Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  “It wasn’t quite like that….” Steenie giggled. “Was it, Constance?”

  “Not quite.” Constance’s face took on a closed expression.

  “In other words, you made it up. Just as I said.”

  “Oh, no. It’s true. Word for word. And Constance wasn’t in bed, were you, Constance?” Steenie gave Constance a sly little smile.

  “Not then.” Constance looked away. Her expression was now one of boredom, yet Freddie had the impression she disliked this interrogation and wished Steenie would stop.

  “The truth of the matter is …” Steenie continued, delving a hand into the bosom of his dress and pulling out yards of stuffing, “the truth of the matter is, Constance used to be a terrible snoop, didn’t you, Constance? Winterscombe’s very own little spy. Once upon a time. When she was younger. Not anymore, naturally.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” Constance roused herself. She stood and met Steenie’s eyes. “I see all sorts of things, Steenie. Even now. I can’t help it—it just seems to happen that way. I see things people would much prefer I didn’t see, and I hear things they’d prefer I didn’t hear. But then, it doesn’t matter, because I never talk about them, do I, Steenie?”

  Constance reached across as she spoke. She lifted her hand and, in a deliberate way, rubbed her finger across Steenie’s rouged lips. The rouge smeared across his cheek, and there was a small and dangerous silence. Steenie’s eyes were the first to fall.

  “No,” he said in a flat voice. “No. You’re very discreet, Constance. It’s what we all love about you. Heigh-ho!” He gave an exaggerated yawn. “How late it is! I think I’ll go to bed now.”

  He retired behind the screen, and in the room beyond, Freddie and Constance looked at each other. Freddie shifted from foot to foot, aware that the atmosphere in the room had changed in a way he did not understand. He could sense both hostility and threat—which were inexplicable.

  And yet Constance, now, seemed quite unmoved. As Freddie looked at her uncertainly, Constance blew him the smallest of kisses. She nodded in the direction of the door.

  She mouthed some words at him—“four present”—and at once Freddie’s heart began to beat very fast. It pounded a tattoo in his mind, and he felt it again, that familiar ache of expectation, that lassitude and alerting.

  Constance now produced this effect upon him very easily. She had done so for some time. How long, he asked himself as he moved to the door. Why?

  The door closed. Freddie waited, well schooled, on the landing. How long? Why? Familiar questions now, and yet Freddie could never quite answer them.

  How long? It began, he supposed, quite soon after the death of Constance’s father, which meant it had been going on for more than four years. Yet it began in such small ways, and it crept upon him with such stealth that Freddie was not even sure of that fact.

  Step by step, inch by inch, meeting by meeting: Constance, Freddie felt sometimes, laid siege to him.

  “Did you find the present I left for you, Freddie? The little marzipan apple? I left it on your shirtfront. In your bedroom. It was my present, especially for you, Freddie….”

  “Did you find the book in your room, Freddie? The one I left? Did you see what I wrote in it? Mind you don’t show it to anyone else….”

  “Oh, Freddie, did you know what I was thinking at dinner? Could you tell, when you looked at me? I saw you blushing….”

  “See, Freddie, I’ve brought you another present. It smells of me. Do you recognize that smell, Freddie? Is it nice?”

  Wicked magic. In his mind all these separate occasions blurred and commingled, the innocent and the less innocent, and Freddie was now uncertain in which order they had happened, or when. Did Constance say these things (and do these things) when she was eleven, or twelve—surely that wasn’t possible? Or was it later? Did it, in fact, begin in a more gradual way than he now remembered?

  Freddie never felt sure. All he knew was that (when she wanted) Constance had him in thrall. She could summon him with a click of the fingers, a glance of the eyes, an inclination of the head. And Freddie would go, wherever Constance’s whim commanded—sometimes the woods, sometimes to the cellars, once the gamekeeper’s hut, ripe with the smell of hanging pheasants, and dark…. Where else? Oh, an infinite number of places. In London once, in his mother’s bedroom, with the door half open for added danger, the two of them in front of his mother’s mirror. Once here at Winterscombe in the King’s bedroom. Once in the attics (no, twice in the attics). Once in the library, under Denton’s desk.

  And what did they do in those places—in a dark hut, in front of a mirror, on rugs up in the attics? Never enough, as far as Freddie was concerned, but just enough to make him ache for more.

  A cockteaser. Freddie knew the term, naturally, and once or twice, when angry, had been tempted to apply it to Constance. He rarely did so for long, for he knew it was inaccurate. Too ribald, too cold, too obvious, too slight. Constance teased, yes, but not just his body, or parts of his body. Constance teased his mind, and his imagination, which was why she was so powerful.

  Constance teased, and when she did (what would his present be?) it was magic. Wicked magic.

  “Acland’s room,” Constance said when she joined him on the landing, in her green dress, with her hair in black snakes over her half-bared shoulders. “Acland’s room. Quickly.”

  Acland’s room? For once, Freddie hesitated, and consulted his watch. He was afraid of Acland—his sarcasm, his anger, his cutting tongue. It was now almost midnight. What if Acland should come up? What if he should find them?

  “He’s downstairs, playing billiards. Arguing about the war. Who cares? Hurry up, Freddie. You want your present, don’t you?”

  By then Freddie did want his present very much; his mind was exploding with the possibilities of that present. Who cared about Acland, indeed? He quickened his pace, hurried along the corridors. From the East Wing to the West Wing; as they passed above the hall Freddie heard music and voices, hesitated once more, and then again quickened his pace. Up to the second floor; Constance flitted through the shadows ahead of him. They were now above the King’s bedroom, in that corridor where (so many years before) Freddie had heard the two mysterious screams. (He had long ago forgotten them.) His room, Boy’s room, Acland’s room; outside the three doors, Constance paused.

  “Maybe I’ll show you something first,” she said. “Maybe I will. Just quickly.”

  And, to Freddie’s surprise, she opened the door to Boy’s room. She switched on the light, smiled over her shoulder at Freddie, who faltered in the doorway. Constance crossed to the corner. There, next to a large roll-top desk, under the shelves that still contained all Boy’s childhood trophies, the birds’ eggs, the lead soldiers he painted, the books, the school photographs—there, in the corner, was a large wooden cabinet ranked with shallow drawers. In this cabinet, Freddie knew, Boy kept his photographs.

  “You thought I was being unkind to Boy earlier on, didn’t you?” Constance looked back at him.

  “No. Well, not exactly. You hit him off very well—but, all right, you did go a bit too far. Boy may be awkward and slow, but he’s kind. He’s a good sort; he means well. He’s never done anything to hurt you.”

  “Hasn’t he? He nearly killed my dog today—or didn’t you notice? It’s you who can be stupid, Freddie. You take people at face value. Just because Boy’s your brother, you look up to him, pretend he’s all sorts of things he isn’t.”

  “Look, let’s leave it, shall we? Yes, Boy’s my brother. Obviously I care for him. I respect him. So what? What are we doing in here anyway? Why are we wasting time?”

  “We’re not wasting time, Freddie. And I don’t want you to think I’m unjust. Not to Boy, not to anyone. Boy is not so slow. He’s an artist. Watch. Wait …”

  As Freddie stared at her in puzzlement, Constance produced a small key from her pocket and held it up.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Don’t ask. I
have it. Maybe Boy gave it to me. Now. Look …” Constance bent, unlocked and then opened the last of the cabinet drawers. It was a deep drawer; at the front of it was a neat pile of envelopes and leather-bound albums. These, with an air of contempt, Constance pushed to one side. She reached her hand into the back of the drawer, scrabbled around a little, and eventually withdrew a thick bundle wrapped in what appeared to be white cotton.

  “What’s that?”

  “That? An old petticoat of mine. And inside it, some prints of his photographs. Not the plates—he hides those somewhere else.”

  “Your petticoat?”

  “My petticoat. My photographs as well. At least, Boy took them, but they are all of me. Not the kind of pictures Boy would leave around in an album in the drawing room. Look.”

  Constance unwrapped the petticoat. She laid the bundle on the bed, and Freddie took a hesitant step forward. One by one, as he bent his head to look, Constance held up the pictures.

  As she said, all the photographs were of Constance, exposure after exposure, and all of them had clearly been taken when Constance was younger. In them Constance stood, sat, lay, in a variety of curious costumes. Sometimes she wore a thin and bedraggled shift; more often she appeared to be wearing little more than rags. Her hair was tousled and her feet always bare. She seemed to be wearing an odd kind of makeup: In some she looked as if her face were streaked with mud; in others her lips were grotesquely smeared with rouge, so that she looked sometimes like an urchin, sometimes like a prostitute.

  This impression was deepened by the poses Constance had struck. Somehow she contrived to look both deprived and depraved. Sometimes the rags or shift clung to her thin limbs, as if the material had been wetted; sometimes a sly hand would draw attention to a forbidden part of her anatomy. There, the point of a nipple, the small bud of a just-developing breast; there (Freddie drew in his breath sharply, for he had never seen this much) Constance parted her legs; between them was a cleft in plump flesh, a hint of pubic hair.

  Freddie stared at the photographs, and sickness crawled in his stomach. They disgusted him and they appalled him; they also (and this was shaming to him) aroused him.

  “It started when I was ten, and it stopped when I was nearly thirteen.” Constance’s voice was matter-of-fact. “My breasts grew too much then. I started to look like a woman, and Boy didn’t want that. He likes little girls. Poor little girls. I expect what he would most like to do is visit the slums of London and photograph girls there. Maybe he does—I don’t know. As it was, I had to pretend to look poor and dirty. Boy helped. He used to make me up, rub the mud on my face, that sort of thing. It started before my father died. Boy took my picture the day of the comet party—in the King’s bedroom. And then, a few months later, he asked if I would pose for him again. It developed from there. Curious, isn’t it? I think it made Boy feel guilty. I had to promise never to breathe a word to a soul. And I haven’t—until now. But I thought you ought to see, Freddie. So you’d know—he isn’t quite what he seems, your brother.”

  “Oh, my God.” Freddie turned away. There was no doubt in his mind that these pictures were pornographic, but there was also a curious tenderness and restraint to them, which confused him. He swung around to Constance. “But why, Connie? Why did you agree? Why did you do it?”

  “Why not?” Constance looked at him calmly. “I was very young and there seemed to be nothing wrong. Not at first. I liked Boy. I wanted to please him. And by the time I was old enough to realize that it wasn’t normal, it wasn’t right—well, we stopped then. I was too old anyway.” She gave Freddie an intent glance and then, with an unusual gentleness, covered his hand with hers.

  “It’s all right, Freddie, really it is. I wasn’t hurt. Boy never touched me, never did … anything. I wouldn’t have let him touch me anyway. I would have known that was wrong. I don’t let anyone touch me—except you sometimes.”

  Freddie hesitated. Constance was looking him full in the face, and her expression was one of limpid honesty. What she said flattered him, excited him, touched him—and yet he was not quite sure if he believed her. He had learned from experience that Constance could lie.

  “Freddie, I’ve upset you. I’m sorry.” Constance rose. She wrapped the photographs back in the petticoat and locked them in the drawer, took Freddie’s hand, and switching out the light, closing the door behind her, drew him out onto the landing.

  There it was dark, and Freddie’s eyes adjusted slowly to the sudden absence of light. Constance was only a dim shape, close to him, as she pressed his hand, released it, edged away.

  “I shouldn’t have done that. I wanted you to know, I suppose.” Constance’s voice was now sorrowful. “You won’t want your present now, I expect. Never mind. I can give it to you another time. Tomorrow. Or the day after.”

  Freddie felt dazed; his heart was thumping fast yet again; he had that familiar breathless tightness in his chest. Flaring in the recesses of his mind were images and memories: the small curve of Constance’s childish breast, peeping out beneath a damp petticoat; shadows between thighs; the touch of a hand, the brush of a damp palm, the smell of Constance’s skin and hair. He tried to fight against these memories and images, but it was useless.

  “No. No. I want my present now,” he heard himself say, in a low voice, and beyond him, somewhere in the shadows, Constance sighed.

  “Very well, Freddie,” she said, and she opened Acland’s door.

  “Watch,” Constance had said, and “Wait …”

  And Freddie had obeyed her. Only a candle lit, the candle Acland kept by his bedside. (Constance loved the ambiguity of candlelight.) Acland’s room was bare and monastic. Constance lay on his bare and monastic bed; the candle flickered; Freddie stood at the foot of the bed. On the floor by the bed was a curl of petticoat, a rustle of green silk, the green dress discarded, sloughed off like a skin.

  In the candlelight Constance’s complexion was creamy, and her sharp little body appeared languorous. Very slowly, Constance stretched. In her hand she held her pet snake, which had been curled up in the pocket of her dress; its appearance startled Freddie. Now Constance held her pet aloft; the snake’s head moved from side to side and its tongue flickered. Slowly Constance lowered the snake and rested it between her small uplifted breasts; she stroked its spine, and it lay still, a necklace of S’s against the pallor of her skin.

  Where should Freddie look first? At Constance’s black hair, which coiled across her shoulders? At her red lips, which were parted very slightly, so that Freddie could see her small white teeth and the pink tip of her tongue? At her breasts, which he had never seen, although he had been allowed to touch once or twice? At the angles of her waist, at her flat and boyish stomach, at that mysterious, alluring, terrifying triangle of hair, which looked so soft but which, once, he touched (one touch only, fumbling under skirts and petticoats) and found to be crisp and resilient?

  Freddie looked at all these things, all these components of Constance’s wicked magic, and his vision swam. Looking was not enough (was looking to be his present?); looking only increased the agony. Freddie reached out a hand.

  “Wait,” Constance said more sharply. “Wait. Watch.” Then she parted her legs, and her snake began to move. Usually this snake was lazy; not now. Now it began a complex journeying: It coiled and uncoiled between her breasts, slithered up to the curve of her throat, nestled in the hollows beneath her collarbones, darted out its tongue, and began a descent. Across Constance’s rib cage, slithering across her thighs, through the pubic hair, down to her ankle, around which it coiled like a slave anklet. There was now an expression of concentration on Constance’s face. She frowned, passed her tongue across her lips, bit the tip of her tongue between her sharp white teeth. Then, just as the snake seemed to decide on a final resting place (curling on the cream of her stomach, a pattern of jet and diamonds), Constance began to touch herself.

  First her breasts, which she cupped in her hands and stroked, then pinched. Her nipples s
tiffened, and Freddie—who had heard of this happening but had never witnessed it—felt his body give a demanding, mutinous lurch.

  After that, Constance’s movements became more businesslike, less desultory. Constance had small square hands (they were not her most beautiful feature); her fingernails were bitten. One of these hands she now insinuated between her thighs; the other remained at her breast, flicking at the tip of one nipple in an idle way, as if she were bored. The right hand, the hand between her thighs, moved deftly, and the fact that it was so small, crammed with cheap rings, that the fingernails were bitten, added to the eroticism for Freddie.

  Freddie could not quite see what this hand was doing, and he leaned forward against the footboard of the bed, which creaked. This alarmed Freddie—one infringement of the rules, he knew, and Constance would curtail the entertainment.

  Now, however, she was merciful; her eyelids flickered open, and her dark blank eyes fixed on Freddie as if she did not see him at all. Or perhaps Constance liked the fact that he watched with such concentration; perhaps—for she smiled.

  “Open the door, Freddie,” she said in a dreamy voice.

  “What?”

  “Open the door….”

  Freddie did so. From below he could hear voices still, and now they were more distinct; actual words could be discerned. War, Freddie heard, then murmurs, then again war: a tocsin of a word, and Freddie hesitated. Supposing Acland came up? Supposing his valet, Arthur, should put in an appearance? Supposing Constance’s current governess, the bristling Fraulein Erlichman, should arrive on the scene?

  But these were (apart from Acland) unlikely appearances: Arthur, who grew insolent and lazy, would come only if rung for; Fraulein Erlichman retired early. Besides, as Freddie had learned, fear of discovery had its uses—it could sharpen desire. Freddie hesitated a second only, no more; then he was back at the foot of the bed. Constance’s eyes were still open and they remained upon him while, with delicacy and precision, she parted the lips of her sex.