In a way I could almost find it in me to envy Henry Chester. I’d always known, of course, that an artist has to suffer to become great. But suffering exquisite enough to produce that…maybe that was worth knowing…this passion which transcends everything.
For a few minutes I sat among the wreckage and mourned like a child. But then my mind turned to more prosaic things and I was myself again. There was still the business of the money.
I stood up for a moment and tried to think logically. Where was the man? I turned over the possible alternatives in my mind…and then I knew. Of course! Thursday. It was Thursday. Marta’s day. I glanced at my watch. Five past seven. Wherever he was now, walking the streets of London in whatever cold circle of hell now possessed him, I knew that at midnight he would be there, in Crook Street, for his tryst with his lady. Whatever the risk, whatever she made him suffer, he’d be there.
For an instant my eyes rested upon the drawing I had picked up at random from the hundreds on the floor: a stiff rough-edged piece of watercolour paper with a blurred outline in brown chalk from which her eyes smouldered endlessly, promising endlessly…A man could fall in love.
I shrugged and dropped the sketch back into the fireplace.
Not me, Henry. Not me.
60
From the moment I saw the opened present underneath the Christmas tree I understood that Effie had at last come home. I heard her footsteps in the passageway, her breathing in darkened rooms; I smelled her perfume in doorways, found strands of her hair on my coats, her handkerchiefs in my pockets. She was in the air I breathed, the shirts I wore; moving beneath the surface of my paintings like a drowned girl just beneath the water so that at last I had to cover them with sheets to hide her face, her accusing eyes. She was in the chloral bottle, so that however much I took I gained no peace from the drug but only managed to make her image clearer in my mind…And when I slept—and in spite of all my attempts to cheat sleep I sometimes did—then she stalked through my dreams, screaming at me in a voice as shrill and inhuman as a peacock’s: ‘What about my story? What about my story? What about my story?’
She knew all my secrets. Night after night she came to me with gifts: the bottle of jasmine perfume, the blue-and-white doorknob, and once, the little white disc of the Host, marked scarlet by the touch of her lips…
Night after night I awoke drenched in the bitter sweat of terror and remorse. I could not eat: I tasted Effie in every morsel I brought to my mouth and she looked out through my haunted eyes every time I looked in the shaving-mirror. I was aware that I was taking far more chloral than was good for me, but I could not bring myself to reduce the doses.
And yet for her sake I endured it, for Marta, my Scheherazade. Does she know it? Does she wake in the night and whisper my name? Even without tenderness, does she whisper it? Does she love, my pale Persephone?
I wish I knew.
I waited until Thursday as I had promised. I dared not do otherwise—my Scheherazade was not kind, and I could not bear the thought of her rejection if I deviated at all from her instructions. On Thursday night I waited for Tabby to go to bed—I even drank her hot milk before I pretended to retire—and I made my way to my room to wait. As soon as I opened the door I sensed the change: a fleeting scent of laudanum and chocolate in the cold air, the flutter of a lace curtain in a half-open window…Clumsily, I fumbled with the spluttering gas-jet, my hands shaking so that it took nearly a minute to light it; and all the while I could hear her in the dark behind me, the Beggar Girl, the sounds of her pointed nails against the silk coverlet, and her breathing, dear God, her breathing. The light flared and sputtered. I turned wildly, and she was there: for an instant her eyes met mine and held them. I was paralysed, mouth open, choking, my sanity unravelling like a ball of twine into a bottomless well. Then I saw the dust-sheet on the bed and relief swept over me in a great, hot wave. The picture. It was the picture. The sheet had slipped somehow and…Dizzy with relief, almost laughing, I ran towards the bed…and the relief froze in my throat, turning my legs to water. On the pillow, pinned to the pillowcase, was a silver brooch I remembered. Effie had worn it that night—I recalled the gleam of it as she moved in the snow, the arch of a silver cat’s back as she fixed me with her own catlike, silvery gaze…
Stupidly I fingered the brooch, trying to slow the vertiginous fall of my thoughts. Below my left eye a banner fluttered a signal of uncontrolled panic.
(what about my what aboutmy whataboutmy story)
If I had heard her say it I know I would have lost my mind, but I was aware that she spoke only in my thoughts.
(whatabout my whatabout whataboutmy)
I used the only magic I knew. To silence the pitiless voice in my mind I spoke aloud the one magic word: I summoned the enchantress with all the yearning intensity of which I was capable.
‘Marta.’
Silence.
That, and something almost like hope. Almost like quiescence.
I waited in that undersea silence for what seemed like hours. Then at ten o’clock I rose from my chair and washed in cold water, dressing carefully and meticulously. I crept, unseen, out of the house and into the breathless night. The snow had stopped falling and a dreamlike stillness crept over the town; with it came fog so thick that even the gaslamps were eclipsed, their greenish globes lost in an endless haze of white. Beneath the fog, the snow seemed to have a radiance of its own, a kind of unearthly cat’s-eye luminescence which made walking corpses of the rare passers-by. But chloral and the proximity to Crook Street had subdued my ghosts; no little Beggar Girl followed me, holding out her thin bare arms in frozen entreaty; the ghosts—if there were ghosts—dared not leave Cromwell Square.
As I made my way through the snow, bracketed from the fog by the light of my lantern, I began to feel strong again, confident in the certainty that she was waiting; Marta, my Marta. I had brought her a present, tucked underneath my coat: the peach silk wrap I had bought on Oxford Street, repackaged in bright red paper and tied with gold ribbon…As I walked, my hand crept almost furtively to the package, testing its weight, imagining how the peach silk would look against her skin, how provocatively it would slip from her shoulders, its fine, translucent grain sliding against the rougher grain of her hair…
It was almost midnight when I reached Crook Street, and the flare of excitement and anticipation at knowing her to be so close was such that I was at the door before I realized what was wrong: the house was dark, no windows lit, not even a lantern at the door. Puzzled, I stopped in the snow and listened…but there was no sound from Fanny’s house, not the faintest tinkle of music or laughter; nothing but that dreadful, buzzing silence which engulfed everything.
My knock echoed dully through the house and suddenly I was convinced that they had gone, Marta and Fanny and all of them, that they had simply packed their belongings and disappeared like gypsies into the uncertain snow, leaving nothing but regrets and a whiff of magic on the air. The conviction was so great that I cried out aloud and beat against the door with my fists…and the door swung open silently, like a smile, as from inside the house I heard the hall clock begin to strike the passage of day to night.
I paused on the doorstep, a faint smell of spices and old incense in my nostrils. There was no light from the hall, but the snow’s luminous reflections were enough to cast a faint, ethereal glow on to polished floorboards and shining brasses, so that my shadow was startlingly clear in the moonlight, falling crookedly across the threshold and down the passageway. A tepid exhalation of scented air touched my face, like breath.
‘Fanny?’ My voice was intrusive, too shrill in the muted intricacies of the house: at last, after so many years of visiting, I realized its immensity, passage after passage of carpeted labyrinth, doors I never remembered passing before, pictures of languid nymphs and satyrs with ravaged, knowing faces; screaming Bacchantes with thighs like pillars, pursued by grinning dwarves and leering goblins; demure mediaeval handmaidens of Pandaemonium with narrow hips
and cryptic, penetrating eyes…As I passed through dim galleries of explicit, gilt-framed lechery, the dark robbed me of all perspective. I speeded my step, hating the dull and somehow menacing pounding of my stockinged feet against the deep pile of the carpets. I tried to locate the stairs but managed only to turn into another passage, and turned handles only to find the doors locked and whispering as if some mystery crouched half-awakened behind.
‘Fanny! Marta!’ By now my disorientation was complete: the house seemed to stretch out for immeasurable distances in all directions; I felt I had been running for miles.
‘Marta!’ The silence reverberated. A hundred miles away I thought I could hear a tinkling of music. After a moment I recognized it.
‘Marta!’ My voice cracked on a high note of panic and I began to run blindly down the passageway, striking the walls with my hands as I went, calling her name in desperate invocation. I turned a corner and ran straight into a door which abruptly brought the passage to an end. The rush of panic dissipated as if it had never been and I felt my heartbeat slowing down almost to a normal rate as my hand closed around the porcelain doorknob and the door opened into the hall.
There were the stairs—I could not understand how I could have missed them the first time I passed that way—and I could see moonlight from a little stained-glass window casting reflections across the burnished wood. The light was so bright that I could even distinguish colours: here a splash of red across the banisters, a couple of green lozenges on the stairs, a blue triangle on the wall…and higher on the stairs a naked figure, the subtle line of her flank and thigh etched in purple and blue and indigo, the rippling fall of her hair a darker veil drawn against the night.
Moonlight caught one of her eyes from the shadowed face, coaxing the iris into opalescent brilliance. She was poised like a cat, ready to leap; I saw the tautness of her white throat, the muscles corded like a dancer’s, saw the arch of her foot on the stair, tension in every nerve of her body, and I was filled with an overwhelming awe for that unearthly beauty. For a moment I was too absorbed even to feel lust. Then, as I moved towards her, she sprang away from me with a soft laugh and fled up the stairs with me in pursuit. I almost touched her—I remember how the fronds of her hair brushed my fingers, flushing my whole body with a hot shiver of desire. She was quicker than I, evading my clumsy embraces as I pounded behind her. As I reached the topmost landing, I thought I could hear her laughter through the door, teasing me.
I gave a little moan of anticipation, the exquisite tension of the moment driving me to her door (the doorknob was blue-and-white porcelain, but there was no time for the fact to register). I had begun to shed my clothes even before I opened the door, leaving a trail of discarded skins (coat, shirt, neck-cloth) on the landing behind me. Indeed, when I opened the door I was absurdly half clad in socks, hat and one trouser-leg, and was almost too preoccupied with ridding myself of the rest of my clothes fully to take in the surroundings. With the benefit of hindsight I know that I had been there before: it was the room of my dreams, her room, my mother’s room, transported by some ironic magick to Crook Street; in the dim light of a shielded candle I could make out the details I remembered from that first, terrible day, diluted almost into insignificance by the nearness of Marta: here was her dressing-table, with the flotilla of little jars and bottles; there was her high-backed brocade chair, a green scarf draped carelessly over the back; on the floor another scarf lay discarded; across the bed dresses lay tumbled in a splash of lace and taffeta and damask and silk…
If I noticed any of this, it was with the eyes of desire alone. There was no sense of danger, no foreboding; simply a childish feeling of rightness and a joy which was purely physical as I leaped on to the bed, where Marta was already waiting for me. Together we rolled among the gowns and furs and cloaks, crushing antique lace and ravaging costly velvets in our silent struggle. Once my outflung arm struck a side-table, sweeping rings, necklaces and bracelets to the floor as I laughed madly, burying my face in the sweetness of her jasmine-scented flesh and kissing her as if I could not bear to leave an inch of her skin unconquered.
As the first uncontrollable madness fell from me I was able to think clearly again, to relish her in ways which the urgency of my need for her would not have allowed. I realized she was cold, her lips pale as petals, her breath a thin, freezing draught against my face as I held her.
‘Poor love, are you ill? You’re so cold.’
Her answer was inaudible, icy against my cheek.
‘Let me warm you.’ My arms were around her, her forehead nestling in the hollow of my throat. Her hair was slightly damp, her breathing feverish and too rapid. I drew a blanket around us both, shivering in the aftermath of passion as I reached for my chloral bottle on its chain about my neck and shook out ten grains. Swallowing five myself, I gave Marta what was left, watching as she grimaced at the taste, her parted lips drawn down in an oddly childish expression which made me smile.
‘There, you’ll see,’ I told her gently. ‘I’ll soon make you warm. Just close your eyes. Shh. Close your eyes and sleep.’
I felt her flinch against me and I flushed with tenderness; she was so young, after all, so vulnerable in spite of her apparent self-control. I allowed my hands to move softly through the tangled web of her hair.
‘It’s all right,’ I whispered, as much for my own reassurance as hers. ‘It’s all right now. It’s all over. Now we’re together, my love, we can both rest easily. Try to rest.’
And, for a time, we did, as the light dimmed and dimmed and finally went out. And for a while, God slept too…
Maybe I dozed; difficult to remember in the haze of impressions. I floated in jasmine and chloral, my mind adrift, and when I awoke I realized that though I was quite warm beneath my blanket, Marta was not with me. I sat up, squinting against the light which filtered in from behind the curtains—the candle had long since burned out. Dimly I could distinguish details of the room, the richness of lace and velvet frozen to silver ash in the moonlight, the vials and bottles on the dressing-table twinkling like icicles against the dark wood.
‘Marta?’
Silence. The room waited. Something moved by the cold hearth; I twisted round, my heart pounding…Nothing. Just a loose piece of soot in the chimney. The fireplace grinned toothily from its brass fireguard.
I was suddenly sure that I was alone in the house. Panic-stricken, I leaped to my feet, the blanket trailing from my shoulders, and cried her name in a voice of rising hysteria. ‘Marta!’
Something clutched at my leg, something cold. I cried out in loathing and pulled away from the bed; the thing held fast and I felt dry, brittle scales against my skin. ‘Ma-ar…aah!’ I twisted violently while pulling at the thing with my frozen fingers…I heard the heavy crack of tearing fabric, felt shredded lace in my trembling hands and began to laugh sickly: my legs had become entangled in the folds of a gown which had been lying on the bed and now lay on the floor in a heap of dismembered petticoats, the sequinned bodice torn fairly in half.
I muttered to myself in derision: ‘Dress. Fighting a dress,’ but I was shocked at the way my voice trembled. Closing my eyes in sudden nausea, I listened as my heartbeat slowed back to normal in time to the ticking of my left eyelid. After a time I was able to open my eyes again and, forcing myself to think rationally, I went to the fire to try and light it. Marta would be back soon, I told myself. In a moment she would come through the door…and even if she didn’t, there was no reason to think that this room—this room, for God’s sake—might want something of me, as my mother’s room had seemed to want so many years ago…and want what? A sacrifice, perhaps? A confession?
Ridiculous! It wasn’t even the same room.
And yet there was something in the silence, something almost gloating. I fumbled in the fireplace, fighting the urge to look back over my shoulder at the door. For an instant the room flared with red light as I struck a match. Then it flickered and died. I cursed. Again. Again. At last I manag
ed to coax the flame into flickering life; the paper caught, then the wood. I looked round as giant shadows bloomed on the walls, then stood with my back to the hearth, feeling the tentative heat of the new flames with a sense of victory.
‘Nothing like a fire,’ I muttered softly. ‘Nothing like…’ The words turned to paper in my throat.
‘Marta?’ For a moment I almost said ‘Mother’. She was sitting on the bed with one foot curled under her body, her head slightly to one side, watching me expressionlessly. She was wearing Mother’s wrap. No, she must have found my present, opened it and put it on to please me. Perhaps she had been waiting for me to notice her all the time.
‘Marta.’ I forced my voice into its normal range and tried a smile. ‘Lovely.’ I swallowed. ‘Quite lovely.’ She tilted her head coquettishly, slipping her face into shadow. ‘Your present,’ I explained.
‘Present,’ she whispered.
‘Indeed,’ I said more jovially. ‘As soon as I saw it I thought of you.’ That wasn’t quite true, of course, but I thought she would like me to say so. ‘And you do look very lovely.’
She nodded reflectively, quite as if she knew.
‘Almost time for your present now,’ she said.
‘Once upon a time…’ Her breath was cold against my throat, her fingers tracing tiny circles against my bare back as she whispered in the dark. I could feel silk and peach lace beneath my moist palms and a scent of jasmine, heavy and soporific, rose from her feverish skin along with a darker, sharper scent…A sudden image of wolves passed through my torpid mind.
Sleep, Pale Sister Page 27
