Blood 20 Read online

  ‘I must go slowly with you then,’ said this man. But nevertheless, he moved her about, and leaning over, kissed her.

  Vonderjan was an expert lover. Besides, he had a pec­uliar quality, which had stood him, and stands those like him, in very good stead. With what he wanted in the sexual way, provided they were not unwilling to begin with, he could spontaneously communicate some telepathic echo of his needs, making them theirs. This Antoinelle felt at once, as his warm lips moved on hers, his hot tongue pierced her mouth, and the finger of the hand that did not hold her tight, fire-feathered her breasts.

  In seconds her ready flames burst up. Businesslike, Vonderjan at once sat down, and holding her on his lap, placed his hand, making nothing of her dress, to crush her centre in an inexorable rhythmic grasp, until she came in gasping spasms against him, wept, and wilted there in his arms, his property.

  When the inclement aunt returned with a servant, having left, she felt, sufficient time for Vonderjan to ask, and Antoinelle sensibly to acquiesce, she found her niece tear- stained and dead white in a chair, and Vonderjan drinking his coffee, and smoking a cigar, letting the ash fall as it wished onto the table linen.

  ‘Well then,’ said the aunt, uncertainly.

  Vonderjan cast her one look, as if amused by something about her.

  ‘Am I to presume – may I – is everything –?’

  Vonderjan took another puff and a gout of charred stuff hit the cloth, before he mashed out the burning butt of the cig­ar on a china plate.

  ‘Antoinelle,’ exclaimed the aunt, ‘what have you to say?’

  Vonderjan spoke, not to the aunt, but to his betrothed. ‘Get up, Anna. You’re going with me now.’ Then, looking at the servant (a look the woman said after was like that of a basilisk), ‘Out, you, and put some things together; all the lady will need for the drive. I’ll supply the rest. Be quick.’

  Scarlet, the aunt shouted, ‘Now sir, this isn’t how to go on.’

  Vonderjan drew Antoinelle up, by his hand on her elbow. He had control of her now, and she need bother with nothing. She turned her drooping head, like a tired flower, looking only at his boots.

  The aunt was ranting. Vonderjan, with Antoinelle in one arm, went up to her. Though she was not a small woman, nor slight like her niece, he dwarfed her, made of her a pygmy.

  ‘Sir – there is her father to be approached – you must have a care –’

  Then she stopped speaking. She stopped because, like Antoinelle, she had been given no choice. Gregers Vonderjan had clapped his hand over her mouth, and rather more than that. He held her by the bones and flesh of her face, unable to pull away, beating at him with her hands, making noises but unable to do more, and soon breathing with difficulty.

  While he kept her like this, he did not bother to look at her, his broad body only disturbed vaguely by her flailing, weak blows. He had turned again to Antoinelle, and asked her if there was anything she wished particularly to bring away from the house.

  Antoinelle did not have the courage to glance at her struggling and apoplectic aunt. She shook her head against his shoulder, and after a little shake of his own (at the aunt’s face) he let the woman go. He and the girl walked out of the room and out of the house, to his carriage, leaving the aunt to progress from her partial asphyxia to hysterics.

  He had got them married in three days by pulling such strings as money generally will. The ceremony did not take place in the town, but all the town heard of it. Afterwards Vonderjan went back there, without his wife, to throw a lavish dinner party, limited to the male gender, which no person in­vited dared not attend, including the bride’s father, who was trying to smile off, as does the death’s-head, the state it has been put into.

  At this dinner too was Justus. He sat with a number of his friends, all of them astonished to be there. But like the rest, they had not been able, or prepared, to evade the occasion.

  Vonderjan treated them all alike, with courtesy. The food was of a high standard – a cook had been brought from the city – and there were extravagant wines, with all of which Gregers Vonderjan was evidently familiar. The men got drunk; that is, all the men but for Vonderjan, who was an established drinker, and consumed several bottles of wine, also brandy and schnapps, without much effect.

  At last Vonderjan said he would be going. To the bowing and fawning of his wife’s relatives he paid no attent­ion. It was Justus he took aside, near the door, with two of his friends. The young men were all in full uniform, smart as polish, only their bright hair tousled, and faces flushed by liquor.

  ‘You mustn’t think my wife holds any rancour against you,’ Vonderjan announced, not loudly, but in a penetrating tone. Justus was too drunk to catch himself up, and only idiotically nodded. ‘She said, I should wish you a speedy end to your trouble.’

  ‘What trouble’s that?’ asked Justus, still idiotically.

  ‘He has no troubles,’ added the first of his brother officers, ‘since you took that girl off his hands.’

  The other officer (the most sober, which was not saying much – or perhaps the most drunk, drunk enough to have gained the virtue of distance) said, ‘Shut your trap, you fool. Herr Vonderjan doesn’t want to hear that silly kind of talk.’

  Vonderjan was grave. ‘It’s nothing to me. But I’m sorry for your Justus, naturally. I shouldn’t, as no man would, like to be in his shoes.’

  ‘What shoes are they?’ Justus belatedly frowned.

  ‘I can recommend to you,’ said Vonderjan, ‘an excell­ent doctor in the city.’ They say he is discreet.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What is he saying –?’

  ‘The disease, I believe they say, is often curable, in its earliest stages.’

  Justus drew himself up. He was almost the height of Vonderjan, but like a reed beside him. All that room, and waiters on the stair besides, were listening. ‘I am not – I have no – disease –’

  Vonderjan shrugged. ‘That’s your argument, I understand. You should leave it off perhaps, and seek medical advice, cert­ainly before you consider again any courtship. Not all women are as soft-hearted as my Anna.’

  ‘What – what?’

  ‘Not plain enough? From what you showed her she knew you had it, and refused you. Of course, you had another story.’

  As Vonderjan walked through the door, the two brother officers were one silent and one bellowing. Vonderjan half turned, negligently. ‘If you don’t think so, examine his prick for yourselves.’

  Vonderjan did not tell Antoinelle any of this, but a week later, in the city, she did read in a paper that Justus had mysteriously been disgraced, and had then fled the town after a duel.

  Perhaps she thought it curious.

  But if so, only for a moment. She had been absorbed almost entirely by the stranger, her strong husband.

  On the first night, still calling her Anna, up against a great velvet bed, he had undone her clothes and next her body, taking her apart down to the clockwork of her desires.

  Her cry of pain at his entry turned almost at once into a wav­ering shriek of ecstasy. She was what he had wanted all along, and he what she had needed. By morning the bed was stained with her virginal blood, and by the blood from bites she had given him, not knowing she did so.

  Even when, a few weeks after, Vonderjan’s luck began to turn like a sail, he bore her with him on his broad wings. He said nothing of his luck. He was too occupied wringing from her again and again the music of her lusts, forcing her arching body to contortions, paroxysms, screams, torturing her to will­ing death in blind red afternoons, in candlelit darkness, so that by daybreak she could scarcely move, would lie there in a stupor in the bed, unable to rise, awaiting him like an invalid or a corpse, and hungry always for more.

  III

  Lucius paddles his boat to the jetty, lets it idle there, look­ing up.

  Another property of the flood-vapour, the stars by night are vast, great liquid splashes of silver, ormolu.

  The light in
Yse’s loft burns contrastingly low.

  That sweet smell he noticed yesterday still comes wafting down, like thin veiling, on the breeze. Like night­-blooming jasmine, perhaps a little sharper, almost like oleanders.

  She must have put in some plant. But up on her terrace only the snake tree is visible, hooping over into the water.

  Lucius smokes half a roach slowly.

  Far away the shoreline glimmers, where some of the stars have fallen off the sky.

  ‘What you doing, Yse, Yse-do-as-she-please?’

  Once he thought he saw her moving, a moth-shadow crossing through the stunned light, but maybe she is asleep, or writing.

  It would be simple enough to tie up and climb the short wet stair to the terrace, to knock on her glass doors. (How are you, Yse? Are you fine?) He had done that last night. The blinds were all down, the light low, as now. But through the side of the transparent loft he had beheld the other shadow stood there on her floor. The piano from the sea. No-one answered.

  That flower she’s planted, it is sweet as candy. He’s never known her do a thing like that. Her plants always died; killed, she said, by the electrical vibrations of her psyche when she worked.

  Somewhere out on the Sound a boat hoots mournfully.

  Lucius unships his paddles, and wends his craft away along the alleys of water, toward the cafés and the bigger lights.

  Whenever she writes about Per Laszd, which, over 27 years, she has done a lot, the same feeling assails her: slight guilt. Only slight, of course, for he will never know. He is a man who never reads anything that has nothing to do with what he does. That was made clear in the beginning. She met him only twice, but has seen him, quite often, then and since, in newspapers, in news footage, and on network TV. She has been able therefore to watch him change, from an acidly, really too-beautiful young man, through his thirties and forties (when some of the silk of his beauty frayed, to reveal something leaner and more interesting, stronger and more attractive) to a latening middle age, where he has gained weight but lost none of his masculine grace, nor his mane of hair that – only per­haps due to artifice – has no grey in it.

  She was in love with him, obviously, at the beginning. But it has changed, and become something else. He was never interested in her, even when she was young, slim and appealing. She was not, she supposed, his ‘type’.

  In addition, she rather admired what he did, and how he did it, with an actor’s panache and tricks.

  People who caught her fancy she had always tended to put into her work. Inevitably Per Laszd was one of these. Sometimes he appeared as a remote figure, on the edge of the action of other lives. Sometimes he took the centre of the stage, acting out invented existences, with his perceived actor’s skills.

  She had, she found though, a tendency to punish him in these roles. He must endure hardships and misfortunes, and often, in her work, he was dead by the end, and rarely of old age.

  Her guilt, naturally, had something to do with this – was she truly punishing him, not godlike, as with other char­acters, but from a petty personal annoyance that he had never noticed her, let alone had sex with her, or a single real con­versation? (When she had met him, it had both times been in a crowd. He had spoken generally, politely including her, no more than that. She was aware he had been arrogant enough, if he had wanted to, to have demandingly singled her out.)

  But really she felt guilty at the liberties she took of necessity, with him, on paper. How else could she write about him? It was absurd to do otherwise. But describing his conjectured nakedness, both physical and intellectual, even spiritual (even supposedly ‘in character’), her own temerity occasionally dismayed Yse. How dared she? But then, how dare ever to write anything, even about a being wholly invented.

  A mental shrug. Alors … well, well. And yet …

  Making him Gregers Vonderjan, she felt, was perhaps her worst infringement. Now she depicted him (honestly) burly with weight and on-drawing age, although always hastening to add the caveat of his handsomeness, his power. Per himself, as she had seen, was capable of being majestic, yet also mercurial. She tried to be fair, to be at her most fair, when examining him most microscopically, or when condemning him to the worst fates. (But, now and then, did the pen slip?)

  Had he ever sensed those several dreadful falls, those calumnies, those deaths? Of course not. Well, well. There, there. And yet …

  How wonderful that vine smells tonight, Yse thinks, sitting up in the lamp-dusk. Some neighbour must have planted it. What a penetrating scent, so clean and fresh yet sweet.

  It was noticeable last night, too. Yse wonders what the flowers are, that let out this aroma. And in the end, she stands up, leaving the pen to lie there, across Vonderjan and Antoinelle.

  Near her glass doors, Yse thinks the vine must be directly facing her, over the narrow waterway under the terrace, for here its perfume is strongest.

  But when she raises the blinds and opens the doors, the scent at once grows less. Somehow it has collected instead in the room. She gazes out at the other lofts, at a tower of shaped glass looking like ice in a tray. Are the hidden gardens there?

  The stars are impressive tonight. And she can see the hem of the star-spangled upper city.

  A faint sound comes.

  Yse knows it’s not outside, but in her loft, just like the scent.

  She turns. Looks at the black piano.

  Since yesterday (when it was brought in), she hasn’t paid it that much attention. (Has she?) She had initially stared at it, tried three or four times to raise its lids – without success. She had thought of rubbing it down, once the litter-chips absorbed the leaking water. But then she had not done this. Had not touched it very much.

  Coming to the doors, she has circled wide of the piano.

  Did a note sound, just now, under the forward lid? How odd, the two forelegs braced there, and the final leg at its end, more as if it balanced on a tail of some sort.

  Probably the keys and hammers and strings inside are settling after the wet, to the warmth of her room.

  She leaves one door open, which is not perhaps sensible. Rats have been known to climb the stair and gaze in at her under the night blinds, with their calm clever eyes. Sometimes the criminal population of the island can be heard along the waterways, or out on the Sound, shouts and smashing bottles, cans thrown at brickwork or impervious, multi-glazed windows.

  But the night’s still as the stars.

  Yse goes by the piano, and through the perfume, and back to her desk, where Per Laszd lies helplessly awaiting her on the page.

  IV: Bleumaneer

  Jeanjacques came to the Island in the stormy season. He was a mix of black and white, and found both peoples perplexing, as he found himself.

  The slave-trade was by then defused, as much, perhaps, as it would ever be. He knew there were no slaves left on the Island; that is, only freed slaves remained. (His black half lived with frenzied anger, as his white half clove to sloth. Between the two halves, he was a split soul.)

  There had been sparks on the rigging of the ship, and all night a velour sky fraught with pink lightning. When they reached the bay next morning, it looked nearly colourless, the sombre palms were nearly grey, and the sky cindery, and the sea only transparent, the beaches white.

  The haughty black master spoke in French.

  ‘They call that place Blue View.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Oh, it was for some vogue of wearing blue, before heads began to roll in Paris.’

  Jeanjacques said, ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘Vonderjan? A falling man.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Have you seen a man fall? The instant before he hits the ground, before he’s hurt – the moment when he thinks he is still flying.’

  ‘He’s lost his money, they were saying at Sugarbar.’

  ‘They say so.’

  ‘And his wife’s a girl, almost a child.’

  ‘Two years he’s bee
n with her on his Island.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘White.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘To me, nothing. I can’t tell them apart.’

  There had been a small port, but now little was there, except a rotted hulk, some huts and the ruins of a customs house, thatched with palm, in which birds lived.

  For a day he climbed with the escorting party, up into the interior of the Island. Inside the forest it was grey-green-black, and the trees gave off sweat, pearling the banana leaves and plantains. Then they walked through the wild fields of cane, and the coffee trees. Dark figures still worked there, and tending the kayar. But they did this for themselves. What had been owned had become the garden of those who remained, to do with as they wanted.

  The black master had elaborated, telling Jeanjacques how Vonderjan had at first sent for niceties for his house, for china and Venetian glass, cases of books and wine. Even a piano had been ordered for his child-wife, although this, it seemed, had never arrived.

  The Island was large and overgrown, but there was nothing, they said, very dangerous on it.

  Bleumaneer, Blue View, the house for which the Island had come to be called, appeared on the next morning, down a dusty track hedged by rhododendrons of prehistoric girth.

  It was white-walled, with several open courts, bal­conies. Orange trees grew along a columned gallery, and there was a Spanish fountain (dry) on the paved space before the steps. But it was a medley of all kinds of style.

  ‘Make an itinerary and let me see it. We’ll talk it over, what can be sold.’

  Jeanjacques thought that Vonderjan reminded him most of a lion, but a lion crossed with a golden bull. Then again, there was a wolf-like element, cunning and lithe, which slipped through the grasslands of their talk.

  Vonderjan did not treat Jeanjacques as what he was, a valuer’s clerk. Nor was there any resentment or chagrin. Von­derjan seemed indifferent to the fix he was in. Did he even care that such and such would be sorted out and taken from him? That glowing canvas in the salon, for example, or the rose-mahogany cabinets, and all for a third of their value, or less, paid in banknotes that probably would not last out another year. Here was a man, surely, playing at life, at living. Convinced of it and of his fate, certainly, but only as the act­or is, within his part.