Rifling Paradise

by Jem Poster

  I remember the strangest sense of leisure, of time frozen or protracted, but in actuality my trance could hardly have lasted more than a few seconds, broken, I think, by the voice of one of the men.

  ‘Let him be now, Samuel.’ There was a nervous urgency in the man’s tone, as though he were calling back a vicious and intractable dog. I looked up. Blaney still stood above me, his broad frame silhouetted against the sky, but I thought I detected a certain irresoluteness in his stance.

  ‘We came here to teach him a lesson,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve given him lesson enough, Samuel.’

  Blaney seemed to consider this for a moment.

  ‘He’ll not tell,’ he said at last. ‘Not with what we know about him.’

  ‘You lay into him the way you laid into Arthur Cotteridge that time and there’ll be no hiding it, whether he wants to tell or no.’

  There was another long pause. I saw Blaney shift position but was unprepared for the kick he aimed at my legs as he turned. His boot struck my left shin a little below the knee, glancingly but not without force. I rolled sideways, anxious to avoid worse, but he was already moving away down the slope of the lawn to rejoin his companions.

  ‘You just mind that,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘next time you’re thinking of putting your milksop hands where they’ve no right to be.’

  I lay still until I was sure the men had all left the grounds. Then I limped back to the house and groped my way painfully up the stairs to my bedroom.

  2

  My leg throbbed and my hands shook so violently that I was scarcely able to light the lamp. I removed my shoes and my muddied jacket and threw myself face down among my pillows, trying to compose myself sufficiently to summon Latham. But as my breathing returned to normal and the trembling subsided, it struck me that it would be unwise to make more of the incident than was absolutely necessary; and having satisfied myself that my injuries were essentially superficial, I eased myself from the bed, drew a chair to the fire, raked up the embers and settled back to consider my situation.

  The decision I reached as a result of my deliberations seemed at the time to involve some radical shift of perspective, yet the plan I formulated that night was really nothing new. From childhood on, I had been fascinated by the exploits of those naturalists who, with scant regard for their own personal comfort and safety, had obstinately pursued their quarry – their specimens, their theories – to the most remote corners of the earth. Throughout my youth and early manhood, I had dreamed almost daily of following, more or less literally, in the footsteps of Darwin or Waterton; and though my own travels had been considerably more modest than theirs, I had made forays sufficiently gruelling and fruitful – into the Camargue, across the Pyrenees – to convince myself that my ambition wasn’t entirely unrealistic.

  What I suppose I lacked was precisely that obstinacy I so much admired in my heroes. At all events, in the years after my parents’ early deaths I lapsed first into trivial habits of mind and then into a form of melancholia – a deep-seated ache or longing that I learned to dull with occasional doses of laudanum and regular recourse to the good red wines laid down by my father for a future he had no doubt imagined he would live to enjoy. I continued to add new specimens to my collection, I contributed notes and articles to minor periodicals; but the invigorating dreams – those vivid fantasies of exploration and discovery – were put aside like childhood toys.

  I might ascribe my loss of vision to the more sombre view of reality that comes with experience or, more specifically, to the responsibilities I rather unwillingly shouldered when I inherited the estate. Neither explanation is misleading in itself, but both skirt the darker truths of my inward life – the passions nursed in secret, the delicate liaisons screened from public view. What had begun as a sentimental camaraderie tinged with philanthropy (I would give the boys this, I thought, I would give them that – a few shillings, an education, eternal friendship) became an obsession, drawing me deep into some shadowy world of troubled pleasure and stifled aspiration.

  What was I looking for, stalking my prey across the bright meadows or leaning over the bridge with assumed nonchalance, waiting in breathless ambush while the waters churned and boiled beneath me? The cynic’s answer is too simple, too obvious. I was, after all, the gentlest of predators, subsisting for long periods on the most rarefied diet – a glance, a greeting, an inept pleasantry (Nathan Farr, lazing in the March sunlight with his back against the churchyard wall, looking up at me from beneath his unruly fringe: ‘We’re alike, Mr Redbourne, gentlemen of leisure’ – the suggestion of fraternity, of easy complicity, haunting me for days). What was it – I mean, what was it precisely – that I had in mind? And what outcome could I possibly have anticipated but humiliation and disgrace?

  Despite the pain from my leg, my thinking seemed unusually lucid, as though the shock of the night’s events had purged my mind of its customary clutter. I could see clearly that my situation was all but untenable and that decisive action was required; it followed from that – since staying put could hardly be accounted decisive unless I were prepared to face my accusers in the open – that I should have to distance myself from the village, almost certainly for some appreciable time. And the moment the idea presented itself, I was gripped by a subdued but unmistakable excitement: the old ambition again, but now in more resolute form. I should travel, I should add significantly to my collection and I should contribute my quota to the sum of human knowledge. That was how I formulated my intentions; and as I did so, I was struck by the thought that what had been a bright but insubstantial dream had now transformed itself into a plan of action.

  I saw at once that there were practical matters to be addressed. Firstly, and most importantly, I had no available funds; and secondly, I should have to find a competent steward to manage the estate in my absence. However, I had some confidence that the necessary finances could be found reasonably close to home, while the fact that my own management of the estate had in recent years proved considerably less than competent inclined me to view the second matter as an opportunity rather than an impediment.

  I was so taken by the apt simplicity of it all that I began, in imagination, to pack for my voyage. That to be left, this to be taken – and this, and this, nets and collecting-boxes, coats and collar-studs, books and papers, my mind running freely over my belongings until, quite unexpectedly, it faltered and stuck.

  The photographs. What about the photographs? I rose awkwardly to my feet, limped over to the wardrobe and took the heavy portfolio from its hiding-place. Village Types: a Photographic Record – the title, neatly inscribed in violet ink on the front cover, was intentionally misleading. There had been half a dozen sitters but, in truth, only one type: a young man somewhere between fifteen and eighteen years of age, well muscled and firm-featured, with a certain unreflective openness in his gaze. A representative record had never, in fact, been my aim. I was, as collectors phrase it, a specialist.

  I set the portfolio on my bedside table and untied the fastening, feeling again the familiar quickening of the pulse, the flickering thrill of guilty anticipation. Yet the portraits were, I reminded myself as I leafed through them, innocuous enough. Luke Wainwright, perhaps divining something of the nature of my interest but more probably prompted by his own notorious self-regard, had stripped to the waist for his sitting, squaring up to the camera like a prizefighter; but all the others sat or stood in their shirt-sleeves, informally posed against the plain white wall which, I had realised from the beginning, set off to perfection their tanned features and the strong outlines of their lightly clothed bodies.

  No, the meaning of the portraits wasn’t to be found in the images themselves, but in the memories they enshrined: the sharp reek of sweat as I helped Matty Turner out of his jacket, my face so close to his sunburned neck that I might easily have put my lips to it; my fingers resting lightly on Luke’s shoulder as I showed him how to look through the view lens or, more audaciously, brushing t
he inside of Nathan Farr’s thigh as I leaned over him to adjust the angle of his chair.

  I’d touched Nathan, yes, and one or two others besides, but neither those fleeting moments of physical contact nor the earnest, oblique and largely one-sided discussions that had led up to them would have been sufficient in themselves to keep me in thrall to Blaney and his mob. Whatever power my persecutors might have exercised under cover of darkness, I should probably have faced them down in public if it hadn’t been for Daniel.

  Daniel, poor, bewildered Daniel, skulking aimlessly in all weathers through the narrow lanes around the village, afraid to return to a house in which cuffs, punches and worse were meted out more regularly than meals by a mother whose name was a local byword for erratic and unreasonable behaviour; Daniel, whose hooded gaze and pinched, melancholy features had drawn me into territory far darker and more dangerous than any I had negotiated in the company of his handsome confreres. The fact that those boys hadn’t needed me had been a perverse part of their charm; Daniel’s need, on the other hand, had been urgent, palpable. He had clung to me – sometimes literally – like a frightened child in a storm and I, for my part, had responded with a tenderness of which I had not, up to that point, believed myself capable.

  Tenderness? That’s the word that comes most readily to mind, though I sense how much it leaves unacknowledged – the relentless cycles of longing and shame, the corrosive despair undermining every look, protestation or act. And yet the word holds good.

  I had set him apart from the others, folded in a sheet of cream-coloured paper at the back of the portfolio, and now I searched him out: a single portrait, a little underexposed, emphasising the hollows beneath the sharp cheekbones, the shadows around the deep-set eyes. The photograph had been taken at Daniel’s instigation, not my own, and had borne out my intuitive suspicion that his beauty was a thing too delicate and equivocal to be captured by the camera. Sullen, tense and slightly stooped, he looked out at me with the fixed stare that had always seemed to hold some unspoken challenge or reproach, and now frankly unsettled me. Smudged death’s-head: Daniel as memento mori, Daniel leaning forward, thin lips parted, to remind me of the night I’d let him go.

  A foul night, rain sluicing down, the wind thrashing the untended laurels in the shrubbery and buffeting the house. I had been dozing in front of the fire, a book open on my lap, when I heard a soft tapping at the window. Daniel peering in, his white face an inch from the blurred pane. I lurched to my feet and hurried to open the front door.

  ‘What is it, Daniel? What are you doing here?’

  No answer. He stood blinking in the muted light of the hallway, his black locks plastered to his cheeks, rainwater pooling at his feet. I could hear Latham moving slowly along the corridor at the back of the house.

  ‘Come through.’ I ushered Daniel into the study and helped him out of his sodden greatcoat. His shirt, scarcely less wet than the coat, clung to his thin shoulders. He moved over to the fire and stood on the hearthrug staring into the flames, pale and tremulous, his arms folded across his chest. I draped his coat over the back of the nearest chair.

  ‘Are you ill?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m well enough. No thanks to you, though, treating me the way you do.’

  I was taken aback, both by the accusation itself and the asperity of his tone.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean. You keep me out there like an old dog in a kennel.’

  ‘Hardly a kennel, Daniel. The cottage is more than large enough for you. You’ve coals in the grate, food on the table, a warm bed—’

  ‘And not much else. It’s no life for a human soul, holed up out there in the woods with no company but owls and flittermice.’

  ‘A better life, I’d have thought, than the alternative. Would you rather be back with your mother?’

  A long silence and then, surlily: ‘I was waiting for you. You hadn’t said you weren’t coming.’

  ‘The weather, Daniel. Surely you weren’t expecting me to come out on a night like this?’

  He spread his hands, holding them wide and a little towards me, a gesture all the more poignant for its clumsy theatricality. ‘Why not? After all, I came out to see you.’

  I stepped forward, meaning to take him in my arms, but a sudden clattering from the far end of the house reminded me of Latham’s presence and I started guiltily, stifled the impulse. Daniel eyed me narrowly. ‘You don’t want me in here, do you? Not where you live. Only out there, where you can choose to visit me or not, as you see fit.’

  The observation was more accurately perceptive than I cared to admit. I hesitated an instant too long, and Daniel pounced. ‘It’s true, isn’t it? Even now, you’re wondering how to get me out of the house.’

  ‘Come now, Daniel. You know that’s nonsense.’

  ‘Is it?’ He fixed me with his challenging stare. ‘In that case, I’ll stay.’

  ‘It’s not as easy as that. I shall have to make arrangements.’

  ‘Arrangements? What arrangements would you have to make? You live alone in a house with more rooms than a family of ten could make use of, and you can’t find space for a friend.’

  He was working himself into a passion, a hint of colour rising to his cheeks. I could see clearly enough the risks involved in letting him stay, but I could see, too, that outright rejection might well fan his anger to an uncontrollable blaze.

  ‘Some other time,’ I said. ‘Maybe next week.’

  ‘Tonight,’ he said fiercely. ‘I want to stay tonight.’

  It struck me then that Daniel had determined, perhaps long before setting out for the Hall that night, to put me to a test I could hardly be expected to pass. His dark eyes glittered with a wild exultation and I sensed that nothing would please him more, at that particular moment, than to tear apart the delicate, precarious structure we had created. Youth tends to seek resolution and truth; maturity knows with what compromises and half-truths our irresolute lives must be shored up. I reached out and gently touched his arm.

  ‘Leave it now, Daniel. We can talk tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re sending me away, aren’t you? Just like I said.’ He brushed my hand aside, gestured towards the streaming panes. ‘Sending me out in weather you’d not walk abroad in yourself – not for my sake, anyway. And if I catch my death—’

  ‘Keep your voice down. Listen, I’ll walk back with you.’

  ‘Damned if I’ll let you.’ He lunged forward, snatched his wet coat from the chair-back and was out in the hallway before I had time to think of stopping him. I followed, to find him wrestling with the heavy bolt on the front door.

  Even now, it cuts me clean to the heart to think of it. As the bolt slammed back in its groove, he half turned and looked up at me over his shoulder. The dangerous glitter was gone from his eyes, replaced by an expression of bewilderment and helpless entreaty. If I had wanted to hold him back, to hold him close, that was the moment to do so.

  Anything would have served – a word, a gesture, the merest touch. I did nothing; I said nothing. And Daniel turned away again, wrenched open the door and stepped out into the dark.

  I set the portrait to one side and turned my attention to the others. In retrospect my action seems freighted with significance, yet I’m not aware of having given a great deal of thought to it. I simply leaned forward and fed the photographs into the fire, singly at first and then, as the flames took hold, in thin sheaves. I remember the heat on the back of my outstretched hand, the smell of singed hair in the air; yes, and the way the lovely faces warped and darkened in the instant before the flames consumed them.

  As the blaze died down, I turned back to Daniel’s photograph. I should like to be able to say that what followed was a gesture of love, or at least of loyalty; but in preserving something of the image – a little oval, roughly snipped out with my mother’s rusted sewing scissors, head and shoulders, like a ragged cameo – I was actually responding to darker promptings. Treat me as you treated them, the
rigid stare seemed to say, and you’ll be sorry. I’m not sure that I saw the matter so clearly at the time, but this was an act of propitiation, a sop to Daniel’s aggried and possibly vengeful spirit. I slipped the scrap between the leaves of my pocket-book before consigning the remainder of the photograph to the flames.

  There was more to be done. I returned to the wardrobe and withdrew the negative plates – six small maroon boxes, each representing a different sitting, a new obsession. I opened each box in turn, tipping its contents into the hearth; then I set to with the handle of the poker, methodically at first but with increasing wildness, the shards of dark glass flying about my hands as I worked. Only when every plate had been shattered beyond hope of recognition or repair did I pause for breath.

  It was then that I began to cry, the tears coursing down my face as I squatted there in the hot afterglow of the blaze. Crying for Daniel, of course, for the poor soul lost in the drenching dark, but not for him alone. My tears were for myself too, for the chastened dreamer hunkered among the splinters of his own unsustainable illusions; and for those other lost ones, the beautiful boys already slipping away into unremarkable manhood in worlds utterly remote from my own.

  The throbbing in my leg had become almost intolerable. I took the hearth-brush and shovel from the stand and tidied up as best I could. Then I poured myself a generous measure of brandy, knocked it quickly back and retired to bed.

  3

  I remember hearing the clock in the hallway strike four as I slipped between the sheets, and then nothing more until Latham came up with my shaving-water at eight. I rose on my elbow as he entered, and a flash of pain shot through my leg from shin to hip. I groaned softly and sank back against the pillows.