might guess, my friend, I thought. But he went on without waiting for amplification.

  “I could actually see the two of
me — Jas and Jim. Me. Myself. Saw them separate, but overlapping — the kind of double image you get when your eyes go out of focus. When they do that, you can push the two images together or let them slide farther apart. Well — I can remember pushing and pushing, but my two images wouldn’t come back together. On the contrary, they kept moving farther away from each other. At the same time I had the most ghastly, helpless feeling, as if my feet were on two separate ice-floes that were drifting apart.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I heard a voice say, ‘Well, that’s the last you’ll see of me,’ and then I suppose I passed out. I woke feeling terrible, with a headache like an iron cuff around the back of my skull, which I could tell was going to get much, much worse and last for about two days. Which it did. And, as well, that sensation of one’s mind racing out of gear — do you know?— images dashing past, you can’t stop them, exhausting, frantic, you can’t get your breath, you can’t stop the procession, they rush on and on. Sometimes I think that death will be like that, the period just before death, revving up to an utterly unbearable climax —”

  For some reason, just then, Fitz came into my mind, a childhood memory. We had found a hedgehog, apparently dead, in the middle of the lawn at Yetford. He lifted it up gently on a spade, to move it to a more seemly resting place. And, at that, it suddenly stretched, yawned, rolled on its back, exposing the softer, defenceless under-part of a hedgehog that normally one never sees. Just pale fur. There seemed something totally relaxed, confiding, about that leisurely, tranquil yawn, uncurling its little pink hands; and at the peak of the yawn it died.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Fitz in simple wonder. “Oh — is that what dying is like?”

  That single moment, I feel certain, divested him for ever of any dread or apprehension about death.

  I was glad, in a way, that he had been out of England when Masha died, for one of the nurses had told me that she died in terrible, unbearable pain; better let him keep his image of the peaceful hedgehog.