‘Once upon a time there lived a King and Queen who had one son.’
I closed my eyes and sank into the blissful half-light of the jade underworld. Her voice was a scattering of random bubbles at my feet; her touch a cool current from the deep.
‘The Prince loved both his parents, but his mother had his heart—he never left her side. The Prince had everything he could wish for…but for one thing. In the castle there was a single room in which he was not allowed entry, a room which was always locked, and the key was kept safe in his mother’s pocket. As the years went by the Prince began to think more and more about the secret room, and longed to see what was inside. Then one day, when both his parents were absent, the Prince happened to pass that secret door and found it ajar. Impelled by curiosity he pushed it open and went in.’
The air was dark with jasmine; Marta, I know.
‘The room was gold, but the Prince had all the riches he could ever want. The room was scarlet and purple and emerald, but the Prince had damasks and velvets by the bale with which to clothe himself.’
Oh Marta, reaper of my dreams, child of my innermost dark…I saw her story—which was also mine; I saw the secret chamber and my fourteen-year-old self at the door with the reflections of a million gems in my black eyes.
‘The room was scented with the essence of a thousand flowers; but the Prince lived in a garden where winter never came. There was nothing here to merit such secrecy, he thought.’
Scheherazade spread her long white fingers, the palms of her hands like scarlet orbs in the firelight.
‘And still, the Prince could not bring himself to leave. A great curiosity gnawed him as, almost idly, he searched through chests and wardrobes until suddenly he came upon a small and very plain wooden casket which he had never seen before.’
My heart began to beat faster, my temples tightening painfully.
‘Why keep this ugly old casket, thought the Prince in surprise, when everything else in the palace is so rich and fair? And he opened the box and looked inside.’
She paused—I saw the glimmer of her crimson smile—and I realized at that moment that she knew the Mystery, had always known it. Here was the woman who could lead me beyond the doomed posturings of sin and flesh: she understood my yearning, my hopeless regret. This was her ‘present’: this revelation.
‘Go on, please; go on.’ I could feel sweat trickling down my cheeks at the thought that even now she might withhold it. ‘Marta, please…’
‘Shh, close your eyes,’ she whispered. ‘Close your eyes and you’ll see. Sleep, and I’ll show you.’
‘What did he see?’
‘Shh…’
‘What did I…’
‘Sleep.’
Imagine the sea-bed under a fathom of brown ooze.
Imagine the peace…
‘The Prince rubbed his eyes: for a moment he saw nothing in the box but a dark blur, like smoke, but as he strained to see what was there he was finally able to make out a wand of hazel wood wrapped in a stained black cloak. “How strange,” said the Prince, “to keep such old and ugly things so secret,” and because he was young and curious, he lifted the two objects out of the box. Now what the Prince didn’t know—what no-one knew—was that the Queen was a witch who had come from a far Northern land beyond the sea, a long, long time ago. By enchantments she had made the King love her, and by enchantments she kept her nature secret. The cloak was magic, and so was the wand, and only the Queen could control them. But the Prince was her son, and the witch’s blood was in his veins. When he put on the magic cloak and held the wand in his right hand he felt a sudden upsurge of power. He lifted the wand and power glowed in him like a sun…but the spirits of the wand, seeing that the invoker was only a boy, saw their chance to rebel and escape bondage. They tore free, screaming with triumph, raking the Prince’s face with their claws and breathing their vile breath in his face so that he fell to the ground in a dead faint.
‘When the Prince awoke, the spirits were gone and the wand lay broken beside him. When he saw this, the Prince was afraid. He replaced the wand and cloak in the casket and fled from the room. When the Queen returned she saw at once that her wand had been tampered with, but she could not mention it because no-one knew she was a witch. So she waited for the night of the dark moon and set a curse on the meddler, a terrible curse; for in breaking her wand he had broken her power, and from now on she would be fated to grow old even as mortal women. She put all her hate into the curse and waited, knowing that soon it would begin to take effect.
‘That very night, the Prince awoke screaming in the aftermath of a terrible dream, and in the days and weeks which followed he grew pale and ill, sleeping little at night, unable to rest or to eat by day. Months passed. The King ordered all the greatest physicians in the land to see his beloved son, but no-one could find a cure for his slow and dreadful malady. To add to the King’s despair, his wife too fell ill, growing weaker and more wan day by day. The whole country was ordered to pray for their recovery.
‘Now one day an old Hermit came by the palace, a very holy man, and demanded to see the King. “I think I may be able to find what ails your son and your wife,” he said, “if only I may see them.” The King, mad with grief, agreed, and the Hermit made his way first to the Queen’s room, then to the Prince. Without a word he looked into the Prince’s eyes. Then he dismissed the guards and spoke severely to the Prince.
“‘You have been cursed, my son,” he said, “by the witch Queen, your mother. If you do not act soon then you will die and she will recover.”
‘The Prince wept, for he loved his mother dearly.
“‘What must I do?” he asked at last.
“‘You must go to her room and kill her,” said the Hermit. “Nothing else can lift the curse.”
‘The Prince shook his head and wept again, but the Hermit was cold as ice. “The Queen has no other children,” he said grimly, “and your father is an old man. Would you see a witch in command of your country for ever?”
‘So the Prince agreed, with a heavy heart, and that night he rose from his bed and made his way softly down the long passageways of the palace to his mother’s chamber.’
The door was open, I know. I see it from my bed of salt slime: the knotholes in the white wood, the blue-and-white china doorknob—how easily all this comes back to me! There is a notch in the side of the second panel where once I accidentally struck it with a cricket stump. The house is dark and somewhere far behind me I can hear Father in his toy workshop, a few bright notes from the mechanism of the dancing Columbine scattered in the dark. I am carrying a stump of candle in a flowered dish; the scent of tallow sharp in my flared nostrils. A thick white tear crawls down the side of the candle and on to the china, pooling across one of the blue flowers. My breathing seems very loud in the thick air.
The carpet is soft and yielding beneath my feet but in spite of this I can hear the sounds of my footsteps. Around me the candlelight catches the glass of her bottles and jars, throwing a thousand prisms against the mirror and the wall. For a moment I am not certain whether or not the baby is in the room with her; but the crib is empty—Nurse has taken it in case its cries awake my mother. Raising the candle behind the glowing red shield of my hand I look at her face in the rosy light with a rapture all the more precious for being forbidden. A laudanum vial glitters on the bedstand beside her: she will not wake.
A sudden wrenching tenderness overwhelms me as I watch her face: her thin blue eyelids, the perfect curve of her cheekbones, her cascade of dark hair covering the pillow and spilling down the folds of the coverlet on to the floor…she is so beautiful. Even so wasted, so pale, even now she is the most beautiful woman in the world, and my heart aches with a desperate, hurt love, poignant beyond my fourteen years. My child’s heart feels as if it will burst with the strain of all these adult emotions; the tearing jealousy, the loneliness, the sick need to touch her, to be touched by her, as if her touch might erode the cancerous invasion of t
he serpent in my stomach, her arms ward away the night. Asleep, she is approachable and I almost dare to stretch out my hand to her hair, her face; I might even brush her pale lips with mine…she would never know.
Asleep, she is nearly smiling; her eyes blurred and softened beneath the violet eyelids, the mauve shadow of her collarbone a perfect Chinese brush-stroke against the pallor of her skin…her breasts a scarcely perceptible swelling through the linen of her nightdress. My hand moves almost by itself, a disembodied starfish in the dim brown night. I watch it, mesmerized, as the fingers touch her face, very gently, with miraculous daring slipping to her throat…I pull away, blushing, all my skin tingling with guilt and excitement. But it is the hand moving all on its own, drifting down the coverlet with languid purpose, now twitching the coverlet aside to reveal her sleeping form, the nightdress drawn up to her knees, showing her taut calves, the soft curve of a thigh.
There is a bruise there, just above the knee, and I feel my eyes drawn to its mauve delicacy. My hand stretches out to touch, and she is powdered satin beneath my fingertips, she is endless mystery, endless softness, drowning softness like undersea sand…Her jasmine scent hides another scent, like salt biscuit, and without even knowing it I bring my face against her, burying my face in the warmth and sweetness of her, taut with yearning and excitement. My hand finds her breast with a leap of savage joy; my arms curl around her, my lips suddenly ravenous for hers…Her breath is faintly sharp, like sickness, but now my body is a single tendon taut as a harp-string, filling the atmosphere with a resonance of unendurable purity which rises and rises in pitch to the point of insanity and beyond…I have no body; I see my soul drawn out like a fine silver wire, vibrating shrilly to the spheres’ ringing…I hear laughter and realize it is my own…
Her eyes snap open.
I feel the line of her mouth tauten beneath my lips.
‘Mother…’ Helplessly, I curl away, stomach a fist of ice.
Her eyes are cruelly sharp; I know that she sees everything. Everything. Years fall from me; a moment ago I felt old, now I am falling backwards into my childhood; thirteen, twelve, eleven, and as I shrink she grows, monstrous…eight, seven…I see her mouth open, hear the distorted syllables: ‘Henry? What are you…’
Six, five. Her teeth are pointed, impossibly savage. Blood hammers in my temples. A scream breaks from my lungs; her rage is enormous. Worse still is her contempt, her hatred, like a tidal wave filled with the floating dead. I can barely hear her voice above the rushing in my ears; there is something soft in my hands, something which struggles with monstrous strength against me. The tide tosses me to and fro like jetsam; I tighten my eyes into knuckles so that I do not have to see…
A sudden, miraculous silence.
I lie on the black sand as the tide retreats, its breath like heartbeats in my eardrums; the return to consciousness is like a million pinpoints of light on my retina, my mouth full of blood from a bitten tongue. I crawl to my knees on the spinning carpet, a rope of bloody spittle dragging to the floor, the pillow still in my convulsed hands.
‘Mother?’
Her glazed eyes stare at me, still hard, as if outraged by the indignity of her posture.
‘Mo-other?’ I feel my thumb creep up to find the corner of my mouth, my knees curling to join my elbows. In some part of my mind I understand that if I can curl up into a tiny enough ball I will be able to go back into that half-remembered place of safety, the salty place of darkness and warmth. Smaller…smaller. Three, two, one…
Silence.
Far above me the sound of laughter, the huge troll-like bellow of God. The black angel picks up her scythe and the Furies fly screaming up out of the pit to find their new plaything; and I know all their faces. The whorechild, with a smear of chocolate on her cheek…Effie’s seawater eyes and foaming hair…my mother, so long forgotten in the merciful blindness but now recalled for ever, dragged back on to her dark pedestal, her fingers like blades. Closer now, the voice of the enchantress, Scheherazade, her wolves at her feet…her unearthly laughter. From my half-sleep, struggling, I try to call her, to invoke her name against the coming nightmare.
‘Marta!’
I open bloodshot eyes, feel the firelight against my frozen limbs. The rogue muscle in my cheek pins my eye closed in a series of fluttering spasms too rapid to calculate. The memory, newly recalled by Marta’s story, is a marble sepulchre from some grotesque fairy-tale, reaching higher than the clouds. I reach out for her comfort…
The light is suddenly, mercilessly bright. I raise my hands to shield my eyes, and I see her, Scheherazade, my golden nemesis, laughing.
‘Marta?’ The voice is barely a whisper, but even as I speak I know that she is not Marta. She is Effie, pale and triumphant; she is my mother, lewd and venomous; she is the ghostchild. All three speak as one, stretching out their hungry arms to me and as I fall backwards, striking my back against the bedrail and hardly feeling the pain as my vertebrae crunch against the angle of the post, I realize at last what she is, what they are. Tisiphone, Megaera and Alecto. Avengers of matricide. The Furies!
A tremendous bolt of agony drives through my body; razors sever my spine and a tremor grips me all down my left side.
As I pass into friendly oblivion I hear her voice, their voice, bright with venom and mockery: ‘What about my story, Henry? What about my story?’ And, in the far distance, the savage laughter of God.
61
The snow began to fall as I left Henry’s studio. By the time I reached Crook Street the night had an ethereal clarity which illuminated my steps and touched my clothes with powdery phosphorescence. As I glimpsed Fanny’s house from the corner I noticed that the lantern which usually hung from the door was dark. Moving forwards I saw that the windows, too, were dark, the curtains drawn, with not a chink of light shining through the heavy folds. I noticed that the snow was scuffled at the doorstep, though no light shone from the stained-glass of the porch. Thinking that maybe there would be someone in one of the back parlours of the house, I went up to the door and knocked. No answer. I tried the door: predictably, it was locked. I knocked again, shouted through the letter-box…but no answer came.
Puzzled, I tried the side door, with as little success, and I was about to leave, shaking my head in bewilderment, when I saw something dark and bulky lying in the shadow by the side of the house, half covered by the rapidly falling snow. At first I thought it was a discarded coal-sack; then I saw the heel of a man’s boot poking out of the snow. A vagrant, I thought, looking for a place to shelter and caught by the cold, poor devil. I had a flask of brandy in my pocket and, pulling it out, I waded through the drifting snow and reached for the body—maybe there was still life in him, I thought. I dragged him from his hollow by the wall and as I brushed away the frozen mask from the twisted, petrified face, I recognized Henry Chester.
One eye was open, staring; the other drooped oddly. The muscles in his left cheek and temple were strangely distorted, like melted wax, and his left hand was a claw, his shoulder hunched grotesquely, his hip dislocated, the leg thrown out at a gruesome angle. Until he moved, I could have sworn he was dead.
A sound escaped his lips; a long, guttural moan.
‘Aaa-daa. Aah-a.’
I pushed the brandy flask between his clenched teeth. ‘Drink it, Henry. Don’t try to say anything.’
Brandy trickled down both sides of his mouth and a rictus seized him as again he tried to form syllables. The intensity of his need to speak was agonizing.
‘It’s all right,’ I said uncomfortably. ‘Don’t talk. I’ll get help.’ There were lights in the windows of nearby houses; surely someone would take care of him while I called for a doctor. Besides, the last thing I wanted was to stay alone with Henry.
‘Ma—a. Maaah…’ The right hand clenched against my sleeve; the head lolled, drooling. ‘Ma-ahh.’
‘Marta,’ I said softly.
‘Ahh.’ His nod was convulsive.
‘You came here to see Marta?
’ I coaxed.
‘Ahh.’
‘But she wasn’t in, so you waited. Is that right?’
Another spasm; the head lolled again, obscenely, his one open eye turned up to the white. ‘Nnn-ah. Mm-aah-a. Ahhh. Aahh…’ His right arm flailed helplessly and tears trickled from his right eye, though the other stayed frozen, a knuckle of stupid flesh.
Unbearable, sick pity jerked me to my feet.
‘Can’t stay, Henry,’ I said, trying to avert my eyes. ‘I’m getting help. You’ll be all right.’
An animal moan, in which I could still distinguish the chilling accents of the human voice; words struggling through dying flesh. Words? One word. One name. I couldn’t bear the sound, the dying sound of his obsession. Cursing myself, I turned and ran.
It was easy enough to find someone to help; a woman from a nearby house accepted a guinea to call for a doctor and give shelter to the stricken man: two hours later the doctor arrived and Henry was transported back to Cromwell Square. It was a stroke, the doctor had said; a massive seizure of the heart. The patient must be kept quiet if there was to be a chance of recovery, and a dose of chloral mixed with water, patiently forced drop by drop between the patient’s rigid lips, served to calm him. When I finally left them, certain that I could do no more, Henry had subsided into a thick stupor, his breathing almost imperceptible, his eyes glazed. That was enough, I decided; I was no sick-nurse. I had saved the man’s life, most likely; what more could anyone expect? When no-one was paying attention I left, quietly, by the back door and disappeared into the deserted streets.
To save us both a little time, I took Henry’s wallet with me as I left: anyone could see that the poor fellow was in no condition to talk business that night.
62
A soft current bore me to a silent world of muted shapes and uncertain perspectives. The darkness was deepest emerald; but in the middle distance I could see figures, featureless, shapes without line or definition and, in the foreground, a face, grotesquely disproportionate, swimming like a bloated fish in and out of focus. For a moment it swam out of my field of vision and I tried to turn my head to follow it but found myself oddly prevented from doing so. I tried to recall the terror and urgency which had forced me to the safety of the sea-bed, but I was strangely serene, as if regarding events through a dark crystal. A shoal of foetuses paddled clumsily through a reef of green coral where a pale girl floated, her long white hair rising like seaweed into the murky grey of the undersea sky.
Sleep, Pale Sister Page 28
