Nightshades

by Tanith Lee

  'Do you think we might have a ghost?'

  'Such fun,' Laura observed acidly.

  Albertine lowered her eyes and played with a piece of bread, 'I'd far rather we hadn't.'

  Sibbi, quickened, seated next to Ashburn, caught his eye.

  'But how romantic - to think I supposed it was you, and all the time it was a spirit. How edifying!' The wine had gone to her head, and her appetite was unimpaired.

  'These old houses, you know,' Merton went on, 'though I don't really believe in such stuff myself. Rather wish I did, you know.'

  'Of course,' Sibbi said, 'you'd frighten any ghost to death.'

  Laura said: 'Does it also write poetry, I wonder? Though, of course, Robert doesn't write anything at present.'

  'Don't chide me, dear Laura,' he said.

  'I shall always chide you,' Laura said. 'No one else dares to do it, and without chiding you would perish.'

  Albertine rose.

  'I wish it weren't so hot,' she said.

  She drifted towards the windows. Merton stared at his plate.

  Albertine's eyes were full of tears, a nakedness which thrilled and embarrassed him.

  'Just think,' Laura said, also rising, 'if there were a ghost we should have to call one of those village priests to exorcise it.' She crossed to stand behind Ashburn's chair, and set one hand very lightly on his shoulder. 'Do you know,' she said, 'they are praying for rain - actually praying. And never in my life did I hear such pagan screaming as emanates from the Catholic church. Come now, Robert, we will take a walk in the garden, you and I, and you shall tell me what you are writing.'

  Sibbi said: 'Yes, the garden, I think I shall come with you -'

  Laura smiled at her. 'I have a much better idea. I heard you playing earlier. You have such a delicate touch and yet, I believe, that latest piece would benefit from practice - why not practise now, Sibbi? It's a little cooler, I think.'

  Sibbi narrowed her cat's eyes as Laura and Ashburn strolled into the garden. She stalked to the piano and began to play very loudly and brilliantly.

  'How do you stand that woman, Albertine?' she demanded. 'Does she suppose she owns everything?'

  Albertine sat in the wicker chair by the veranda doors. Her dress spilled about her feet like a pool of milk.

  'Never mind,' she said soothingly, as if to a child.

  She watched Ashburn and Laura go up and down the walks among the burning green with its little filigree flickers of shade. The brazen clangour of heat was mulling, darkening, lying down like lions under the trees. Albertine could imagine Laura saying to Ashburn: 'Yes, I know what I am to you. Albertine is your heart, and this silly little Sibbi your appetite. And I am your brain. Do you think you can relinquish me?'

  Albertine imagined she saw how the poet became animated, speaking of what he wrote to Laura. She sat very still in the wicker chair, watching them. A whole procession with its banners travelled through her mind, the first meeting, the first dream, the first embrace, the green graves, the seascapes, the hot gypsy summers with, superimposed upon it all, Laura, with her sharp dark gown slashing at the grass.

  Suddenly Sibbi jumped up.

  'Why didn't I think of it before? We must hold a seance. There is an ideal little table, and I recall there is something one does with a wine-glass -' She ran to the veranda doors and called out. Ashburn turned at once. Sibbi stood, like a slender flower stalk, holding out her hand to him across the lawn.

  And shortly they all sat round a table, like figures inscribed on a clock.

  They held hands, the obdurate glass discarded. Nothing had

  happened, but it was too hot to move. Merton, seated between Sibbi and Laura, fell suddenly asleep and woke as suddenly with a wild grunt. As it had mummified the flowers, the earth, the island, the heat mummified the two men and three women at the table.

  Only the eyes of the women sometimes darted, like needles stabbing between their lashes, observing the poet. Sibbi held one of his hands, Albertine the other. Ashburn, blinded by the heat, shut his eyes and experienced the sensation of two leeches, one on either palm, sucking his blood from him. He thought he had fallen asleep for a moment as Merton had done; he could not resist looking down at his hands.

  Albertine's hand was cold as ice, Sibbi's warm and dry. A peculiar stasis had fallen over them all. The poet glanced up and saw the clock had fittingly stopped on the mantelshelf. The eyes of the three women and of the man, as always, were on him.

  'This is very irksome,' Laura said. 'Really, Sibbi, can't you use some blandishment to persuade your ghostie to appear? I have three letters to write -'

  'I could sing,' Sibbi said, and her hand moved in his. 'If Robert thinks I should.'

  'That should charm any ghost, I'm sure,' stung Laura.

  They had drawn the blinds; the room was drowned in a bloody shadow. The poet stared at the silent clock.

  'What would you like me to sing?' Sibbi murmured, offering the sting so that he could draw the poison from it.

  'Anything,' he said. What does it matter, he thought, what she sings?

  Desire ran through her hand into his body, yet he scarcely felt it, sex, like an absent limb, lost in some war, castrated by some mental battle… His eyes unfocused on the face of the clock. He did not want to go back to the room in the tower, to the unfinished work, the spell which evaded him, urgent once, now meaningless. He had put it off.

  The girl began softly to sing; she sang as if far away over some hill of the mind, words he had written to an old tune of the island: Stream, from the black cold sun of night,

  Phantoms in robes of darkest light,

  To muddy the clear waters of our lives

  With dreams.

  And after this dream, what? The room began to breathe about him, or else it was the sea. Nothing achieved or to come, and if achieved what did it signify? Ants crawling in ant cities… He felt the floor tilt a little beneath his chair, and thought distantly: Now, an earthquake.

  But it was the sea, the sea cool and green, washing in across the floor.

  'By George, we're flooded,' Merton observed jovially, without rancour or alarm. 'And the roof's come down.'

  The house was gone. In a paper boat they rocked gently over an ocean glaucous and slippery as the backs of seals.

  'Look at this,' Merton said, prodding the paper. 'Soon sink. Dear chap, I said the shipwright should look at her. Not seaworthy, you know.'

  The ship was composed of manuscripts. The ink ran and darkened the water.

  'You have had my wife, of course,' Merton said, 'but it's all for the best. Ballast, you know. Jettison extra cargo.'

  The poet looked down and saw that Laura and Sibbi floated under the glass-green runnels of waves with wide eyes and fish swimming in their hair and in and out of their open mouths. With his right hand he was holding Albertine beneath the water, while her garments floated out like Ophelia's, and she smiled at him sadly, encouraging him to do whatever was necessary to save himself.

  Ashburn leapt to his feet and the bottom gave way in the paper boat and, as the water closed over his head like salty fire, he saw Merton knock the dottle from his pipe -

  Albertine still lay against his arm, he was trying to lift her above the sea and she was calling to him and struggling with him and suddenly he found himself in the blood-red room with fragments of glass on the table, Sibbi cowering in her chair, and no hands visible except Albertine's, both holding on to him as if he and she were drowning indeed.

  But it was night which drowned everything, all confusion and outcry.

  It swooped on the island. The sea turned red then black, the sky opened itself to an ochre moon. A serpent of lights wound out of the village at sunset and settled upon the beach below the house with the hoarse screeches of predatory bats.

  'Our favourite pagan-Christians are restive again,' Laura said. 'Dear God, who would believe such ceremonies could still exist. Are they sacrificing maidens to the
sea?'

  'Praying for rain,' Merton said. 'Poor beggars. They get little enough from the land in a good year, but this drought - well, there's no telling.'

  'Their hovels are empty of food, clothing and furniture,' Laura said,

  'and in the church are three gold candlesticks. How can such fools hope to survive?'

  Merton lit his pipe and relapsed in his shadowy chair, Sibbi sat slapping down cards before the lamp; Laura, her wormwood letters written, stood at the window gazing out at the firefly glare on the foreshore. And above? From time to time each of the three looked up at the ceiling. The poet and his pale woman were locked in some curious, stilted, yet private and unsharing communion.

  My satisfaction lies only in observing my fellow exiles, Laura thought, and glanced at Sibbi with a dark little smile. 'Really, dear Sibbi, you did get such a scare, didn't you?'

  Sibbi slapped down the coloured cards, commonly, as Laura had seen the market women do with fish.

  'I don't know what you mean. Anyone might be taken ill in this weather.'

  'Yes, of course,' Laura smiled, 'and scream at the top of his lungs, and frighten little Miss Muffet into a flawless fit. Did you imagine only women are permitted to have hysterics? You will have to get accustomed to such things in this house.'

  'Some sort of-of nightmare,' Merton ventured. 'Dropped off myself.'

  Laura showed her teeth, as sharp, predatory and feline as Sibbi's and with no pretence.

  'What does Sibbi see in the cards? Good fortune, health and happiness? Or is it a soupçon of undying love?'

  She leaned back against the window frame. The torches were guttering out, the howling voices blown to cindery shreds on the wind. A melancholy hollowness yawned inside her, a

  disembowelling ache. She suffered it, waiting, as if for a spasm of pain, until it passed. Does nothing die? she thought, her heart squeezing its bitterness like a lemon into her veins.

  The shore was all darkness now. The foxy moon meanly described only the edges of the sand, the ribs of the water. Above on the tower, the awning gave a single despotic flap like the wing of a huge bird.

  Laura looked upward, then down, and made out a figure walking along beneath the garden wall, towards the beach and the sea. For a moment she did not question it, saw only some fragment of the night, a metaphysical shape without reference. Then, from the turn of the head, the manner of moving, she recognized Ashburn.

  'Merton - look -' Merton came rumbling to the window. His pipe smoke enveloped Laura; she thrust it from her eyes. 'Do you see?

  What can he be doing?'

  'Good lord,' Merton muttered, 'good lord.'

  'For heaven's sake, go after him,' Laura cried. 'In this state, he'll walk into the sea and never realize it.'

  They ran together towards the front of the house and burst out wildly on to the beach, Merton stumbling, Sibbi erupting in a frenzy of curiosity, demand and fright after them. The dreadful, enormous intimacy of the darkness swept over them, the hot dim essence of the night which still faintly carried the arcane noises of the islanders and the smell of torch smoke.

  'Oh, where is he?' Laura cried. She could not reason why she was so afraid, yet all three had caught the fear, like sickness.

  'There, I see him. You stay here -' Merton set off across the sand, a blundering, great, bear-like form, shouting now: 'Ashburn! Robert!'

  'Oh, the unsubtle fool,' Laura moaned.

  Sibbi half lay against the door, biting her wedding ring, hissing over and over: 'I can't bear it, I simply won't bear it.'

  Merton plunged towards the sea, waving his arms, yelling; then abruptly stopped. Simultaneously the seaward window of the tower opened, and the wind snatched pale handfuls of hair out upon itself as

  if unravelling silver wool from the head of Albertine.

  'What's wrong?' she called down, in a soft, panic-stricken voice.

  'Don't you know?' Laura screamed at her.

  'Oh, please be quiet,' Albertine implored. 'Don't wake him, for God's sake.'

  Laura ran out on to the shore, stared up at the window, then towards the bone-yellow breakers of the sea smashing at Merton's feet.

  'I saw Robert walking towards the water,' Laura said. 'So did Arthur.'

  'But he's sleeping,' Albertine protested. She glanced over her shoulder into the tower room. Her normally calm face betrayed itself when she looked again downwards at Laura. It was convulsed in horrified accusation and loathing, and white as the face of a clock. She shrank back and closed the window after her with violent noiselessness.

  Merton came up the beach, sweat ran down his cheeks. He looked at Laura silently and passed on. Sibbi giggled wildly in the doorway. 'I didn't see,' she cried. The breakers clashed on the shore and raked the sand with their black fingers.

  They had expressions suitable for everything.

  They breathed closely, at midnight, like a woman on the poet's pillow, her ocean voice sounding in the seashell of his ear. He woke and searched for her, a woman with any number of faces. But no woman lay on the narrow bed in the tower, only a girl sat asleep in a chair near the window.

  He got up quietly and went to look at her, yet somehow had no fear that she would wake. Her profile, her defenceless hands and alabaster torrent of hair, all these touched him with a listless tenderness. He wanted to stroke the tired lines away from her mouth which, even in sleep, had a touch of the hungry recalcitrant childishness that generally moulds only the mouths of old women. He wanted to soothe her, go back with her to the green shades of the past. Yet he had no energy, no true impulse. He stood penitently before her, as if she were dead. He desired nothing from her, really desired nothing from any of them, and they clamoured to load him with their gifts, to fetter him with their kindness.

  What do you want then? Undying fame, the glory of the king whose monument is made of steel and lasts for ever? Or does any monument

  last, or any hope? And does any wish of a man matter!

  He left her slumped there and went down the stair from the tower. In her wasp-cell Laura would be sleeping, curled like a foetus around her hate and pain. And pretty Sibbi, probably quite content in the arms of her bear. He crossed the room where the piano stood like a beast of black mirror. He opened the veranda doors yet the garden seemed more enclosed even than the house, full of heat and shadows like lace, and the huddled leper colony of statues. He went out on to the terrace nevertheless, and stood there, and the noise of the sea poured around him and on the beaches inside his brain.

  He felt nothing.

  He wanted nothing, expected nothing.

  He did not quite expect the man who came from the side of the house, along the terrace.

  A slight dark man, walking, looking out of dark eyes, carrying with him the primeval green odour of the sea. The poet turned and looked at the man. A little white hot shock passed through his heart, but he felt it only remotely. The man was himself.

  Ashburn said quietly: 'Well?'

  The man who was himself gazed back at him, without recognition, without dislike, without love. His clothes, Ashburn's clothes, were soaked, as if he had been swimming in the sea. Incredible black and purple weeds had attached themselves to his shoulders.

  'How long,' the man said to him, 'will you make me wait for you?'

  Ashburn leaned back against the wall of the house. All the strength had gone out of him; it seemed as if his body had fainted yet left his mind conscious and alert. He laughed and shut his eyes. 'I have called up my own ghost,' he said, and looked again, and the man had gone.

  The poet rubbed his head against the hot hard wall and discovered, with little interest, that he was weeping. The tears tasted of the sea, teaching him.

  Yet, 'Don't go,' Albertine said in the morning, as she stood on the shallow step by the royal blue water. Her eyes were fixed, not on him, but on the little boat, the young brown islander arrogantly at work on her rigging, fixed on Merton standing on the beach, smoki
ng his pipe, nodding at the waves.

  'The sea's as calm as glass, look at it,' Ashburn said. He smiled at her, took her hand. 'Do you think Merton would risk the trip otherwise, or the island boy?'

  Albertine reached out and took his face fiercely between her hands.

  'Don't go, don't leave me -'

  'There are things we need from the mainland, my love, beside Laura's vitriolic letters to be posted.'

  'No,' she said. Her eyes were wide and desolate as grey marshes; her cold hands burned.

  Merton came up, patted her arm.

  'Come now, it's just what we all need.' He winked anxiously, indicating to her that Ashburn would benefit from an hour or so in the boat. 'Sea's like blue lead, and it's hot enough to fry fish in that water.'

  Albertine suddenly relinquished her hold on the poet. Her eyes clouded over and went blank as if she had lost her sight.

  'Goodbye,' she said. She turned and went back into the house.

  Merton, glancing up, saw her emerge presently on the flat roof of the tower, and wait by the black telescope beneath the awning.

  The two men walked towards the boat together. The village boy nodded sneeringly and let them, as a particular favour, get in, packing his brown bony limbs in position as he took the tiller. They cast off.

  The silken arms of the water drew them in.

  The ship clove the waves gracefully, with a gull-like motion, her sails opening like flowers to the wind. The island and the red house dwindled behind them, and the smoking hills.

  'Cooler here,' Merton said. He knocked the dottle from his pipe as if relieved to be rid of it. 'Feel better now, I expect, old chap?'

  The poet smiled as he lay against the side of the boat, ineffably relaxed. The sea and sky seemed all one colour, one ebony blue. He was aware of a lightness within himself, an inner silence. All the busy organs of the body had ceased, the ticking clocks, all unwound, all at peace, no heartbeat, no beat in the belly or loins, no chatter in the brain. The sky appeared to thread itself between sail and mast like sapphire cotton through a needle. The heat was almost comforting, a soporific laudanum summer breath sighed into the motionless