by Lee, Tanith
‘Something.’
She faltered. She said, ‘Will Adamus come out of hiding to see to it?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Camillo. ‘When Adamus was a child, Sylvian started crossing out the books. Adamus tried to stop him. There was a scene in the library. A child shouting and an old man. Anna intervened. She was sometimes about in the daytime then.’
‘Adamus cared about the books.’
‘Then.’
‘What does he care for now?’ She shuddered.
But Camillo only said, ‘Ask him.’
‘I intend to avoid him.’
‘Avoid him then.’
He was scratching a skeleton on the ruler.
‘You won’t tell me anything useful.’
‘Go, horse, go.’
‘Is that Sylvian you’re drawing?’
‘Anyone,’ said Camillo. ‘Touch your face and feel the skull beneath the skin.’
‘I know,’ she said.
‘You’re all right then.’
‘No, Camillo. Camillo...’
‘Horsey, gee up.’
Rachaela left him, and went back to her green and blue chamber.
She looked at the temptation of Eve. What was so alluring in an apple?
When Anna and Stephan came into the room Rachaela tensed, to see if all the others would come after them, as they had gathered for the weird lunch. But no one else appeared. It was a night like any other.
Michael served the drinks and went away.
‘Anna,’ said Rachaela, ‘what are you going to do? Will Cheta go to the village, find a phone?’
‘You mustn’t worry about this,’ Anna said.
‘It will be taken care of,’ Stephan added.
‘But you’ll need a doctor for the certificate of death. When will Cheta go? Tomorrow?’
‘Cheta will go tomorrow to the cottages. The van will be there.’
‘And she’ll phone for a doctor?’
‘Rachaela,’ said Anna, ‘don’t concern yourself. Everything will be seen to. You must understand. This has happened before and will happen again. We are old. We die.’
Anna’s face was serene, her voice coaxing. Winsome and persuasive, Adamus had said. She smiled, consoling a peevish infant.
‘No,’ Rachaela said, ‘I don’t follow you. This utter indifference—’
‘He’s gone,’ said Anna.
‘He’s gone,’ said Stephan.
‘He’s upstairs,’ said Rachaela, ‘in the grey bedroom with the violent window. Something has to be done about him.’
‘Of course, of course. Why such vehemence? We’re used to seeing to such things.’ Anna sighed. ‘Can you even imagine how many we’ve lost? And young ones too.’
‘The young are the worst. A waste,’ said Stephan, drinking his black drink. He looked into the fire.
‘But Sylvian had lived a long, full life,’ said Anna.
‘And so you don’t grieve,’ said Rachaela, stung by their equanimity, wanting to see them show her something which made sense, and was not like herself.
‘Grief is superfluous,’ said Anna. ‘It is over.’
She got up and she and Stephan walked into the dining room.
Rachaela saw. No extra places were laid, only the habitual three.
Anna and Stephan took their seats.
Rachaela too sat down.
And Cheta and Maria came with a tureen of cabbage soup.
They ate in silence. Some emotion inside Rachaela scratched and gurned, the anguish and alarm she had felt since yesterday, when she had fled him, given a focus now.
‘And the funeral,’ she said, ‘where will the Scarabae bury Sylvian?’
Anna looked at her. The eyes of these people were no longer predominantly hungry. The famishment had settled to something else. It was credible to see the likeness between his eyes and the eyes of Anna. Pools of deep black liquid. Tams of eyes.
‘Don’t let what’s happened distress you, Rachaela. Nothing need trouble you. We have our own ways, older than the house. You must let us deal with our dead.’
‘How?’
Anna said, ‘As we see fit.’
Winsome, persuasive, hard as cold flint. There was no method of getting past her. She spoke for them all.
The soup was cleared.
Michael brought a fish-pie.
Anna and Stephan began to talk of the excellence of the winter vegetables, the cleverness of Carlo and Michael in growing things out of season.
Rachaela listened. She felt the sense of depression and fearfulness which they, they should have felt. Above, the dead one lay on his bed. The house reeked as if with smoke.
She was excluded. She had no place in these rites. They would not invite her to the funeral. For death had nothing to do with her; she, like Adamus, was the new life. The sinful incestuous bloom they had nurtured with their smiles and creepings by.
Rachaela began to be angry. But that too was pointless. Not only was she their pawn, she was their adored afterthought. If grief were superfluous here, then so was she.
Stephan and Anna ate portions of the pie. Rachaela picked at the food.
Stewed fruit was served.
Rachaela said nothing else, and when she had finished toying with her plate, she left the two of them, and went upstairs.
What could she do but sit in her room and play her radio for comfort, pretend this was some cosy house at which she lodged, the fire and lamps some lovely old-fashioned niceness, and nothing dark anywhere, no shadows, the window clear and ready to let in the coming day.
A sombre symphony of Mahler’s added to her gloom. She turned, as she rarely did, to a station of speech, to hear a normal human voice.
Men and women talked knowledgeably about politics. Rachaela sat mesmerized. Out there, the world, dangerous and real. She could not believe in it, and clung to the talkers in an effort to credit them. In how many ordinary places did those leading normal lives attend to these words which now to her were like snow swirling past a precipice. She had never learned the strategic points of maps. Tonight other countries were like dreams, the capital city an illusion.
There was only now, and this.
At midnight she heard them moving in the house like water in a pipe.
She patrolled the room back and forth before the hearth. She knew they were seeing to Sylvian, some ceremony of their own, having nothing to do with doctors, ministers, the church.
She opened the wardrobe on instinct and took out her coat.
She went out of her door and stood in the passage, listening. She could barely hear them now, and then a little burst like bats squeaking. They were on the stairs, on the red Persian carpet, going down. And Carlo must be there, strong Carlo the porter, with his load.
Rachaela walked firmly to the landing. She saw them below her in the hall. They were all there except for Camillo. Camillo and Adamus—too old, too young, to be a part of this.
Would they send her back? Entreat or threaten?
As she descended, the iron head of Livia turned; Miriam and Jack lit her with their bright rat eyes. But not a word was said.
She was family. Not included, but not to be shut out. A witness.
They went across the lobby, into the drawing room. The fires were dead. Already the rooms were cold. Into the airlock of the conservatory. Carlo was ahead of them. He carried something Rachaela did not need to see to identify. They brushed by the towering plants. This time petals did fall. Rachaela recalled what Camillo had said to her, the flower head...
Outside the night was frigidly cold, achingly still, but for the rush of the sea.
The tide was out, the moon up. Perhaps they had been waiting for both these phenomena, as much as for the coming of the night.
She watched them file ahead of her along the path where the unseasonal wild flowers grew.
She kept a little distance between herself and the last of them, who now was Miriam.
They sidled round the cliff, went beyond the path
, beside the wood, slanting back to the sea. They were going to the slippery steps. Easy is the descent to Avernus—
Those ancient brittle bodies on those stairs of slime. She caught her breath for them, but they did not hesitate, they crowded to the edge.
And now Carlo bowed to some task. She saw a length of rope slide out, and something bumped drily on the face of the cliff.
They had tied up the body of Sylvian, and were lowering it ahead of them, it grazed against the rock again and again, and Rachaela heard it with a chill of the blood.
She pictured dragging her mother’s corpse behind her, out to the dustbins, and gall filled her throat.
But they were lowering Sylvian to the beach, to the sea. What would they do with him there? Give him to the ocean like a Viking?
The old men and women began to descend the cliff.
They moved with care, but not with extreme caution. They did not stumble or slip but felt their steady way like worms.
None of them had dressed for a funeral. In the blue-white light of the moon their coats were patchwork, they were draped and tailed with scarves. Alice with velvet violets in her hat and Miriam with a toque of white fur.
Coming behind them, it was Rachaela who knew fear. She took her own unsure paces down the rock, clutching at hand-holds, skinning her palms, tearing a nail, frightened.
They were already spooling out upon the beach when she was half-way down.
She stopped, and stared at them.
She forced herself on, downwards.
Their witch-like voices came up to her abruptly, and she paused again, gripping the cliff, her feet at angles.
What were they doing?
For a moment the scene swayed and bloomed out like a sail in the wind.
Rachaela held the cliff and drew in three long breaths.
She could go down no further. She opened her eyes and saw the small figures moving busily like ants in sugar.
On the rocks of the cove the drunken figurehead of the merman leaned, waiting for Camillo. Carlo and Michael climbed towards it.
The body of Sylvian lay directly below, flat on the strip of sand as it had lain on the chequered floor. The Scarabae came in to it and went away, bringing it things from the shore.
She must get nearer.
Rachaela tried four more steps and froze once more. The moon had made the stair more slippery, like a dousing of water. She would after all, have to get up again, ahead of them.
She eased her body over and managed to find some respite from the cliff. Her whole frame shook and her mouth was dry.
She could see and hear them, but they were small and foreshortened and no words came clear.
Round Sylvian now the offerings were piled. Cheta, Jack and George were placing things from a sack, and by the side of it a black rectangle stood upright with a smear of the moon on its top.
Meanwhile Carlo and Michael had reached the merman. They crawled about it, took a grasp on it. Like workmen or loggers they began to manhandle it down towards the beach. They could not quite manage. Rachaela heard Carlo give a warning shout.
The merman tumbled and rolled over the rocks, bouncing down as Sylvian’s corpse had done, on to the beach.
Carlo leapt after it, and Michael hurried at his back.
The figurehead came to rest on the beach. The two men came up with it and began to drag it on towards the corpse. They hauled it level with the body, laying it out beside Sylvian.
Would they tie Sylvian to the trunk of the merman, set them afloat together at the lip of the sea, to attend on the returning tide?
The Scarabae pleated in again.
She anticipated some quavering chant, some hymn of wildness to rise from them, but there was no sound.
Far out the sea made white flounces.
A tangerine flower budded in Carlo’s hands. It was a match. The soft moist wind guttered it out.
Rachaela saw Michael lift up the black rectangle, unscrew its cap and pour the libation over Sylvian and all the driftwood they had packed about him, and the little logs.
‘They’re going to burn him,’ she said aloud.
Without a prayer or a song, like old clothes or refuse, so they would cremate their dead at the rim of the sea.
A second flare woke in Carlo’s hands. It flew down upon the pyre. For a few moments, nothing, and then a great wash of blue and fulvous flame going up from the petrol.
Some of the Scarabae stepped back a little way. Some stretched out cold hands to the fire. Warmed by death.
Rachaela smelled the true smoke, and with it the awful smell of burning human flesh. She turned her face into the cliff and gagged. But the wind blew the smell away. It was too cold for it to linger in the nostrils.
One of them, Eric, had gone off a few steps, and came back now with another gift. Heavy and white, a dead gull hung from his hand, picked up from the shore.
He cast it down into Sylvian’s bonfire. A rage of sparks sprighted up. And then some of the feathers, caught in a whirlwind of the heat, fluttered up on fire into the air. Quill pens for the crossing out of the books of flame and night.
When the fire had consumed him, they would come away, and leave the slender bones of Sylvian for the tide to take. The ocean would have them, polishing them for ever, changing them to corals...
The merman cracked and the fire gouted from his tail and belly.
She must go back up the rock.
Rachaela stood against the cliff, the bonfire of the dead reflecting neon yellow in her eyes.
Chapter Seven
Morning described Cheta cabbage-green. She was stowing the heavy canvas bags, much folded, in her coat pockets. Carlo stood by, and behind him the gas cooker shone in the cabbage-sea windowlight.
‘You’ll be coming with us again, Miss Rachaela.’
Rachaela nodded. ‘Yes.’
Maybe she slowed them down, Too bad.
They set out along the path, and went away from the place where the evil steps led to the cove and the remains of Sylvian in the water.
It was a hard, sunny, icy morning, the mufflers and sunglasses did not look so incongruous on them.
Crystallized bars of sunlight hit the landscape. Birds sang in the bushes as before. The heath was the same, lit and bleak. The prospect of the long walk enervated Rachaela and at the same time eels of tension slithered in her stomach. She carried the black shoulder bag casually. It weighed on her.
They passed through the dragon areas and came to the empty road. As before Carlo and Cheta walked at its centre. There would be plenty of time to hear anything coming, but nothing ever came. Some type of thistle was bursting out of the asphalt.
They went between the hedges. Rachaela longed for the landmark of the gutted farm, but it did not come for an age. Her whole body ached as if she had not walked for weeks.
Finally, at last, the road ran over and the valley opened like a dirty green basin. There were the rusted cars, sunken fields and stony houses.
Cheta and Carlo, as previously, had not spoken.
Rachaela could not help herself. She said, ‘The van will be here today?’
‘Oh yes. This is the day he always comes.’
And Rachaela realized that in her cunning struggle to keep hold of time, its minutes and hours, afternoons and mornings, she had lost the days. What day was it? If she asked Cheta, would Cheta say? Rachaela could not bring herself to try.
They walked down the street and passed the dismal pub with the creaky sign.
On the slope of open ground the blue van sat just as before. And in the background, unmended, the vandalized phone box.
No one else was there, as usual.
In the back of the van the fat man was reading a paper. He seemed definitely to be waiting for Cheta and Carlo.
The skinny woman was knitting something pink and fluffy.
Rachaela took particular notice of them on this occasion. She saw the wedding ring among the chilblains and that the woman’s eyes were a faded-jeans bl
ue. Hairs poked from the man’s nose and under his anorak he wore a jumper, perhaps knitted by his wife.
‘Here you are,’ said the man, as he had before. ‘Almost given you up today. What can we do you for?’
Cheta handed over the list. ‘And the lady will want some things.’
‘No,’ said Rachaela, ‘I don’t need anything today.’ She smiled stiffly at the man, who looked surprised. ‘Many more stops for you after this one?’
‘This is the last,’ said the man. ‘Then back to town and put me feet up.’
The skinny woman sniffed. ‘And that’s when my work starts.’
‘A woman’s work is never done,’ said the van driver, clearly pleased at this adage which shored up years of male indolence and buck-passing.
The cans of oil were coming out for Carlo, and some petrol. Of course, they had used up a lot of petrol on Sylvian.
Seeing Carlo tote the cans, Rachaela recollected him hoisting the merman off the rocks, lugging it over the beach.
Cheta, her bags loaded with soap and soda, dettol, oatmeal, said, ‘Did you bring the brandy?’
‘Could only get one bottle. Just a tick.’
The man squeezed into the back of the van, slightly displacing his knitting wife like a stack of cornflakes, and returned with the black bottle.
Stephan’s drink. Doubtless the abstemious consolation of some of the others. The Scarabae were not great drinkers, but they liked their little comforts.
‘Couple of books too, for the missus,’ added the driver, giving to the preposterously laden Cheta a parcel tied, old-fashionedly, by string.
Cheta produced the roll of brown notes.
Rachaela thought of the envelope of brown and turquoise notes in her own bag.
‘Any chance you could give me a lift into town?’ said Rachaela, bright, innocent, an offhand request.
At her side Cheta altered, it was impossible to be certain how—astonishment, alarm or menace.
‘Well... It’s a small van, this one.’
‘I’d be happy to pay.’
As she had expected, easy money tempted him.
‘What do you say, Rene? Shall we help the girl out?’
Rene folded up her knitting. ‘It’s all one to me.’
‘I’ll see you later,’ Rachaela said, lying, brightly, innocently, to Cheta.
