Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  Hennessy and Tubbs: they had both made an effort, that was clear. They had arrived on the overnight train from Yorkshire that morning; they would return on a train that afternoon. Jack Hennessy wore the uniform of a private; Arthur Tubbs, that of a corporal. Hennessy’s uniform was spruce. His khaki jacket strained across the muscles of his back; the toes of his army boots were mirrors. The back of his neck looked raw—a severe army haircut; there was a shaving gash on his cheek. They made an incongruous pair: Hennessy so massive, Tubbs so shrunken. Tubbs was fluent as a weasel; his hair, parted in the middle, was smarmed with grease. He sported a new moustache; traces of the acne remained.

  Of the two, it was Tubbs who appeared the more nervous. He fingered the wisp of moustache; he craned his head back and forth; he winked at his mother and his sisters; he shifted from foot to foot. Tubbs was a coming man (though Constance of course did not know that). Tubbs would do well out of the war: His expertise in supplies would become adroit; he would learn about markets, black and white; he would come to understand the poetry of supply and demand. After the war, Arthur Tubbs would rise; Jack Hennessy would not. Coke, and the boiler in the basement that ate pound notes, lay in wait for Hennessy, whose instincts were feudal.

  Hennessy, meanwhile, was an impressive bridegroom. No sign of nerves: He stood ramrod straight; he did not turn once. A tree of a man, an oak of a man. Constance looked at his rigid back. Hennessy, who used to catch butterflies and put them in matchboxes. Once he showed her a stag beetle and pulled off one of its legs, so that it ran around in a circle. With such diversions Hennessy had entertained Constance Cross the albatross.

  The asthmatic organ changed key; it made a new attack to herald the entrance of the bride. Still Hennessy did not turn around. Jenna was wearing gray, not white (Jane had paid for her dress). It was of soft material, gathered across the front to disguise the alteration in her figure. She came up the aisle on the arm of a small rusty old man, presumably another member of the Tubbs family, for as he passed them, the rusty old man winked. A steady pace. Jenna held her chin high; she looked neither to right nor left. She was carrying, Constance saw, a bouquet of violets.

  Violets were cheap, easily available on any street corner, and perhaps therefore predictable. Nevertheless, they made Constance angry too. The ghosts in the church shifted and shuffled; they whispered about the violets; they snuffed at their scent of damp earth. Jenna had reached the altar rail. The priest drooped within vestments too big. Jenna faltered once as—for the first time—Hennessy turned.

  How the anger sang! Constance knew she ought to clamp down on it now, quickly, but she did not want to clamp—she wanted to let it rip. There was lightning in her fingertips; her hair burned; she tasted smoke; her heels drummed. Acland’s baby was being given away.

  One person was missing from this congregation, and that person was Acland himself. Constance waited for him to join the other ghosts. She waited for him to stop this terrible ceremony. When he did not come (of course he would not; he had come once only, to her, to say goodbye) her anger rebelled. It made a chaos of this church: It took up the tiles from the floor and hurled them about in the air; it whistled and hooted its revolution; it made barricades of the pews and burned down the altar rails.

  Constance looked up: up, up, up. Above the arches of the nave, above the clerestory windows, up to the spandrels and the curvatures of the roof. A dark place, full of words and whispers, they whirled with the most violent energy.

  They brushed her skin. Constance gave a small cry; she would not stay. It was too wicked and too terrible. Easy to leave. Snap the prayer book shut. Kick the hassock. Tap the heels and the toes on the tessellated floor. Down the side aisle, past the monuments, past the poor box, past the font. The porch door was heavy. Its hinges screamed. Constance was outside on the steps. The rain still fell. The wind blew paper along the street. London wept.

  Constance lifted her face to its tears. She breathed in great gusts of its air. She tasted salt and soot. She remained absolutely still—that was necessary—until the anger left her.

  It did not want to go. It was like an incubus. It liked it inside her. It clutched and it clung. It insinuated itself into her veins. It pounded its fists in her head and made it ache. It drummed its heels up and down inside her lungs. It became soft, and the sponge of her lungs soaked it up.

  It could be willed away; she had willed it away before. Constance closed her eyes and concentrated her mind. She gathered the ugly incubus into a bundle, a malevolent amorphous thing, a crafty thing, dwarfish and sly. It resisted being gathered, but she could do it. Tentacle by tentacle: there it was. She could feel it: It was lumpish. She forced it down, out, and away. It was like giving birth, getting rid of the thing. It stuck. Its lumpishness jammed her up. It clung to her.

  “Get out, get out, get out.” Constance said the words aloud. The thing gave a knotty and reluctant consent. It bunched, squirmed, clung, gave up.

  It was gone. She could breathe again. Constance hugged her arms around herself. She began to see again. The city righted itself. The sky stopped weeping. She felt very pure. She was like an empty purse, a hollow shell; she rejoiced in the emptiness. It made her feel cleansed and perfectly light. A light, pure, clean, empty thing. Dry as a nutshell, light as a feather, capable of flight.

  She stood very still upon the steps. No sound came through the heavy door of the church. She walked back and forth upon the steps in such a way that someone watching her might have thought she tried to come to a decision. Back and forth.

  Then she stopped. Apparently the decision was made.

  She carried an umbrella, which she then raised. Almost immediately she closed it again. She ran down the flight of steps. Acland told her to go on, so she sped along the wet pavements. Her feet pattered. Acland encouraged. The stones shone.

  Along the street, around the corner, and she was on a bridge. She looked down and watched the Thames flow. A gray river, that day, deep and tidal. Farther up there was a landing wharf; the water was clotted with boats: a coal barge, two tugs, a ferryboat, a steam launch. Constance looked down at the river for a precise length of time: seventeen minutes, one for each year of her life. Stop, or go on.

  A cab was passing. Constance, unused to hailing cabs, contrived to stop this one.

  It smelled of hair oil and tobacco. There was a newspaper full of war left behind on the seat.

  Constance climbed into the back without giving the driver directions. The engine idled; it made the vehicle shake.

  She leaned forward and tapped on the glass partition. When the driver pushed it back she told him to take her to Albany, although she was quite aware it was morning still, and four hours till three o’clock.

  When they came into the bedroom Jenna shared with Florrie—she and Jack Hennessy, alone for the first and last time that day—Hennessy said three things. They frightened her. He said: “Was it just the once?” He shook her when he said it, catching hold of her very suddenly and shaking her so hard it made her teeth clash. Jenna did not answer him. Hennessy seemed not to notice her silence. He said the next thing.

  He said: “You done it before. It wasn’t the first time. You’ve been dirty, you have. Dirty little bitch.”

  He took a gulp of air. He said the third thing. He said: “I know. I set that trap for him. When I heard he was dead, I thanked God. I hope he rots. I hope the rats get him.”

  He said these things very fast. The words were wet and hot, like his eyes; it seemed a physical effort for him to get them out past his teeth and his lips and his tongue. He shook with the effort; his skin glinted with sweat. The words seemed to give him pain, and pleasure; Jenna thought he looked like a man having sex. He grunted and turned away; his shoulders slumped. Jenna felt sick.

  She knew she had to be careful—she had known that before they even came into the room. So she was careful with his words now. She edged away from him and, since there was no chair, sat down upon the bed. Her child moved in her womb. She look
ed at the words; she unpicked them; she stitched them together again. She told herself that they could not mean what she thought they meant; they must mean something else. A trap.

  Jack Hennessy had begun to walk up and down in the small room. Its ceiling sloped, and he had to duck his handsome head to do so, but he seemed hardly to notice that. Back and forth, up and down. The floor of the room was bare scrubbed boards. There was one strip of coconut matting. Hennessy walked up and down this strip, like an animal in a cage at a zoo. He did not look at her. His hands were thrust into his pockets.

  In her hand, Jenna held an orange. She looked down at it. She concentrated her eyes and her mind upon it, thinking that the orange might make his words go away. The orange had been provided by Mrs. Tubbs. It was a great extravagance, but Mrs. Tubbs said the children liked them; they always had oranges for Christmas, birthdays, and weddings.

  They had also had, for the wedding breakfast, a bridal cake, round pies filled with steak and kidney, jellied eels, saucers of mussels and cockles doused in vinegar, a trifle decorated with crystallized violets, stout for the men, and a drop of gin for the ladies.

  Jenna had eaten one pie, a spoonful of trifle. She had speared one cockle on a pin and swallowed it. It was rubbery and sour. The cake was rich and sweet; the icing pierced her teeth. Mrs. Tubbs was ribald—also kind. She knew there was something wrong with this wedding, and that made her kinder still. “Now, Arthur,” she said, “let those two lovebirds alone. They’ve had enough of your stories. Give over. They want to be alone.”

  She had almost managed conviction. Jenna had been touched by that. She knew she did not look like a lovebird of any kind. They had gone upstairs obediently, and Jenna had taken her precious orange with her. It was wrapped in silver paper; when she eased the paper back and pressed her nail against the peel, the juice spurted. It was sticky on her fingers. It smelled tangy; it was as sharp as the sun.

  She did not know Hennessy at all, of course. She had known that as soon as she walked into the church. There he was, familiar in every respect; she was acquainted with each hair of his head and each pore of his skin. She knew his voice, she recognized the deliberation of his hands, there were no surprises in his eyes—and yet he was a stranger. She was about to marry a man she had known since she was born, whom she had never met in her life.

  She had almost wavered then. But her child kicked. She had walked on.

  Jenna had been eight when her mother died, and Mrs. Hennessy, who had four sons and craved a daughter, had taken her in. The other three sons, all large like Jack, were boisterous. He was not. He liked to be on the edge. To sit at the edge of a room or the edge of a group. He always stationed himself near a door when inside, and when outside, would linger, delay, then—without explanation—peel off from the group. He liked to walk alone. He preferred to eat alone, when he could. He liked to drink alone, too, though this was never discussed. He went on binges, which might last for as long as two days, and then he would return and sit on the edge of the room again. He binged, and returned sullen.

  He was slow. Some of the people in the village said he was simple. They would touch their foreheads in a meaningful way. Simple, but harmless, and a hard worker.

  He could fell even quite large trees single-handed; he had been known to work eight hours in the sawpit. He liked to sand wood down, and he would do it religiously, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing until the surface was as silky as driftwood.

  He smelled. He smelled now—of the sweetness of stout, of damp khaki, of sweat. Jenna thought that perhaps he knew he smelled, for he washed constantly—every morning and every night when he got back from work. His brothers might be lazy; Jack was not.

  Washing was a performance: His mother had to boil water and carry it steaming out to the back scullery. Hennessy would strip to the waist. He immersed his head in the water; he soaped his thick arms, his huge shoulders, his chest, his back. He rubbed at his armpits. He sniffed at them. He splashed water all over the floor, which was earth, and left a muddy mess for his mother to clean up after him.

  He would emerge: lean, muscled, anointed, gleaming, and his mother would hand him a clean shirt. He would stand by the door of the back parlor and button it up, slowly. His mother would make little rushing conciliatory movements, smoothing the sleeve, stroking out an invisible crease, and Jenna would sit by the fire and watch him. She thought Hennessy liked to be watched. She thought his mother was hurt when people said her eldest son was simple. She also thought his mother was afraid of him.

  A hulk of a man. A man of few words, his mother used to say. When she was small, he fascinated Jenna: She could not understand how a man so large and so strong could also be so gentle. And he could be gentle; he was always gentle with her. He used to take her for walks. He held her hand and never crushed it. He picked flowers for her. He knew their names: lady’s-smock; wake-robin; scarlet pimpernel; Queen Anne’s lace. She liked him.

  Going for walks, and walking-out. It was a crucial distinction. She and Jack Hennessy had passed from the one to the other without comment. She admired this reticence in him. He was teased by his brothers, who said he was gone on her. Hennessy ignored this, and she admired that too. Hennessy had dignity. He declared his affection for her once, and once only, when she was fourteen years old. Out of his habitual and brooding silence came a wellspring of words, which were not without eloquence.

  He said she had him there in the palm of his hand, and always had, and always would do. He said he kissed the ground she walked on. He said he gave her his heart. He said he would die for her. He said, “You’re mine, Jen. I always knew it.”

  His eyes swallowed her up. They looked hungry and anxious. They beseeched her and they commanded her. She knew people laughed at him. She felt sorry for him. He put his arm around her waist. It was the only time he touched her, ever; he said she was not like other girls, that she was decent, that was why—but all the same Jenna thought it was odd. She had expected him to kiss her.

  She might have married him in any case—there was a part of Jenna that would not fight, a part that drifted, and clung to the familiar: to Mrs. Hennessy and the Hennessy house and the companionship of Hennessy’s brothers. She might have settled for that. Then Acland happened.

  After which, Hennessy was an alibi. She knew she used him, but she told herself she was scrupulous. She was kind to him. She talked to him. She never laughed at him. She was not required to lie—or, rather, she lied only by omission. Hennessy never asked her if she loved him, for he had always seemed to assume she must; there it was, weighty in his eyes: fate, destiny. Sometimes this made Jenna rebel. She resented the assumption and felt she wanted to slap it down and wriggle free of it. She never did. She let Hennessy assume—it was safer that way. It made for a better alibi.

  Hennessy could not be hurt by what he did not know, Jenna had told herself then, as people do. She knew it was an evasion, and the evasion would set off small flurries of guilt. The guilt, in a way, made it worse—for when she was most guilty, she was also most kind.

  And now she was married to him. There was a baby in her womb and a ring on her finger, and an orange in her hand.

  Hennessy was still pacing the coconut matting.

  Jenna examined the orange. She smoothed the silver paper. She unstitched Hennessy’s three statements, then stitched them together once more. They frightened her very much. This stranger she had married was violent. He was not so simple, or so slow. He knew.

  “Was it just the once?”

  Hennessy said those words again. They came at Jenna out of the silence and the creaking of floorboards; they made her jump.

  They did not fit with his other words, but they gave Jenna hope. She could see it in front of her face, opening out: the possibility of a lie.

  Well, she had prepared a lie. She had coached herself. She had the words pat.

  Hennessy lowered himself onto the bed near her. Its springs sagged beneath his weight. He sat upright, staring straight ahead. He seemed
to be waiting for the lie, and so Jenna began on it. It was as close to the truth as she could make it (scrupulous again). There had been a soldier; it was her night off; she took one drink too many; it was … just the once.

  A soldier—that was true anyway. Jenna did not find it easy to lie. She knew the fabric of the story was threadbare, and so, in an effort to make it stronger, she repeated the lie, once, twice, a third time: just a soldier, just a mistake, just the once. It was some time before she realized that, somewhere in this tangle of sentences, Hennessy had begun to cry.

  He attempted to stop himself. When that did not work, he took gasps of breath, which made him shudder. He rubbed his knuckles in his eyes like a child. Jenna was shaken and appalled.

  “Jack. Jack. Don’t take on so. It makes me ashamed,” she said. She moved closer to him and, in an awkward way, put her arms about his neck.

  This seemed to quiet Hennessy. He became still. He took her hand in his and looked at it.

  “I put that trap there. Did you guess? I put it there for him.” Out came the words. He continued to stare at her hand.

  “What trap, Jack?” Jenna said. She was very afraid.

  “You know what trap. You know right enough. It wasn’t in use. It was all rusted in one of the sheds—but it worked. I tested it. I thought … I don’t know what I thought. I could see him in it. I could see that very clear—him, in his fine clothes, all torn. I wanted that. Only maybe I didn’t want it, because I set it wrong, set it in the wrong place, caught the wrong man. I put it by the clearing. If I’d wanted him in it, really wanted it, I’d have put it where you met.”

  “Where I met?”

  “Where you met him. In the birch grove. I’d have set it there. That’s what I meant to do, I think. Only I didn’t. I could have pushed him in it—easy. I could have done that. No more than smiting a fly. Killing a rabbit—as easy as that. He was tall, but he was thin. A gentleman. Not a lot of strength. I could have done it. I wanted to. I hated him, Jen.”