Blood 20 Read online

  ‘You told me once before,’ says Yse, ‘a shark did that.’

  ‘To reassure you. But it was a vampire.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I say to him, Watch out, monsieur.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘He watched out. Next night, I met him again. He had yellow eyes, like a cat.’

  ‘He was undead?’

  ‘The undeadest thing I ever laid.’

  He laughs. Yse laughs, thoughtfully. ‘A piano’s caught in my terrace tree.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ says Lucius, the perhaps arch liar.

  ‘You don’t believe me.’

  ‘What is your thing about vampires?’

  ‘I’m writing about a vampire.’

  ‘Let me read your book.’

  ‘Someday. But Lucius – it isn’t their charisma. Not their beauty that makes them irresistible –’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Think what they must be like … skin in rags, dead but walking. Stinking of the grave –’

  ‘They use their hudja-magica to take all that away.’

  ‘It’s how they make us feel.’

  ‘Yeah, Yse. You got it.’

  ‘What they can do to us.’

  ‘Dance all night,’ says Lucius, reminiscent. He watches a handsome youth across the café, juggling mirrors that flash unnervingly, his skin the colour of an island twilight.

  ‘Lucius, will you help me shift the piano into my loft?’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  ‘Not tomorrow, or next month. I mean, could we do it today, before sunset starts?’

  ‘I love you, Yse. Because of you, I shall go to Heaven.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Shit piano,’ he says. ‘I could have slept in my boat. I could have paddled over to Venezule. I could have watched the thought of Venus rise through the grey brain of the sky. Piano, huh, piano. Who shall I bring to help me? That boy, he looks strong, look at those mirrors go.’

  The beast had swum to shore, to the beach, through the pale, transparent urges of the waves, when the star Venus was in the brain-grey sky. But not here.

  There.

  In the dark before star-rise and dawn, more than two centuries ago. First the rifts, the lilts of the dark sea, and in them these mysterious thrusts and pushes, the limbs like those of some huge swimmer, part man and part lion and part crab – but also, a manta ray.

  Then, the lid breaks for a second through the fans of water, under the dawn star’s piercing steel. Wet as black mirror, the closed lid of the piano, as it strives, on three powerful beast-legs, for the beach.

  This Island is an island of sands, then of trees, the sombre sullen palms that sweep the shore. Inland, heights, veg­etation, plantations, some of coffee and sugar and rubber, and one of imported kayar. An invented island, a composite.

  Does it crawl onto the sand, the legs still moving, crouching low like a beast? Does it rest on the sand, under the sway of the palm trees, as a sun rises?

  The Island has a name, like the house that is up there, unseen, on the inner heights. Bleumaneer.

  (Notes: Gregers Vonderjan brought his wife to Bleu­maneer in the last days of his wealth …)

  The piano crouched stilly at the edge of the beach, the sea retreating from it, and the dark of night falling away …

  It’s sunset.

  Lucius, in the bloody light, with two men from the Café Blonde (neither the juggler), juggles the black piano from the possessive tentacles of the snake-willow.

  With a rattle, a shattering of sounds (like slung cut­lery), it fetches up on the terrace. The men stand perplexed, looking at it. Yse watches from her glass wall.

  ‘Broke the cock thing.’

  ‘No way to move it. Shoulda tooka crane.’

  They prowl about the piano, while the red light blooms across its shade.

  Lucius tries delicately to raise the lid from the keys. The lid does not move. The other two, they wrench at the other lid, the piano’s top (pate, shell). This too is fastened stuck. (Yse had made half a move, as if to stop them. Then her arm fell lax.)

  ‘Damn ol’ thing. What she wan’ this ol’ thing for?’

  They back away. One makes a kicking movement. Luc­ius shakes his head; his long locks jangle across the flaming sky.

  ‘Do you want this, girl?’ Lucius asks Yse by her glass.

  ‘Yes.’ Shortly. ‘I said I did.’

  ‘’S all broke up. Won’t play you none,’ sings the light-eyed man, Carr, who wants to kick the piano, even now his loose leg pawing in its jeans.

  Trails of water slip away from the piano, over the terrace, like chains.

  Yse opens her wide glass doors. The men carry the pia­no in, and set it on her bare wooden floor.

  Yse brings them, now docile as their maid, white rum, while Lucius shares out the bills.

  ‘Hurt my back,’ whinges Carr the kicker.

  ‘Piano,’ says Lucius, drinking, ‘pian-o – O pain!’

  He says to her at the doors (as the men scramble back into their boat), ‘That vampire I danced with. Where he bit me. Still feel him there, biting me, some nights. Like a piece of broken bottle in my neck. I followed him, did I say to you? I followed him and saw him climb in under his grave just before the sun came up. A marble marker up on top. It shifted easy as breath, settled back like a sigh. But he was beautiful, that boy with yellow eyes. Made me feel like a king, with him. Young as a lion, with him. Old as him, too. A thousand years in a skin of smoothest suede.’

  Yse nods.

  She watches Lucius away into the sunset, of which three hours are still left.

  Yse scatters two bags of porous litter-chips, which are used all over the island, to absorb the spillages and seepages of the Sound, to mop up the wet that slowly showers from the piano. She does not touch it. Except with her right hand, for a second, flat on the top of it.

  The wood feels ancient and hollow, and she thinks it hasn’t, perhaps, a metal frame.

  As the redness folds over deeper and deeper, Yse light the oil lamp on her work-table, and sits there, looking forty feet across the loft, at the piano on the sunset. Under her right hand now, the pages she has already written, in her fast untidy scrawl.

  Piano-o. O pain.

  Shush, says the Sound-tide, flooding the city, pulsing through the walls, struts and girders below.

  Yse thinks distinctly, suddenly – it is always this way – about Per Laszd. But then another man’s memory taps at her mind.

  Yse picks up her pen, almost absently. She writes:

  ‘Like those hallucinations that sometimes come at the edge of sleep, so that you wake, thinking two or three words have been spoken close to your ear, or that a tall figure stands in the corner … like this, the image now and then appears before him.

  ‘Then he sees her, the woman, sitting on the rock, her white dress and her ivory-coloured hair, hard-gleaming in a post-storm sunlight. Impossible to tell her age. A desiccated young girl, or unlined old woman. And the transparent sea lapping in across the sand …

  ‘But he has said, the Island is quite deserted now.’

  II: Antoinelle’s Courtship

  Gregers Vonderjan brought his wife to Bleumaneer in the last days of his wealth.

  In this way, she knew nothing about them, the grave losses to come, but then they had been married only a few months She knew little enough about him, either.

  Antoinelle was raised among staunch and secretive people. Until she was 14, she had thought herself ugly, and after that, beautiful. A sunset revelation had put her right, the westering glow pouring in sideways to paint the face in her mirror, on its slim, long throat. She found too she had shoul­ders, and cheekbones. Hands, whose tendons flexed in fans. With the knowledge of beauty, Antoinelle began to hope for some­thing. Armed with her beauty she began to fall madly in love – with young officers in the army, with figures encountered in dreams.

  One evening at a parochial ball, the two situations became confused.
r />   The glamorous young man led Antoinelle out into a summer garden. It was a garden of Europe, with tall dense trees of twisted trunks, foliage massed on a lilac northern sky.

  Antoinelle gave herself. That is, not only was she prepared to give of herself sexually, but to give herself up to this male person, of whom she knew no more than that he was beautiful.

  Some scruple – solely for himself, the possible conse­quences – made him check at last.

  ‘No – no –’ she cried softly, as he forcibly released her and stood back, angrily panting.

  The beautiful young man concluded (officially to himself) that Antoinelle was ‘loose’, and therefore valueless. She was not rich enough to marry, and besides, he despised her family.

  Presently he had told his brother officers all about this girl, and her ‘looseness’.

  ‘She would have done anything,’ he said.

  ‘She’s a whore,’ said another, and smiled.

  Fastidiously, Antoinelle’s lover remarked, ‘No, worse than a whore. A whore does it honestly, for money. It’s her work. This one simply does it.’

  Antoinelle’s reputation was soon in tatters, which blew about that little town of trees and societal pillars, like the torn flag of a destroyed regiment.

  She was sent in disgrace to her aunt’s house in the country.

  No-one spoke to Antoinelle in that house. Literally, no-one. The aunt would not, and she had instructed her servants, who were afraid of her. Even the maid who attended Antoinelle would not speak, in the privacy of the evening chamber, prepar­ing the girl for the silent evening supper below, or the lump-three-mattressed bed.

  The aunt’s rather unpleasant lap-dog, when Antoinelle had attempted, unwatched, to feed it a marzipan fruit, had only turned its rat-like head away. (At everyone else, save the aunt, it growled.)

  Antoinelle, when alone, sobbed. At first in shame – her family had already seen to that, very ably, in the town. Next in frustrated rage. At last out of sheer despair.

  She was like a lunatic in a cruel, cool asylum. They fed her, made her observe all the proper rituals. She had shelter and a place to sleep, and people to relieve some of her physical wants. There were even books in the library, and a garden to walk in on sunny days. But language – sound – they took away from her. And language is one of the six senses. It was as bad perhaps as blindfolding her. Additionally, they did not even speak to each other, beyond the absolute minimum, when she was by – coarse-aproned girls on the stair stifled their giggles, and passed with mask faces. And in much the same way, too, Antoinelle was not permitted to play the aunt’s piano.

  Three months of this, hard, polished months, like stone mirrors that reflected nothing.

  Antoinelle grew thinner, more pale. Her young eyes had hollows under them. She was like a nun.

  The name of the aunt who did all this was Clemence – which means, of course, clemency – mild, merciful. (And the name of the young man in the town who had almost fucked Antoinelle, forced himself not to for his own sake, and then fucked instead her reputation, which was to say, her life … His name was Justus.)

  On a morning early in the fourth month, a new thing happened.

  Antoinelle opened her eyes, and saw the aunt sailing into her room. And the aunt, glittering with rings like knives, spoke to Antoinelle.

  ‘Very well, there’s been enough of all this. Yes, yes. You may get up quickly and come down to breakfast. Patice will see to your dress and hair. Make sure you look your best.’

  Antoinelle lay there, on her back in the horrible bed, staring like the dead newly awakened.

  ‘Come along,’ said Aunt Clemence, holding the awful little dog untidily scrunched, ‘make haste now. What a child.’ As if Antoinelle were the strange creature, the curiosity.

  While, as the aunt swept out, the dog craned back and chattered its dirty teeth at Antoinelle.

  And then, the third wonder, Patice was chattering, breaking like a happy stream at thaw, and shaking out a dress.

  Antoinelle got up, and let Patice see to her, all the paraphernalia of the toilette, finishing with a light pollen of powder, even a fingertip of rouge for the matt pale lips, making them moist and rosy.

  ‘Why?’ asked Antoinelle at last, in a whisper.

  ‘There is a visitor,’ chattered Patice, brimming with joy.

  Antoinelle took two steps, then caught her breath and dropped as if dead on the carpet.

  But Patice was also brisk; she brought Antoinelle round, crushing a vicious clove of lemon oil under her nostrils, slapping the young face lightly. Exactly as one would expect in this efficiently cruel lunatic asylum.

  Presently Antoinelle drifted down the stairs, light­headed, rose-lipped and shadow-eyed. She had never looked more lovely or known it less.

  The breakfast was a ghastly provincial show-off thing. There were dishes and dishes, hot and cold, of kidneys, eggs, of cheeses and hams, hot breads in napkins, brioches, and chocolate. (It was a wonder Antoinelle was not sick at once.) All this set on crisp linen with flashing silver, and the fine china normally kept in a cupboard.

  The servants flurried round in their awful, stupid (second-hand) joy. The aunt sat in her chair and Antoinelle in hers, and the man in his, across the round table.

  Antoinelle had been afraid it was going to be Justus. She did not know why he would be there – to castigate her again, to apologise – either way, such a boiling of fear – or something – had gone through Antoinelle that she had fainted.

  But it was not Justus. This was someone she did not know.

  He had stood up as she came into the room. The morning was clear and well-lit, and Antoinelle had seen, with a dreary sagging of relief, that he was old. Quite old. She went on thinking this as he took her hand in his large one and shook it as if carelessly playing with something, very delicately. But his hand was manicured, the nails clean and white-edged. There was one ring, with a dull colourless stone in it.

  Antoinelle still thought he was quite old, perhaps not so old as she had thought.

  When they were seated, and the servants had doled out to them some food and drink, and gone away, Antoinelle came to herself rather more.

  His hair was not grey but a mass of silvery blond. A lot of hair, very thick, shining, which fell, as was the fashion then, just to his shoulders. He was thick-set, not slender, but seemed immensely strong. One saw this in ordinary, apparently unrelated things – for example the niceness with which he helped himself now from the coffee-pot. Indeed, the dangerous playfulness of his handshake with a woman; he could easily crush the hands of his fellow men.

  Perhaps he was not an old man, really. In his forties (which would be the contemporary age of fifty-five or -six.) He was losing his figure, as many human beings do at that age, becoming either too big or too thin. But if his middle had spread, he was yet a presence, sprawled there in his immaculately white ruffled shirt, the broad-cut coat, his feet in boots of Spanish leather propped under the table. And to his face, not much really had happened. The forehead was both wide and high, scarcely lined, the nose aquiline as a bird’s beak, scarcely thickened, the chin undoubted and jutting, the mouth narrow and well-shaped. His eyes, set in the slightest ruching of skin, were large, a cold clear blue. He might actually be only just forty (that is, fifty). A fraction less.

  Antoinelle was not to know that, in his youth, the heads of women had turned for Gregers Vonderjan like tulips before a gale. Or that, frankly, now and then they still did so.

  The talk, what was that about all this while? Obsequi­ous pleasantries from the aunt, odd anecdotes he gave, to do with ships, land, slaves and money. Antoinelle had been so long without hearing the speech of others, she had become nearly word-deaf, so that most of what he said had no meaning for her, and what the aunt said even less.

  Finally the aunt remembered an urgent errand, and left them.

  They sat, with the sun blazing through the windows. Then Vonderjan looked right at her, at Antoinelle, and suddenly he
r face, her whole body, was suffused by a savage burning blush.

  ‘Did she tell you why I called here?’ he asked, almost indifferently.

  Antoinelle, her eyes lowered, murmured childishly, thoughtlessly, ‘No – she – she hasn’t been speaking to me –’

  ‘Hasn’t she? Why not? Oh,’ he said, ‘that little business in the town.’

  Antoinelle, to her shock, began to cry. This should have horrified her – she had lost control – the worst sin, as her family had convinced her, they thought.

  He knew, this man. He knew. She was ashamed, and yet unable to stop crying, or to get up and leave the room.

  She heard his chair pushed back, and then he was standing over her. To her slightness, he seemed vast and overpowering. He was clean, and smelled of French soap, of tobacco, and of some other nuance of masculinity, which Antoinelle at once intuit­ively liked. She had scented it before.

  ‘Well, you won’t mind leaving her, then,’ he said, and he lifted her up out of her chair, and there she was in his grip, her head drooping back, staring almost mindlessly into his large, handsome face. It was easy to let go. She did so. She had in fact learnt nothing, been taught nothing by the whips and stings of her wicked relations. ‘I called here to ask you,’ he said, ‘to be my wife.’

  ‘But …’ faintly, ‘I don’t know you.’

  ‘There’s nothing to know. Here I am. Exactly what you see. Will that do?’

  ‘But …’ more faintly still, ‘why would you want me?’

  ‘You’re just what I want. And I thought you would be.’

  ‘But,’ nearly inaudible, ‘I was – disgraced.’

  ‘We’ll see about that. And the old she-cunt won’t talk to you, you say?’

  Antoinelle, innocently not even knowing this important word (which anyway he spoke in a foreign argot), only shivered. ‘No. Not till today.’

  ‘Now she does because I’ve bid for you. You’d better come with me. Did the other one, the soldier-boy, have you? It doesn’t matter, but tell me now.’

  Antoinelle threw herself on the stranger’s chest – she had not been told, or heard his name. ‘No – no –’ she cried, just as she had when Justus pushed her off.