The Barbarians did not wonder why the house still existed; it offered them shelter so they moved in and filled it with the smoke of their fires and their abominable refuse. The hall was very dark but Marianne could make out some old carvings on the walls and a curving marble staircase sweeping upwards. The smell of roasting meat mingled with that of ordure. She was still clutching her sprig of honeysuckle and she pressed it against her face, smelling the outdoors upon it. A woman came from the shadows at the back of the hall, raised her heavy skirt, squatted and urinated.
‘Where has Jewel gone?’ asked Marianne.
The woman wobbled in the middle of the spreading puddle, made the sign against the evil eye and wailed.
‘Oh, don’t be stupid,’ said Marianne angrily. ‘I’m flesh and blood and I want to find Jewel.’
The woman seemed impressed by Marianne’s anger and said: ‘Upstairs, in Donally’s room.’ She glanced warily at the young girl before she darted back through a doorway into a black hole where there was a fire. Marianne limped upstairs and saw an open door.
Perhaps this room had been a chapel for it seemed the most ancient part of the house, a high, narrow vault of dark stone. The arched windows were covered with animal hides and the only light came from some guttering candles stuck to plane surfaces of stone. Weeds were growing out of cracks in the walls. Someone had ingeniously contrived a stove out of a large saucepan and made a funnel arrangement so that most of the smoke was taken out through a hole in the window, behind the hides; on this stove, a pot simmered and sent out a green scent of herbs which hovered on top of the reek of putrefaction which filled the room. It was as if all the appalling smells which had ever assailed her reached a peak and culmination; she had never smelled decaying flesh before. The honeysuckle dropped from her hand. A bundle of blankets lay on a mattress in the centre of the floor and she guessed this was the man who was dying of a mortifying wound.
In a corner, the young boy she had seen in the forest sat chained to a staple in the wall, gnawing upon a bone. There were rushes on the floor and everywhere a litter of books, bottles, vessels, strangely shaped utensils and bundles of dried plants. The youngest brother pushed past her abruptly, leaned over the banister of the staircase and vomited lengthily into the hall. She could make out nothing of what was going on in the room except for some moving figures by the improvised bed and the sudden flash of Mrs Green’s apron; there was a good deal of confusion, some angry voices, some terrible screams and babblings and then Marianne fainted.
Mrs Green had a room to herself because she was old and dignified. She also insisted upon a proper chamberpot of her own. She kept a faded photograph of the wife of a Professor of Economics for whom she had once worked in a tarnished silver frame on the wooden box in which she kept her personal belongings, a few dresses, several aprons, her hairpins and a book which was no less precious to her because she had forgotten how to read it. This book was a copy of Great Expectations. She also kept the first tooth which Jewel had shed, wrapped up in a twist of paper, and also a lock of his first hair.
The walls of her room were still stuck here and there with a paper of red flock, furry to the touch, which, peeling, showed huge patches of plaster where various colours of damp and rot combined to give the appearance of a gigantic bruise. While Mrs Green bathed Marianne’s leg with warm water and put clean bandages on it, she stared at this bruise, which changed its shapes continually and all were familiar but none were recognizable.
Mrs Green gave up her own bed to Marianne, a hay-stuffed mattress spread with linen sheets and some blankets, all stolen. While Marianne was ill, she stayed with her much of the time and, though she rarely spoke to her, she sometimes sang her lullabies like those her nurse had sung. Marianne was very ill for a long time and sometimes delirious, when she would confuse Mrs Green with her nurse and be either comforted or distressed according to whether she remembered her childhood or her nurse’s last days. When she was delirious, the room would also fill with multiple images of snakes and knives or would become the forest and she alone in it. But one night she woke from an unusually deep and dreamless sleep and saw that the room, though full of unpredictable shadows and silence, was only a room with red walls and a fire was alight in the hearth.
The companion of her journey crouched before it. She knew him immediately. Mrs Green, a solid and at last unmistakable figure, sat beside him on a chunk of wood cut from a piece of tree and slowly combed out his long, black hair. She held his head on her aproned knees and the firelight lent them both a dramatic yet dignified chiaroscuro. Marianne raised herself on her elbow to watch them, for she had never seen anything so ancient or so romantic, except in woodcuts at the head of ballads in her father’s rarest books.
‘The girl’s woken up,’ observed Mrs Green. ‘My, she’s a lucky girl to get over a snakebite.’
‘Is she all right?’ he asked drowsily.
Marianne nodded. She was lucid and recovered; she knew herself to be well again and thinking coherently.
‘She’s a tough little girl,’ said Jewel. ‘I’ll say that for her.’
‘She’s a long way from home,’ said Mrs Green. ‘And I’ll thank you to keep your hands off her, my duck; you just watch out.’
‘And did your brother die, in the end?’ asked Marianne, and shivered.
Jewel looked down at his fingers and she realized she had been tactless.
‘Oh, yes. He died before I had to exercise the dubious prerogative of mercy. All I had to do was dig his grave. I’m the public executioner, see, and also the fucking grave-digger.’
‘Watch your language in front of the young lady!’ exclaimed Mrs Green.
He glanced at her as if amazed and laughed, but the laughter turned into another shattering fit of coughing. He fell on the floor and was wracked, while Mrs Green clucked uselessly and Marianne, watching him writhe, choke and gasp, thought remotely: ‘He’s going to die young.’
3
‘The thing to remember about them is, they don’t think,’ said Mrs Green. ‘They jump from one thing to the next like kids jumping stepping stones and so they go on until they fall in the water.’
‘Does Jewel never think, although he is educated?’
‘Sometimes he does,’ said Mrs Green. She was taking in the seams of an embroidered shirt so that Marianne would have something to wear. She used needles from a little case she had carefully kept with her since one wild night when she was eighteen years old and she saw her home burning and her husband’s head shot clean from his shoulders. Since her husband had been an old man who often beat her and demanded unnatural practices in bed, she had then said: ‘Take me with you’ to some horseman as he reloaded his rifle and he lifted her up behind his saddle and subsequently gave her a number of children until another night attack, from which he never returned. And this was how Mrs Green first arrived in the tribe.
‘Sometimes Jewel thinks but usually he gets the Doctor to do his thinking for him.’
A cold, wet wind blew in through the glassless window. Outside, it was raining; it was a cold, wet summer’s day. The shirt in Mrs Green’s hands was of fine wool, originally woven and sewn in a Professor village for intellectuals to wear but now it was covered all over with red and yellow daisies and little chips of mirror, a gaudy and totally changed garment.
‘They like bright colours, see,’ said Mrs Green with faint disparagement. ‘Bright colours, beads, things that shine. They’re like kids, I tell you.’
The colours of the Professors were browns and sepias, black, white and various shades of grey. All the clothes Marianne had ever worn were muted and restrained and Mrs Green still dressed herself in dark shades, as if she refused to capitulate to the tribe at some final point. Perhaps somewhere in her mind she still hoped for another change. She talked about the tribe with detachment, although she was a woman of authority within it.
‘And I’d have run away if Jewel had been killed. They’re little kids that believe the first thing that comes
into their heads, and I don’t trust the Doctor, I never have. I told Jewel to bump him off years ago but he wouldn’t, not after his dad died even, not even then he wouldn’t. And everyone else too scared. It’d be hell with your Dr Donally running everything, real hell, no respect for the old or nothing. Only tortures, mutilations and displays of magic.’
Marianne raised her eyebrows to hear this.
‘Hell,’ repeated Mrs Green. ‘Hell on earth.’
Her use of the word ‘hell’ indicated to Marianne that Mrs Green had belonged to one of the fiery religious sects that still flowered among some Professor communities, and, more exotically, among the Barbarians, also. These sects held in common the belief that the war had been the wrath of the Lord. The communities maintained Professors of Theology while the Barbarians (it was said) practised human sacrifice. Marianne recalled descriptions of hell in her father’s books, a place of fire and torment. The hard rain rattled into the room.
‘Would you have run away to the Professors, back to where you came from?’
Mrs Green stopped sewing for a moment and gazed at her needle as if recollecting the first things she had sewn with it.
‘You don’t understand a mother’s heart,’ she said. Her speech was studded with commonplaces.
‘No, but would you?’
‘I’m too old to change back, now,’ said Mrs Green. ‘I’ve got used to the travelling and all. I’d have taken, perhaps, my granddaughter, my little Jen, and gone down to the coast. Jen’s mother doesn’t take good care of her, she’s soft in the head, Jen’s mother, and Jen’s father, my son, that was, he’s dead. I’d have gone to the coast, I’ve got a daughter that married into the fishermen down there. Perhaps that’s where I’d go, if Jewel got killed, ever.’
‘And do you trust none of the other brothers? Aren’t they your foster-sons, too?’
‘Wild boys,’ said Mrs Green. ‘Wild boys, all.’
Marianne sat covered with furs against the cold while Mrs Green talked in a gentle, murmurous stream, talk of an old woman starved for company, and every other word she said betrayed her passion for her eldest foster-son. Marianne unblocked the dam; she said:
‘How can a man call himself Jewel without embarrassment?’
‘Jewel Lee Bradley, his mother was a Lee. The Lees are Old Believers, they’re clannish but they’ve got class. They were travellers before the war, you see. Jewel’s his mother’s boy, though he doesn’t recall her; she was ever such a good-looking woman and that pleased to see a boy, since she’d had two girls before. Both of which died. But she was so pleased to see a boy she called him Jewel, her Jewel. And then she died herself, poor thing; she had him and never stopped bleeding. All her blood ran out of her womb and I suckled her boy, since one of my own just died. They’re all dark, the Bradleys, like their father, old Bradley, he was black as pitch but then, he rarely washed, if ever. All the same, black as pitch under the dirt. And all the Lees are light on their feet and graceful, he gets that from his mother. And good with horses, the Lees are famous for it. Tamers of horses.’
Marianne was interested to find evidence of a Barbarian snobbery. If Jewel was an orphan of the hurricane, he was also one of its aristocrats, which might account for the extreme arrogance of his bearing. He did not come to get his foster-mother to comb his hair for him again; nobody visited her now she was well for now she was a prisoner. A hard scab covered the wound on her leg and she could walk as well as ever but Mrs Green still would not let her out of her room and Marianne no longer had any clear idea of how long she had been there.
If time was frozen among the Professors, here she lost the very idea of time, for the Barbarians did not segment their existence into hours nor even morning, afternoon and evening but left it raw in original shapes of light and darkness so the day was a featureless block of action and night of oblivion. Marianne was fastened into the room by means of the trunks of some trees which were placed across the door outside and she was left quite alone, for, now she was no longer sick, Mrs Green occupied herself with her other duties about the house and only came to Marianne to bring her sad, heavy food or to lie down beside her on the mattress and sleep. The weather continued bad; she watched mists of rain shift and coalesce.
As it grew dark, apparitions of horsemen appeared between the melting trees. Leaving the woods, they crossed the river, their horses loaded with carcasses of deer, wild pig and sheep; and men in their dripping furs were so plastered with mud they seemed not men at all but rather emanations of the shaggy forest. Mud and weariness rendered every one anonymous and the wide, wet brims of their felt hats hid their faces; she could never distinguish Jewel among them. Miserable dogs lolloped beside them and they rode in silence.
She felt herself removed to a different planet. Here, the very air had a different substance, dank, chill and subtly flavoured with ordure, to be choked down, like bad food, rather than breathed easily. Even the flames in the hearth formed a different kind of fire, when Mrs Green lit it, a fire which menaced as it warmed and did not warm sufficiently while it puffed out such piercingly acrid smoke her eyes were always watering. Sounds drifted into the room, raucous cries and the neighing of horses. Sometimes she heard ferocious inhuman howlings, she thought these were the cries of wolves outside in the forest. And sometimes she thought she heard music which seemed to come from within the house itself, though often she confused it with the sound of the wind sighing in the branches outside. If Jewel did not come to visit her, then neither did his tutor; it was as though she were in quarantine.
‘Well, Donally reckons it’s all right for you to come downstairs in the morning,’ said Mrs Green one night, taking bone pins from her coil of hair which then fell down in thin, grey wisps round her creased neck. ‘But, here – I’ll say this, never eat anything that I haven’t cooked for you myself, nor given you with my own hands. And you keep beside me, mind, don’t go running off.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s what you might call a health precaution,’ said Mrs Green. She shrouded herself in a voluminous flannel nightdress and blew out the flame of the small, foul lamp. This lamp was nothing but a lint wick floating in a saucer of animal fat. Then the old woman lay down beside Marianne; Marianne could just make out the shimmer of her fleshy back, a stout wall.
She watched Mrs Green prepare her some breakfast in the empty kitchen where the huntsmen had eaten hours before. Mrs Green used a metal pot over an open fire; she mixed flour from a sack stolen from those who had effortfully tilled the soil, kept good seed and sown it, reaped, harvested, milled, bagged and then been deprived, though they were the rightful bakers and eaters of the flour and its subsequent bread if there was such a thing as natural justice. Nevertheless, Mrs Green scooped up a handful of flour by right of conquest, since the need of the Barbarians was greater. To make her bread, she mixed the flour with salt, water and animal fat in a bowl of very rough pottery.
‘Bread’s a bit of a luxury,’ she said, but her unleavened bread was only a sour kind of biscuit. She also made a thin porridge with some other grain; this porridge tasted principally of smoke. There was cold meat. There was some milk for Marianne, though it was poor milk and Mrs Green mixed it with water to make it go further. Marianne sat at an immense, foundering table and ate the strange food that was now her regular diet.
The kitchen was more a cave. There was still glass in most of the windows but this glass was now so caked with the grime of years that only the great fire crackling on the hearth and the door, open to the morning, gave any light. Joints of meat either undergoing the process of smoking or smoked already hung everywhere from hooks and huge, lacquered bluebottles buzzed about. A few pieces of worm-eaten furniture still remained and the ancient dresser was still mysteriously loaded with cracked and ancient pottery which the tribe was too superstitious to utilize. There was a large sink full of a brilliant moss which also coated the flagstones underfoot with emeraldine fur. There was a smell of earth, of rotting food and of all-pervading excrement.
Marianne drew herself coldly inside her skin and ate because to do so was necessary though by no means pleasant.
The child Jen sat on the table and squinted inquisitively at her. It was another cold day and Jen wore a tunic of long-haired fur that made her look like a little Ancient Briton. Marianne contemplated the archaic child and wondered if her clothing were proof of the speed with which the Barbarians were sinking backwards or evidence of their adaption to new conditions. Then Jen slapped her hand. She spilled a spoonful of porridge.
‘I don’t like it when you stare at me,’ said Jen.
‘I don’t like it when you stare at me, either,’ snapped Marianne, furious.
‘Here, do I have to be friends with her?’ Jen asked her grandmother plaintively. Mrs Green watched a pan of bread cooking over the fire; the flames threw her shadow across the wall.
‘I dunno,’ said Mrs Green. ‘I’m not sure, nobody’s told me.’
‘What, the old man didn’t say?’
‘Nobody’s told me nothing except she’s to be looked after,’ said Mrs Green with a sigh. She stared at the girl and the child thoughtfully, considering; suddenly she issued a brusque and arbitrary order.
‘Give her a kiss. Go on. She’s real.’
Melodramatic amounts of smoke billowed from the chimney, blackening the bread with soot. Jen gave an astonished caw and flinched. The flinch persisted until it became a shudder; shuddering, she drew back, crawling backwards across the table, out of both daylight and firelight off into the shadow. She drew back so far she slipped off the far edge of the table, turned tail and fled from the kitchen into the passage. Her bare feet thudded softly on the stone as they receded into the depths of the house. Mrs Green shrugged, emptied the contents of the pan of bread on to a wooden dish and began to scrape off the soot with a knife.
‘Anyone can make mistakes,’ she said. ‘Thought she might give you a kiss, see. Thought it might make you seem more natural.’
Heroes and Villains Page 6
