Soul

by Tobsha Learner

  The shaman—the wise man of the village—sensed conflict within the Colonel. Awed by the age and muscularity of the veteran soldier, he perceived the white man had a valuable soul. As he traced the facial scar the Colonel had received in the Crimea, he promised that the half of the soldier’s soul that had been torn away from him in battle would come back to him if he had the strength to face the Goddess.

  With the help of two boys, the shaman lifted the ritual mask—an elongated face with huge lidded eyes, a streak of yellow ochre for a nose, a screaming circle for a mouth, and fringed by reeds that hung to the ground—and solemnly placed it over the white man’s head and body.

  The heavy scent of the oiled wood mixed with the smell of the pungent soil, filling the Colonel’s nostrils. The mask hung heavily; it felt as if it were fused to his skin. His heart thumped as he mimicked the movements of the dancers around him: arms arching up to the heavens, evoking the spirit of each of the Gods their masks represented—the earth, the river and the rising moon, a pale coin suspended above them. The dancers’ arms whirled about him faster and faster, until they transformed into feathered limbs and he felt the Goddess becoming him, he becoming her—the great bird that delivered man at birth and took him up at death. And now, infused with the drug, the Colonel saw how Time could be broken down into a series of moments, each layered upon the next, and how those moments need not be linear. ‘I am Evaki!’ he screamed out, encouraged by the shaman who whirled a torch around and around, creating a spiral of trailing embers and light that seemed to arch up to the very heavens. At the centre of that burning helix Huntington suddenly saw himself as a child, then at the age he was now, and finally the terrible spectre of his own death. The panting breath of his fear filled his eardrums, as, stumbling, he struggled to stay in rhythm with his companions, the dancing messengers, their shiny legs and arms making a cradle for his terror as the Goddess rose from the smoke of the fire with nothing but her eyes—vast and recognisably human, floating like leaves swept up in the heat.

  Where there is death there must be life, she whispered and the Colonel felt the words through the rattling cage of his ribs, through his very bones, and knew then that he must beget an heir, a son, and that within this revelation lay his deliverance.

  6

  Ireland, 1858

  THE CARVED IVORY HEAD OF the walking stick was in the form of a snarling gorilla and had a ferocity that, privately, Colonel James Huntington found comforting. Just as Moses had held up the golden calf, he could hold up the stick and wave it at the indifferent gods in righteous indignation, the monkey sneering for him. But the Colonel was not a righteous man. In all his soldiering, all his travels, he was yet to find a reason to believe in anything but the relentlessness of Nature, that onward grind called life—the grimacing ape.

  He flicked a ribbon of seaweed across the pooling sand. The tide was on its way out and the foreshore was broken by a ridge of rock pools, each glassy pond a still, tepid eye beyond which the Irish Sea thrashed. I should like to be a better man. Would marriage make me so? It was a rhetorical question. He had already made up his mind, sometime in the early hours, having examined his options from every angle, turning them over like an hourglass, calculating the various ways the sand might trickle, finally concluding that whichever way the instrument was turned, the sand did indeed travel grain by grain. Time ran only one way.

  At forty-seven, the Colonel was haunted by his own mortality. Arthritis beat hollowly in his left shin—a battle wound from Sebastopol—and there was more grey in his whiskers than he cared to acknowledge. He had arrived at that time of life when a man is confronted with the legacy of his conquests; in his case, a series of unsatisfactory liaisons that he regarded as a festering collection of regrettable memories. A libertine, whose sensual pleasures transcended the notion of gender, James Huntington was, naturally, intensely private about his pursuits. Recently, old diversions had ceased to excite and he was now driven to extremes to experience any stimulation—intellectual, emotional, sexual or otherwise. Consequently, his erotic expeditions had of late become increasingly perilous, as if propelled by an unconscious compulsion to destroy his social standing. He was at a crossroads: the path he was on could lead to social disgrace, or worse, but all the future seemed to hold was further decadence and an erosion of the primary morals he, at least mentally, subscribed to—truth, honour, fidelity.

  A bubble broke in the sand ahead and he wondered about the sandworm beneath. Did such creatures mate? Or did they reproduce asexually? The answer escaped him but his resolution rushed back anew. The epiphany he had experienced in the Amazon held true: he must procreate, and the seventeen-year-old girl approaching him was a destiny any hedonist might wish for.

  ‘It is an uncommonly beautiful day, do you not think, Colonel Huntington? It is early for the west coast to experience sunshine as glorious as this.’

  The Colonel looked up from his sandworm and smiled, amusement crinkling around the eyes that Lavinia could never quite decide on as blue or green; they seemed to change with the emotions of their owner.

  Lavinia glanced back to where the grey stone and wood of the cottages and fishermen’s shacks followed the mouth of the river to where it spilled into the sea. She knew that Maggie O’Dowell, the postmistress, would be spying on her, tutting like a parrot as she fantasised about all kinds of immoral behaviour that she could report to the four local widows who sat in judgement on every young woman this side of Killarney. Lavinia knew she was already damned: for her arrogance, for her youth, and for the worst sin of all—ambition. Lord help me if I am also to be condemned as whore, a woman who walks hatless and chaperoneless with a man.

  Laughing at her own irreverence, Lavinia pulled off the straw bonnet, letting her hair fall to her waist. Her neck, bared, burned under the Colonel’s gaze and, tilting her head at an angle that she knew would flatter the strong planes of her face, she prayed silently, Ask me, ask me now, you must. You will be my husband, and I your wife, and you shall lift me high like the wind and carry me away from this atrocious backwater that is a murder for my spirit. The silent invocation bubbled under the crashing waves.

  Colonel James Huntington was the first man—aside from her father—who had taken her aspirations seriously and she had decided to love him for it. He was also the only man she’d met who wore spats and a velvet waistcoat and had an expensive gold pocket watch with his name inscribed on the back. The Colonel was the epitome of the cultured English gentleman, inhabiting a world he had described to her as a fascinating paradox of ambition and greed, beauty and terror; a world Lavinia was now convinced would be her salvation.

  The cottage chimneys were smoking and under the fecund odour of burning peat, she imagined she could detect the very smell of the prejudices and fears that shackled all of the village’s one hundred and fifty-six inhabitants, censoring even their dreams. It was a stench composed of body grime, the blistered ink of fading postcards from relatives in faraway places and other people’s infidelities slipped like whispers between the billowing laundry—rags worn for so long they had become threads.

  Lavinia skipped a few paces on the sand, then waved her hat defiantly at a clump of seagulls that threw themselves into the air screaming. Even the birds sound disapproving, she thought. A pox on them all; she was determined that Lavinia Elspeth Kane was destined for bigger things, for a life that would leave an indentation on the world, even if it were less than a chicken’s scratching.

  Watching her dance the Colonel lifted his head to breathe in the breeze. The fresh salt air chased the exhaustion from his bones. The young woman standing before him, so charmingly seductive in her violet smock and buttoned leather boots, the heels of which were now splattered with wet sand, her inky hair loosened like a shimmering waterfall, was from an entirely different class altogether. In fact, it was only by a capricious and wondrous synchronicity that the two individuals there on the strand, buffeted by the Gaelic wind, knew each other at all, brought together by a coinc
idence of events that pivoted entirely upon the very humble Liparis liparis, otherwise known as the common sea snail.

  The Reverend Augustus Kane—Lavinia’s father—was a widower Presbyterian minister whose lack of passion for the sermon was matched only by his passion for the study of all things natural, including Man himself. In Nature, he had told his daughter more than once, lies God and in Nature alone. Blasphemous words, particularly in that part of the world where the apostles, the moneyed landowners and the English had abandoned the ordinary man during the terrible years of the famine. Perhaps it was this profanity, and the Reverend Kane’s noticeable want of enthusiasm for the theatrical, that had caused his parishioners to dwindle to a mere loyal seven.

  The patronage of Lord Lahmont, the local landowner, kept the small church open as its graveyard, packed with tombstones jammed like playing cards, was the only Protestant cemetery within a fifty-mile radius.

  One blustery damp morning, the minister had made a minor discovery about the gender and sexuality of the Liparis liparis. Elated, he had danced in the churchyard in the rain, wearing just his dressing gown and Wellington boots—an act that set many of the local Catholics to muttering about the powerful disrespect of the Protestants for all things sacred.

  Despite a subsequent heavy cold, the reverend wrote up his findings and they were published in the London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and the Journal of Science. His florid and compellingly graphic prose had caught the attention of Colonel Huntington—himself an amateur naturalist—and a correspondence had been fostered upon this commonality of interests. The letters had blossomed into a friendship of sorts, and the Colonel became a regular visitor to the Kane household.

  Now, Colonel Huntington walked alongside to the next rock pool. A small crab scuttled from under a piece of seaweed and threw itself with endearing desperation into the glassy shadows of the stilled seawater. Catching a glimpse of Lavinia’s narrow ankle as she negotiated the uneven terrain, he was reminded of the first time he had set eyes on the young woman—then a shy pubescent, whose swelling curves were just beginning to soften her birdlike frame.

  A slim figure lipped with a crescent of sunlight, Lavinia had stood before her father’s desk, a huge conch shell held deferentially in her hands as she recited first the definition of the creature then a précis of its habitat, both in fluent Latin, to the proud delight of the reverend.

  Despite the recent additions of frills and petticoats, the young woman relished still the dissection of specimens and could converse easily about the distinctions of various plant life and the manner in which species varied and mutated. The promise of mentoring such innocence was dangerously tempting to the Colonel. He needed a wife to relieve him of the increasing stress of compartmentalising his private life from his public life, and he needed a child. With the detached eye of a scientist he assessed that Lavinia had three major assets: intelligence, youth and, most enticing of all, anonymity. Her lineage was so mundane that Society would not be able to place her. Inherently a provocateur and a maverick, the Colonel was excited by the audacity of introducing such a creature into his circle. As his wife, Lavinia would be entirely his creation.

  When Colonel Huntington had arrived unexpectedly from London the month before, Lavinia, whose notions of love were informed solely by copious readings of Victor Hugo, Stendhal and George Sand, had assumed that the long walks they took along the shores of the Irish Sea must be a form of courtship. But after weeks of convoluted small talk, she had begun to fear that his only interest might genuinely be her education.

  Then one evening, after her father had discreetly retired, the Colonel had lifted her mouth to his and slipped his hand inside her bodice. Shocked, she had stood there frozen, with his warm hand over her breast, astounded by the trickling excitement that ran from her nipples to the very core of her.

  But that was a week ago and the Colonel still had not proposed. Could he be exploiting her status? After all, Lavinia was the penniless daughter of a Presbyterian minister with no dowry and few marriage prospects, and he was the son of a Viscountess, independently wealthy with a town house in Mayfair and a country house in West Scotland. There was little but the gossip of the village to stop him making her his mistress.

  It was this anxiety that had kept Lavinia up most of the night. At the very least, respect for her father would surely prevent him considering such an arrangement. But the Colonel was a worldly individual who could afford anything and anyone he wanted.

  Today, however, he appeared nervous, unexpectedly formal—like a noble predator, normally so in control of its territory, suddenly cornered and befuddled by an unforeseen change of locale. Lavinia would have found it amusing except for her own fears. He must ask her; any delay now would endanger her reputation.

  The Colonel took her arm and together they peered into the rock pool.

  ‘These habitats are a microcosm of the greater world, my dear,’ he said. ‘A miniature metropolis filled with predators, prey, scavengers and those individuals who cling to the edge of life and simply observe, praying that today will not be the day they are eaten. Lavinia, London society is far more ruthless, far crueller, particularly towards a species it cannot place.’

  Lavinia peeled off her glove and wove her fingers through his. Her skin felt deliciously cool and, to his surprise, the Colonel felt the stirrings of genuine emotion.

  ‘Yes.’The girl’s voice was confident, determined.

  He looked sideways, trying to read the blue band of her eyes, dazzling in the sun.

  ‘Yes what, my dear?’

  ‘Yes, I will marry you.’

  7

  Los Angeles, 2002

  CARLA WAITED IN THE LOUNGE room, tapping her foot nervously. Unable to keep still, she walked over to the fireplace. A frenetic energy seemed to beat beneath her translucent skin, a restlessness—some might call it unhappiness.

  She ran her finger along the mantelpiece, past the pictures of Klaus and Julia—the wedding photo, the holiday in Cuba, Julia receiving her doctorate. As Julia’s closest friend, Carla knew the history of each of the pictures intimately, almost as if they were her own memories.

  Her finger paused at the photograph of Klaus in Antwerp, posing outside his university. Taken when he was twenty, it was one of the few images that pre-dated the marriage. His face appeared optimistic, as yet unlined by disappointment. Carla traced his mouth. Do not make judgement, do not, she caught herself thinking, before glancing away. I love both of them—that’s the terrible paradox.

  A large portrait hung over the fireplace. It was of a young woman dressed as the goddess Diana and sitting in a mossy glen, a quiver slung over her shoulder. A baby boy played at her feet. In the foreground lolled the majestic head of a huge stag the goddess had just shot down, the arrow still impaled in his rust-coloured hide. An engraved brass plaque set into the bottom centre of the frame read: Mrs. Lavinia Huntington as Diana. Darcy Quinn, Dublin 1860.

  The young woman looked no older than about seventeen, and was clothed in a draped tunic that provocatively displayed one naked shoulder, her hair incongruously coiffed in elaborate coils. But it was her expression—the direct gaze that stretched beyond the canvas and the artifice of her setting—that was most captivating. An unnerving intelligence shone in the blue eyes. Carla stared back at her, and found that the realism of the young woman’s stare made it difficult not to feel, as a spectator, that one was both an impostor and a voyeur.

  Despite the summer heat beating in through the windows Carla shivered. She turned at the sound of her friend entering the room.

  ‘I’ve never seen this painting before,’ Carla said.

  ‘An inheritance from my father. I had it hung just before my trip. It’s my paternal great-grandmother, Lavinia Huntington, painted in the early days of her marriage to my great-grandfather, James. He was an eminent explorer and gentleman soldier and wanted her painted as Diana as a tribute to his own exploits. The child at her feet is my grandfather, Aida
n. See the dead stag? That was weirdly prophetic—Lavinia stood trial for her husband’s murder just a year later.’

  ‘Jesus, Julia, did she do it?’

  ‘My grandfather always claimed that she was innocent.’ Julia held out the wrapped present. ‘Sorry, it took a while to get through all the boxes, but here it is. Don’t get your expectations up too high—it’s sort of humorous.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Carla submitted reluctantly to Julia’s embrace and the two women held each other briefly, the sunlight slanting in through the low windows throwing their melted shadows into stark relief. The blonde-haired television producer was ten years younger than Julia and a good deal slighter in frame and in height. If Julia had been an observer, she would have seen Carla staring emotionlessly over her shoulder, but, holding her friend in her arms, she was oblivious.

  Pulling the paper free, Carla glanced down at a set of DVDs, the cover showing a cheap Xeroxed image of a man holding a gun to a woman’s head, then laughed as she recognised the title beneath—a TV series she’d worked on.

  Julia smiled. ‘I found them on this tiny stall on the West Bank—counterfeited copies, subtitled in Arabic. I couldn’t resist.’

  ‘I guess that makes me an internationally renowned producer,’ Carla remarked ironically as Julia sat down beside her. ‘You look amazing. Two months striding through the killing fields of the Middle East suits you.’