The Horned Man

by James Lasdun

  Bruno stood up. ‘I’ll keep it in mind.’

  There was a silence after the door closed.

  ‘So much for that,’ Roger said quietly. ‘Zena, you’ll have a word with your student?’

  ‘I’ll do what I can, Roger,’ Zena replied wearily. Even she seemed to have been disturbed by Bruno’s attitude.

  A few minutes later I was walking across campus with Elaine by my side. The afternoon had turned soft and sunny. Over the distant roar of traffic, you could hear the trickle of melted snow running into the storm drains. For a while we moved together in silence – a silence that I sensed was highly charged for her.

  ‘I’d almost given up on you,’ she said at last, her voice thick.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I didn’t attempt to explain why I hadn’t been in touch.

  ‘Oh no, I’m sorry. I was just so – excited, I guess.’

  ‘That’s good. I want you to feel excited.’

  ‘Oh … Thank you for saying that.’

  ‘What would you like to do?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d like to cook you a meal. That’s what I’d like to do.’

  ‘I was hoping you might say that.’

  ‘I’m famous for my cauliflower quiche.’

  ‘My mouth’s watering already.’

  ‘Oh, you!’ she said, laughing. She scribbled the directions to her house on a scrap of paper, and we parted with a fond, liquid look into each other’s eyes.

  Since she lived near the next train station up along the line, it wasn’t worth my while going back into Manhattan before dinner. I had two hours to kill. I went to my office, picking up a yellow interdepartmental envelope from my mailbox on the way. Inside was the piece Amber had asked me to look at. Reluctantly, I laid it on my desk and began to read, but I found myself completely unable to concentrate on it. I was thinking of its author – the way she seemed to suspend herself so vividly in the inner proscenium of my consciousness whenever I was in her presence, and the apprehension this always aroused.

  At once I caught a trace of something from the distant past: a faint resonance, like the last, almost inaudible reverberation of a gong.

  It sometimes seems to me that the mind – my own at least – far from being the infinitely capacious organ one likes to think it is, is in fact rather rudimentary, possessing only a very limited number of categories for the things it experiences, and lumping all kinds of diverse phenomena together on the basis of the most accidental resemblance. That would account for the way you realise from time to time that you have never made a real distinction between, say, the dog-owning neighbor in the town you were born in, and the cat-owning neighbor in the town you moved to later on. Both have simply been categorised as ‘pet-owning neighbors.’ It’s always a bit of a shock when you realise that the people or things you’ve fused together have nothing to do with each other at all.

  In the case of Amber, what I realised was that I had combined her image with that of a figure from my adolescence: Emily Lloyd, my stepfather’s daughter.

  It wasn’t that they looked like each other. Emily had thick chestnut ringlets; she was petite, with a watchful, smoothly angular face, while Amber was long-limbed, willowy, even a little gawky; a bit like a giraffe foal in fact, with her freckles and red-gold hair.

  But the feeling each aroused in me was the same: a desire so sharp (I had had to acknowledge that Amber’s effect on me amounted to this) it seemed more to do with recovering something vital and precious that had been taken from me, than with gaining possession of something new. That, and a feeling of confronting something capable of destroying me.

  Not wishing to think about either of them, I scanned the bookshelves for something to distract me.

  A small collected Shakespeare caught my eye. I took it down and opened the front cover. In faded green ink, the handwriting as neat as a row of pines on a mountain ridge, was the following inscription:

  To our beloved Barbara,

  A gift to remind you how much we treasure you as you go off to college and embark on your life’s great dream.

  Your ever-loving Mom and Dad

  8 September 1985

  The late Barbara Hellermann, I presumed: Trumilcik’s successor in this room, and my own immediate predecessor; brewer of coffee for her students, recipient of thankyou notes, collector of uplifting quotations … And quite a bit younger, judging from the date she went off to college, than I had imagined. Not more than her mid-thirties, it would seem, when she died: a painful thought, especially in the context of the parents’ loving inscription. With a small internal rustle – a little inner scene-shifting – the kind-old-lady image I had formed of her was replaced by that of a young woman in the tragic flush of some rare illness. Poignant, though since I had no personal connection, only superficially distressing.

  Leafing through the silky pages of the volume, I came to Measure for Measure. I hadn’t looked at the play since my teens, but the lines were as familiar to me as if I had written them myself. There was the sexual miscreant Claudio, that ‘warpèd slip of wilderness’, on death row for his sins. There was his judge, Angelo, ‘this ungenitured agent’, as the dissolute scoffer Lucio calls him, battling (with underappreciated sincerity, I felt) his own ungovernable urges. And there was Claudio’s sister, chaste Isabella, about to enter the cloisters when she encounters Angelo, triggering his explosive lust. I took her part once in our all-boys O-level class, and I recalled now the queazy excitement it had given me to announce that I would rather die than accept Angelo’s offer to spare my brother’s life if I would sleep with him. Were I under terms of death, I remembered declaiming passionately, th’impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies …

  I took the volume over to my desk, meaning to reread the play. I hadn’t got far, though, when Emily Lloyd started drifting back into my thoughts. It occurred to me that I must have come into contact with her right around the time we were studying this play. I was fifteen, home from school, where my stepfather was now paying the fees. I remember him tousling my hair as I arrived at the little station near the weekend cottage he’d bought my mother in Kent. I put down my bags and we shared a look of helplessness. We were less than nothing to each other – a void; the shape of an absence. In his case his own children; in mine, my father, who’d died of a brain tumor when I was five.

  The house was tiny; all that Robert – my stepfather – had been able to afford now that his ex-wife had his finances tied up. It was a former ploughman’s cottage, with minute windows. My mother filled the little rooms with rustic bric-à-brac, but it remained obstinately gloomy, and every time the three of us spent any time there together, the effort of not getting on each other’s nerves would distill itself into a fine, potent melancholy that tended to engulf us in silence after a few hours.

  ‘You look a bit peaky, dear,’ my mother said to me that evening.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re not bored are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think it’s a dreadful shame you didn’t want to bring one of your friends to stay.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘There’s lots to do. Bike rides, sailing on the reservoir … I should have thought they’d jump at the opportunity to come and stay.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be revising.’

  I couldn’t tell her it was out of the question that I should ever bring a friend here. There was an absolute veto on the subject in my mind. The form it took was a sense that everything that occurred in our household was blighted with a deep wrongness of spirit. I didn’t know where this sense had originated, but I knew it was so. Under our roof, the simplest observation on the weather was liable to sound insincere, or manipulative; the social functions my mother liked to arrange had a fraught, overelaborate quality that made everyone long for them to be over. With the resignation one learns at the kind of schools I went to, I accepted all this as my lot in life, but I had no wish to share it with anyone else.

  Even so, my mother was right:
I was bored, and I was lonely.

  ‘It’s a pity the Bestridges don’t seem to want to know us,’ she pressed on. ‘They have a boy Lawrence’s age don’t they, Robert?’

  ‘Do they?’

  My stepfather was ensconced behind his newspaper with a glass of white port, his long legs in their well-cut pinstripes sprawling with an incongruous languor toward the diminutive fireplace.

  ‘Why don’t you invite them over for cocktails?’

  He lowered his newspaper, glancing at her through the tops of his bifocals.

  ‘We’ve been through that, dear.’

  ‘Have we? Well I think it’s very silly that we can’t invite them for cocktails just because they haven’t had time to invite us back for dinner yet. I think it’s very stuffy and conventional, if you must know.’

  ‘If they’d wanted to socialise with us, they’d have found time to invite us over in the year and a half since we had them to dinner, don’t you think?’

  ‘How would I know? I’m not them. Anyway, why wouldn’t they want to socialise with us?’

  ‘I can’t imagine.’

  ‘It isn’t as if they have any right to be high and mighty with us. You’re a company director. Lawrence goes to a perfectly good school. I may be a bit of a nobody, but at least I’m not a frump, which can’t exactly be said of Jill Bestridge. I should have thought they’d want to bend over backwards to be friends with us. Perhaps they’re shy, perhaps that’s all it is, Robert. Perhaps they need more encouragement. Robert?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Oh, you’re no help!’

  ‘You can’t force people to like you, Geraldine dear. It’s against the laws of physics.’

  He turned the page of his newspaper and shook it straight with a single practiced snap.

  My mother stood up and wandered about the room, fussing with her ornaments and flowers. She wasn’t done with this topic, I could tell. Her restless, aggrieved spirit never settled easily, once aroused.

  I sensed also that she hadn’t yet come to her point, her real point; that to get to it she had to conjure a more vexed and petulant atmosphere than currently prevailed.

  ‘I don’t see how you ever get what you want in life if you aren’t prepared to push a little. You have to push! I’ve had to push people all my life.’

  ‘And you wonder why people find you pushy.’

  ‘Do they?’ my mother asked, her violet-blue eyes suddenly wide and vulnerable.

  I could see that my stepfather regretted his riposte.

  ‘No dear, I’m just saying they would –’

  ‘Is that why the Bestridges don’t –’

  ‘Don’t let’s start, Geraldine –’

  ‘I suppose you think I pushed you. Is that what you think?’

  ‘Geraldine –’

  ‘All those afternoon drinkies at the Portingham Cellars – was that me pushing you? Those romantic tête-à-teêtes down in the storage room at Findley Street, did I push you down there? Did I? Pushy Geraldine shoving poor weak Mr Robert Julius Lloyd down the basement stairs in the middle of the morning when she couldn’t wait another second for a bit of what you fancy, is that how you remember it darling?’

  My stepfather sighed, folding away his newspaper. He disliked confrontations, and would agree to almost any demand in order to avoid them. His own dissatisfactions he worked out silently and in private, in stratagems that didn’t emerge until their fruit was already fully ripened. For all I know, as he sat there gazing mildly at my mother, he was already plotting how to start siphoning off funds to set up the flat (or ‘love nest’ as the newspapers later called it) for his new mistress, a private casino waitress by the name of Brandy Colquhoun, whose existence burst on us a year or so later.

  ‘What is it you want, my love?’

  ‘Want? I don’t want anything. I’d like to think I had a husband who took some interest in the well-being of my child –’

  ‘Geraldine, I’m simply saying I don’t think the Bestridges –’

  ‘Oh who cares about the Bestridges? Do you think I care tuppence about those snobs?’

  ‘Well what is it you want me to do?’

  ‘What’s the point of even discussing what I want you to do since you refuse to do anything I suggest anyway?’

  ‘What have I ever refused?’

  My mother looked away from him; adjusted a dried rose.

  In a quiet voice, she said:

  ‘The Royal Aldersbury, for one thing.’

  There.

  ‘Ah, now Geraldine …’

  ‘What? Just because your daughter’s a member does that mean it’s too good for Lawrence? I find that a little bit insulting, if you must know.’

  The Royal Aldersbury was a sports club for well-to-do county families. Robert’s daughter Emily was a member and, from what I could gather, spent all her free time there, in a gilded haze of tennis tournaments, dinghy regattas, and country dances.

  It was near the Lloyd house, twelve miles from us, on the banks of a wide stretch of the Medway. Robert met his daughter and two young sons there for tea every Sunday, an event from which he would return in a state of dejection that my mother had come to feel offended by, so that they had had to institute a counter-ritual of dining out at an expensive restaurant – the White Castle or the Gay Hussar – every Sunday night when they arrived back in London.

  Several times she had raised the subject of Robert getting me into the Royal Aldersbury, ostensibly so that I would have something to do when I came to the cottage, though the more Robert had resisted the idea, the more firmly it had acquired the higher significance of a measure of his current regard for her. Robert was too much of the English school of obtuseness to say right out that he was afraid it might upset his daughter to have to mix with the son of the woman he’d left his family for, but that was evidently what he felt, and my mother found this mortifying. She had taken the position that once she and Robert had married, the entire situation regarding both families had become irrevocably normalised and stable, almost to the point of retroactively annulling the fact of his previous marriage. She often tried to get Robert to bring his children to our home, and even hinted that it was about time he took us over to visit his former wife. Perhaps she had visions of joining Selena Lloyd and her set for ladies’ luncheons in Tunbridge Wells.

  Even so, she was probably as surprised as I was when Robert suddenly stood up and telephoned the Royal Aldersbury, asking to speak to the Club Secretary.

  A few minutes later I was a probationary member.

  ‘Satisfied?’ he asked my mother, sitting back down to his newspaper. He was affecting nonchalance, but he must have been aware of the magnitude of what he had done; its fundamental destructiveness. I suspect he was the type of man who even took a certain fastidious pleasure in setting off small avalanches of this nature: proving to himself and the world just how much of a source of disorder he was.

  My mother was pleased: deeply, physically pleased. She flushed, and her eyes shone. She brought the bottle of white port over to Robert and filled his glass. They were guarded about showing physical affection in front of me, but they had evolved numerous small acts of attention that by now were as obvious an indication of the flow of feeling between them as the deepest of French kisses would have been.

  The next morning my stepfather took me to the Royal Aldersbury. It was a fine spring day: the May was flowering in the hedges and the apple orchards were in bloom. We drove in silence: by tacit agreement we never spoke to each other when my mother wasn’t around.

  The main building of the club was a grand, gabled, chimneyed pile covered in Virginia creeper. Around it were tennis courts, squash courts, croquet lawns, a badminton lawn with stout-legged ladies leaping around in pleated skirts, and at the back, gliding blackly in its flower-filled banks, the river.

  Robert took me uptairs to meet the Treasurer and Secretary. He was politely aloof with these functionaries, who appeared to regard him as a mighty personage. An enigma
tic smile played across his features as they made conversation with him, supplying their own answers when none was forthcoming from him. Though I had no idea what he was thinking, I felt that he was privately amusing himself at everyone else’s expense. I didn’t mind.

  A woman came to the door and signaled to the Treasurer. He tiptoed over to her, murmuring an apology. They stood in the next room talking in hushed voices, then the Treasurer tiptoed back. He cleared his throat:

  ‘It would appear that Mrs Lloyd is taking tea in the main lobby with Miss Lloyd. Would you – would you like us to take you out through the side door Mr Lloyd … ah … discreet …’

  ‘No. I was hoping she’d be here. I want to introduce Lawrence.’

  The Treasurer and Secretary looked nervously at him. Though they probably didn’t expect anything so vulgar as a ‘scene’ to occur, they were the kind of creatures to whom a situation with even the potential for a scene, even where that potential is sure to remain firmly suppressed, is a source of anxiety.

  After I had filled out my forms and signed the membership book – an ancient volume with a column in it for your title as well as your name and address – I followed Robert back down to the main lobby, which was now alive with the particular muted but purposeful buzz of the upper classes going about their leisure.

  Mrs Lloyd and her daughter were seated in an alcove half-screened by potted palms. As we approached them, I saw at once that the daughter was beautiful, and moreover beautiful in a way that so intimately corresponded to my ideal conception of female beauty at the time, that it was hard to resist the feeling that she had been created and placed there expressly for my personal delectation. My interest in the place, till then not nearly as strong as my mother’s, abruptly sharpened.

  Mrs Lloyd, a smaller, sallower, skinnier woman than I had imagined, gave a brief start as she saw us, but quickly recovered her composure. Emily looked gravely at her father, her bee-stung little mouth firmly closed.

  ‘I want you to meet Lawrence,’ Robert said. The same aloof, secretive smile played on his face. Perhaps it was just his way of showing embarrassment, though its effect was to suggest he wasn’t actually present in the situation at all, other than in the most banally literal way.