There was a second, more violent one, two days after her departure.
Looking already not quite the same person, as though the imminence of that departure had effected a definite though inexpressible change in her, in a chocolate-brown suit that I thought I recognised as having once belonged to Audrey, she stood waiting in the hall, her single suitcase strapped and ready at the foot of the grandfather clock, which has been sadly disordered since Howard’s death, and now, as I was crossing the hall towards her, at eighteen minutes to eleven, chimed solemnly five times. While she waited there for her taxi I spoke to her and she spoke to me and between us we put an end to the silence that had been lying over the house.
‘You knew all along, didn’t you?’ she said to me. I was still crossing the hall when she said this, intent on wishing her bon voyage and handing over a gift I had bought for her the day before, a pair of circular earrings fashioned in copper, which I thought would be acceptable. I had the sequence of words and actions involved in all this carefully worked out, but her remarking that I had known all along took the wind out of my sails completely. I handed over the little black box in silence—nodding and smiling of course, as I always do in interim periods.
She looked at them for a moment in their box, then she took them out and put them on. They did not really suit her very well, I thought. She was going to Durham to stay with some relative of her mother’s. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said now. ‘They’re lovely.’
I was most perturbed to see that tears had come into her eyes. ‘Don’t cry,’ I said, and this completely unpremeditated injunction released an emotion in myself which must have been lurking there in wait for just such a set of circumstances. In her white face, the painful prominence of her teeth, the tears in her eyes, I saw the bereaved child who had come to us seven years before, departing as she had arrived, in grief and loneliness; and my own eyes moistened as I accused myself of having regarded her merely as a figure in a pattern, never a single suffering person.
The tendency so to regard everyone, cultivated early and now quite habitual, had cost me the power of a genuinely sympathetic response—as though I had been applying over the years a sort of slow but insatiable leech to my affective faculties. Too late now of course. There was no way, no way unattended by irony or deliberate self-distancing, of conveying to Marion my feeling of sorrow. I tried, however. I stopped nodding and smiling. I even raised my hand and touched Marion on the cheek, actually touched with my finger tips the surface of her face, a gesture I could hardly believe I was making. ‘Don’t cry,’ I repeated. ‘He really isn’t worth it.’
This, without intention on my part, was the right thing to say because it stiffened Marion immediately. The tears proceeded no farther. ‘You mustn’t say that,’ she said, and there was authority in her voice. ‘He was led astray. He is easily led. He hero-worshipped that Cade.’
‘Well I suppose he did, er, does,’ I said. ‘All the same—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It is being easily led that is his trouble. He won’t ever come back here. But he knows where to find me. If he ever wants to find me he will know where I am. . . .’
It seemed to me now that Marion had begun to speak in an unnatural way like one of those heroines in her True Romances and I was relieved to hear the approaching taxi.
‘Well, I’ll be going,’ she said. She had made a distinct recovery during our conversation. The affirmation of Josiah’s worth had cheered her, apparently; or perhaps the assurance that he knew where she was to be found. At any rate she departed holding her head up and smiling. I carried her suitcase to the taxi.
After Marion left, silence settled over the house again. Silence and dust. Audrey remained in her room, making foraging trips to the kitchen when she thought I would not be about, for cream crackers, tea, things of that sort. I myself relied chiefly on tinned soups during this period. It was an uncomfortable time for us both. I suffered from feelings of lassitude and depression, perhaps in reaction to the strain of the previous weeks, and spent most of the time in my room.
Then at a few minutes after nine, on the evening of the second day following Marion’s departure, the silence was again broken, but this time more dramatically. I had just consumed a tin of mushroom soup and was in my room, looking through some old copies of Nova for stocking advertisements to cut out and stick in my scrap-book. (These pictures of women in the act of putting on stockings I find very stimulating, the deliberateness and at the same time carelessness of the exposure.) Suddenly, I heard a very peculiar sound from Audrey’s room, with a bubbling, almost gargling quality in it. I sat for some seconds, but the sound was not repeated. It was rather difficult to know what to do. I did not think that I could have been mistaken, but I was naturally reluctant to intrude on Audrey’s privacy. I listened intently. There was no sound at all. Neither from inside nor outside the house. This silence, in fact, now that I had begun particularly to register it, was oppressive and rapidly grew more so. It seemed to me like the silence that hangs over abandoned places.
I rose and laid my Nova carefully aside. A last look down at the open page, that dreaming face, those heedless thighs. Then I left my room and went along the passage. I listened at Audrey’s door but could hear nothing. I tapped lightly on the door. There was no response. I tapped more loudly. ‘Are you all right, Audrey?’ I called. There was some reply, I thought but very faint, I could not distinguish it. Perhaps she was ill. I turned the handle. The door was not locked. I half opened it and put my head into the room. ‘Are you all right?’ I said. Audrey was sitting up in bed, bolt upright, with the sheet drawn up to her chin in what struck me at first as a rather histrionic spasm of modesty. She had obviously been watching the door intently. Now she stared at me in a curiously wide-eyed, watchful way, as though she were expecting me to behave outrageously.
‘Is everything all right?’ I said again. ‘I thought I heard you calling out.’
‘Go away,’ Audrey said, or whimpered rather, and I should probably have obeyed despite the strangeness of her manner, had I not seen the blood. An irregular patch of it on the sheet just below Audrey’s chin. At that distance it was merely a dark stain but I identified it immediately as blood, my mind made an intuitive leap. ‘That is blood,’ I said, and I advanced into the room. The patch was now much bigger, and spreading rapidly, soaking through the sheet below Audrey’s face. Her wide-eyed expression did not change, but when I put out my hand towards the sheet, she opened her mouth and screamed. I took the sheet and drew it away from her. There was blood everywhere. The front of Audrey’s flannel dressing gown was covered with blood and all the left side of her neck and shoulder. There were little puddles of blood in the folds of the lower sheet.
The knife was not found till much later. It was the bread-knife she had used. She had sat there and sawed through the left side of her neck. Then she called out, just once. If it had not been for that she would almost certainly have bled to death; or so the doctor said. She had not been able to repress it, sensing how terribly she had damaged herself. At any rate, by the time I entered, her resolve had hardened again; she had genuinely wanted me to go away, leave her alone to die. I will not readily forget how her attempt to hide this ebbing of her blood resembled at the time a sort of exaggerated modesty, nor how she screamed when I forced the sheet from her, when she knew her wound was about to be detected. . . .
Audrey has always anticipated everything. It does not strike me as surprising that she should anticipate her end. What I do find difficult to understand is the ferocity of the means employed, the self-mutilation. She has never discussed her reasons with me nor indeed made any but the obliquest references to the episode. I shall never know for certain why she chose to hack at herself with a breadknife.
I shall never know either, probably, what Mr Cade said to her the day I met him in the grounds with wet shoes. I think his main object that day had been to reconnoitre the copse, get the lie of the land so to speak. But it is my belief that he took the oppo
rtunity of telling Audrey something that destroyed her pleasure in the horse. Perhaps he told her that it had been intended in the first place for him. . . .
At any rate Audrey recovered. But owing to the damage to the tendons of the neck on one side she is now obliged to keep her head tilted at an angle about thirty degrees to the vertical. This gives people the impression that she is listening intently for some very faint sound, just as when I came upon her in the drive that day calling Josiah’s name and listening with her head cocked for an answer that never came. . . .
She would not leave the house at first. I had everything to do, everything. (It was during this period that I encountered Major Donaldson at the Post Office, and made an enemy of him.) Little by little, however, she has regained confidence, though still very conscious of her deformity of course. I take her for walks, the devoted brother. No question now of my leaving. We have engaged a maid, more robust than poor Marion and much less given to reading. One day last week, when we were walking down the High Street, happening to glance behind me, I caught some small boys imitating my sister’s gait, mincing along the pavement with their heads cocked. One of them was that round-headed boy whom Audrey had permitted to wander in the grounds. He showed no sign of recognition.
These October days are excellent for digging. I am hoping to reach the front hedge by spring. Then, when the warm weather comes, I shall be able to watch the careless cycling girls.
Books by Barry Unsworth
After Hannibal
The Hide
Mooncranker’s Gift
Morality Play
Pascali’s Island
The Rage of the Vulture
Sacred Hunger
Stone Virgin
Copyright © 1970 by Barry Unsworth
First American Edition 1996
First published as a Norton paperback 1997
All rights reserved
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Unsworth, Barry, 1930–
The hide / Barry Unsworth.
p.cm.
I. Title.
PR6071.N8H531996
823'.914—dc2096-1915 CIP
ISBN: 978-0-393-31632-2
ISBN: 978-0-811-22538-0 (ebk)
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
W.W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU
The Hide Page 19
