Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  “— Hallo?”

  “Is that you?” said my husband’s voice.

  How very odd it was to hear him over the telephone, sounding so familiar. The last time we spoke like this, I thought, had been before our wedding, making arrangements for it. How much younger we had both been then.

  (When he was wooing me so pertinaciously, we used to talk on the telephone for hours, sometimes; he would call me from Athens, Islamabad, Melbourne — wherever he happened to be.)

  “Yes, it’s me. — Where are you?” I said, and felt at once that I had begun on a false note.

  “At the Close Hotel in Dorchester. I have to see you,” he said coldly.

  “Well — I’m here! And I think you are rather more mobile than I am at the moment. Having no car at present. And still being in plaster, on crutches.”

  “Oh. Your foot,” he said slowly, as if he had entirely forgotten about that, and must now rethink his arrangements.

  “Why don’t you come out to Glifonis? It’s looking very pretty. You were quite right about it — it’s a charming little place.”

  The falsity in my voice dismayed me. Yet all I did was try for the note that used to come naturally.

  “No!” he retorted with some violence. “It’s too shut-in down there. I was going to suggest a walk. If it weren’t for your foot. — Well, there’s a piece of conceptual art that I want you to see.”

  “Conceptual art?”

  This was utterly unexpected. Since when had Ty interested himself in conceptual art?

  “But if — your foot — I suppose that rules out doing it on foot,” he muttered to himself. He was, I thought, well on the way to being drunk; though I had never known Ty much affected by alcohol.

  “Yes! Conceptual art!” he suddenly announced belligerently. “You had some high-falutin’ idea, you were talking about it once — conceptual art, all over the South Downs — like the Stone Age, you said —”

  “Why, yes.” Now, with embarrassment, I vaguely remembered. “So I did. That was in Venice — the time when we had the big argument about colour charts — and you said a sixty-year-old woman couldn’t possibly assimilate a new idea — and I said why not; and we were arguing about the Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and whether that gesture of her hand under her chin is meant to be erotic, and you got so cross —”

  “Oh, be quiet!” shouted Ty furiously, as if I were pulling short hairs out of his neck with tweezers. Then he added in quite another voice, cold, vindictive, measured, deadly. “Why did you tell that little loose-tongued bitch, Olga Laszlo, about the Companions of Roland possibility?”

  “Olga Laszlo?” I was startled almost out of my skin. “I never did! I wouldn’t dream of doing any such thing.”

  “I did think at least I could trust your discretion,” he went on with intense bitterness.

  “I never told her.”

  “She said you did.”

  “She told a lie, then. Which wouldn’t be the first,” I added.

  There was a long, charged silence. Then: “How else could she know?”

  “Don’t ask me!”

  “Oh—!” It was a cry of exasperation that he let out, almost of anguish, as if he were beset on every side. Without thinking, I said, “Have you got one of your migraines coming on?” and then could have bitten out my tongue. The last thing, just then, that he needed was sympathy from me, a reminder that I knew about his weakness. Wary, defensive, vulnerable Ty.

  “I have to see you,” he announced. “I’ll pick you up at the Glifonis car park tomorrow morning. Half-past eight.”

  “Too early. Make it nine.”

  I didn’t want him to see me come clambering up the slope, and I would need at least a half-hour for that.

  “All right.”

  The receiver clanged down at his end before I could say goodnight.

  Very gently, I replaced my own mouthpiece, with a deep feeling of sadness and loss. I suppose I never do realize how much I love people, until I have lost them.

  . . . It’s no use remembering Andrei, and I never do. All that area has been railed, screened, concreted off, like Chernobyl, with tons and tons of barricade. A leakage from the other side would be too dangerous, too painful, too disruptive. As Masha taught me, I go on, I don’t look back. Most people, after all, have had a first love, most know the totality of that experience. For me, Andrei was Family, but Family translated into something strong, male, intelligent, and full of love; everything that Papa was not. God knows what I represented for him: Western freedom, unlimited creativity, frivolity, perhaps. Little Katushka, he used to call me. No, no, I’m not going into all that. Let it lie, under the stone. Fitz has never asked me about his father. Not once. Masha must either have laid some tremendous prohibition on the subject, once and for all, or else given him sufficient of a story to satisfy him. Fitz, in any case, occupies himself with wider matters . . .

  IX

  NEXT DAY I woke very early; in fact it can hardly be said that I went to sleep at all. For most of the night I had thrashed about, my thoughts leaping from Ty to Olga and back again. For how in the world had she come to know that Ty had been shortlisted for the Companions of Roland? It was true, Olga had so many connections, all over Europe, that this was just the kind of information she might be expected to pick up; confidentiality meant nothing to her, she paid for one well-kept secret with another, and then either made practical use of them as barter, or scattered them abroad at random, as the fancy and the mood took her. In her hands Ty’s secret was about as safe as a pot of gelignite in a spin-dryer; I wondered unhappily whether the fact that it had percolated as far as Olga would already have lost Ty his chance of final acceptance? He would be wondering the same thing. No wonder he had sounded so enraged.

  Would he have calmed down by nine a.m.? Would he accept my assurance that I had no connection with the leak? Our relationship had been so short-lived that I could come to no decision on this point. Even if he had trusted me before the disclosure that I was Nurse Smith, the need for total realignment after that revelation might easily mean that he no longer did so. I knew that my own attitude to him had changed radically since I assimilated the news that he was Jimmy-who-made-the-promise about the old man’s daughter; Jimmy, who made the promise and hadn’t kept it. (At least I assume he never kept the promise, for where is she now?) Of course he may have had excellent reasons, the very strongest reasons for not doing so. Maybe she is dead.

  I was out of bed by six, making a pot of extra-strong coffee. The day was sunny but frosty; masses of wild daffodils planted over the slopes of Glifonis (as she had told me) by Elspeth Morgan, were going to wait another day or two before opening fully. The ice-blue sea gleamed like a hard stone.

  To my great surprise, as I clomped cautiously about in the kitchen, I heard a tap at the back door and, turning, saw the figure of Odd Tom through the glass door, bristly and grim as usual. He never seemed to shave, but the bristles never grew any longer. I opened and asked him in.

  “Hallo, Tom. You’re an early bird.”

  “Do your foot now. Hand, too,” he said, nodding.

  “Take off the cast, do you mean?” I asked with some apprehension. He nodded again.

  “Time, now. Only get weak if that cast stays on.”

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  The twitch that I now understood to be a grin passed over his face.

  “Wouldn’t say no. But that cast’s coming off first.”

  He removed it expeditiously with a sharp kitchen knife. (During the last few days the equipment in my kitchen had been much augmented, thanks to the practical good sense of the Ladies of Glifonis.)

  My wrist ached without the cast, felt draughty and vulnerable, but Odd Tom worked on it, as he had on the ankle, testing, listening, testing again, until it had the warm flexibility of a healthy joint. “Not much wrong there now,” h
e pronounced, tapping it, and then started in on the ankle. “Have you hiking up to Bulbarrow before breakfast in a day or two,” he boasted.

  “Well I’m supposed to take a walk with my husband after breakfast this morning, as a matter of fact,” I told him. “But on the cliffs near here, I think, not Bulbarrow.”

  “Your husband? Lord Fortuneswell?” Odd Tom sat back on his heels; he seemed considerably jolted by this information. He stared at me, mumbling his jaw and frowning. “Thought you was supposed to be parted?”

  “Oh no.” I couldn’t help being a bit nettled that our marital affairs were, apparently, such common currency. “But he’s very busy and had things to do in Paris and London, and I had to be down here for the TV job —”

  “Don’t you go walking with him,” said Odd Tom. Then, for some reason, his former incomprehensibility returned in full measure; he poured out a vehement stream of syllables and I could hardly catch one word in fifty. But the gist was clear: it would be a great piece of folly to undertake any excursion with Ty.

  “But I have to, Tom; I said I would. You were married, weren’t you? To — to Jenny. You know how important it is to keep a promise to the person —”

  We looked at one another, sad and baffled.

  “Crutches anyhow — mind you take your crutches along,” he said.

  “So he won’t expect me to be too agile? I’d have taken them anyway; I wouldn’t trust myself without them yet . . . though I do feel amazingly better, thanks to you.”

  Who can I tell about Odd Tom? I was thinking. There must be dozens of people in the acting profession who would pay lavishly for his services. He could make a modest fortune in a few months —

  As he blew on his cup of coffee I suddenly remembered that I had invited Zoë for breakfast.

  “Would it be a great nuisance, Tom, to take a message down to Miss Grandison’s house?”

  No skin off his nose, he assured me, so I scribbled a note, “Have to see Ty this morning, can you make it lunch instead of breakfast?”

  Tom then insisted on escorting me up to the car park and left me seated on the low stone parapet that surrounded it. As he shuffled off down the hill again, he cast many anxious glances back at me, until he had disappeared round the bend. Queer, good little man. I’d make sure, somehow, that he didn’t have to go on living in a barrel on Poole harbour (if that was where, indeed, he lived). I wondered if he looked on Ty as a kind of Antichrist? An idea had been growing in my mind over the last few days, from stray remarks he had let drop, that Tom had lived here before, in the former times of the caravan park, that it was to the old Caundle Quay that he had made that return with Jenny, only to discover that their home had gone. If Tom understood that Ty had been the motive force behind that dispossession, what must his feelings be towards my husband? I thought of the corner from the orange paper packet, UR2 Dye. By now I felt fairly sure that Tom had left it in my kitchen. (From which, in a day or so, it had vanished, in the way such things do.) Had it been meant, not for me, but for Ty? And what about the fire that nearly killed me? The passage of time had somewhat dulled my first paranoid suspicions about that, since there were no further episodes; I had fallen into the Ladies’ belief that it must have been an accident, arising from defective wiring and carefree Greek builders. But now I wondered, had the fire been intended for Ty?

  All these suspicions went very much against my natural instincts. I liked Odd Tom; and not only because he was mending my ankle and wrist; he seemed genuinely honest, guileless and kind-hearted; I did not want to believe him capable of such acts.

  The sound of a motor broke my musings and I looked up to see Ty arrive with a screech of brakes. That brought to mind the first descent he had made on me from the helicopter. His expression as he sprang out (not from the conspicuous Rolls but from a sturdy mud-splashed estate wagon) was just about as unconciliating as on the former occasion. He came striding across the open spaces of the car park like an angry hero on his way to chop off a monster’s head. Ty had a queer stride — leaning back, very characteristic; perhaps from all those hours of walking up and down the lawn with the LIAR placard on his back.

  “Hallo. Why don’t you come down to the house and have a cup of coffee?” I suggested, and added mildly, “It’s really a nice little house.”

  I had become attached to it, as you do when you escape death in a place. Arkwright and Tom, the two odd familiars, endeared it to me also. And the visits of little Shuna. Perhaps, I thought foolishly, I ought to settle down here and become the village witch, Glifonis would be a friendly place in which to end one’s days.

  Ty’s expression, like the bow-wave of the Q.E.II, cast such notions aside.

  “No,” he said. “Come on, get in the car, hurry up. I haven’t much time. And I want — I want — to show you this thing.”

  “In that case, would you like to bring the car a bit closer?”

  I wondered why he had left it so far away; at the top extremity of the car park. Then realized that there it would not be visible from the houses down below. But, plainly, he was going to make no superfluous gesture on my behalf. His eyes blazed with hostility. And he glanced sharply about him — as he had on the Accademia bridge — peopling the empty space with eavesdroppers.

  “Oh well,” I sighed. “Never mind,” resignedly, and made a great thing of crutching myself uphill to the estate wagon, amusing myself by putting Ty in the wrong. Rosy would have appreciated this performance, I thought.

  Ignoring all that, Ty strode past me, flung open the car door, and took my crutches — grabbed them, rather. Still exaggerating my infirmity, I laboriously edged myself on to the front seat. He tossed the crutches in the back, making no inquiry as to my injuries. I had taken the precaution of re-bandaging my foot, and had put a strapping on my wrist for support, so they looked much as they had before.

  After shutting the door on me, Ty went round and got in on his own side. Then, suddenly, volcanically, he demanded,

  “Why didn’t you tell me that you had a son?”

  I felt the jolt as, I’m told, you do when you’ve been shot: shock, not pain.

  “I would have told you. By and by. I meant to, in due course. I wasn’t keeping him from you. It — it just didn’t seem relevant.”

  “Relevant? What would be relevant, for god’s sake?”

  “I’d have told you,” I repeated. “I didn’t have any plan to keep him dark. You were so engaged,” I added with chill mildness, modelling myself as hard as I could on Rosy, “you were so busy telling me about your own past (though leaving out a few items yourself) that you didn’t really give me a great deal of chance to tell you my story.”

  By way of answer he switched on the ignition and slammed the car into gear.

  The jerk with which we started would have been agony for me only a couple of days ago. I thought of Parkson, sadistically bumping me down from step to step. The wheelchair hadn’t really proved much use in Glifonis, I decided, and then retracted that, remembering its signal utility as a battering ram.

  “Where is your son now?” Ty asked in a dry voice.

  “At Harvard. He’s a philosopher. He’s twenty. I suppose Olga Laszlo told you about him?” He did not answer. I added, “Anybody might have. It’s no secret. After all, nearly everybody has a son at Harvard.”

  Ignoring these foolish words, he drove along the road that led inland, then, soon, turned eastwards along a small third-class lane with high banks.

  During the ten minutes while Tom and I slowly climbed steep Glifonis hill, and while I waited in the car park, the day had been quietly deteriorating. A filmy, insidious veil had crept across the sun, and the temperature had dropped sharply; as Ty drove eastwards and ascended a ridge, all the landscape on either side simply slipped out of sight. We were engulfed in a cold floating mist which seemed insubstantial but completely screened off the view.

  A pity, rea
lly. This must, in better weather, be an exhilarating little road, so high up that the prospect on either side ought to be spectacular. Southwards, on our right, sloping pastures ran down, doubtless, to the cliffs and a view of the Channel; north and left, a steeper-seeming fall of land, outlined by the scruffy shapes of gorse and whin bushes, dropped into a grassy valley, bounded on its northern side, a mile away, by yet another furzy ridge. All this land, I had learned from the big map on the Ladies’ kitchen wall, was War Department territory, untrodden by foot of civilian man. Great Bustards throve on these ridges, and other species long extinct in areas frequented by H. Sap.

  “Is it all right for us to be here?” I said. “Aren’t we in a no-go area?”

  “Oh, I’m allowed,” Ty replied. “I drive this way all the time. I got permission from Major-General Dickinson. It’s much the quickest way from Glifonis to Knoyle.”

  “What do the red flags mean?”

  “Just a warning to the public to keep off.”

  The road ran over a lip of land and veered northwards, dropping into the valley. Now we might truly have been in Shangri-la; nothing but vague dark-brown lumps, which were bushes, could occasionally be seen at the road’s edge, and the pearly mist floating around us in all directions.

  Ty said: “Did you tell your son about me?” snapping off the words like icicles.

  “I told him that I was getting married, yes. And who to. Of course he knew who you were.”

  “What was his reaction?”

  “Pleased naturally.”

  Had Fitz been pleased, though, I wondered. Not really. Anxious, solicitous. I added: “Relieved to have the responsibility taken off his hands.”

  “Responsibility?” What a dry cold voice. It might have been Papa speaking. Don’t interrupt, Catherine. This is none of your business.

  Had life with Masha turned him into what he was?

  Of course it must have. We all affect each other all the time. This needs to be thought about. But not just at this present juncture. I said: