by Lee, Tanith
‘I’m sorry, I shan’t be completing the month.’
‘Oh. Well that’s not very fair.’
‘You’ve dismissed me. What difference does it make.’
Mr Gerard began to inform her in detail of the difference, shouting. Rachaela put down the phone. Four days later a cheque arrived. He had not paid her for the extra month nor a penny beyond the day she had last worked for him, which had been Friday. He would have to manage the Saturday rushes of two people on his own now.
She wandered about the tiny flat, tidying it for the last time. If she returned, the flat would be no more. She would store her furniture, the Scarabae could pay for that.
Day by day now the flat became like a prison. She could settle to nothing but packing her two new cases, parceling up the few leftovers for Oxfam. Her plants had died, she could not grow things. The cat had died. She had no friends, no one to bid farewell. She sent the new address to the landlord, who would probably ignore it. The new address was surreal in any case, perhaps invented, a place that did not exist.
A lot of matters she left unseen to. For when she came back.
But it was inconceivable, a return, the outward journey with all its twists and pitfalls before her.
Outside on the green she thought that, twice, she caught sight of the agent in the woollen hat, hiding among the wet trees, watching. But he might be an hallucination.
She hoped the ghost of the cat would vanish from her rooms once she had left. The thought made her cry as sometimes she did, violently, but never for very long.
She had indulged in purely emotionally-sexual fantasies from childhood, at rest or in bed before going to sleep. She pictured unformed adventure, and men almost faceless, tall and black-haired. In the world she never met them, although now and then, for a moment at some street corner, across a room, she might see a fleeting illusion which dissolved as she gazed on it.
Following her mother’s death—when Rachaela was twenty-five—she had believed herself too old for these dreams, hazy and incoherent, repetitive and unlikely as they were, meetings in storm and mist, on hillsides, under midnight trees... She put them away. Now and then a book or a film might try to trigger them. She was stem.
Currently her imaginary excursions were all to the place where she was going. She conjured it with terror. It was like a swamp which sucked her in.
Chapter Two
After the last of the journey, many hours long, the traveller was hypnotized, her body still moving with the sway and judder of the train, her eyes amazed by stillness. She stood outside the tiny, half-derelict station among the winter weeds. The sky swept to the land. It was a scene by Turner, great clouds, and suggestions of hills; no break of sun in the vanquished afternoon.
Then along the asphalt road that ran above the station, a fawn Cortina drove towards her.
Isolated in the landscape, she and the car seemed destined for one another.
The Cortina swung into the station forecourt among the weeds and grass. The window went down.
‘Name of Smith?’
The driver had an indeterminate alien accent.
‘Yes.’
The door opened and politely the driver came to lift her two bags into the boot. Heavy with books, not clothes, he must strain. He said, ‘Come for a holiday?’
‘No,’ Rachaela said, coldly, to exclude him.
Not a driver of the city, he did not impertinently press her, presuming on a wish to talk. He fell silent, opening the passenger door.
Rachaela got in. As the car started up she felt relief. Her body had been in motion so long it now seemed only comfortable if moving.
The car was stuffy and dank yet she sank back against the seat, longing to close her eyes. But the alien driver meant she could not abandon herself. She watched the pale olive green of the country stream away along the road. Dark woodland patched it and occasionally the tobacco-coloured basins of fields, a stone farmhouse, an ancient garage with fallen sign and brilliant rust.
The driver did not speak for thirty miles.
Then he said, mildly, ‘I don’t know the area too well. I’m from the town. Will you know the place?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Have to chance it then. Mr Simon sent me a little map. May help.’
She thought of the driver leaving her in the wilderness, running his shabby car home to an electric fireside, a warm semi littered by children’s toys and washing, beefburgers for tea, a warm wife and two lively kids, perhaps a toddler. She was jealous a moment, passionately, furiously jealous of this easy normality. Only the mortgage to worry him, the long odd hours of his work, but the warm wife to come home to and the procreative results of former love.
And what am I? How then do I see myself?
She had a vision of a black moth battered through the night, a deer hastening between the fraught shadows. Dramatic, fearfully apt. No warm fireside for her. To what then was she going, where was this baffled driver, himself unsure, taking her? The quag gaped. Rachaela tensed and found her hands clutched together on her limp black bag long ago wrung out. Faint sickness oozed in her vitals, as it had off and on for days, at this prospect. An adventure after all. Maybe it was correct that she should be afraid. Scarabae.
Across level fields Rachaela saw the sudden sun, watery and veiled, sinking down into the western valleys.
Bold hills rose straight up from the ground, some with white chalk masks, like the heads of phantom animals, leering, smiling, grimacing, holes for eyes. Trees trailed over rock. Ivy grew along the earth, and festooned old broken walls. Once there had been houses. Now, nothing, Gone away.
‘Empty old place,’ said the driver, venturing once more into Rachaela’s silence, making her start. ‘See the sea soon.’
This alliterative phrase snagged on her mind.
She had not known they approached the coast. She was ignorant of everything. The whole world had stayed undiscovered for her, strange names and languages on her radio.
The shop in Lizard Street would be closing shortly. The buses would be scuttling down the highways. A planet away. Lost, gone.
Some seagulls passed across the view.
The road pulled itself up and over, and a sudden break revealed the fish-grey glitter of the ocean. A white cannon-shot of foam discharged itself below. Rachaela’s heart rose with it, fell back fatigued and fearful. The sea did not reassure.
They drove above the water and sometimes a stretch of sinuous beach appeared, and once a great tanker was on the horizon like a slowly swimming dinosaur.
‘Now there’ll be a turn-off here, if I read that map all right.’
Again the voice of the driver snapped at her nerves. ‘A turn-off,’ she repeated. But he was not now inclined to converse.
The turn presently appeared on their left, winding in amongst a vast bank of trees. Black pines rose along the hill, a sort of forest from a fairy book, in miniature. They sped from the sea, and a cave of boughs brought them shadow. Branches struck savagely at the sides of the car. It was a poor road, bumps, and shingle spraying up as if from machine guns.
‘Rough on my tyres,’ said the driver.
Rachaela did not say she was sorry.
He said, ‘Never told me it’d be this bad.’
They swerved through the forest. Sheer blackness coiled under the trees. The sun broke through with a flash and vanished again.
The road curled over and came to a stop against the flank of a crumbling hill. It was dark, the trees massed all about, listening. The Cortina stopped and in the stillness birds twittered and chimed, a curious primeval noise.
‘Look there.’
Rachaela looked and saw a stone signpost. There were two words on it: The House. Nothing else, not even an indicatory arrow.
‘Must be up the top of the slope.’ The driver turned and grinned at her, showing after all the anticipated face of the enemy. ‘I can’t get the car up there. There’s no road. You’ll have to walk.’
They wen
t to the boot and he drew out the two heavy cases, which she had ported all day, already spent by them.
‘Can you manage?’ he asked, unhelpful, recalcitrant.
‘What do I owe you?’ Rachaela asked.
‘Taken care of. They have an account, the Simons. Don’t know why, they never seem to use a car, until now. First time any of us has been out here. Mind how you go.’
There was a sort of path leading away up the hill from the signpost, veined with roots and scattered by pine needles. In summer the undergrowth would be thicker, the path perhaps invisible.
In the darkness Rachaela began to walk away from the car. She heard its engine start and the sounds as it reversed on the shingly road. She did not look back.
The cases were heavy as lead, but they contained all that had seemed essential to her. She heaved them on.
She was weary, and the nervous fear slid under her exhaustion, nearly extinct. Did the house not exist, as in half of her daydreams?
She rose above the pines, and cedar trees and massive oaks with mossy, glowing peridot trunks climbed from the soil, great pillars upholding a tracery of dull panes, less light than contrast to darkness.
In such a spot, from among the trees, anything might come at her.
The path eddied from the wood.
She was high up. She heard the rush of the sea.
It was twilight, the sun had gone out inland. The sky was closing. She saw two stars, and away over the open land before her, a building.
There was a tower with a cone of roof. Crenellations and walls slanting. Some last hint of light cast a weird burnish on to ranks of slender windows. It was a large house, and in the dusk it became a masonry vegetable. Beyond its shape the land gave way. Below the sea dashed itself against rock and gulls or silence cried.
Here? She was to confront them here? To confront what?
Dizzy with her tension, she had put down the two slabs of lead.
She must cross the formless ground between herself and the house. She must ring a bell or knock some primitive knocker, and then one of them would come. She would go in and so begin to know.
It was cold on this headland. Now she could see seven, eight tinfoil stars, burning icy, thin and hard.
She took up the cases and wands of pain struck at her shoulders. She walked towards the house, stumbling a little on stray stones, the tufted wintry grass.
The house came nearer, drifting over the navy dusk.
She reached an outer wall broken by two posts. No gate. The way was open wide but not necessarily inviting.
Above her, afloat over a tall crowd of garden trees, a window lit up in the house.
Rachaela stared. The light was dull but the window became a fruit of coloured glass, liquid crimsons, dense purples, and damson green.
What did the window propose? Anything? Nothing?
It was not a welcome, rather a shutting out.
The path from the wall to the house was straight. There were massive ancient yews on either side, cemetery trees, where darkness lurked and rustled.
The house too, but for its one lit window, was faceless and black.
A porch became visible. Ebony wood, intricately carved, above five shallow steps, each patterned dimly, which she mounted. No light within the door. A solid wood frame. No bell. Rachaela searched for a knocker, for some semblance of willing communication.
But the door was ajar. It stood open on the empty world, the night and trees. She put down her cases once more and disbelievingly pushed at the door—and it gave.
Blackness and, again, the dim pattern on a white tile underfoot. A black oblong in blackness, there was a second door within the first. Gradually she made out an old-fashioned doorknob, a globe that turned as she gripped it. But the inner door was also open.-A smothered red ember of light appeared, so vague, so intangible, like the glim of a dying candle.
She must go forward into this cobweb half-light.
Or stay outside in the cold and whispering darkness.
Inside the second door was a huge open oblong of space, a hall or lobby with a chessboard floor of russet and black marble. It was as wide as a great room and from it there fell away massed shadows that might be anything, doorways, passages, crouching bears.
On a mahogany table softened by a grape-bloom of dust burned a ruby oil lamp, its wick turned low, while from the ceiling hung, unlit, a snow-flake chandelier. Filmy webs knit the glass prisms of the chandelier, which slipped softly to and fro in the draught of the opened doors. Beads of the red lamp caught on it like drops of red ink.
Rachaela could smell the dusts of the house, and the damp vaults of it, but there was too the smell of the oil, a scent like fur, herbs and powders, tinctures unguessable.
She dragged her suitcases into the hall, and turned to close the inner door.
‘Please leave it open,’ said a flat soft voice.
She moved quickly to face the lobby. A thin, small figure, male, leaning slightly forward, stood at the far side of the lamp.
The doors are always left a little open after dark.’
This strange statement unnerved Rachaela. She left the door alone. She poised by her cases, for what came next.
‘I shall fetch someone for your bags. Will you allow me to show you the room which has been made ready.’
‘Who are you?’ said Rachaela.
Beyond the lamp she saw a mannequin in a shabby ancient suit, a small pale face with two blots of eyes. Grey hair.
‘My name is Michael. I serve the family.’
‘And you know me?’
But who else would come here with the darkness?
‘You are Miss Rachaela.’
‘And—the family?’ she said, her hands clenched.
‘Miss Anna and Mr Stephan will presently come down to welcome you.’
The flat soft voice and its words did not calm Rachaela.
A flutter in the oil lamp as the man took it up caused all the shadows to take wing, the walls to topple. Extraordinary carvings jumped out and vanished again as the light ran off them.
A stairway was born out of the dark on Rachaela’s right. She looked at it in wonder. A wooden nymph guarded the newel post, holding up an ornate light fitment, blind, in her hand. The stairs went up and up, carpeted at their centres in Persian red that the oil lamp made rich.
They ascended in the magic halo of this lamp.
Rachaela counted twenty-two steps. Behind her her cases were swallowed in the deserted blackness of the hall. Only the chandelier caught still red drops among its films of dust.
There was a carpeted landing. A corridor appeared, lighted by another oil lamp on a stand. This lamp was of a pinkish white tone, and abruptly, for a second, Rachaela saw the face of her guide, a cameo between shadow and fire. Not a young man. His eyes were fixed sightlessly. There was a peculiar bloom on them resembling the pollen of dust on the table and other elements of furniture.
They entered the passage. It turned at a massive window, leaded, set with stained glass that had no colour left, showing only the darkness of the night. There were confused pictures on the walls.
The servant of the family opened a door.
‘This is to be your room, Miss Rachaela.’
The room, like the house, was gothic. It was green and blue. A lamp with a base of emerald glass and clear chimney was burning on the mantelpiece of a green-tiled fireplace. A fire worked there busily over a pile of logs. In other places plain white candles were lit in sconces on the walls. She noticed, there was not so much dust, perhaps they had dusted here for her, or this oblique servant had done so.
Across the room stood a bed with posts, hung with bottle-green velvet. An indigo cover was pulled back to reveal pillows that looked white and very clean. Perhaps they had bought new linen just for her.
She sensed their preparations. That she was unique, exciting, like a new-born baby.
There was the faint smell of damp, but over this the dry peppery smell of the fire, and a scent li
ke face powder in a compact.
‘Your bags will be brought up to you.’ The servant Michael indicated the passage. ‘The green bathroom is there. We have hot water.’
‘Thank you.’ Of course the house was old enough to have done without. She wanted the servant to go. The room overwhelmed her yet for a few precious minutes she might hide in it. ‘When do Mr Stephan and Miss...’
‘Miss Anna and Mr Stephan will go down shortly.’
‘How shall I find them?’ she asked.
‘The rooms will then be lit on the ground floor, Miss Rachaela.’
The servant went out and the door shut. A curtain like those of the bed fell back over it.
There was another large slim window beyond the bed, its drapes undrawn; this window too was of blackened stained glass. Rachaela stared and made out the plumed image of a tree, two figures. She would need daylight to see what kept her company here.
She went to the fire. It was appealing, a luxury, and none of the trouble of cleaning or laying it would fall to her. A servant—the Scarabae had domestic help.
Rachaela tried to enjoy the fire.
There were blue iris flowers enamelled on the fireplace tiles. The carpet in the room was very old, Persian probably, blue and rose plants and green birds.
In two places a mirror winked behind the candles, ornately camouflaged by designs of coloured glass jewels. A huge old dressing-table supported a winged mirror whose face was similarly obscured. Rachaela looked at herself through a hedge of lilies, a wild sunset in rays and swallows, cutting her into segments. How bizarre. But it would not matter, she had brought her own ordinary mirror with her.
She sat on the bed a moment, conscious of the dim sound of the sea and of the ticking of a pair of clocks, a black clock on the mantel with two angels, a tiny tower beside the bed. The greater clock told her it was seven-thirty, while on the tower the face showed nine.
Rachaela glanced at her watch, but she had, as so often, forgotten to wind it. It had stopped.
Well, she must prepare for Stephan and Anna.
She could not imagine them.
She got up and made herself go out into the lamp-lighted corridor. She found the bathroom at once, the only other door at this end of the passage.
