Half Light

by Frances Fyfield

  Maria prayed to another picture (three along), which showed a swooning saint praying to God in thanks for the stigmata on her hands, the tidy wounds blessing her bare feet. Maria envied the stigmata. She had stigmata in the wrong places: puncture wounds on her ankles and the healing holes on her wrists. The dog should have gone for her hands if she were ever going to acquire sainthood. The other way she had denied sainthood today was to scream, to whimper and to lie. She had in all ways lost anything which could ever be termed a holy dignity. The thought was distressing, so she moved on to Bernadette of Lourdes, who saw the Virgin with roses round her feet, the same feet which stamped or danced on rock to open the miracle spring at Lourdes, a nicely humble saint, but the ankle hurt, hurt, hurt, and not from stigmata. Life had to be hard to earn the right passage, but need it be this hard?

  She prayed to the Jesus of the Sacred Heart. Maria asked him to help and he smiled back at her his faded, benign smile. He looked lovely, Jesus. He was telling her, as he often did, to do what she could about the world, the flesh and the devil. But mostly, of course, the flesh. Her own was as mottled as ever. You could not get to heaven with any other kind. If you had something better, you should hide it.

  Well, Maria thought, if I am a little bad sometimes, you must all help me, but will you please help my brother, because he is worse? She worried for her brother, began to think of what he had said when he brought her downstairs. Her cruel, misguided brother: she agonized for his soul and he told lies on Sundays. The thought struck her afresh. He had told her, on the Sunday before Elisabeth arrived, that Elisabeth was a sort of saint in disguise. Saints were often humble people, like Joseph the carpenter, artisans, cleaners, like Martha. Now he was suggesting that Maria should not speak with this good person, because she was not… good.

  But then, he told lies on other days of the week as well. He told them all the time.

  Thomas was frightened. He could feel his fear penetrate the hackles of the dog, which growled without moving.

  ‘Shut up, you brute,’ he muttered. ‘Don’t you dare growl at me.’

  Perhaps he had gone too far in training the dog as he had in everything else. Let us review this little life, Thomas. It is not Sunday any more, old man. There is no need to tell so many lies, the way you always have, to get whatever you wanted. What have you done? Think about it. When did the madness start? It was time to think, because he had never predicted this new conspiracy between Maria and Elisabeth: that had not been on the cards at all. Even so, it might not have been wise to speak to Maria the way he had earlier on. His troubled mind dismissed that problem, went back and forth in a kind of sweeping motion over his conscience, like the windscreen wipers on a car. Oh, he had hated Elisabeth. Hated but loved this girl child who hung around him so piteously in that misguided dump in the North, at the time when he considered himself a rebellious socialist, an artist with the God-given talent as well as the right to paint the secular world as he saw it. He already hated the spiritual. Despised Elisabeth then for inciting those two brothers of hers, even though he knew, once the wounds were healed, that she would have done no such thing. There had been no one to look after him when he came home to this empty flat. Except his neglected sister, Maria, the saviour then, who had never quite left home with all its corridors of holy illustrations. Maria, to whom he was bound for life, for all her goodness to him.

  When had it begun, his old, new fixation? When he was trustee of the art school, and saw, by chance, those photographs of la belle Elisabeth? Known from those austerely erotic prints, duplicated by himself and sent to her parents while the rage was still hot, that she had grown well. When had it got so much more complicated, with himself collecting portraits which contained some element of her, either the skin, the hair, something reminiscent? He had to get Butler to guard them all. Against all manner of things. And there was still Maria, whom he could not cast out, because, yet again, she had been the only one on call – nurse, cook, haphazard but effective, the only one who would do this with an element of love. He could not bear her in the house. That, too, was accommodated. Everything was accommodated.

  ‘I only want to look at her.’ He detached his finger from the hole which was the eye, replaced the painting exactly where he had found it, wrinkling his nose at the smell, went back into his chilly bedroom.

  ‘I only wanted to look at her,’ he repeated, standing tall. Yes, her, and a hundred canvases or more, all with their little bit of resemblance of perfection. He only wanted to look until he had begun to follow her, watching the details of that limited life, hating it on her behalf. It had swung from a longing to a sense of responsibility, to a sense of ownership, of entitlement. And in the middle of these wild arcs, still swinging now, there was the hatred which had begun it all, the sense of loss, the wanting to look at that perfect face all the time, and the other moments of not being able to bear it.

  ‘I only want to look at her!’

  Yelled, this time, with a shower of spit, as if he were an orator and there were a thousand to convince. No, it was not entirely true. Yes, he wanted more, could contemplate anything except letting her go, but he wished, sometimes, that she was dead.

  She would look lovely in the blue dress. Better than the madonna.

  She would look perfect.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  They had delayed. There were the obligations of work which they could not ignore on this or any weekday, but still the delay was wilful and they both knew it. It became a self-perpetuating delay, to hide the fact that they did not, quite yet, want a conclusion. In the end, it was Francis who found the address. Annie was infuriated by the ease of his method. She preferred doing everything under her own steam; it made the effort more honest somehow, more worthy of a reward. Nor could she have done what Francis did, because she was incapable of finding the right words to persuade a single policeman to help her across the road. Officials, any officials, somehow sensed her hostility, and became anathema, an alien breed. Francis, on the other hand, was born to delegate. He did not expect people to take his burdens from him: they simply volunteered. The detective whom he had saved from embarrassment was happy to assist over a pint after court. Go and see this garage owner (address on this old receipt). Establish if the girl did bring in her car and whether, more than three weeks later, a man came asking what had happened to it. There was no scope for a proper inquiry yet, the detective warned.

  ‘I mean she went away, meant to go away, no one’s reported her missing. It would be different if she’d hired the boy to ruin her car, for insurance money or something, but no, I see, it wasn’t that kind of car.’ No commercial value at all, thought Francis sadly, rather like most of Elisabeth’s possessions. ‘You would just like to know, would you, sir, if the man who called to enquire about the car, left a name and an address? Your friend had asked about this before, but the garage owner was too distraught to say? He was an uncle, you say, this man?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Francis, ‘an uncle. Definitely an uncle with an interest in her car. Probably sent by her. I just want to know where she might be.’

  ‘Easy, sir. The garage is on my patch.’

  On my patch. Francis realized he had no sense of territory, no sense of being born anywhere, belonging anywhere which commanded profound knowledge or a fierce loyalty. He did not envy Elisabeth the territory of her birth, but he did envy those who stayed still in one place and knew it intimately. He knew perfectly well that if it had been he who had vanished without trace for weeks, a plethora of acquaintances and family would have noticed: there would have been more than an inquiry by now; there would have been a nationwide hunt because people like him did not disappear without a flurry of indignation. Yet with Elisabeth Young, there were shrugged shoulders and the vague feeling she would turn up, as if people without family connections were faintly disgraceful and owed it to others not to be so inconvenient. The thought of her afflicted him, together with wondering what it was like to be her, waking to the horror that there was no
one, not a soul, rooting or searching. But with the uncomfortable conscience of such thoughts, came the sentiments of a hundred criminal clients: she deserved it; she wanted the isolation; she could always use a telephone or write a letter.

  Not if she was not in the habit of asking, she couldn’t. Not if she had always prayed to a mountain of silence. And why should she phone you, you supercilious bastard? You cut those lines of need as soon as you saw them. With a knife, boy, with a knife.

  The pictures on the walls of his flat seemed to unite in rebellion, especially the ones she had restored, hung as crooked as a row of thieves’ heads on spikes, mute accusations in their unexpected delinquency, as if they missed the loving touch of her hands and reminded him that love was not too fine or foolish a word for it. Love in various forms was something he considered his own. He had taken hers in the same spirit, left nothing behind but the vacuum of expectation.

  Annie would be angry with him, he knew. He did not like that, either.

  The detective called Francis at his chambers the same afternoon. ‘No address, sir, none. But his name is Thomas Milton. Lives near Westminster Cathedral.’

  Doubting Thomas. Francis took to the telephone directory. Nothing. Took to verbal enquiries which were both feasible and possible because of his patrician voice and the way he asked. After that, there was one address, only one.

  The sky, late on a Tuesday afternoon, was bluer than summer. Where he lived, in Kensington, trees played against the windows. He ignored the beer cans in the gutters, the figure recumbent across a doorway as he skirted his way home, sights which would normally occasion a fierce irritation but now caused a mild embarrassment. First, he telephoned the number he had researched, somehow knowing, even as he dialled, that there would be no reply, not even bothering to consider what he might say if anyone answered. Despite the predictability, he felt absurdly disappointed, almost hurt, imagined a telephone disconnected and placed in a drawer by someone who wanted to be left alone. It felt like a rejection by Elisabeth herself, slowed down that sense of urgency into a kind of paralysis.

  Elisabeth was trying to recall that state of mind which had ever found the noise of a telephone irritating. She longed for its disturbance. The anger with which she had greeted interruptions seemed alien now. It seemed such a bizarre thing to do, hide a telephone, but Thomas had removed the one from this room on the second day she was there and she had not even considered it odd at the time. So many normal reactions had been eradicated from the moment she entered this flat. Such as now, when her reaction to receiving a gift became the opposite of what it might have been. Elisabeth’s youth had not accustomed her to receiving luxuries, but when they were given she would experience a moment of euphoria. Francis had not been a giver of gifts, did not seem to know how soon they could create a frisson on the way to loving. But this did not apply to large, blackmailing gifts, given by a man who held the keys and hid the telephone. There was no frisson but hatred for Thomas’s gifts and Elisabeth could not bear to touch what he touched.

  She had been deliberate in ignoring the second parcel Thomas had brought home with him the day before. The sleek black and gold bag had stood on the floor of the studio like a cunning accusation. There was no sign of Maria. Elisabeth felt a sick wave of longing and anxiety when she thought of poor Maria. Thomas pottered out and pottered in: twice he took Butler, but mostly he hovered in a mutually maintained silence. They teetered on the brink of speech, like a pair of ballerinas waiting for a cue, warming up, but every ounce of energy had gone from them both. Elisabeth thought of it when she bent in the morning, touching her toes, clasping her ankles and aligning her torso with her knees, an automatic routine of stretching to prove she was still alive. Yesterday was yesterday. She had slept somehow, briefly, but the sleep was poisonous, full of the sound of Maria’s screaming, visions of the colours of hellfire and bruises. All the pictures merged in her mind: the madonna wore fur which was stained with blood while the strewn clothes of the second picture squirmed at her feet, and the madonna carried her heart in her hand like a hideous torch, gazing with a face which had no eyes. There were holes instead which ran like corridors into rooms with strange windows at the back of her skull. In the end, Elisabeth had lain with her own eyes open, forcing herself to think of nothing but the completion of that one single painting. It was her secret, but by the end of the previous day, the madonna had become a fleshy creature, a beckoner-on, on, a powerful, non-virginal thing. Not the benign and sensitive matriarch she had first seemed. Something else. It was as well Thomas stayed well away, took out the dog, came back, ignored her. Except once, outside the kitchen, armed with a stick.

  ‘Maria’s not coming today. I told her to rest.’

  ‘I’ll go shopping, then, shall I?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary. Be reasonable.’

  ‘Reasonable!’ Her voice faded and she shied away from him.

  ‘Shh,’ he commanded, turning away, ending the encounter, going to his own room. Then his voice floated back, drifting over the carpet.

  ‘Oh, don’t forget I brought you a gift…’

  ‘I don’t want it, I don’t want it…’ She was chanting like a child, clenching her fists, remembering the power hidden inside that physique of his, resenting her own lack of weapons. There was nothing sharp or heavy in the kitchen: she had looked and looked.

  ‘Try it, please. Please. Try.’ The demand softened to a request. And that was all. A day without Maria seemed particularly empty. The third presence had been more of a distraction than she knew, more a reminder of the outside world and a conduit to freedom than she had ever understood. Without Maria, there was less hope and more fear. Elisabeth worked savagely. There was nothing else to do until the light faded. Then, in the late afternoon, when she had done all her eyes would allow her to do and regarded what she had done with strange fascination, she stumbled across the bag and remembered the gift again. Curious, dithering, idle, lonely and frightened: whatever her reservations, she could not quite ignore the bag where the tissue paper stung her hands. Men gave gifts to mistresses, did they not, although none had done so for her: she had never been owned, never would be and, in the context of this confinement, any gift was revolting, but then, as the light had faded from the afternoon, so too had her power to sustain her calm by normal functioning and feverish but deliberate work. Avoiding the last light of the studio room, accessible to Thomas in theory although he had not come near all day to her acute relief, but in the privacy of her bedroom, she let the gift slither from its wrapping like a live thing.

  The robe (somehow, the words ‘frock’, ‘dress’, ‘outfit’ were all inadequate as descriptions) could not have been purchased in one expedition. It belonged in a play, designed for effect. There were elements in it of the kind of ball gown in which you sat for your portrait, if you were the kind who ever sat thus. You sat in your best, from generation to generation, and often showed plenty of your flesh. Definitions for the garment defied her. A robe for the house or the opera. Her relief to find that it was not what she dreaded most by way of gift, some vulgar piece of negligée or film-star nightie designed for tearing off, gave her a temporary sensation of release, licence to look and admire before thinking. No woman could have failed to do that, even a woman with Elisabeth’s lack of vanity, and certainly not one with an eccentric but profound addiction to almost anything of beauty. She was a prisoner seeking oblivion, stealing into the kitchen looking for something to drink, a soupçon of alcoholic courage. White wine in the fridge. Furtively, she seized a bottle, glass, plastic corkscrew, went back to her room and looked again, but only after the first glass had hit the back of her throat in an icy stream. After that, it was not enough to look. Even in self-disgust she could not stop there.

  There was a huge wardrobe in her bedroom, made of walnut, with one mirrored door. As she stood, dressed in the robe, without quite knowing how she came to be so dressed, she looked as if she were inside a picture, framed by the moulded wood surrounding t
he glass, the bevelling of the edges catching the bedside light and throwing her shadow behind her. The robe was made of silk lined with silk, thick but fine and immediately warm to the skin. The collar stood up in a fan of pleats behind her head, down across her collarbones and across her bosom to the top button of the fastening. Tiny buttons of bluish pearl surrounded by the same silk, two dozen of them, descended past the moulded waist to the floor. There were no tucks, no darts, no obtrusive seams, simply panels of cloth which created the fluid shape of the thing, fluting out to a rich volume round her ankles and brushing the floor on which the toes of her bare feet curled in involuntary delight. The sleeves were pleated at the shoulder, full in the upper arm, buttoned at the wrist: the whole garment was shimmering, Elizabethan, medieval, modern, Eastern and Western, barbaric, severe but sensuous; the material moved as she moved, twisted, turned to see the panels which contracted into the small of her back, accentuating her waist, and, when she stood still, the cloth fell back softly into draping folds with less noise than a lace curtain in a breeze. It was both a European court and the kasbah, herself the queen or the odalisque. In the course of fastening the buttons which slipped easily into tiny, hand-wrought button holes, Elisabeth consumed another glass of wine and, as she stood transfixed by her own reflection, another and then another. The gown fitted but skimmed: she could move without breathing in, piled her hair on top of her head with the two combs which usually served to scrape it away from her face and keep it from trailing into paint or chemicals. The scent of this garment made her giddy: clean and fresh with a hint of roses, so divine she loved it while hating all it could signify. There was something insidious about the domination of this dress which even in the wonder of it made her angry. The blues shimmered and danced in the shadows of folds – ultramarine, the most expensive blue of the painter’s palette. Elisabeth wanted to sob as she regarded herself. Ludicrous, the whole scenario obscene. The captive dressing up like a child before a party. Entertaining herself before the scaffold.