by Tanith Lee
‘Drink that. Shall we go to the restaurant below the bridge? They prepare a wonderful dish, a whole chicken baked with grapes.’
Unerringly, too, Althene sensed Rachaela’s current wish for voyaging things, before matters inexorably changed, before she grew heavy and inert and wanted only little-girl buttered toast and tea before the comforting fire of summer’s end.
The man had disappeared from the shore, and the chemical cloud shone bronze. Was the watching only her paranoia? Perhaps the cloud watched too. Perhaps the birds had binoculars.
In her eighth month, they moved. It was made very simple for them. Three courteous packers arrived to parcel up the books and objects, and the clothes. The flat had been furnished on Rachaela’s arrival, and they had never utilized the lower floor. The plants were put in terracotta troughs and sailed out like angry galleons. The cats yowled and clawed their baskets. Juliet screamed imperiously.
Rachaela felt guilty. They had left the flat because of her—perhaps unreasonable, biologically induced—sense of watchers. They thought Juliet had mated with Jacob by now. Juliet too, pregnant, should have consideration.
But the cats liked the house on the hill.
The hill itself was preposterous, vertical. No one, unless very dedicated, could walk up it. Far below, soundless in distance, maroon buses passed along the town street.
A high wall guarded the house, and above it an equally vertical garden ran up to the building. Poplars of immense size topped a lawn rife with daisies. A stone bird-bath perched before the door. White, two-storeyed, and flat-roofed, the house had also lion-coloured shutters and a wooden door. There was no lock. A panel gave on a small bank of buttons. You pressed for entry, as with a safe.
And the windows were of bullet-proof glass, Althene casually said. With, here and there, stained glass on the inside. Two gorgeous women in the long window over the wide stair, red, ice green, and gold, Ceres and Persephone, perhaps, goddess mother and daughter, the woman’s hair a long gold sheaf of wheat, and the paler daughter with an innocent armful of scarlet poppies. In the main room, the living room, a mediaeval Zodiac was set in at the upper casements, fire signs in rose, air in blue, earth saffron, water green.
Althene had not brought Rachaela to the house before moving day. Trust? It was like a Christmas morning, coming down to find the presents magically assembled by the tree—some fantasy Rachaela had never, as a child, realized.
‘It’s too large for us,’ she said.
‘We will fill it up.’
Skulls of old fawn bone emerged from Althene’s crates, a globe (unscratched), of malachite. Books. A bronze Grecian statue of a boy in a garland. Wine was bought for the cellar. A washing machine of complex design, a dishwasher from outer space. ‘Someone will come in to clean. A couple, I belive,’ Althene said.
‘They have arranged this?’
‘Miranda.’
‘But then they know we’re here.’
‘Not at all.’
Rachaela acceded, gave up.
It was a fact. She felt safer on the hill. She would look at the tiny buses from the window. Where were they going?
There was a minimum of furniture. They were left to choose, maybe, later. Yet there was a dreamy quality to the wide cases of rooms that had only flowing curtains (muted sky colours, milky emeralds), a chair and Chinese rug islanded on a polished floor, a wide bed adrift in sunny emptiness.
The autumn was mellow but brief. The poplars yellowed. The yew on the vertical drive came into olive-black prominence.
Rachaela observed herself. Her back did not even ache, this time. There was only heaviness.
She let Althene cosset her. Mulled wine in bed, the endless wholemeal toast with butter and strawberry jam which was now all she wanted, eating only from duty the succulent omelets and chicken breasts that the woman, Elizabeth, prepared. Elizabeth was not Scarabae. A plump Scot, with redder than red hair and a glorious accent, who installed a Hoover in the lockable cupboard opposite the stairs. Sometimes Elizabeth sang as she cleaned the two bathrooms, or made the bed. Lovely lullabye of a voice.
I am the one having the child. I am not the child.
As she had always done, Althene handwashed her silken lingerie, and it hung in rainbow weeds in the second bathroom. Later she would iron the silks with a tiny iron. Rachaela gazed on the ritual, fascinated. She is my mother.
He is my mother.
Rachaela laughed.
‘She finds me amusing, does she?’ Althene said, standing in her tailored grey jeans and exquisite French sweater.
Does she love me? Rachaela thought. Yes. How odd.
The light melted down and down and the days grew short.
The man, Reg, mowed the lawn. A hundred feet away another imposing house stood blind-side on over the garden wall. No one could get close, to watch.
‘Juliet is definitely due to become a mother,’ said Althene, having expertly and tenderly tested Juliet’s sleek black undercarriage.
‘We two,’ said Rachaela. She looked down at Juliet, who behaved just as she had always done, and now lay purring on Rachaela’s abbreviated lap. But there were more than two of them in the chair. There were at least five—Rachaela and the baby, Juliet and her impending kittens—a sudden flash of utter delight passed through Rachaela.
It stunned her. She had felt what women were expected to feel—were coerced into feeling.
Behind the split second of joy came a deep depression.
On Sunday mornings you could hear the bells from the Saxon church down in the town. Rachaela stood in the October living room, where the sun would come in the late afternoon.
It was a clear day. The windows were bright, gleaming from Elizabeth’s Friday attentions.
Rachaela looked up at the Zodiac.
Virgins in kirtles, scorpions with wicked tails, solemn bulls, twinned fish—and there the Scales, with its balanced cups, brazen on the sapphire glass. Libra.
Libra was glowing. Some strong sideways reflection of the sun, perhaps striking on a surface outside, pierced back through the balance like a flame.
Then the twisting, grasping pain came, violent and without warning.
Rachaela clutched at a chair in terror.
The time had come. Her time. Would it be like it was before? She was early... Surely the midwife had said—a false alarm? No. Oh no.
The pain redoubled, and Rachaela cried out. She experienced the motion of a wave going through her lower body, a wave of molten rock—
Then an easement came, and she went up quite steadily to the bathroom. When she emerged, she crossed into the bedroom and looked down the hill, where Althene had gone with Reg in the car, for groceries at Alldays, which stayed open on Sunday from eight a.m. to nine p.m.
All alone with the telephone.
Rachaela dialled the appropriate number.
There was no delay, no prevarication, no argument. Why had she expected one? The Scarabae had seen to everything. Even if, ironically, Althene, the mother-figure, was not here to assist.
Inside twenty minutes the midwife had arrived, and ushered Rachaela to the designated room, without flap or hesitation.
Kate Ames, the midwife, was one of those slender women strong as a cart-horse. She radiated quiet enthusiasm.
‘We’re going to be very quick, Rachaela.’
Rachaela already knew that.
Kate Ames did not ludicrously tell her to push.
The pain was horrible, worse than she remembered. Or then again, sometimes it did not seem so bad. She had wanted Althene, and started to cry like a little girl, but the pain had brought her round like a slap.
‘What bad luck,’ said Kate Ames, ‘that your sister isn’t here. It’s those queues. They go mad on Sundays, as if the shop wasn’t there the rest of the week.’
Five minutes later, when the malfunction to Reg’s car had been dismissed with Reg, and Althene was walking up the vertical hill with two bags of shopping consisting mostly of strawberry jam, the
true child that had been inside Rachaela’s hard white belly, came out into the smoking air of the third bedroom.
Rachaela was on a river.
She thought, I know I am hallucinating. What was that stuff she gave me? Is it that?
The river was wide, brown as liquid honey. Duck rose from a fringe of reeds. And then, in an oval of soft light, Rachaela saw her baby hanging by a nail of gold.
‘It’s a girl. And in full working order.’
Rachaela heard the child begin to cry, a mile away, getting nearer.
‘That’s it. You have a weep, love,’ said Kate Ames. ‘You’ve been brilliant.’ And to Rachaela, ‘Just clean up a bit, and then you can have a cup of tea. Are you ready to hold her?’
I don’t want to hold her. I don’t want her.
‘Give her to me,’ said Rachaela—‘please—quickly—’
‘There you go.’
The baby only cried softly after its first screech. It smelled clean and faintly antiseptic.
Rachaela looked at the face. It was a cat. A cat wrapped up in a white shawl. It was Jacob. No, it was a baby.
‘Yes, she’s all there. Properly operational kid, that is.’
‘What—what’s this little mark?’
‘Oh that. That’s nothing. That will just fade.’
A tiny bluish whisper, like the palest bruise, left of the chest, just under the tiny unopened rose-bud of nipple.
Kate Ames was making Rachaela comfortable.
Far away, Rachaela heard the downstairs door open.
Too late.
Who are you?
The eyes of the baby were strange. Not dark, yet not blue. Silvery. And the head was orioled, like Juliet’s black fur, with a glim of blondeness.
Is it peculiar? Another weird Scarabae baby.
In a minute, Althene, having seen the midwife’s car on the drive by the bird-bath, would run up the stairs and rush in. And how would Rachaela greet her? A dulcet picture of dam and infant. Or the former image, the reluctant mother saddled with the weight of rendered life.
‘She’s stopped crying. Is she all right?’
‘Oh, yes, she’s fine. Perhaps you’re going to be fortunate there. Some of them are quiet, you know.’
‘My last... cried all the time.’
Kate Ames waxed serious. Naturally she knew Rachaela had given birth before, but not the fate of this mysterious and absent progeny. Kate Ames was a good woman. Rachaela’s safe and uncomplex delivery of a correctly formed child had made her genuinely happy. She cheered up. She said, ‘Well, who knows. She may be screaming blue murder in ten minutes’ time.’
The child did not sleep. It could not see, they said, no focus yet to the eyes, that were like silken dead hydrangea flowers.
Then the door flew open.
Althene stood there. She was white, as pale as she looked sometimes after sex.
But you are really a man. A man white-faced to find me here. Yes I’m alive. And so is this.
Your daughter, said Rachaela, but not aloud, to spare Kate Ames.
And Kate Ames, beaming, said, ‘Rachaela’s been a marvel. I don’t even think we were an hour over it. A perfect little girl.’
Althene’s eyes went to the baby, and in Rachaela the serpent uncoiled. Love at first sight. I am going to be stupidly and ridiculously and unworthily and torridly jealous. And we are incestuous Scarabae. Christ knows, I have some cause.
Chapter Three
Elizabeth stared out at the snow.
It was a massive fall, mitten-thick upon the trees, and in places piled up to the windows. Bags of nuts for the birds, which Reg had put up earlier, hung dead still. There was a great silence.
But inside, the faint strains of music seeped from the living room, and here, in the glistening kitchen, the oven popped faintly, giving off a wonderful aroma of baking cake.
‘Oh, Mrs Day. I expect you’d like some coffee.’
Rachaela had never persuaded Elizabeth to use their first names, and in Elizabeth’s world, seemingly, all women with children were Mrs, like Victorian cooks.
‘Yes... Just instant. I’ll make it, Elizabeth.’
‘No, no. I’ve been dreaming. Well, I won’t say dreaming. Worrying.’
Rachaela braced herself for another’s troubles.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘It’s my sister’s son. She’s afraid he’ll be called up. He’s in the reserves. You don’t think, do you.’
Rachaela did not. She did not know what Elizabeth meant. And then she recalled the dark shadow on the new year, the war. What could she say to comfort? Rachaela was ignorant of everyday affairs.
‘Perhaps it won’t come to that.’
‘Well, the good Lord knows what it will come to.’ Elizabeth put the kettle on the gas, as if it were the last kettle of the world. Although grammatically her speech was only Anglicized, her lovely Scottish accent moulded every word, giving each an extra savour, and potency. ‘The hospitals could be packed with them, young men badly burnt, and ruined. And their chests. I’ve seen, when I was a girl, what mustard gas can do.’
Rachaela too looked out at the snow.
Reg and Elizabeth had somehow got the car up the hill, and now they were delaying departure, dreading probably the performance of descending. The car had been temperamental any way, ever since the morning it broke down outside Alldays. The Sunday Anna was born.
The coffee came, and Elizabeth allowed herself to sit at the kitchen worktop. They ate oatmeal biscuits Elizabeth had baked.
‘But there, it’s no good worrying, is it?’ said Elizabeth.
‘No, not really.’
‘If only it were,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We could put the world to rights in a tick.’ She listened a moment to the Sibelius symphony drifting over the hall. ‘She likes her music, Mrs Simon.’
‘Yes.’
‘And your little Anna.’ Elizabeth sighed. She said, ‘I do lose track of time. It happens when you get to my age. Sometimes I lie awake, just planning tomorrow’s shopping, and then I pop along to the toilet, and it’s half past two in the morning. Four hours, and it only seemed like twenty minutes. But Reg, he sleeps like an old dog.’ She smiled. Elizabeth liked Reg, who was effortlessly clever at all he did, monosyllabic, restful. ‘And your little girl,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Is it three she is now?’
‘No,’ Rachaela said smoothly. ‘One year and a few months. She’s grown fast for her age.’
‘And she’s got a good head on her.’
Elizabeth made more coffee for Rachaela, who had drunk her mug dry without noticing.
Jelka, Juliet’s daughter, came into the kitchen. She was a black cat without a dot of white, yellow-eyed like her sire. She stalked to the window and meowed to be let out.
‘Oh, you won’t like that, you won’t,’ said Elizabeth, but she went and opened the sash window (of bullet-proof glass) and Jelka leapt into the snow, vanishing at once up to her breast. The cat scrambled out and sprang into the stone urn that, in autumn, had held geraniums.
Juliet’s children had been three in number, two of them black and white in a handsome but usual way, and Jelka like a coal. Juliet had produced the litter without drama the previous November, in one of the nests of newspaper Althene had left about to entice her. When they were old enough, the male and female had gone to Eric, Miranda and Sasha, as a gift. Althene had seen to this. Jelka, the witch’s cat, cleaved to her mother. In time, she too would mate with Jacob, her father. Cats also, were intractably Scarabae.
But it had occurred to Rachaela that the cats now represented a unit like their own. A male, two females, consort and child.
It had been Emma who had said to her, after the birth of Ruth, ‘You’re missing all the best parts.’ And Rachaela had taken care to miss as much of Ruth’s babyhood as possible. Had anything really changed?
It was Althene now who had bottle-fed Anna; Rachaela—deliberately?—had not produced sufficient milk. It was Althene who, mostly, changed Anna’s napkins. Ev
erything was disposable. It was all quite easy. Besides, very quickly, Anna stopped being messy. By five months she had been able to use the bathroom, and had evinced a demanding desire to do so. At first supervised, and with a stool to climb up by, presently self-possessed and alone. Although they kept her in diapers, thereafter Anna did not have accidents.
Rachaela knew that was not normal. She knew from Ruth.
Anna had spoken her first word on Christmas Day. Not quite three months after her birth.
It might have been imagination. The eager parents misinterpreting a gurgle or burp. But then Anna spoke again. It was a name. Althene’s name. Not quite correct. ‘Althni,’ she said.
And Althene picked Anna up and held her, and Anna smiled down, from this pinnacle, on the other mother, the woman-mother who did not love her but was quite kind. ‘Rashla,’ said Anna, generously.
By the age of six months, Anna could talk. Her speech was unformed, like that of someone with a mild, mellifluous impediment, but her syntax was correct. She did not speak in the quaint yet logical way of children, ‘I runned’, ‘I is here’. No, she was exact. She ran. She was.
Althene began to teach Anna to read, and soon Anna could write in big unwieldy letters. She wrote a note to Juliet about Jelka. She seemed to think the cats, with whom she constantly played, and beside and amongst whom, when allowed, she would fall asleep in the natural way of an infant, could talk also, and read. It disappointed her, learning that Juliet could not.
Physically, she was a flawless child. Long-legged, slender, with the slightly protruding stomach of the evolving girl. Tall for her age. White skin. Her eyes a silky grey. Her hair white-blonde—no. Her hair, too, was white. It did not darken, became paler as it thickened. An ethereal child. Special.
On the left side of the breast, the little blue mark had faded but not gone away. A birthmark, then. That was all.
