‘When she shut the front door behind her this morning I woke up. I caught up with her half way down the drive so you probably wouldn’t have heard the poor girl expressing her opinions.’
‘She wasn’t happy?’
Miranda finally turned round and faced him.
‘No. She woke up on her own. When she came out to look for you we’d left my bedroom door open. She saw the two of us in bed together.’
‘But we fell asleep fully dressed?’ He used the anticipated excuse.
‘Yes, but I half-woke up at six this morning because it was so cold; the weather’s changed you know. I was surprised to see you there, but I decided just to pull the covers up over us both. I’ve put the heating on since then, and…’
‘You did tell her that it wasn’t how it might’ve looked?’
‘Of course I did, but she wasn’t in the mood to listen.’
‘I was meant to go up to her,’ he explained. ‘But we started playing cards, and I wasn’t allowed to finish the game until I’d won everything Gerald had.’
She didn’t reply, but now sat down opposite Lucian with her sandwich. He noticed for the first time that she had a bruise forming under her eye, and there was a cut on the side of her face by her ear. There was a new scab but it was starting to bleed again.
‘Perhaps it’s for the best?’ she suggested hopefully.
‘You may be happy to see the back of Gerald, but I’m not so happy to lose Elizabeth.’ He took a bite out of his sandwich and his stomach lurched.
‘Do you love her?’
‘Of course.’
‘No, really, do you love her? Is it really the end of the world that she thinks you’ve been unfaithful?’
He didn’t know.
‘She said,’ and Miranda smiled at this, ‘that if you try and contact her she’ll tell your parents about everything that’s happened this weekend.’
‘That might be the end of the world.’
‘Of course it isn’t. You’re eighteen, aren’t you,’ she threw her sandwich on the plate, still uneaten.
‘Yes, but I’m relying on my parents to pay my grant so as I can go to University.’
‘The only good thing about families is that they’re forced to forgive even the worst sins.’
‘They might forgive me in time, but they’ll never let me forget. My mother has a special gift for martyrdom. I need their cooperation to escape. Perhaps she will tell my parents anyway, so that I’ll have to stay?’
‘Would she do that?’
‘Possibly.’
‘That’d be desperation on her part, not love. It’s up to you, of course, but it doesn’t sound like an ideal relationship. In a few months time you’ll be away and able to choose friends, and girlfriends, from a vast group of new people. Believe me, what’s happened here’s not the end of the world, not for you. It may actually make life easier.’
‘I really don’t know what to do.’
‘Of course you don’t, but you’re welcome to stay here, for as long as you like. Lie low. No matter how bad things seem right now, they’ll be a little bit easier by tonight, and tomorrow it’ll be even better still.’
‘I’ll still have to face her, and try and explain.’
‘And how pathetic do you sound? If she really loves you she’ll come and ask for your side of the story. Let her prove her love. But ignore me. I’m sounding like a bloody agony aunt. But what’s a couple of days staying here? It can’t get any worse. Inaction is no great crime.’
‘Thanks.’
He looked over at her and noticed that there was blood coming through her dressing gown. It was no surprise she had thrown Gerald Kent out if this is what he had done to her. Lucian thought about asking Miranda about her cuts and bruises but could not summon the courage.
After breakfast the clock chimed the half hour as he passed it in the hall. He felt better for having talked to Miranda, and though he doubted her advice, it was easiest not to question her reasoning. Miranda was seven years older, a woman of the world, he told himself; she knew what she was talking about.
Lucian shaved and showered and found his last change of clean clothes. He decided he would telephone his parents later that day to tell them that he was staying for a few more days. They wouldn’t mind him being away, but quite what he would do he didn’t know.
Washed and dressed, his head felt clearer and he made his way back down the stairs and sat for a while in the living room which still bore the evidence of the previous night’s battle. He was reading Miranda’s book when she appeared in the doorway. She had changed out of her dressing gown and was wearing a sheer grey dress. Once again he wondered at the woman before him and the woman of Gerald’s pictures. The dress was tight under her breasts and tailored around her stomach. As with all her clothes the sleeves were tight and reached down past her wrists, accentuating the length of her arms. She had her red hair tied severely back, and the dress, while not low cut, revealed her collar bone and her neck seemed almost too long.
When she walked on through to the kitchen he got up and followed her. She was sitting at the table and was looking at her hands, and feeling rather self-conscious Lucian set about making a pot of tea. He looked through the cupboards for the materials he needed but she was oblivious to him.
While waiting for the kettle to boil he stared out of the window, unthinking, and when he poured the water into the teapot he asked how she would like her tea. Still she said nothing and he resumed his position at the window. Eventually he decided that the tea must have brewed so he poured it into two cups. His movement reminded her of his presence.
‘I think that Gerald is dead,’ she said simply.
‘How do you know?’
‘A quiet feeling of liberation has come over me.’
She got up and held out her hand, which he took without questioning her. She took him to the door and to his surprise led him outside. The wind dashed the rain into their faces and roared about in the trees and eaves overhead. He hadn’t realised how wild it had become outside. They walked, heads down, around to the front of the house and into the full force of the tempest. It would have been almost impossible to talk, or shout even, but he heard Miranda laugh. He wanted to insist that they go back inside, that it was too cold to be out but she pulled him forwards and down the lawn to a small exposed terrace where the wind tore at their clothes and tried to push them back uphill. She stopped when they were close to the edge and looked out into the wind. In the uproar he could not see the town below, all points of reference were lost in the riot of wind and rain. It was painful and exhilarating at the same time.
She was still laughing. She seemed out of control.
It was not comfortable to be standing still. He hadn’t realized how drenching and cold the rain could be. He was sodden already. The mud oozed into his shoes, but looking down he could see that Miranda had abandoned hers. She saw him looking at her feet where the mud came up between her toes. He felt drunk again from the night before, and hungover, and realised that he didn’t quite know what they were doing. She took his head in her hands and shouted into his ear that she was so cold she could sense her skeleton, and was afraid that if she should fall over then her bones would snap. But all he could think of at that moment was that her words were too loud, but that her breath on his ear felt warm.
And then she let go of him and turned to the rain, and started to sing loudly.
The leaves were torn from the tossing branches of the trees. The wind caused her coat to stream away behind her. It tore through his, and his shirt underneath, separating it from his body by cold, wet blasts.
After a few moments she yelled the explanation that she was trying to out-sing the wind, and she pulled him forward. He wondered how far the gale would take the woman’s words? Perhaps not far, for the wind seemed to be constantly changing direction. They might be snatched from her and taken down into the town? They might be borne across the valley as far as the distant hills?
They ha
d to hold on to each other for support as the wind moved round and was now at their backs, forcing them towards the low western wall of the garden and the edge. It pushed them with an insistence that he was unwilling to go along with. At the very top it was all that they could do to turn around and not be thrown over the side.
Miranda suddenly took his head in her hands again and kissed him on the lips. She gave him no time to respond, but she held him tight and he felt her cold body against his. Again, before he could do anything to reciprocate she turned back to the streaming wind and then she let go of him. The wind seemed to lift him up. He bent to it and was light. He straightened out and on tip-toe, at an angle to the wind, it was as though he had no weight at all. The wind was constant, no longer in gusts, and did not let him down. He put his arms out as if to fly and it seemed to him that there, at the very top of the world with nothing but chaos about them, that he was actually lifted off the ground.
He became one with the wind. It moved around him and through him and he was no longer an obstruction to it.
And then the wind let him down. Lucian collapsed on the muddy ground.
‘You were trying to fly,’ Miranda shouted at him excitedly. ‘And you do it very well.’
He could not stop grinning inanely. She offered a hand to help him up.
‘You’re filthy,’ she laughed and hugged him. When she let go he laughed:
‘So are you now,’ he shouted back.
He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and started to wipe the mud from her face.
‘No,’ she said, struggling away. ‘Let’s get back indoors and out of this.’
They ran back across the lawn, bent low against the wind, and in at the nearest door which led into the conservatory. It was not locked and they would have both hurried through the cold studio but they stopped before the portrait on the easel. Lucian was surprised to see that it had been worked on, presumably at some time that day. The figure was the same, but the background had been given detail that made it look like hanging material.
Miranda shivered but could not look away from it. Lucian too was cold but he was staring at her. He noticed that the ugly mark around her eye had deepened in colour. He looked down at her hands and could see blood mixed with the mud.
The din of the rain on the huge glazed roof was immense. He shivered violently and she noticed, grinning and trembling with cold herself.
‘Where are his paints?’ Lucian asked, rubbing his arms in an attempt to warm them. ‘Where’s the paint brush he’d have been using?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t see them anywhere. He must’ve taken them away with him,’ she shivered almost uncontrollably
‘What’s he playing at?’ Lucian asked. He was staring into the background of the composition. ‘It must have taken him some time to do this. This painting is quite detailed. It isn’t just purple, it’s red and mauve . . . There’s white mixed in, in faint streaks.’
Miranda did not answer. She simply stood hugging her wet clothes to herself and shivered.
‘And it’s quite dry,’ he added, poking the canvas with his index finger. He received a slap on the hand from Miranda.
Neither of them said anything.
‘It’s really quite well done,’ he continued.
‘Don’t say anything,’ she said, stamping her feet in the small puddle of water that had run off her. She could not stop shaking and walked through to the hall.
Miranda rushed off into the dim house and he followed slowly. He could not help but think that she was collaborating with the artist. Perhaps, he guessed, it was an elaborate game? He could not have eluded them all day and yet have been painting at the same time?
Lucian followed Miranda’s damp footsteps upstairs where she was taking a towel from a cupboard.
‘Perhaps you ought to keep all the doors locked, then we’d have to hear him coming in,’ he proposed.
‘I never lock the doors,’ she pointed out, walking to the bathroom but not shutting the door behind her.
‘I suppose he’d have had his own key anyway.’
From where Lucian stood, talking, he could see her pull her dress off, up over her head. He took a step back.
‘There could of course be a supernatural explanation,’ he tried to joke.
‘He’s somewhere in the house,’ she called back at him. ‘He probably never left. He must’ve been in here all the time.’
‘But you saw him leave?’
‘He hit me and I fell on the ground. Maybe he simply came back? Maybe that’s why I couldn’t catch up with him?’
‘I didn’t hear him come back.’ Lucian had doubts now. He heard the shower turned on and found a towel for himself in the cupboard. He rubbed his hair with it vigorously as he walked into his own room and then started to remove his own sodden clothes. He took out the one spare pair of trousers from his bag and sat on the bed and waited. He would have to take a shower after Miranda and hoped she wouldn’t be long; he was shaking with cold.
Eventually the shower was turned off and he heard her go across to her room.
Walking out carefully he didn’t look through her open door on his way past.
‘I didn’t hear him come back,’ Lucian called back at her. ‘Why did you run after him? What were you going to do? The bastard hit you.’
He turned on the shower and took of his clothes. As he was getting in the shower she appeared, leaning on the doorframe in a long-sleeved, dark red, almost black dress. It was an evening dress for a special occasion, it looked wrong at that moment. She didn’t appear to notice his nakedness and embarrassment.
‘Oh, my plan was simple . . . I was going to kill him,’ she said matter-of-factly.
‘Fair enough,’ he said, his back to her as he started to wash. He had long since given up trying to understand her humour. ‘But that means he’s probably in the house with us now?’
‘Listening to us, no doubt,’ she said, then called loudly back into the house: ‘He’s such a bore.’
When he looked back she was still in the doorway, looking down at her still wet feet. ‘I want him to be gone,’ she said, and finally noticing his embarrassment she walked away.
‘You know,’ he called after her. ‘You don’t have to let him come back. You’re not just going to accept his return are you?’
She came back to the door, her expression more serious:
‘Our relationship was expedient in many ways. All the best ones are. Love has never come into marriage, at least, not happy marriages. You need to find the right partner for practical, not romantic reasons. Romance is to be found outside marriage, isn’t it?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Of course it is! We didn’t get married; we both appreciated what a farce it is. People together for a long time begin to hate each other, so you find a partner who doesn’t mind being hated, and who enjoys hating the other person. Come on, you can tell me the truth, you hate him as well? Everyone does who has ever met him.’
‘I don’t know him well enough to properly hate him,’ he said, and then considered that his words might not have sounded quite how he meant them to.
She laughed, but there was a crash from downstairs.
‘He’s down there,’ cried Miranda, surprised.
‘That explains it,’ Lucian said, angrily. ‘Are you a part of the games he’s playing?’
‘He isn’t here!’ she contradicted herself, almost screaming at him.
‘Alright,’ he said, getting out of the shower and putting a towel around himself. He was too annoyed to think of how he looked at that moment. ‘You go down the front stairs,’ he ordered her. ‘I’ll go down the back stairs and we’ll meet in the hall. We’ll flush him out.’
Miranda stood at the head of the stair and yelled, ‘We’re coming to find you.’ She did not descend, however.
‘Come on, let’s get this over with?’ he prompted from the other end of the landing. Still Miranda refused to move.
‘You can prove to me
that he isn’t here,’ Lucian tried to sound as though he thought it all a great game. ‘Or that he is. Whatever you want it to be.’
‘You can look for yourself! I’m not wasting my time chasing after him.’
‘Come on, Miranda,’ he tried to look as though he understood what was happening.
‘Yeah, sure,’ and she disappeared unwillingly down into the darkness.
Lucian continued on through the rambling house, throwing on all the lights in the darker corners. Striding from room to room he failed to find the artist. It was the first time he had been in many of the rooms and it was a depressing exercise to see the house in such a state of deterioration. It was not just that the paintwork and wallpaper and long curtains were stained and discoloured with age, but in places plaster had dropped from the walls and ceiling; in some places it still lay where it had fallen. Cobwebs even trailed across the doorways of the least used rooms.
He met Miranda at the front door and advocated that they go back up and repeat the exercise upstairs. He said that they must have misheard where the sound had come from? Miranda meekly followed him and he repeated the exercise of turning on all the lights. The loft space was eventually the only place which could possibly have concealed anyone.
‘No, he can’t be up there,’ she pointed out. ‘It’d require athletic skills that the bastard doesn’t posses.
‘I suppose you’re right. It’s a good ten feet, and those cobwebs haven’t been touched. You should be ashamed of cobwebs that size,’ he tried to sound light-hearted. Suddenly, now he had stopped running from room to room, he felt cold again.
‘If they worry you,’ she mumbled, distracted, ‘then there’s a brush in the kitchen.’ She continued to look at the loft hatch.
‘I’ve got slightly better things to do then clear up your cobwebs.’
Miranda walked through to her bedroom, calling out to the man hidden somewhere in the house;
‘We give up because we couldn’t give a shit where you are.’ She turned to shut the door. ‘I’ll see you downstairs when you’re dressed.’
‘Alright. But then I’ll leave you two to sort it out between yourselves. I’d better be going home.’
Bloody Baudelaire Page 4
