Blackground

by Joan Aiken

  “Well — now he’s free to live his own life. Doesn’t have to concern himself about me any more. Tiresome old Mum.”

  With a catch in my throat I remembered that light-hearted plan: we’ll get a Peugeot and drive all over Europe. I went on, “He’ll almost certainly stay in America. Philosophers do much better over there.” And then, in order to strike the ball out of my court, “Have you heard any more about the Companions of Roland? When the — when the ceremony takes place?”

  He did not answer. He swerved his car off the road on to a flat grassy space among cobwebbed gorse bushes, and cut the engine. The silence was, suddenly, formidable. We could hear nothing at all but the gargling, rising voices of curlews; normally a sound that I love, but just now they seemed inexpressibly mournful.

  After a minute, Ty said, “Can you imagine how I felt? When I found that you had been keeping such a thing from me?” He lit a cigarette, which surprised me greatly; I had never seen him smoke before. His hands shook badly.

  I thought he was pressing the moral advantage for more than it was worth. His voice sounded less hurt than censorious.

  “Oh, Ty. For heaven’s sake!” Fighting hard — because, of course, I did feel guilty — I retorted, “What about all that you kept from me?”

  “Like what? I didn’t have any children hidden in the background.”

  “What about that girl?”

  “What girl?”

  “The old man’s daughter. Old Leyburn.” I had finally recalled his name. “Sir Ostin. The one you promised to look after. What happened to her?”

  “Oh. She died. A long time ago.” He added, rather pompously, “Naturally — if she hadn’t — I’d still be supporting her.”

  In his voice I caught, suddenly, what must have been the tones of his mother — cold, prim, inflexible. I suppose, I thought forlornly, it was a terrible, terrible piece of folly to marry the son of such a hateful pair; I can see that now; but then, how was I to know? He hadn’t told me about them then.

  “Ty, I’m very sorry. I daresay I ought to have told you about Fitz. Well, of course I ought. I can see that now. But, in a way, he was cut out of my life for so long — my mother looked after him right through his childhood, all I did was provide for his support; and now he is completely self-sufficient and independent; as I said before, it just didn’t seem relevant to you and me, to us; we were,” I said sadly, “we were having such fun.”

  Fun. The word lay between us like a candy wrapper. Ty looked as if he had never heard it in his life. Olga really is a prize mischief-making bitch, I thought, and wondered why, at this precise juncture, she had deemed it necessary to tell Ty my story. Just because he happened to be there? Because she happened to encounter him in Dorchester? Just idly for her own amusement?

  “Does it really matter so much to you, Ty?”

  “Suppose I wanted a son myself?” he said furiously.

  The one doesn’t preclude the other, it seemed to me.

  “Do you want a son, Ty? I’d have thought — having had such unhappy relations with your own parents — that would be the last thing you’d —”

  “But suppose I did!”

  Good heavens, here we are, I thought amazedly, up against the old original barricade. You’d think it would have been totally demolished, eroded away, by now; but no: he really wanted me to have been a virgin. He really wanted to have been the First Man in my life, upper case and gothic ornamental capitals. Because I was Rosy, and Rosy must be a virgin? Because he had made me into Rosy? Or had made Rosy out of me?

  Never once did he ask about Fitz’s father. So might Joseph, I thought, have preserved a baneful silence; not out of tact, but from bitter, bitter pride.

  “Ty, I’m really sorry. I never dreamed, in all honesty, that it would mean so much to you. In fact I never thought my former life would be of particular interest to you —”

  “You must have an odd notion of what would interest me.”

  “Well,” I said in a practical tone, “do you now believe that our marriage has been a total mistake? Do you want a divorce? Because the whole relationship has been a — a misapprehension? If that’s what you want, feel free! It was a kind of fairy-tale, I suppose . . .”

  Everybody ought to have a drama-school training. Voice control is really essential for scenes like these.

  To my surprise, Ty did not immediately respond to this suggestion. “Divorce? I hadn’t thought.—Perhaps. Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know! It’s just the feeling I can’t trust you! That I’ll never again be sure what’s going on behind that front of yours —”

  Enough of this, I thought. We aren’t getting anywhere. And it’s too painful. You landed me in the mess, Fair Rosamond, you get me out now. With chill, mild dignity, I suggested, “All this commination is a bit of a waste of time and energy, don’t you think? You feel that you can’t trust me. Well: there are — there are aspects of you which came as a considerable surprise to me —” He gave me a dagger-like glance and opened his mouth to speak, but I went right on — “so I can see it’s no manner of use our trying to live together any longer, having got off on the wrong foot like this. Why don’t we have a cooling-off period — like trade unions — say, a month or so — and then talk about it again?”

  What I had in mind was his Companions of Roland nomination. If we could get him safely over that hurdle, still respectably married to me — then, I hoped, tensions might ease all round. If the Companions of Roland nomination was still on. Which of course I couldn’t ask.

  After a silence he said, “Very well.” His voice was rough, oddly pitched.

  Trying for a lighter note, I went on, “Where’s this piece of conceptual art you spoke of? Or was that just a — a figment?” — and then wished I had not used that particular word, one that we had tossed back and forth, with various silly connotations, in Venice.

  “No, no,” he said, still in that rough, exasperated way — as if it were a hideously unfair imposition to be obliged even to carry on a civil dialogue with me. “No — I’ll show you. It’s along here — we have to drive a bit farther —”

  He glanced at his watch, then flung the half-smoked cigarette out of the car window.

  I said: “Are you pressed for time? Do you have to get back for a meeting, or something? Because — because frankly — just now — I can take conceptual art or leave it alone. Besides, in this mist, there won’t be much point, I’d have —”

  “The mist won’t matter,” he snapped. “Make it more impressive.” And then he added, putting the car into gear. “After all, you did say that you had always wanted to see Carnac.”

  So I had. At the very first party, the one where Randolph had introduced Joel and me to Ty, when we had all been so light-hearted, the talk had turned to Carnac. “Oh, I really really long to see that place,” I had lisped, and Ty instantly replied, “Then why don’t we go, I’ll fly you over in the helicopter tomorrow,” to which I, all Rosy at that point, had replied languidly, “Sweet of you but I have to be back in London tomorrow. Another time, perhaps.”

  I always have wanted to see Carnac. Photographs make it seem so much more mysterious than Stonehenge; or, at least, it looks the way Stonehenge must have been before Government got its death-dealing hands on the area.

  Ty swept the car on along the little road, through denser and denser mist.

  “Ty, really I don’t think this is much use —”

  “No, no,” he said impatiently, “the mist is bound to clear, I tell you, it often does, very suddenly. Just have a little patience, will you? Can’t you wait a few minutes, even?”

  Again he pulled off the road, on to a furrowed, rutted piece of land which looked as if giant pigs had been rooting in it for truffles.

  “You wait there a moment while I look about,” he told me, and, jumping nimbly out of the car, vanished in the brume. I waited, peering through the si
lvery dimness and thinking unhappy thoughts. Shouldn’t I also, at this point, have revealed to Ty that my expectation of life really didn’t seem very long?

  That the ache in my back was now gripping and wrenching like a red-hot vice? That the pain in my throat and jaw had grown so severe that I envisaged myself, in a year’s time, like Freud, always having to turn my left profile to the camera . . . ? If only Ty were prepared to wait nine months or so, I thought; a widower is so much more respectable than a divorced man.

  Ty had taken off with him, rather unexpectedly, a folding canvas chair which he extracted from the boot. He now returned without it and said, “Yes, this is the right place. Come along. I’ll give you a hand.”

  With swift efficiency he helped me from the car and then, firmly gripping my arm, began to lead me through the mist, over the rough ground.

  “Wait — wait!” I said, hopping. “My crutches!”

  “Oh, come on, it’s only a couple of yards. The crutches would be no use on this soft stuff anyway. Here, I’ll carry you.”

  To my utter amazement he picked me up and strode forward at great speed. I had never thought Ty particularly strong. Tough, yes, stringy, agile — but now he seemed endowed with prodigious energy and vigour. I had gasped, the breath quite jerked out of me as he whisked me up, and gasped again when he dumped me with equal suddenness on the canvas chair, which he had established beside some large vague shape. A barn? A huge rock? Then its bouquet reached me — a sweet, comforting reminder from childhood — the warm pepperiness of rather musty hay. Or straw.

  “Good heavens! What a rampart,” I said faintly.

  “Wait there a minute and you’ll begin to see several more. They are all set along here in a huge curve — like something the Druids might have laid out —”

  Ty glanced again, jerkily, at his wrist, and gave a sharp, annoyed exclamation.

  “Damn!”

  “What’s up?”

  “My watch. It’s gone —”

  “Came undone, perhaps, when you picked me up. You had it on before, I’m certain. What a nuisance —”

  “Or —” he frowned, “when I threw my cigarette out of the car window. I believe I remember feeling it loosen. No, don’t move —” as I began to hoist myself out of the chair — “you stay there and wait for the mist to clear. I’ll have a hunt. I’ll be back soon —”

  He began moving off in the direction of the car, scanning the rough ground as he went. “You stay there!” he called back again. In a moment he had become just a vague shape in the mist; then he was gone, out of sight. A moment later I heard the sound of the engine; it revved, grew louder, soon died away.

  For a few moments I sat in a kind of dreamy limbo. The respite from Ty’s company — so jagged, furious, discordant — was wonderfully refreshing. I snuffed up the wet, fresh, hay-scented, sea-scented air in deep draughts. How different, I thought, Ty was from Andrei. Two random memories came into my mind: Andrei weeping after we had been to see Dr Zhivago. In the street, he wept unashamedly. “All I want,” he said, “is for everyone in the world just to have enough to eat.” He was simple, he was a Russian, this seemed to him a simple aim. And I remembered how he used to be able to hypnotize cats, he had a gift for this; he would sing them a little Russian air and they would lie on their backs, paws in air, totally relaxed . . . I have never seen this done by any other person.

  By degrees — as one tends to when suddenly abandoned in an unfamiliar spot — I began to feel very dislocated. Who am I? Where is this? Do I really exist? Is there such a person as Cat Conwil? And, if so, am I she?

  A curlew bubbled his questioning call somewhere to my left; otherwise, the silence was profound.

  Into my peaceful emptiness of mind, by pinpoint stages, worry began to creep.

  First I thought: will Ty ever be able to find this spot again? Next, I thought, does he actually intend to come back? Is this his notion of a joke? (Remembering that horse-play in Venice and the time he locked me in the bathroom and refused to let me out unless I promised . . . well, never mind that.)

  The watch had certainly been missing from his wrist, but he could have taken it off himself the first time he left the car.

  But what would be the point? To give me an opportunity to repent my malfeasances towards him?

  Instead of those, for some reason, I had a piercing memory of how I once took a fancy to apply for a landscape-gardening job. I phoned Masha (who was by now living in the dismal little house outside Reading) and asked her for some plans of imaginary gardens that I had once drawn for her. “Do you still have them, Masha?” I asked with that confidence we have in our parents’ being able to produce anything at a moment’s notice. “Well,” she said in a troubled way, “I’m not quite sure. They may be in a drawer, or a parcel . . . Things got packed up in the move — and put away —” “I’d be so very grateful if you could find them,” I said. “They’d be really useful. I’ll come out tomorrow — shall I? — maybe you will have come across them by then.”

  When I drove out next day to the little house in Grosvenor Crescent I noticed that she was looking very unwell — face all drawn, a terrible colour, hair lank and lifeless. “Masha, what is it? Are you ill?” “Oh, I just had one of my little turns, you know — acidosis, indigestion, what Papa used to call collywobbles. It’s nothing.” Which, I later deduced, meant spending most of the night in the bathroom with wrenching pains and diarrhoea. “But I found your drawings!” she announced with triumph. “I had been so worried that I might have lost them in the move.” And she handed me the yellowed little bunch of papers held by a rusty paperclip.

  I was smitten with guilt, I can tell you. My careless, unthinking demand had put her to all this trouble and, I was sure, brought on the attack of gripes. If I hadn’t carelessly mislaid my own drawings, I need never have troubled her . . .

  I never did apply for that garden job.

  Now my thoughts reverted to Ty. Did he think that if I were left out here long enough, I’d die of exposure? Like the Babes in the Wood? Or get lost and fall over the cliff? That seemed too preposterous. Just the same — supposing this were the arctic — I could easily imagine him capable of such an act. He had a calm ruthlessness of purpose. I had seen him elbow his way to the front of queues; he was always the first passenger on to planes or trains. I had seen him narrowly miss a woman with a pushchair and hand-led child on a pedestrian crossing, and had been distressed because he seemed to show no sign of compunction or guilt afterwards. I had seen him, at a party, when presented with a book that he had no intention of reading, slide it swiftly out of sight between the cushions of a sofa, the very instant the donor had moved away; he knew, to a nicety, what he meant to do and what he had no intention of doing.

  What had he intended when he left me here?

  I am given to sudden acute attacks of disquiet about my mind. Suppose, one day, it stops behaving rationally? Even now I suffer from terrifying blanks when its processes, for no apparent reason, go on strike, fail to produce the word I want, the instruction for what I am supposed to do next. I walk into a room and stand there clueless . . .

  Perhaps this will be the moment when it chooses to go on permanent vacation? Perhaps they will find me here, weeks hence, witless, wandering on Egdon Heath like Mad Maggie?

  I called, “Ty?” hopefully into the void. “Ty? Are you there?” knowing full well with my saner sector that he couldn’t possibly be within earshot, for I had heard no sound of the returning motor. Just the same, the sound of my own voice cheered me, and I called again, “Ty? Halloo-oo?”

  To my surprise and great joy, a voice did answer: “Yoo-hoo! Halloo!”

  I let out a couple more enthusiastic shouts and presently a figure became dimly discernible, wavering through the silvery fog. Not Ty: someone very much shorter, and a completely different, more undulating motion. When it came closer I saw to my astonishment that it was
Zoë Grandison, sensibly dressed for walking in cords and shaggy sweater with her cloud of hair tucked inside a woolly cap.

  “So this is where you’ve got to!” she said. “Where’s the big chief?”

  “Zoë! How in the world did you get here?”

  “Oh,” she said, “I’ve been to this place before. Did he bring you in his car? It’s not half so far as you’d think, coming by road; there’s a footpath that cuts the distance by at least three miles. But just the same I think you had better get moving. Where’s he?”

  “He lost his watch and went off to look for it.”

  “Humph,” said Zoë. “Cutting it a bit fine, wasn’t he?”

  “Cutting it fine? How do you mean?”

  “Target practice, my honey. Come along — let’s get the hell out of here. Where are your crutches?”

  “Oh damn. They’re still in the car.”

  Zoë had a stout ash-stick. She passed it to me. “I carry it because of dogs,” she explained. “So many people nowadays have them in the country. And nasty brutes!—but if they see a stick they treat you with respect.” Eschewing further comment she took my arm and obliged me to move, irregularly but at fair speed, over the rough pitted ground. There’s a Scottish word, hirpling, that describes our progress well. Soon we came to a path, narrow as a rabbit-track but plainly used by somebody, which made, with a purposeful directness, up a steepish bit of slope, diagonally in the direction of the sea. We saw two more of the huge straw castles, which were constructed, I saw when we passed beside one of them, from those immense circular bundles like giant Swiss Rolls that farmers leave lying about in stubble fields.

  “Top of the ridge,” said Zoë cheerfully when we had left the stack behind us. “How are you holding out, love?”

  “Okay.” I didn’t enlarge on that.

  The walk was definitely more than my ankle, even after Odd Tom’s ministration, was ready for; I had no energy to spare for comment or question. Knowing Zoë to be a deeply practical person (her general appearance of a walking sex-symbol was quite delusive) I had straightway grasped the fact that there was need for speed. Her expression was calm, but the grip on my arm spoke volumes. So I hurried, as best I could, and kept questions for later.