by Lee, Tanith
It was a perfect period piece, for which the rich and famous would pay thousands in the city. Another oil lamp lit up the bath of green marble, the marble wash-basin and wooden-seated lavatory wreathed in green daisies. The vaunted hot water came via an Ascot. White pristine towels lay on a chest sporting eau-de-Nil basin and jug, and a dish of dried petals. The soap was also green with a smell of honeysuckle. New soap, new towels. On the walls mermaids dived over the tiles.
Rachaela looked up. There was a light fitment without a bulb. Electricity had come and gone.
She washed her face, hands and arms, seeing that she was trembling. The mirror behind the basin showed a glass ocean scene with a three-masted ship. She saw her Ups, eyes, the blackness of her hair, in fragments.
Back in the bedroom her bags had noiselessly arrived. She changed her jumper, took off her boots and put on high-heeled shoes. In the great wardrobe with its mahogany wreaths and flanges, each sealed by a fine pollen of dust, she would later hang her few clothes. She disliked colour on her person, it wounded her. Oddly, the black, grey and cream, the sere faint-green and blue would match her always to this room.
She had again the sense of the validity of her arrival, their excitement, and of permanence, that too. She was frightened by these feelings but it was too late to be afraid. She had come to them. They had let her in.
She powdered her face in her mirror and reaffirmed the dark pencil around her eyes.
When she had combed her hair she walked straight to the door. And paused.
She had not heard the coming of the cases, but now someone was proceeding along the passage. It was a peculiar, rhythmic and uneven gait. Then she heard the voice, high and petulant. ‘Giddy-up, giddy-up!’
Rachaela thought of a child pretending to ride a horse. An old child playing up and down the corridor.
There was a tiny scuffle. And the horse rearing: ‘Whoa there!’ And then galloping by and away.
Rachaela opened the door suddenly.
A black shadow cavorted in the passage’s end, and rolled from view.
Something lay by the door.
Rachaela bent down, and touched with one finger the body of a perfect long-tailed mouse. It was dead, without a mark. About its body was tied a faded bow of pink silk.
Rachaela picked up the gift-wrapped mouse.
She held it in her hand. It did not distress her. It was soft and pitiful, beautiful as a toy in death. She laid the mouse on the dressing-table, took her bag, and went into the house.
Downstairs the lamps and candles had bloomed out everywhere. She saw doors in the walls of the hallway, one with black iron fitments like something from a castle. Burning reflections swam in the marble floor.
An archway gave on to a drawing room, a chamber of immense size and filled by lovely sullen furniture, and by the fine lace draperies of dust. The Scarabae lived in a desert of dust, clearing areas as they must, for here and there a table shone like a black pool.
A fire filled the centre of a white marble fireplace whose icy ends were pillars and heraldic shields.
No one was in the room, it was full of waiting.
Rachaela felt the room receive her, closing over her head. The sea sounded louder.
One of them at least was insane—the mysterious galloper, bearer of dead mice. It had been a man’s voice, high-pitched, eldritch, but male. Could it be Mr Stephan who had ridden by?
A sound. Michael the servant of the Scarabae entered with a silver tray. Bottles and decanters glinted on the tray. He set it down on one of the dustless pools of tables. Rachaela was reminded of an expensive advert. Through the arch of the doorway now should come two elegant and well-dressed people.
‘May I serve you with something, Miss Rachaela?’
Rachaela asked for wine and a glass was filled. The crystal was exquisite, the wine transparent.
Rachaela drank gratefully and the liquor leapt into her brain. An electric awareness made her turn.
Through some other door, or out of thin air, two figures had evolved.
They stood side by side.
They were very old, thin as twine, one female and one masculine, and at the borderline of age where the sexes blend, these two had sustained their genders. The woman’s hair was the grey of gunmetal and piled up on her head, held with yellowish pearl pins. Her old dark dress, like something found on hangers in the wealthy clothes markets of the city, hung to her ankles. Her shoes had been in the mode a hundred years before, and were again. A sequin winked, another. She was sprinkled in a sugar of tiny blinks.
The man wore an antique dinner jacket and drained black trousers. His shirt was starched. His hair was thick and white, his eyebrows like iron shavings.
Both their narrow sets of hands were ringed.
Two elderly dolls they stood across the room in the fire and candlelight and their eyes glittered sharply. The eyes of clever rats, not mice.
‘It’s Rachaela,’ said the old man, in a clear desiccated voice and an impeccable actor’s accent, vacant of any hint of anywhere, even the country that surrounded them. He did not sound like the galloper.
‘It is,’ said the old woman. ‘It is.’
And they did not move, forward or away. They were so old the absurd flutterings of youth no longer motivated or disturbed them.
Rachaela said, ‘You must be Miss Anna and Mr Stephan.’
‘Anna and Stephan,’ said the woman. She smiled and her face moved like the sea, a wave, layers of pleated skin. Her smile was only a mask.
The old man said, ‘How polite she is. No formality, please, with us.’
He did not smile, yet the sculptured motionless creases of his face were also masklike.
Age itself was held up before them, and they peered through, the bright eyes of rats in a wall.
‘Later,’ said the old woman, ‘you will meet all the others. One by one. Here and there. No hurry.’
‘We dine, you see,’ said the old man. He added, ‘I like to dine. It’s civilized. But the rest... We keep to different hours.’
‘You’ll grow accustomed,’ said Anna. ‘You must do exactly as you like here. Now it is your home.’
‘No,’ said Rachaela. She spoke too quickly, violently.
They did not notice, or did not care.
Stephan said, ‘We invited you.’
‘Which of you wrote to me—the typed letter?’
‘Oh, not us,’ said Anna. The tide of her face flowed. ‘Not we.’
‘Nasty machines,’ said Stephan. He grimaced and brushed the crumbs of the typewriter off his hands.
‘The letter—’ Rachaela said again.
‘Don’t concern yourself with the letter now. Now you’re here, among us. We are your family, Rachaela.’
The servant entered and went to the tray, and they attended on him in silence.
In the sparkling firelight he brought to the old man a small slender glass of blackness and to the woman a thimble of garnet.
‘We shall dine soon,’ said Stephan.
Michael bowed, there could be no question of his gesture, bowed, and left them.
‘I hope you will like the dinner,’ said Anna. ‘We eat very simply. We live off the land.’
She crossed to a chair and sat down. The old man continued to stand but when Rachaela seated herself to allow him to sit also, he did not do so. He went to a dusty table where a chessboard was laid out with onyx figures. He moved one carefully and stepped away.
‘I must ask you,’ said Rachaela, ‘why I was invited. You pursued me. Why do you want me here?’
‘But naturally we want you. Not only Stephan and I. The others. It’s good that you take your place among us.’ Anna was unruffled.
‘There are many of us,’ said Stephan. ‘We agreed.’
‘Each of you agreed that I must—that I must come here?’
‘Of course.’
‘We’ve waited several years. Until the right time.’
‘Why,’ said Rachaela, ‘is it the righ
t time now?’
Anna said, light as gossamer, ‘There is a proper time for everything. Knowing it is the art.’
‘Miriam and Eric, George and Peter, Sylvian perhaps, they would have had you here far sooner,’ said Stephan.
Rachaela recoiled at the pure numerical addition. Were there so many of them, the tribe of the Scarabae?
‘But the time was always wrong,’ said Anna. ‘Now the moment has arrived.’
She swallowed what was in her thimble, the garnet, in one stiletto gulp. She rose, and began to walk across the room towards a door curtain. Stephan said, ‘We are going to dine.’ And hastened ahead of her to whirl the curtain away and pull wide the door.
Rachaela got up. She followed like an obedient child. When she had been yet unborn, these two had moved on the earth, adult, leading God knew what lives.
Rachaela had never eaten rabbit before. They told her it was rabbit pie, asking her if she minded, if that would be all right. First there was a clear tomato soup. Michael and Cheta grew the vegetables, she was told. They relied as little as possible on the town.
She did not mind the rabbit, it was not unpleasant, rather bland, she thought. She wondered who hunted the rabbits—Michael, with his oddly focusless, blind-looking eyes?
Cheta served them. She was a female Michael, clad in an ordinary dark dress with a brooch at the collar. Its white stones looked real. Her grey hair was dressed in a bun low on her neck as if to show subservience, and her shoes were flat. Her eyes were just like Michael’s.
Michael and Cheta were not so old as Anna and Stephan, yet they were old, had a dusty attic quality. They were Anna and Stephan come down in the world.
Candles lit the long table, laid with only three places. Above, lightless, a broken chandelier, snagging firelight from the grate. On the mantel was a golden clock, not ticking, stopped conceivably for decades.
The meal was indeed simple enough. After the pie, served with presumably home-grown carrots and fried cabbage, was dished up a dessert of sliced fruit in an alcoholic juice.
A cheeseboard came and biscuits baked by Cheta, and by another unseen one, Maria.
What relation were Anna and Stephan to each other? Did they bear some relation to the servants, for there was a similarity in all the faces. Rachaela found them disconcertingly familiar. Did this mean that she perceived, too, a resemblance to herself?
She did not want to ask these intimate questions. It had been difficult enough to ask what she had. And they had not answered—or there truly was no answer. Maybe their elderly hearts had only creaked out for her youth.
They were fascinated by her. She saw that.
The little questions they plied her with in turn, to do with the food, what food she liked, if she wished for the salt, were popped into her like polished coins into a magical box, to elicit her responses. They watched her with their bright cruel eyes. They would eat her alive. She only had to be, to feed them. They ate the rabbit with fastidious sharp snaps.
The conversation had been slight.
They were no conversationalists. They had come down here to feed.
As Stephan picked about amid the presumably town-bought cheeses, a curtain rustled, a door opened, and another thin old man came wafting in, weightless and virtually silent, with a book beneath his arm.
He crossed the carpet and slid to the table, but not to dine. He stared at Rachaela greedily, craning a little.
‘Eric, here is Rachaela,’ said Anna.
The eyes of Eric were the eyes of Anna and Stephan. His crinkled mummy’s face showed nothing, the thin dry lips were not parted. Eric made a tiny sound, like a hiccup almost, and glided away and out of another curtained door, which seemed for a moment to open on a garden.
‘You mustn’t mind them,’ said Anna. ‘Not all of us are chatty. Eric is a thinker, a reader.’
The door curtain moved again and two old women in fusty beaded dresses blew into the room.
They too swam to the table. They had the eyes.
‘Rachaela is here,’ said Anna unnecessarily, for the eyes beamed and crackled on the newcomer. ‘Rachaela, this is Alice, and this, Sasha.’
‘Good evening,’ said Rachaela, to test them.
Alice in the plum-sombre red replied with a quick darting movement of her hands. Sasha in a lace collar spoke: ‘Good evening, Rachaela.’ Like Anna and like Stephan, her voice, which somehow should have had a foreign accent, had none, no accent at all. It was a fact, each of them should have talked like dummies with the dialect of some mountainous European upland.
‘Did you have a pleasant journey?’ said Alice, abruptly, in the voice of Anna and Sasha.
‘Not really,’ said Rachaela.
‘Oh I’m so sorry,’ said Alice, the waves of her face making up concern. ‘Travelling is so tedious now. So taxing. Everyone is so unhelpful.’
‘Now Alice, when did you last travel anywhere?’ chid Anna, playfully.
‘I remember,’ said Alice, flustered, ‘the great black trains and all that steam and smoke. One was filthy. I remember my hat almost blew away, and Peter had to catch it.’
Rachaela found herself picturing a Soviet snow-scape, the antique monster of the train flying in sparks and fume.
‘It’s years since any of us ventured out,’ said Stephan from the cheese. ‘We have small need now.’
‘We were driven,’ said Alice to Rachaela. Her face was still a mask, but a mask of confiding. Her eyes gleamed to see how Rachaela would react. ‘Driven out.’
‘The pogroms,’ said Sasha suddenly.
Rachaela caught at the foreign word eagerly. They had given themselves away.
‘Ours has not always been a tranquil history,’ said Anna. There was no warning or repression in her voice. ‘But this is too soon to burden Rachaela with the past. She’s never known such things, and perhaps she never will.’
‘Old scars,’ said Stephan. He pushed his plate from him. ‘Old history. The family has borne very much.’
Somewhere, perhaps in the room, a clock struck distantly.
‘It isn’t the time,’ said Anna, still without warning.
Rachaela shivered at the power of unison in this rectangular space.
There were many of them, how many she did not now dare to guess. A swarm, the Scarabae, and heavy with their past which was not hers, and yet which, by relationship, must come to belong to her.
She felt a terrible affinity. She believed she was related to them, had somehow come to acknowledge it in the few weird hours she had spent here.
Alice said, faultlessly, ‘She will see the library.’
Anna gave a little laugh like broken scales.
‘The library!’
‘Sylvian was busy today,’ said Stephan.
They sighed, each of them, almost as one.
The large house teemed with these creatures, but they were one thing, facets of a whole, an entity.
And she, Rachaela, where did she fit?
Was she to be absorbed, devoured?
‘Anna,’ she said, forcing herself to utter the name, as if to name them was sorcerous. ‘I’m awfully tired. Would you excuse me if I went up to bed?’
‘You must do exactly as you want, Rachaela. There’s a bell in your room by the fireplace. If you should wish for anything, Michael or Maria or Cheta will see to it. Did Carlo take up your bags?’
‘Someone did.’
‘Yes, that will have been Carlo. He is our strong one.’
Rachaela rose. She was taller than all of them: Anna and Stephan seated at the table, Cheta and Michael, Alice and Sasha facing her across its glowing length set only with three places. The candles shone and gave heat. Above, sprinkled with reflected light, the second chandelier dropped its mutilated beauty.
‘How many are you?’ said Rachaela, stemming the alarm of her voice. The sea sounded very loud in her ears.
Stephan laughed. His laugh was the male formula of Anna’s. ‘Many, many.’
Anna said quietly, ‘N
ow we are twenty-one persons.’
Stephan said, ‘You forget—’
‘No,’ said Anna. ‘No.’
The dead mouse had been removed from the dressing-table, but the ribbon left there, neatly folded.
Rachaela sat brushing her hair. Her mother had been used to brush it. She was heavy-handed, seeming to think the thick prolifereration of the hair precluded any feeling at its roots. Rachaela had been a tangled child. Once the mane was lopped for convenience. Rachaela had wept. She walked in hatred until the mass of hair was regrown.
The house did not make her dwell on her mother. This brusque memory was used, briefly, as a shield between herself and the house. The Scarabae.
On the stairs as she returned to her room she had met another old man in a greenish jacket. He peered into her face with burning eyes.
‘I’m Rachaela,’ she said. ‘And you?’
But this old man scurried away, not frightened of her but unwilling to communicate. Was he Peter, or George, or Sylvian from the library? What did it matter? They were all one, and twenty-one in number.
There was a key in the lock of her door, and after visiting the bathroom, she used it. She had a vision, of course, of other keys which would open the way, and a troupe of them entering in a noiseless procession to observe her while she slept. Cobweb-ringed fingers over her things, her comb and brush, her powder and mirror, musty dresses shuffling by, the flick of an old man’s sleeve...
It was impractical to leave. There was no means. Besides, she had been doomed to stay. She had nowhere else. All the wide world could not afford her sufficient crannies to hide from them.
For she knew she belonged to them. It was in her bones. She shrank only from certainty.
Finally she undressed and put on one of the pair of nightdresses she saved for emergencies; normally she slept naked. But here she must be protected by an extra flimsy film of man-made silk.
The nightdress was black. She surveyed herself among the marsh of lilies, the sunburst, in the mirror. She had noticed two or three mirrors in the rooms below, each set with coloured glass, ornamented, obliterated. As if seeing oneself must be kept to a minimum.
