by Jem Poster
‘Then her achievement is all the more remarkable.’
Eleanor was shifting uncomfortably on her seat between us. Mrs Merivale reached out and placed her hand gently on the girl’s shoulder. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘you know that Eleanor is musically gifted too.’
‘Really? What instrument does she play?’
Eleanor whipped round to face me, her eyes flashing. ‘Anyone would think you were discussing a clever five-year-old,’ she said. ‘I sing.’
‘And very well too,’ said Mrs Merivale soothingly. ‘I’m sure Mr Redbourne would like to hear something from you.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Eleanor sullenly.
‘Believe me,’ I said, with as much conviction as I could muster, ‘nothing would give me greater pleasure.’
‘In that case,’ said Mrs Merivale, ‘Eleanor must sing. I know that Esther’ – she beckoned imperiously to her daughter – ‘will be more than happy to accompany her.’
Just a little less than happy, I thought, scrutinising Miss Merivale’s delicately expressive features as her mother enlisted her services, but she made no objection. She returned to the piano, Eleanor following at her heels.
‘I’m going to sing,’ announced Eleanor bluntly, as though defying the company to stop her. She lifted the hinged lid of the piano stool and withdrew a slim clothbound folio.
‘Schubert,’ she said, letting the lid fall with a bang. ‘We’ll have a Schubert song.’ She opened the songbook and bent it back on itself so sharply that I heard the glue crack in the spine; then she placed it firmly on the rack.
Miss Merivale seated herself on the stool and peered at the music. ‘Not this one,’ she said.
Eleanor stared down at her. ‘Why not? she asked coldly.
‘I don’t like it.’
‘Don’t like or can’t play?’ Scarcely above a whisper, but I don’t imagine that any member of the company could have missed either the words themselves or the sting they carried.
Vane leaned forward. ‘You’ll mind your tongue, Eleanor,’ he said quietly.
Miss Merivale turned to him with a thin smile, her slender hand raised. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘If Eleanor particularly wants the song, I’m willing to accompany her.’ She deftly flicked up the bottom corner of the page and half turned, lifting her eyes to meet Eleanor’s. ‘Are you ready?’ she asked. Eleanor gave an almost imperceptible nod, and Miss Merivale began to play.
I had heard the song on a number of occasions, but the legend of the Erlking was in any case familiar to me from my childhood: indeed, I had at one stage become so morbidly obsessed by the little volume of folk-tales in which it appeared – and in particular by the sinister engravings that accompanied the text – that my father had eventually taken the unprecedented step of transferring the book to a shelf beyond my reach. Miss Merivale’s performance compared favourably with others I had heard, but it was Eleanor’s singing, thrusting me back into a shadowy world of half-remembered nightmare, that gripped my imagination that evening.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression: Eleanor was, in strictly musical terms, comprehensively outclassed by her accompanist, and she certainly began very badly indeed. Miss Merivale, elegantly poised above the keyboard, held the rhythms – the right hand’s percussive beat, the insistent growling of the bass – with exemplary precision, while Eleanor’s rich but evidently untrained voice stumbled behind like an unseated rider. I saw a smile pass across Miss Merivale’s face, a smile so signally devoid of warmth that it might have been construed as a smirk; and then everything changed.
I can locate it precisely, that moment of transition. As the frantic hoofbeats slacken, the Erlking moves in, creating a stillness at the heart of the storm, his mouth so close, it seems, to the ear of the panicky child that he barely needs to raise his voice. That was where Eleanor found what she was looking for, or where it found her. ‘Du liebes Kind, komm, geb mit mir’ – that terrible, unrefusable invitation, the words welling from her throat as sweet as honey but laced with menace and, more subtly, with the sick yearning of the demonic for a world of human warmth and love.
Then off again, Eleanor utterly present now in the song, her voice – the child’s voice – soaring in terror against the gathering pulse of the accompaniment, the quickening hoofs; and the father’s words infused, in her interpretation, with the same terror, their sensible, humane reassurance so thrillingly subverted by that unspeakable otherness that I felt the hairs prickle at my nape. I was back there in the library, the book open in front of me in a pool of yellow lamplight, a small boy lost among the nightmare images: the father crouching low in the saddle, his hair flying in the wind, his cloak half concealing the wild-eyed child huddled in the crook of his left arm; and emerging from the tangle of briars and branches behind them, one long-fingered hand out-stretched, the Erlking himself. He is crowned as a king should be, but his clothes hang in tatters from his wasted body; his mouth is set in a famished grin. He doesn’t seem to be moving with particular speed, but his narrowed eyes are lit with a terrifying certainty, as though he can already envisage the end of the story, the end of the hopeless, hectic ride. I heard the final words of the song ring out, stark and raw, in the space left by the suspended accompaniment; and then Miss Merivale, with studied understatement, struck the closing chords.
As the notes died away, Miss Merivale dropped her hands to her lap and drooped her head. She looked suddenly small and lost, her poise gone; in her face there was a kind of subdued panic, as though the song had told her something she would have preferred not to hear. Eleanor stood erect, staring out over our heads, her eyes brimming with tears. There was a long, uneasy silence, broken at last by Merivale.
‘Bravo, ladies,’ he called out, beating his thigh with the flat of his hand. ‘That was splendid. Really splendid.’ His sister looked up with a grateful smile, and the applause became general. I leaned back in my chair, feeling the tension begin to evaporate from my body, from the room. And then Eleanor’s eyes met mine.
What did it signify, the gaze she turned on me then? Too intense for our surroundings, it might have reflected the frightful exhilaration of a night-ride whose hammering rhythms seemed still to echo in the air around us, yet it was focused on me, and on me alone, with a directness bordering on indelicacy. Recognition, was it? Accusation? Desire? For an instant that seemed an age I was transfixed, held like an insect on a pin; then she turned abruptly away and let me fall.
8
I had fallen asleep with Eleanor’s singing still echoing in my mind but it was Daniel who visited my dreams, visible as a vague thickening of the darkness at my bedside, his voice sweeter and clearer than in life. Come with me he fluted, taking up the Erlking’s theme, wheedling, coaxing. He moved in close and I felt his fingertips play lightly over my face, his lips brush my ear. Come. I started back from his touch and woke drenched in sweat, trembling with desire and dread. I lay in bed until the darkness began to draw off; then I rose and towelled my damp skin before dressing and making my way downstairs.
The eastern horizon was brightening as I left the house, and the air was ringing with bird-calls. Not the sweet tones of an English dawn chorus, but something altogether wilder and more disquieting – a babble of contending shrieks, whistles and warblings with an undercurrent of lighter piping sounds. More than anything I had yet experienced, those cries spoke to me of the distance I had travelled from my native soil, and as I walked out through the gates I was gripped by a spasm of something like vertigo and my heart lurched in my chest.
Once at a reasonable distance from the villa, I positioned myself among the shrubs at the edge of the track and waited, my gun at the ready. Vane had mentioned the passage, at dawn and dusk, of small groups of waterfowl, and I was eager to try my luck. I had barely settled back when a dozen or so duck winged over, low and fast. I jerked the rifle clumsily forward, fired both barrels and, as the second shot rang out, saw the hindmost bird stagger and drop.
I thought at first that
I had lost it, but after a few minutes’ searching I discovered the body half buried in a clump of low scrub, one wing twisted stiffly upward like a flag marking the spot. It was a beautiful thing, I saw, as I tugged it clear, its underparts a deep cinnamon-brown, flecked with darker mottling, and the gleam of its bottle-green head-feathers shifting with the loose swing of its neck. I placed it carefully in my satchel and returned to my makeshift hide.
I had no further success but I was pleased enough with my prize, and after a hasty breakfast I hurried down to the barn to skin the bird. Eleanor was there before me but her glance, as I entered, seemed less unfriendly than before, and I had no sooner placed the duck on the table than she set down her brushes and stepped over to my side.
‘Teal,’ she said. ‘Chestnut teal.’ She stretched out her hand and gently touched the bird’s breast with the backs of her fingers. Something in the gesture – some quality of hesitant tenderness – stirred and confused me.
‘So soft,’ she said, with a little catch in her voice. ‘Do you remember what Milton says about the waterbirds – bathing their downy breasts on silver lakes?’
‘You’ve read Milton?’
She must have caught the note of surprise in my question. She bridled, glared. ‘Why shouldn’t I have done? You take me for a dunce, don’t you? A little colonial flibbertigibbet.’
‘Of course I don’t. But I always think of Milton as a peculiarly masculine writer. I imagine that young ladies tend, as a rule, to prefer something a little less—’
‘Perhaps,’ she interrupted rudely, ‘you need to widen the circle of your acquaintance.’
There was a moment of tense silence. Then she reached out and touched my arm, half propitiatory, half coercive.
‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I want to show you something.’
She marched over to the hayloft ladder, hitched up the front of her skirt and began to climb. I hung back, inhibited by a faint, unsourceable anxiety. As she reached the platform, she turned and held out her hand.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It looks unsteady, but it’s safe enough.’
‘I’m not afraid of a fifteen-foot drop,’ I said stiffly.
‘What is it, then?’
I couldn’t have explained it to myself, let alone to her. ‘Nothing,’ I answered, moving over to the ladder.
I’d imagined the loft very differently – hay bales, twine, dust and shadows; not that swept space, amply lit by the window and skylights and furnished like a nursery. Against one wall stood a low table, set as though for tea with a miniature porcelain service, sprigged with rosebuds; against the opposite wall, a small bench occupied by three exquisitely dressed china dolls. A blanket-chest, loosely draped with a fringed woollen shawl, had been positioned immediately beneath the skylight. Eleanor was looking at me, her head tilted a little to one side, evidently waiting for me to comment.
‘I take it this used to be your playroom,’ I said.
‘In a manner of speaking. When I was sixteen my father told me I was to clear my bedroom of the trappings of childhood. That was the phrase he used. I said I wouldn’t – told him I saw no reason to – but he wouldn’t drop the matter. He quoted scripture at me – as if St Paul would have cared whether or not a young girl kept her dolls by her bedside – but I raged and cried, biting my wrists and knuckles until they bled, making him frightened I might do myself worse harm. In the end we agreed that I should be allowed a few keepsakes, so long as I removed them from the house. That was when I began to make a place for myself out here – a place where I can be as I am, not as he’d have me.’
Her voice, I noticed, had hardened as she was speaking; her expression was cold and distant. It seemed sensible to shift ground. ‘You told me you had something to show me,’ I said. ‘Did you mean …?’
‘No, not these things. Something more important.’ She stepped over to the blanket-chest, removed its covering and eased back the lid. Peering over her shoulder, I saw a neat bundle – a thick cylinder of tightly wrapped burlap about two feet long, tied at each end with a length of grubby cream ribbon – lying diagonally across the top of a disorderly heap of books. She removed the bundle, placing it carefully on the floor beside her, and rummaged through the books until she found the volume she was looking for.
‘Do you know,’ she said, quickly scanning the pages, ‘I think no-one else has ever described things the way Milton does. Listen to this.’ She settled back on her heels, angled the book towards the skylight and began to read.
And higher than that wall a circling row
Of goodliest trees loaden with fairest fruit,
Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue
Appeared, with gay enamelled colours mixed:
On which the sun more glad impressed his beams
Than in fair evening cloud or humid bow,
When God hath showered the earth; so lovely seemed
That landscape: and of pure now purer air
Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires
Vernal delight and joy, able to drive
All sadness but despair: now gentle gales
Fanning their odoriferous wings dispense
Native perfumes and whisper whence they stole
Those balmy spoils.
She sighed and gently closed the book. ‘Fanning their odoriferous wings,’ she breathed, lifting her eyes to mine. ‘Can you imagine?’
If, as I suspected, she had brought me to her hideaway in order to impress me with her little library and her modicum of learning, her rapture was no less genuine for that. I smiled, touched and faintly excited by her wide-eyed gaze. ‘They’re glorious lines,’ I said.
‘Yes, and frightening too.’
‘Frightening? Why?’
‘Because,’ she said, and her mouth twitched uneasily, ‘he’s already there.’
‘Who?’
‘Satan. It’s Satan approaching the garden. Prowling around, looking for a way in, plotting mischief. We’ve waited for our glimpse of paradise, and here it is at last, but he’s there with us. And when we enter, we enter with him. Or he enters with us – I don’t know exactly how it is. I want to see the garden pure and clear, and I can’t. Milton won’t let us. It’s as if he’s telling us the evil’s deep in our own hearts and can’t be rinsed out.’
‘The gospels tell us otherwise. And Milton himself knew that the loss of paradise was only part of the story. It might be said that our fall can only be understood in relation to the act of redemption that follows it.’
‘Are you a believer, Mr Redbourne? I mean, do you believe we can all be saved? Supposing someone sins – I mean a sin so terrible she can’t speak of it, though it’s not her fault – and goes on sinning because she has no choice. Might she still find her way back to paradise?’
‘Everyone has a choice,’ I said. ‘That’s the point. Sin is a choice, and so is repentance.’
There was a long silence before she spoke again. ‘I don’t believe that,’ she said at last. ‘It’s too simple.’ She turned away with an odd grimace and began to fumble nervously among the books in the chest. It struck me that I had not given her the answer she wanted.
‘I’m no theologian,’ I said gently. ‘I may be wrong.’
She appeared not to have heard. ‘Cowper,’ she said, tugging a worn clothbound volume from the heap and handing it to me. ‘All of Cowper’s poems. And Crabbe’s. Some of Byron’s too. Bumped and battered, but that’s all I can afford.’
‘Don’t you have access to your father’s library?’
She gave an ugly, mirthless laugh. ‘My father has no library,’ she said. ‘He thinks books are a waste of time and money. He’d be horrified if he knew of my own few shillingsworth.’
I opened the volume she’d handed me and made a show of examining the text, but found myself intrigued and vaguely distracted by the bundle on the floor. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘I can show you,’ she said, ‘but you must promise not to say anything about it i
n my father’s hearing.’ Without waiting for a response, she lifted the bundle on to her lap, untied the fastening and began to unroll the cloth with quick, eager movements of her slender hands. I caught a glimpse of polished wood, a dusky gleam between the folds.
‘Do you promise?’ she asked, pausing suddenly in her task.
‘I promise.’
She spread the cloth to reveal a carved figure lying on its back like a small brown baby, its stumpy legs slightly splayed and thrust a little forward from the hips. Neither the legs nor the skimpy arms suggested a great deal of care on the part of the carver, but the torso, though crudely modelled, was intricately decorated with tiny gouge-marks, and in the space where the thighs met under the rounded belly, the vulva was carefully delineated – a stylised leaf-shape bisected by a deep slit and fringed with finer incisions.
But it was, above all, the face that compelled attention: a polished oval, longitudinally ridged to form two distinct planes and dominated by the enormous, deeply sculpted eyes. I stared down at it, perplexed by its teasing inscrutability. It wasn’t that the face was inexpressive, but that its expression was so deeply ambiguous as to engender a kind of confusion in my mind. Was the thing grieving, or were its features set, as the protruding tongue half suggested, in a mocking parody of grief? Was it angry? Lustful? Or had it perhaps withdrawn into some calm, contemplative space beyond the reach of passion? I stooped to examine it more closely and, as I did so, Eleanor smiled up at me.
‘Don’t you think she’s beautiful?’ she asked.
It wasn’t the adjective I should have chosen. For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by sculptural form, and I regard the sculptors of classical antiquity as having attained a level of artistic expression unmatched, in any medium, either before or since; among their productions are works of such refined and exquisite beauty that I have, on occasion, been moved to tears in their presence. In what sense, I asked myself, could this crudely worked totem be said to share their qualities?
