by Tanith Lee
I walked through into the room. She had had a refill from the bottle and was stirring sugar into it.
“Do you mean Daniel’s father raped you?”
“Course that’s what I mean.”
“And you didn’t know who it was?”
“No.” She drank. She was smiling slightly and licked the sugar off her lips.
“I thought you said he was a sailor.”
“I never. I said he was at sea. That’s what I told people. My husband’s at sea. I bought myself a ring, and gave myself a different name. Besmouth. I saw it on an advertisement. Besmouth’s Cheese Crackers.” She laughed. “At sea,” she repeated. “Or out of it. He was mother naked, and wringing wet. I don’t know where he’d left his clothes. Who’d believe you if you told them that?”
“Shall I take this up to Daniel?” I said.
She looked at me, and I didn’t like her look, all whisky smile.
“Why not?” she said. She swallowed a belch primly. “That’s where you’ve wanted to go all along, isn’t it? ‘How’s Daniel?’” She mimicked me in an awful high soppy voice that was supposed to be mine, or mine the way she heard it. “‘Is Daniel Ookay?’ Couldn’t stop looking at him, could you? Eyes all over him. But you won’t get far. You can strip off and do the dance of the seven veils, and he won’t notice.”
My eyes started to water, a sure sign of revulsion. I felt I couldn’t keep quiet, though my voice (high and soppy?) would tremble when I spoke.
“You’re being very rude. I wanted to help.”
“Ohhh yes,” she said.
“The thing that worries me,” I said, “is the way you coop him up. Don’t you ever try to interest him in anything?” She laughed dirtily, and then did belch, patting her mouth as if in congratulation. “I think Daniel should be seen by a doctor. I’m sure there’s some kind of therapy—”
She drank greedily, not taking any apparent notice of me.
I hurried out, clutching the sandwich plate, and went along the corridor and up the stairs, perching on two wobbly sticks. If I’d stayed with her much longer, I, too, might have lost the use of my lower limbs.
Light came into the hall from the glass in the door, but going up, it grew progressively murkier.
It was a small house, and the landing, when I got to it, was barely wide enough to turn round on. There was the sort of afterthought of a cramped bathroom old houses have put in—it was to the back, and through the open door, I could see curtains across the windows. They, too, must be boarded, as she had said. And in the bedroom which faced the back. A pathological hatred of the sea, ever since she had been raped into unwanted pregnancy beside it. If it were even true.... Did she hate Daniel, as well? Was that why she kept him as she did, clean, neat, fed, cared for and deliberately devoid of joy, of soul—?
There was a crisp little flick of paper, the virtually unmistakable sound of a page turning. It came from the room to my right: the front bedroom. There was a pane of light there too, falling past the angle of the half-closed door. I crossed to the door and pushed it wide.
He didn’t glance up, just went on poring over the big slim book spread before him. He was sitting up in bed in spotless blue and white pyjamas. I had been beginning to visualise him as a child, but he was a man. He looked like some incredible convalescent prince, or an angel. The cold light from the window made glissandos over his hair. Outside, through the net, was the opposite side of the street, the houses, and the slope of the hill going up with other houses burgeoning on it. You couldn’t even see the cliff. Perhaps this view might be more interesting to him than the sea. People would come and go, cars, dogs. But there was only weather in the street today, shards of it blowing about, The weather over the sea must be getting quite spectacular.
When she went out, how did she avoid the sea? She couldn’t then, could she? I suddenly had an idea that somehow she had kept Daniel at all times from the sight of the water. I imagined him, a sad, sub-normal, beautiful little boy, sitting with his discarded toys—if he ever had any—on the floor of this house. And outside, five minutes’ walk away, the sand, the waves, the wind.
The room was warm, from a small electric heater fixed up in the wall, above his reach. Not even weather in this room.
He hadn’t glanced up at me, though I’d come to the bedside, he just continued gazing at the book. It was a child’s book, of course. It showed a princess leaning down from a tower with a pointed roof, and a knight below, not half so handsome as Daniel.
“I’ve brought you some lunch,” I said. I felt self-conscious, vaguely ashamed, his mother drunk in the room downstairs and her secrets in my possession. How wonderful to look at the rapist must have been. Crawled away, she had said. Maybe he too—
“Daniel,” I said. I removed the book gently from his grasp, and put the plate there instead.
How much of what she said to me about my own motives was actually the truth? There were just about a million things I wouldn’t want to do for him, my aversion amounting to a phobia, to a state not of wouldn’t but couldn’t. Nor could I cope with this endless silent non-reaction. I’d try to make him react, I was trying to now. And maybe that was wrong, unkind—
Maybe I disliked and feared men so much I’d carried the theories of de Beauvoir and her like to an ultimate conclusion. I could only love what was male if it was also powerless, impotent, virtually inanimate. Not even love it. Be perversely aroused by it. The rape principle in reverse.
He wasn’t eating, so I bent down, and peered into his face, and for the first time, I think he saw me. His luminous eyes moved, and fixed on mine. They didn’t seem completely focussed, even so. But meeting them, I was conscious of a strange irony. Those eyes, which perhaps had never looked at the sea, held the sea inside them. Were the sea.
I shook myself mentally, remembering the whisky plummeting on the gin.
“Eat, Daniel,” I said softly.
He grasped the sandwich plate with great serenity. He went on meeting my eyes, and mine, of course, filled abruptly and painfully with tears. Psychological symbolism: salt water.
I sat on the edge of the bed and stroked his hair. It felt like silk, as I’d known it would. His skin was so clear, the pores so astringently closed, that it was like a sort of silk, too. It didn’t appear as if he had ever, so far, had to be shaved. Thank God. I didn’t like the thought of her round him with a razor blade. I could even picture her producing her father’s old cutthroat from somewhere, and doing just that with it, another accident, with Daniel’s neck.
You see my impulse, however. I didn’t even attempt to deal with the hard practicality of supporting such a person as Daniel really was. I should have persuaded or coerced him to eat. Instead I sat and held him. He didn’t respond, but he was quite relaxed. Something was going through my brain about supplying him with emotional food, affection, physical security, something she’d consistently omitted from his diet. I was trying to make life and human passion soak into him. To that height I aspired, and, viewed another way, to that depth I’d sunk.
I don’t know when I’d have grown embarrassed, or bored, or merely too tired and cramped to go on perching there, maintaining my sentimental contact with him, I didn’t have to make the decision. She walked in through the door and made it for me.
“Eat your sandwich, Daniel,” she said as she entered. I hadn’t heard her approach on this occasion, and I jerked away. Guilt, presumably. Some kind of guilt. But she ignored me and bore down on him from the bed’s other side. She took his hand and put it down smack on the bread. “Eat up,” she said. It was macabrely funny, somehow pure slapstick. But he immediately lifted the sandwich to his mouth. Presumably he’d recognised it as food by touch, but not sight.
She wasn’t tight anymore. It had gone through her and away, like her dark tea through its strainer.
“I expect you want to get along,” she said.
She was her old self, indeed. Graceless courtesies, platitudes.
She might have told m
e nothing, accused me of nothing. We had been rifling each other’s ids, but now it was done, and might never have been. I didn’t have enough fight left in me to try to rip the renewed facade away again. And besides, I doubt if I could have.
So I got along. What else?
Before I went back to my room, I stood on the promenade awhile, looking out to sea. It was in vast upheaval, coming in against the cliffs like breaking glasses, and with a sound of torn atmosphere. Like a monstrous beast it ravened on the shore. A stupendous force seemed trying to burst from it, like anger, or love; or grief, orchestrated by Shostakovich, and cunningly lit by an obscured blind sun.
I wished Daniel could have seen it. I couldn’t imagine he would remain unmoved, though all about me people were scurrying to and fro, not sparing a glance.
When I reached my nominative aunt’s, the voice of a dismal news broadcast drummed through the house, and the odour of fried fish lurked like a ghost on the stairs.
The next day was Tuesday, and I went to work.
I dreamed about Daniel a lot during the next week. I could never quite recapture the substance of the dreams, their plot, except they were to do with him, and they felt bad. I think they had boarded windows. Perhaps I dreamed she’d killed him, or I had, and the boards became a coffin.
Obviously, I’d come to my senses, or come to avoid my senses. I had told myself the episode was finished with. Brooding about it, I detected only some perverted desire on my side, and a trap from hers. There was no one I could have discussed any of it with.
On Wednesday, a woman in a wheelchair rolled through lingerie on her way to the china department. Dizzy with fright, if it was fright, I watched the omen pass. She, Mrs. Besmouth, could get to me any time. Here I was, vulnerably pinned to my counter like a butterfly on a board. But she didn’t come in. Of course she didn’t.
“Here,” said Jill-sans-bra, “look what you’ve gone and dunn. You’ve priced all these eight-pound slips at six-forty-five.”
I’d sold one at six-forty-five, too.
Thursday arrived, cinema day. A single customer came and went like a breeze from the cold wet street. There was a storm that night. A little ship, beating its way in from Calais, was swept over in the troughs, and there were three men missing, feared drowned. On Friday, a calm dove-grey weather bloomed, and bubbles of lemonade sun lit the bay.
I thought about that window looking on the street. He should have seen the water, oh, he should have seen it, those bars of shining lead, and the great cool topaz master bar that fell across them. That restless mass where men died and fish sprang. That other land that glowed and moved.
Saturday was pandemonium, as usual. Angela was cheerful. Her husband was in Scotland, and this evening the extra-marital relationship was meeting her. Rather than yearn for aloneness together, they apparently deemed two no company at all.
“Come over the pub with us. Jill and Terry’ll be there. And I know Ray will. He asked me if you were coming.”
Viewed sober, a night of drinking followed by the inevitable Chinese nosh-up and the attentions of the writhing Ray, was uninviting. But I, as all pariahs must be, was vaguely grateful for their toleration, vaguely pleased my act of participant was acceptable to them. It was also better than nothing, which was the only alternative.
“It’s nice here,” said Jill, sipping her Bacardi and coke.
They’d decided to go to a different pub, and I’d suggested the place on The Rise. It had a log fire, and they liked that, and horse brasses, and they liked sneering at those. Number 19. Sea View Terrace was less than a quarter of a mile away, but they didn’t know about that, and wouldn’t have cared if they had.
Lean, lithe Ray, far too tall for me, turned into a snake every time he flowed down towards me.
It was eight o’clock, and we were on the fourth round. I couldn’t remember the extra-marital relationship’s name. Angela apparently couldn’t either; to her he was ‘darling’, ‘love’, or in spritely yielding moments, ‘Sir’.
“Where we going to eat then?” said Ray.
“The Hwong Pews’s ever so nice,” said Jill.
Terry was whispering a dirty joke to Angela, who screamed with laughter. “Listen to this—”
Very occasionally, between the spasms of noise from the bar, you could just hear the soft shattering boom of the ocean.
Angela said the punch line and we all laughed.
We got to the fifth round.
“If you put a bell on,” Ray said to me, “I’ll give you a ring sometime.”
I was starting to withdraw rather than expand, the alternate phase of tipsyness. Drifting back into myself, away from the five people I was with. Out of the crowded public house. Astral projection almost. Now I was on the street.
“You know, I could really fancy you,” said Ray.
“You want to watch our Ray,” said Angela.
Jill giggled and her jelly chest wobbled.
It was almost nine, and the sixth round. Jill had had an argument with Terry, and her eyes were damp. Terry, uneasy, stared into his beer.
“I think we should go and eat now,” said the extra-marital relationship.
“Yes, sir,” said Angela.
“Have a good time,” I said. My voice was slightly slurred. I was surprised by it, and by what it had just vocalised.
“Good time,” joked Angela. “You’re coming, too.”
“Oh, no—didn’t I say? I have to be somewhere else by nine.”
“She just wants an excuse to be alone with me,” said Ray. But he looked as amazed as the rest of them. Did I look amazed, too?
“But where are you going?” Angela demanded. “You said—-”
“I’m sorry. I thought I told you. It’s something I have to go to with the woman where I stay. I can’t get out of it. We’re sort of related.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Ray.
“Oh well, if you can’t get out of it.” Angela stared hard at me through her mascara.
I might be forfeiting my rights to their friendship, which was all I had. And why? To stagger, cross-eyed with vodka, to Daniel’s house. To do and say what? Whatever it was, it was pointless. This had more point. Even Ray could be more use to me than Daniel.
But I couldn’t hold myself in check any longer. I’d had five days of restraint. Vile liquor had let my personal animal out of its cage. What an animal it was. Burning, confident, exhilarated and sure. If I didn’t know exactly what its plans were, I still knew they would be glorious and great.
“Great,” said Ray. “Well, if she’s going, let’s have another.”
“I think I’ll have a cream sherry,” said Angela. “I feel like a change.”
They had already excluded me, demonstrating I would not be missed. I stood on my feet, which no longer felt like mine.
“Thanks for the drinks,” I said. I tried to look reluctant to be going, and they smiled at me, hardly trying at all, as if seeing me through panes of tinted glass.
It was black outside; where the street lights hadn’t stained it, the sky looked clear beyond the glare, a vast roof. I walked on water.
Daniel’s mother had been drunk when she told me about the rape. Truth in wine. So this maniac was presumably the true me.
The walk down the slope in the cold brittle air neither sobered me nor increased my inebriation. I simply began to learn how to move without a proper centre of balance. When I arrived, I hung on her gate a moment. The hall light mildly suffused the door panels. The upstairs room, which was his, looked dark.
I knocked. I seemed to have knocked that door thirty times. Fifty. A hundred. Each time, like a clockwork mechanism, Mrs. Besmouth opened it. Hallo, I’ve come to see Daniel. Hallo, I’m drunk, and I’ve come to scare you. I’ve spoken to the police about your son, I’ve said you neglect him. I’ve come to tell you what I think of you. I’ve booked two seats on a plane and I’m taking Daniel to Lourdes. I phoned the Pope, and he’s meeting us there.
The door didn’t open. I knock
ed twice more, and leaned in the porch, practising my introductory gambits.
I’m really a famous artist in disguise, and all I want is to paint Daniel. As the young Apollo, I think. Only I couldn’t find a lyre. (Liar.)
Only gradually did it came to me that the door stayed shut, and gave every sign of remaining so. With the inebriate’s hidebound immobility, I found this hard to assimilate. But presently it occurred to me that she might be inside, have guessed the identity of the caller, and was refusing to let me enter.
How long would the vodka stave off the cold? Ages, surely. I saw fur-clad Russians tossing it back neat amid snowdrifts, wolves howling in the background. I laughed sullenly, and knocked once more. I’d just keep on and on, at intervals, until she gave in. Or would she? She had over fifty years of fighting, standing firm, being harassed and disappointed. She’d congealed into it, vitrified. I was comparatively new at the game.
After ten minutes, I had a wild and terrifying notion that she might have left a spare key, cliché-fashion, under a flower pot. I was crouching over my boots, feeling about on the paving round the step for the phantom flower pot, when I heard a sound I scarcely know, but instantly identified. Glancing up, I beheld Mrs. Besmouth pushing the wheelchair into position outside her gate.
She had paused, looking at me, as blank as I had ever seen her. Daniel sat in the chair like a wonderful waxwork, or a strangely handsome Guy Fawkes dummy she had been out collecting money with for Firework Night.
She didn’t comment on my posture, neither did I. I rose and confronted her. From a purely primitive viewpoint, I was between her and refuge.
“I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again,” she said.
“I didn’t think you would, either.”
“What do you want?”
It was, after all, more difficult to dispense with all constraint than the vodka had told me it would be.
“I happened to be up here,” I said.
“You bloody little do-gooder, poking your nose in.”
Her tone was flat. It was another sort of platitude and delivered without any feeling, or spirit.
