Love

by Angela Carter

  They rolled all over the pastel crayons scattered on the sheets so her back was variegated with patches and blotches all the colours of the rainbow and Lee was also marked everywhere with brilliant dusts, both here and there also darkly spotted with blood, each a canvas involuntarily patterned by those workings of random chance so much prized by the surrealists.

  She was fortunate in her first lover in so far as he was kind, gentle and experienced; she was unfortunate in that soon he began to love her and, after that, could not leave her alone. As for Annabel, she was like a child who reconstructs the world according to its whims and so she chose to populate her home with imaginary animals because she preferred them to the drab fauna of reality. She quickly interpreted him into her mythology but if, at first, he was a herbivorous lion, later he became a unicorn devouring raw meat and she never saw him the same twice, nor did these pictures have any continuity except for the constant romanticism of the imagery. She had no control over them, once they existed. And, as she drew him, so she saw him; he existed for her only intermittently.

  Waking in the middle of the night, she sometimes saw white birds, perhaps albatrosses, frozen in the middle of the ceiling; if she could not make out their outlines, precisely, that made them even more terrifying and there was no comfort to be got from the man sleeping beside her for he had undoubtedly become another, some other thing. She lay immobile under the covers listening to the menacing thunder of his breathing and did not dare stretch out her hand to touch him for fear of encountering the leathern surfaces of a dragon’s wing. One night Lee woke in the grip of a dream and reached out for her while she was asleep. She screamed so loudly Buzz sprang awake and darted to defend her.

  ‘I thought you were an incubus,’ she said to Lee when the ensuing confusion had died down. Then they had to make tea and so on, in the false cheerfulness of five in the morning. Still, whatever he was, he grew necessary to her and she even played with the idea of bearing his children, though these children existed solely in the terms of her mythology, were purely symbolic and quite undemanding, related not to fantasies of motherhood but to certain explicit fantasies she had of totally engulfing him which she occasionally experienced with extraordinary intensity when he penetrated her, as if, drawing him through her hairy portals, he could be forever locked up inviolably inside her, reduced himself to the condition of an embryo and, by dissolving in his own sperm, become himself his own child. So, by impregnating her, he would cease to exist.

  Because she gave Lee so large, if so ambiguous, a role in her mythology, she wished, gently, to reduce him to not-being.

  She allowed her parents to take her away but she knew she would come back in the end. It was all the same to her whether she married Lee or not though he regarded it as a legal contract. Her parents bought her a white dress to be married in but she forgot to put it on that morning and dressed herself as usual in jeans and tee shirt, although her mother made her change her clothes and brushed out her hair for her. Annabel stood beside her parents in front of the registry office, kicking at the plaster in the wall with a bored air, wearing a thin, pretty dress of white silk she had not chosen for herself while she waited for things to continue as they had done before. It was a hot day in July and the courtyard was full of the suave perfume of lime trees. The mother wore a suit of coffee-coloured lace. Lee was twenty minutes late, blanched, shaking and still fairly drunk. The ragged brother sat cross-legged outside during the ceremony as immobile as a veritable Apache with his camera slung round his neck like a talisman.

  ‘Oh, my darling,’ said Annabel’s mother. ‘It’s not what I would have wished for you.’

  Lee wrote his name in the register.

  ‘What an unusual name,’ said the mother with a faint note of hope. ‘Leon.’

  Lee realized that if they were foreign, some of their eccentricities might be excused so he bared his teeth in a snarl and said: ‘I was named for Trotsky, the architect of the Revolution.’

  At that, he remembered his aunt and thought his heart might break as he stood in the cool, bright building for he had abandoned all the hopes with which his aunt had named him, if he had ever understood them at all. ‘Betrayed to the bourgeoisie!’ he thought and, once outside, lurched against the wall as if to face the firing squad. The brilliant morning shot him through the eyes with darts of glass and he was crushed by the conviction that he had done something irreparable. He saw the man and the woman grimacing at his brother and his new wife, their daughter, and all transmitted signs and messages not one of which any of the others could interpret. Words flew out of their mouths like birds, up and away, and all were behaving well, even Buzz, though he looked fresh from a visit to the tomb of Edgar Allan Poe for he had found a black suit somewhere.

  No wonder the daughter saw only appearances. Despite the eccentricity of his behaviour, the uncouthness of his accent and the length of his hair, the parents were so impressed at the sight of the camera they thought Buzz might be a respectable Bohemian and would, one day, grow rich for they had read how photographers were the new aristocracy. So the camera was sufficient justification for the boy’s wild appearance and both cast strained glances at the drunk, sick and shattered bridegroom as if they thought their daughter had made the wrong choice, if she was going to marry into Bohemia anyway, that is, and since she was so good at art, they might as well resign themselves. After all, they had let her go to art school. But Lee looked like a seaman after a week’s leave in a rough port and could be incorporated into no tender system of dreams or hopes. Annabel lifted up her hand which wore a wedding ring. The morning fell apart. Overcome with nausea, Lee ran inside the registry office. He found the lavatory and vomited for a long time.

  When he crept back nervously into the sunshine, shielding his hurt eyes with his hand, he found his abrupt departure had broken the frail bond of the wedding group who now stood each one far apart from the others and looked abstractedly outwards in different directions. The white carnation in the father’s buttonhole would have brought tears to Lee’s eyes if his eyes had not been full of tears already.

  ‘You’re covered in white,’ said Buzz. ‘How bridal, how apt.’

  ‘There was a window.’

  ‘I suppose you tried to climb through it and run away, then.’

  ‘You bet.’

  Buzz laughed and brushed the whitewash off Lee’s shoulder. Lee was white as the plasterwork and running with sweat but he said: ‘Nothing personal, love,’ to Annabel and she took hold of his clammy hand where her parents had insisted he, too, should wear a ring.

  Soon the parents drifted wanly away and the Collinses, now legally augmented by their third, returned to their quarter, up the hill, past the university, attracting to them a procession of chance acquaintances on the way so the boisterous party which arrived at the house was more Réné Clair than Antonioni and Lee, who thought it was immoral to be unhappy, soon regained his good humour. But that night Buzz had a paranoid crise because he smoked too much and Lee fought with him for about an hour, to keep him still.

  Annabel folded herself up in a corner in her wedding dress which was very grubby by now and covered her ears with her hands for Buzz was screaming dreadfully. The light was that of a church at Christmas for they had lit a great many candles and the flickering room smelled of melted wax. The people who came to celebrate the wedding drifted out into the night for most of them knew from experience to leave the brothers well alone when they were wrestling with demons and, at last, Lee got a handful of sleeping tablets down Buzz’s throat, half led and half dragged him to the safety of his narrow cot and held him till he went to sleep.

  Annabel, altogether too white and sinister in the soft light, was slowly blowing out the candles one by one. Because of the indifference natural to her, Lee thought she showed no interest in what had happened to Buzz though she might have been too frightened to want to speak of it. However, he was too embarrassed at so much hysteria to do anything but act as if nothing out of the ordinary h
ad occurred. Besides, she would have to get used to that sort of thing, if she was to live with them for ever. They went to bed together and it was no better and no worse than any other time except that Lee found it more difficult than usual, for he remembered that a door can be only open or closed and he had made some formal promises, before witnesses, that he ought not to sleep with any other woman again until the end of his natural life which meant, perhaps, another forty years. Unless Annabel died. Barricaded behind her immobility, Annabel felt nothing but forgot the wedding ceremony almost immediately. Next morning, she started to paint the walls dark green.

  In the rich, dark room his touch told her he could not deceive her but she said: ‘If you deceive me, I’ll die,’ and he hugged her more closely, on the brink of treacherous tears, for she did not even suspect him after they had lived together for so long. She would as soon have thought that her coronation mugs, her Staffordshire pottery figure of Prince Albert and her brass bedstead itself be unfaithful to her or her own clothes commit adultery. He occupied the most important place among these possessions she had bought at auction sales or which Buzz obtained for her; they went to the city tip together, too, and raked through ashes for objects. And they went out stealing while Lee was at work, to come home with their arms full of things, many of them useless.

  Lee deluded himself that, since he was not emotionally involved with the girl, Carolyn, he was not, significantly, unfaithful to his wife. In the period of introspection which followed the inevitable catastrophe, he had ample time to ironically applaud the extent of his self-deceit but now he had neither the time nor the inclination to do so nor any intimation a catastrophe might be near for he thought that he had finally established an equilibrium and now things could go on for ever.

  ‘Sleeping with Annabel is like reading Samuel Beckett on an empty stomach,’ he said to Carolyn as he walked her home through deserted streets in the small hours. Though he spoke primarily to clarify the situation to himself and so excuse it (for he felt some premonitions of guilt) it came through to her as a seduction speech; it interested her in him. When they reached her room, he blinked at the light and inspected her posters and paper flowers curiously. He had forgotten how far Annabel’s gloomy interior deviated from a young girl’s norm. Momentarily embarrassed, Carolyn halted with her fingers on the fastening of her fur jacket, for something in his manner suggested that though they had returned to her room with only one purpose, the act seemed too intimate to be performed by people so unfamiliar to one another.

  ‘Do right because it is right,’ thought Lee but the motto was no help at all since it only implied the question of the nature of the right.

  She laughed out of embarrassment and enquiry; the space between them vanished immediately. Contentless sexuality is the most puritanical of all pleasures since it is pure experience devoid of any extrasensory meaning and Lee suddenly appreciated the iron will of the wife of his tutor in ethics, who had been strong enough to evade the perils of the aftermath in which confidences may be exchanged and information gathered. Carolyn told him how she was in love with someone who was in love with some other person and, in return, he felt bound to offer her a few behavioural snapshots of Annabel, such as Annabel drawing her deceitful tree that winter morning; Annabel flipping his penis between her fingers and asking, ‘What is it for?’ and Annabel being beaten. But he realized these were not so much pictures of actual events, even though they had all happened, but somehow the terms in which he was forced to describe them turned them into stills from expressionist films, stark, grotesque and unnatural. So he talked a little more, though, by trying to formulate and coherently relate the exact truth about certain aspects of their relationship, he inflated these details out of all proportion and, as soon as he showed her Annabel being beaten, he knew he had gone too far.

  He and Annabel sometimes played chess for she liked to handle the pieces of a red and white Chinese ivory set that Buzz had somehow acquired for her; she would fall into a reverie, her eyes fixed vacantly on the board caressing the knight or castle in her hand while Lee gnawed his fingernails and waited for some startling, irrational move which would throw his mathematical attack into disarray.

  ‘She plays chess from the passions and I play it from logic and she usually wins. Once, I took her queen and she hit me.’

  Though, he recalled, not sufficiently brutally to require that he tie her wrists together with his belt, force her to kneel and beat her until she toppled over sideways. She raised a strangely joyous face to him; the pallor of her skin and the almost miraculous lustre of her eyes startled and even awed him. He was breathless with weeping, a despicable object.

  ‘That will teach you to take my queen,’ she said smugly. There were bruises on her shoulders and breast when she took off her sweater to go to bed. She stroked herself thoughtfully and suggested: ‘I should like a ring with a moonstone in it.’

  Her transparency astonished him but he was guilty enough to go and look for a moonstone ring the next day. But there were no moonstones to be bought in the city so he found her a print of Millais’ ‘Ophelia’ in a second-hand shop because Annabel often wore the same expression and she seemed surprised and contented enough with that, though he suspected she bore him a concealed grudge.

  ‘What was she doing?’ asked Carolyn. ‘Was she trying to humiliate you?’

  ‘Maybe. It’s a roundabout way of doing it, though.’

  Already he felt remorse that he had told this story in such a way that he himself appeared in a good light, for so he betrayed Annabel when he did not know who she thought he was when he beat her. As he returned home, the street lights were winking out and the birds singing. He often went out without Annabel and came home late for his friends bored her but this time she woke up as he slid into the bed and said: ‘I had a bad dream. It was morning and you weren’t here and were never coming back.’ He closed his eyes and pressed his face into the pillow but could not forbear to take hold of her terrible, hot, sticky hand for he knew he was her only friend although she did not like him much.

  ‘Sometimes I surprise her in front of a mirror, practising smiling,’ Lee told his new mistress and it was true, as far as it went, for he often found Annabel smiling to herself in the mirror and he could not think what else she might be doing if it was not practising how to smile.

  ‘Oh, darling, she does sound a bitch,’ said Carolyn with false lightness; she was not an imaginative girl.

  His face went as blank as if all capacity for expression had dropped straight out of it and Carolyn learned, in that moment, that a woman in love can never afford to reveal what feelings she may have towards her lover’s wife. This knowledge in itself would have been worth the emotional price of the whole experience to Carolyn but, by the end of the affair, she had acquired so much miserable information about men and women she almost decided to give up relationships for good for, if she fell in love with Lee to distract herself, the cure proved worse than the disease.

  She was a student of English literature and knew both brothers by sight and by word of mouth; they had an attractive reputation of danger because Buzz was a petty criminal and all kinds of rumours went around about the three-cornered household. Carolyn saw the wife once or twice in the street and dismissed her from her mind for Carolyn was far prettier than Annabel, much more passionate and three times as comprehensible. She was not at all prepared for the overwhelming jealousy she began to feel for this shadowy figure. It was as if she found herself cast willy-nilly in the role of the Other Woman and now she had to learn the entire traditional script, no matter how crippling she found it to her self-esteem. So, much later the same evening that Annabel had been terrified by the sun and moon, Carolyn arrived at Lee’s flat with some of her friends because Buzz was giving a party and Carolyn could use it as an excuse to infiltrate Lee’s home.

  Buzz stuck candles by their own grease on to every flat surface and Lee helped him, half in hopes the house would catch fire and burn down for Buzz had told hi
m about the scene on the hill. He had tried to talk of it to Annabel, she could not or would not answer him and now he was in a mood of savage depression. Buzz, half naked, had covered himself in stripes of red and black greasepaint. He pushed Annabel’s bed into a corner, cleared away enough of their common junk to make a dancing space and opened the double doors to create a single, large, L-shaped room. By the time Carolyn and her cover arrived, the party could be heard half a block away and the hosts were lost among the guests.

  Annabel sat wrapped in a flowered silk shawl making right angles to the wall on her brass bed, still too frozen with fear to drink from the glass of red wine she held in her hand. When Lee felt her eyes upon him, he thought she was privately accusing him of hypocrisy and soon grew in the mood for violence. The brothers danced together, a put-on or come-on for which they were notorious, an exotic display. Loud music played. Carolyn detached herself from her group and edged down the room until she reached the long windows. She slipped the catch on one window and let in a breath of cold air which made the candle flames around her quiver and sent coruscating lights up and down the shining surface of her white satin dress. Lee saw her and was by now drunk enough to give her his most dazzling smile. Her principal distinguishing feature was an air of tranquil self-confidence and he thought it was both plausible and even inevitable she might light him out of Juliet’s tomb into some kind of promised land.

  Afterwards, the events of the night seemed, to all who participated in them, like disparate sets of images shuffled together anyhow. A draped form on a stretcher; candles blown out by a strong wind; a knife; an operating theatre; blood; and bandages. In time, the principal actors (the wife, the brothers, the mistress) assembled a coherent narrative from these images but each interpreted them differently and drew their own conclusions which were all quite dissimilar for each told himself the story as if he were the hero except for Lee who, by common choice, found himself the villain.