Fearie Tales

by Fearie Tales- Stories of the Grimm

  I watched avidly, telling myself that, since the lake was on my property, I was entitled to the spectacle. Besides, I imagined that my feelings in those moments were not predominantly sexual. I was filled with the desire to possess her, but in the way that one longs to possess some exquisite little object—an ivory statuette, perhaps, seen in the window of an antique shop.

  The still of the morning was utterly noiseless, so that I seemed to hear the blood running through my veins and my heart drumming. Laura the cat, having had her fill of breakfast, came over and began to nose my legs. I continued to watch, motionless.

  Presently Yuki dived down into the depths of the lake, leaving the surface a dark, unblemished mirror. Her absence stretched from fifteen to thirty seconds, so that I began to be concerned for her, then to wonder if my vision of her had not been some kind of illusion.

  Thirty seconds stretched to a minute and my concern became a fever. I considered running down to the lake to rescue her. Then at last she broke the surface and was swimming toward me. Strangely she had allowed her hair to fall over her face so that I could barely see her features, and what I could see was blurred by the water that dripped over it.

  As she walked up the bank the water seemed to cling to her like a viscous veil. There was a moment when she stopped abruptly and lifted her head, still partially covered with her hair. I was reminded of an animal in a forest suddenly scenting danger and felt sure that she had somehow become aware that I was watching her. With instinctive quickness—again I was reminded of an animal—she crouched down and turned her head away from me.

  When she rose again she had her back to me and was clutching something white. It was a robe of some kind—toweling, perhaps—and when she had put it on she began to run up the bank and across the grass in the direction of her cottage as if seven devils were behind her. I turned away from the window, not wanting to be seen and feeling obscurely guilty. I had seen her breasts: they were small but perfectly formed and the nipples, like her lips, were the color of raspberries.

  In the next few days I tried to avoid all contact with Yuki. I occupied myself with the small amounts of work to which I had been delegated: writing articles for trade magazines and the like. Danielle, whose powers of observation had been enhanced rather than dimmed by her condition, noticed at once that I was in an odd, distracted state. Of course I tried to conceal it from her, but it was no use. Her oblique, intuitive intelligence devised a plan to shake me free of my neurosis. She proposed that we should have a dinner party, and that our pretext should be that we were inviting friends and neighbors to meet our charming new tenant, Yuki. I agreed, knowing that any reluctance on my part would immediately invite further suspicion.

  In the country one can become extremely attached to rather dull people simply because they live nearby and are pleasant and kind. So we invited the Havards and the Spences. I say they were dull, but, to be as objective as I possibly can, I can’t really say they were any duller than Danielle and I had become over the years. They were almost inevitable choices because, apart from anything else, we owed them hospitality. The difficulty was to find a spare man to partner Yuki, and Danielle was oddly insistent that we should sit down to table as four couples. Eventually, for want of anyone more suitable, we invited Justin.

  Justin lived in a small cottage in our village and was an artist. That is to say, he painted and called himself an artist, though I have never heard of anyone buying one of his paintings. His means of subsistence was a small inherited private income. I found his choice of lifestyle on the whole rather admirable. He never complained, as some artists do, about the neglect to his genius, perhaps because he never did anything to inflict it upon others; at the same time I did wonder how he found purpose in life. He was a tall, lean man in his fifties, not unattractive, but too diffident to be a charmer. He had about him the slightly wistful, neglected air that you find in many unpartnered middle-aged men. He was not dull; at any rate his form of dullness was peculiar to himself, which, in our part of the world, counts as being interesting.

  Yuki was the first to arrive for the dinner party. It was a warm July evening, so we had decided to have drinks on the terrace overlooking the lake. Danielle and I noticed at once that in the fortnight since she had come to us her English had improved enormously. Paradoxically, this only served to make her seem more Japanese, since she had managed to translate the formal conversational patterns of her native language into equally formal English. On arrival, having first presented Danielle with a bonsai tree in a pot, she handed me something wrapped in black tissue paper.

  “Because you a famous and popular actor interested in theater,” she said.

  I had come across this penchant for meaningless flattery in the Japanese before and knew that it required no denial from me that I had ever been famous or popular. We both understood it was nonsense, just part of the game.

  I opened the tissue paper and found that it was a book called Noh Plays of Old Japan Translated by A Lady. The edition, dated 1867, was bound in Hessian cloth and printed on what looked like handmade paper. There were full-page illustrations too, in black and white. I thanked Yuki profoundly for this strange rarity and she bowed in acknowledgment. She told me she had discovered it in a local secondhand bookshop.

  The next person to arrive was Justin, carrying an untidy bunch of flowers plucked from his garden, which he presented to Danielle. It was typical of him that the shirt and jacket he had decided to put on for the occasion were almost smart, but his jeans were clearly the ones he had worn all day and were smeared with countless dabs of paint. Yuki seemed bewildered at first by this vision of British eccentricity.

  Egoists like Justin can occasionally deliver bursts of enormous charm, and for about twenty minutes he showed his best side, but as soon as the Spences and the Havards arrived he began to devote his attention exclusively to Yuki. From then until the end of the evening he monopolized her. It was difficult to say whether he had captivated her or she him, but there was clearly a mutual fascination. I have to say that their relationship bothered me from the first, but I did nothing at all to hinder it. It was partly that any interference would have aroused Danielle’s suspicions; in any case, I could never decide whether I should warn Justin about Yuki or vice versa.

  That night, after our guests had left, I said to Danielle: “That seemed to go all right.” Usually this rather banal opening was the prelude to a discussion about the social interactions that had just taken place. It was a process which both Danielle and I were still able to share and enjoy, but on this occasion Danielle was not in the mood for postmortems. Rather abruptly she asked to be put to bed. I wanted to ask what was the matter, but was afraid of a rebuff.

  Having settled Danielle, I went to my own study to drink a final glass of whisky on my own. I often feel that the best thing about exercising hospitality is the stillness that follows it. Outside in the darkness an owl shrieked. I started violently and was a little alarmed by my reaction. My nerves were unexpectedly on edge. I picked up Yuki’s gift and leafed through it.

  Noh plays are not really dramas as we would understand it. They consist mostly of narration and comment. To the Westerner they are more like cantatas or liturgies with responses and lyrical interludes, and yet, though the tales they tell are often vanishingly slight, they have a compelling quality. Events pass as if in a dream; delicate atmospheres are invoked. There is sometimes a harshness and cruelty about them which may even enhance their beauty.

  I turned the pages dreamily and was surprised to find that one of the illustrations was similar to the print I had hung on Yuki’s wall. It was in severe black and white as opposed to color and the lines were more crudely engraved, but the image was the same. An old man is sweeping leaves beside a pond. His face is a serpentine wriggle of black lines that simply but effectively convey the man’s age and the torture of his soul. In the trees that fringe the pond hangs an object like a tambourine.

  On the page facing the picture was the beginni
ng of a play that announced itself as Aya no Tsuzumi, The Silken Drum. After a list of characters came the first speech of one designated as COURT OFFICIAL (Waki):

  “You have before you an official at the Palace of the Moon in the province of Chukuzen. Let me relate to you the history of this place. There was once a beautiful Princess who lived in the Palace of the Moon which was surrounded by a lovely garden. The garden was tended by an old man who regularly came to sweep the leaves by the Laurel Pond. There one day he saw the Princess and fell in love with her. He was a very foolish old man because one day he could not prevent himself from declaring his love for the Princess, but she was born of a water spirit and had no heart, and when she was alone she had no face. The Princess appeared to take pity on the old man and hung a drum in the tree beside the Laurel Pond telling him that every time he beat it, she would hear the drum in the Palace of the Moon and come to him. But when the old man beat the drum he found that she had mocked him by stretching silk instead of skin across the drum so that it made no sound. The old man would beat the drum in vain and in the end he went mad with despair and threw himself into the Laurel Pond. And now his angry ghost haunts the Laurel Pond with his endless torment and those who come to it at night hear inside their heads the beating of the silken drum.”

  The rest of the play seemed to me to be a simple working out of this strange little story, and not very impressive save for a few stray lyrical fragments from the chorus:

  “A silken drum, hung in a laurel tree,

  Beats out the autumn of his lust,

  As rainfall on withered leaves,

  As the fall of a dragonfly into a moonlit lake.”

  I found it hard to sleep that night, possessed by the sheer strangeness of what I had read. The story stuck in my mind, despite its cruel pointlessness, or perhaps because of it. In my fitful dreams I seemed to discover a meaning which, when I woke, evaporated. Eventually I could stand it no longer and decided to get up.

  Laura the cat was pleased to be fed so early. She nuzzled my hand tenderly before attacking the sachet of food I had opened for her. I wandered about the sitting room, idly clearing up after the previous night’s party. I pulled open the curtains.

  The dew was heavy on the lawn. The sun had only just risen above the horizon behind a thin veil of cloud. Over the lake hung mist like a congregation of specters, twisted into strange shapes. I had hoped—yes, I admit it—that I might have seen again the naked form of Yuki dipping in those waters, but she was not there. Of course not! Why should she have been? It was a shameful idea.

  A figure stood on the far side of the lake, but it was fully clothed and male. I could not tell immediately who it was because of the mist. The figure was pacing around, hands in pockets with slightly hunched shoulders. He was an odd sort of trespasser. Was he waiting for someone? I found a pair of binoculars and looked again. This time I could see that it was Justin.

  It angered me to find this artistic deadbeat making free with my property at such an early hour. I decided to go down and challenge him, firmly but politely, of course, but just then Danielle called out from the bedroom. Once I had attended to her needs I came back into the sitting room to look again, but Justin was gone.

  There was no doubt, however, that something was happening between Yuki and Justin. I would often see Justin walking down the drive to pay a call on her. If I waved or called out to him he would often ignore me, or offer the most perfunctory of salutes. Frequently he would be carrying a brush and a tin of paint or a box of tools, presumably with a view to making some minor adjustment to Yuki’s domestic arrangements. I might have told him that any repairs or alterations were my responsibility, not his, but somehow I did not. When Lee was at home Justin could be seen out on the lawn with the boy, bowling to him with a tennis ball or catering to some other childish whim. He seemed to me to have become a slave to Yuki and her son.

  I remember on one occasion watching Justin as he wheeled Lee around the lawn in a wheelbarrow which had been lined with cushions for the boy’s comfort. It was a hot August afternoon and Justin was sweating from the exertion. Every time he stopped, Lee would yell at him and insist on one more circuit of the lawn. Dimly through the window of the cottage I could see Yuki looking out. Her face was expressionless, the eyes dark. It was as if she had placed a mask at the window instead of her own face to look out on the scene.

  As time went on, my concern—you might say my obsession—with Yuki and Justin’s relationship increased. Even now I cannot fully explain it. I even voiced it to Danielle, though I knew I would get no sympathy there. In the last few weeks Danielle had begun to withdraw into herself. Acute illness and disability sometimes take people in this way. When I mentioned Yuki and Justin almost lightheartedly to her, saying something like “I just can’t make out their relationship,” she looked at me with that unnervingly penetrating gaze she had.

  “Why on earth are you bothering about them?” she said. “Just thank your stars she hasn’t got her little hooks into you.” In other words it was none of my business, and of course she was right.

  I tried not to think about it, but it was difficult. One evening in mid-September, just as autumn was beginning to encroach on us, having settled Danielle in front of the television with a light supper, I went out for a walk. I went down the road to the stream which divided us from the next village and lingered at the ford, watching the light drain from the sky behind the black trees. By the time I was returning it was darker than I had expected. At the top of the drive I looked down toward Yuki’s cottage.

  The curtains of one of the windows to her sitting room were open and the interior was bathed in the yellow glow of a standard lamp. In the background on the opposite wall I could make out the array of white theatrical masks that had replaced the mirror. In front of them were two people. Yuki was standing up and Justin was sitting or kneeling in front of her, I could not tell which.

  Yuki’s face was almost entirely obscured from me by her long black hair. I could see her figure down to just below the thigh and she was naked. Though half turned away from me, I saw the contour of her breast and its raspberry-colored nipple. Justin’s face was clearly visible and his expression gave me a shock. He was gazing up at her and his look was one of perplexity and terror. I could not help approaching for a closer look.

  Yuki lifted up one arm and from a cup began to pour a liquid over Justin’s head. His expression turned from one of fear to acute agony and he covered his face with his hands. I heard her laugh. It was a terrible laugh, high-pitched, like an animal’s shriek—a laugh of pure vicious mockery without a trace of humor or humanity in it.

  I stepped forward, half-minded to intervene, but then something was in my hair, fluttering and screeching. Glancingly I touched it, and there were no feathers, so not a bird. It was only a second or two, but I believe that I had touched the fur and leathern wing of a bat. I turned and ran back to my house.

  After that I became still more distracted and out of touch. Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—Danielle did not notice. She was by that time too involved in her own physical deterioration. I had begun to hire carers for her on a more regular basis, and this in turn gave me more time for my own obsessions.

  A few days later I was taking a walk through the village when I happened to pass Justin’s cottage. Morbid curiosity had been growing in me and I decided to satisfy it.

  His was one of a row of workmen’s cottages, barely large enough for one, of the two-up and two-down variety with a kitchen extension at the back. His front door was not open, so I concluded that he must be in his studio, a brick outhouse at the end of his garden. Its door was standing open and I could see him within, his back to me, attending to one of two canvases, both of which were on easels. Not wishing to extend the period of my unobserved scrutiny of him, I knocked tentatively at the door.

  He started violently and turned round. “Christ, where did you spring from?”

  I was shocked to see how he had aged in a few short w
eeks. His lean face was now scribbled over with lines that I had not seen before. Deep grooves creased his cheeks and curved around his mouth from the nostrils; the eyes were puddled in grayish-purple sleeplessness. His sparse hair was in wild confusion over the top of his head, with more gray in it than previously. It broke like a storm over the shore of his temples. I thought I saw madness on him, but this may be the product of hindsight or wishful thinking.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, with an effort to control himself. “I don’t really like to be disturbed when I’m working.” Working, he called it: a small vanity, I suppose.

  “Looks interesting,” I said.

  Justin’s paintings were vaguely reminiscent of the sloshy semiabstract style of Willem de Kooning, an artist whom he admired. The two canvases before me seemed more controlled and less abstract than his usual work. Both showed roughly the same scene: a woman standing beside a pond fringed with trees. The woman was wearing a traditional Japanese kimono, sketchily done, but well enough to create a clear impression. In one painting the woman was bent over the pond so that her long black hair, blazoned with a single streak of white, streamed over the front of her head, obscuring her face. But there was no reflection of her in the water. In the second she was standing upright and her face, fringed by the black hair, had no features; it was a smooth white oval, like an egg. Hanging in the bushes behind her was a tambourine-like object covered with patterned cloth.

  “Is that meant to be Yuki?”

  “Piss off! Look, just … piss off!”

  I did as I was told. I had seen the anguish on Justin’s face and knew that it was no use arguing. As I left the cottage an autumn wind sprang up and began to snatch leaves from the trees. Later that afternoon from the windows of my house I caught sight of Justin again. He was raking dead leaves from the lawn in front of Yuki’s cottage. A white face seen dimly through a windowpane indicated that she was watching.