Blood 20 Read online

  Jeanjacques drank cloudy orjat, tasting its bitter orange-flowers. Vonderjan drank nothing, was sufficient, even in this, to himself.

  ‘Well. What do you think?’

  ‘I’ll work on, and work tonight, present you with a summary in the morning.’

  ‘Why waste the night?’ said Vonderjan.

  ‘I must be ready to leave in another week, sir, when the ship returns.’

  ‘Another few months,’ said Vonderjan, consideringly, ‘and maybe no ship will come here. Suppose you missed your boat?’

  He seemed to be watching Jeanjacques through a tele­scope, closely, yet far, far away. He might have been drunk, but there was no smell of alcohol to him. Some drug of the Island, perhaps?

  Jeanjacques said, ‘I’d have to swim for it.’

  A man came up from the yard below. He was a white servant, shabby but respectable. He spoke to Vonderjan in some European gabble.

  ‘My horse is sick,’ said Vonderjan to Jeanjacques. ‘I think I shall have to shoot it. I’ve lost most of them here. Some insect, which bites.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yes.’ Then, light-heartedly, ‘But none of us escape, do we.’

  Later, in the slow heat of the afternoon, Jeanjacques heard the shot crack out, and shuddered. It was more than the plight of the unfortunate horse. Something seemed to have hunted Vonderjan to his Island and now picked off from him all the scales of his world, his money, his horses, his possess­ions.

  The clerk worked at his tally until the sun began to wester about four in the evening. Then he went up to wash and dress, because Vonderjan had said he should dine in the salon, with his family. Jeanjacques had no idea what he would find. He was curious, a little, about the young wife – she must by now be 17 or 18. Had there been any child­ren? It was always likely, but then again, likely too they had not survived.

  At five, the sky was like brass, the palms that lined the edges of all vistas like blackened brass columns, bent out of shape, with brazen leaves that rattled against each other when any breath blew up from the bay. From the roof of the house it was possible also to make out a cove, and the sea. But it looked much more than a day’s journey off. Unless you jumped and the wind blew you.

  Another storm mumbled over the Island as Jeanjacques entered the salon. The long windows stood wide, and the dying light flickered fitfully like the disturbed candles.

  No-one took much notice of the clerk, and Vonderjan behaved as if Jeanjacques had been there a year, some acquain­tance with no particular purpose in the house, neither welcome nor un.

  The ‘family’, Jeanjacques saw, consisted of Vonderjan, his wife, a housekeeper and a young black woman, apparently Vrouw Vonderjan’s companion.

  She was slender and fine, the black woman, and sat there as if a slave-trade had never existed, either to cruc­ify or enrage her. Her dress was of excellent muslin, ladyishly low-cut for the evening, and she had ruby ear-drops. (She spoke at least three languages that Jeanjacques heard, including the patois of the Island, or house, which she ex­changed now and then with the old housekeeper.)

  But Vonderjan’s wife was another matter altogether.

  The moment he looked at her, Jeanjacque’s blood seemed to shift slightly, all along his bones. And at the base of his skull, where his hair was neatly tied back by a ribbon, the roots stretched themselves, prickling.

  She was not at all pretty, but violently beautiful, in a way far too large for the long room, or for any room, whether spacious or enormous. So pale she was, she made her black attendant seem like a shadow cast by a flame. Satiny coils and trickles of hair fell all round her in a deluge of gilded rain. Thunder was the colour of her eyes, a dark that was not dark, some shade that could not be described visually but only in other ways. All of her was a little like that. To touch her limpid skin would be like tasting ice-cream. To catch her fragrance like small bells heard inside the ears in fever.

  When her dress brushed by him as she first crossed the room, Jeanjacques inadvertently recoiled inside his skin. He was feeling, although he did not know it, exactly as Justus had felt in the northern garden. Though Justus had not known it, either. But what terrified these two men was the very thing that drew other men, especially such men as Gregers Vonderjan. So much was plain.

  The dinner was over, and the women got up to withdraw. As she passed by his chair, Vonderjan, who had scarcely spoken to her throughout the meal (or to anyone) lightly took hold of his wife’s hand. And she looked down at once into his eyes.

  Such a look it was. Oh God, Jeanjacques experienced now all his muscles go to liquid, and sinking, and his belly sinking down into his bowels, which themselves turned over heavily as a serpent. But his penis rose very quickly, and pushed hard as a rod against his thigh.

  For it was a look of such explicit sex, trembling so colossally it had grown still, and out of such an agony of suspense, that he was well aware these two lived in a constant of the condition, and would need only to press together the length of their bodies to ignite like matches in a galvanic convulsion.

  He had seen once or twice similar looks, perhaps. Among couples kept strictly, on their marriage night. But no, not even then.

  They said nothing to each other. Needed nothing to say. It had been said.

  The girl and her black companion passed from the room, and after them the housekeeper, carrying a branch of the candles, whose flames flattened as she went through the doors onto the terrace. (Notes: This will happen again later.)

  Out there, the night was now very black. Everything beyond the house had vanished in it, but for the vague differ­ential between the sky and the tops of the forest below. There were no stars to be seen, and thunder still moved restlessly. The life went from Jeanjacques’ genitals as if it might never come back.

  ‘Brandy,’ said Vonderjan, passing the decanter. ‘What do you think of her?’

  ‘Of whom, sir?’

  ‘My Anna.’ (Playful; who else?)

  Jeanjacques visualised, in a sudden unexpected flash, certain objects used as amulets, and crossing himself in church,

  ‘An exquisite lady, sir.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vonderjan. He had drunk a lot during dinner, but in an easy way. It was evidently habit, not need. Now he said again, ‘Yes.’

  Jeanjacques wondered what would be next. But of course nothing was to be next. Vonderjan finished his cigar and drank down his glass. He rose, and nodded to Jeanjacques.

  ‘Bon nuit.’

  How could he even have forced himself to linger so long? Vonderjan demonstrably must be a human of vast self-control.

  Jeanjacques imagined the blond man going up the stairs of the house to the wide upper storey. An open window, drifted with a gauze curtain, hot, airless night. Jeanjacques imagined Antoinelle, called Anna, lying on her back in the bed, its nets pushed careless away, for what bit Vonderjan’s horses to death naturally could not essay his wife.

  ‘No, I shan’t have a good night,’ Jeanjacques said to Vonderjan in his head. He went to his room, and sharpened his pen for work.

  In the darkness, he heard her. He was sure that he had. It was almost four in the morning by his pocket watch, and the sun would rise in less than an hour.

  Waveringly she screamed, like an animal caught in a trap. Three times, the second time the loudest.

  The whole of the inside of the house shook and throbbed and scorched from it.

  Jeanjacques found he must get up, and standing by the window, handle himself roughly until, in less than 13 seconds, his semen exploded on to the tiled floor.

  Feeling then slightly nauseous, and dreary, he slunk to bed and slept gravely, like a stone.

  Antoinelle sat at her toilette mirror, part of a fine set of silver-gilt her husband had given her. She was watching herself as Nanetta combed and brushed her hair.

  It was late afternoon, the heat of the day lying down but not subsiding.

  Antoinelle was in her chemise; soon she would dress for the evening dinner
.

  Nanetta stopped brushing. Her hands lay on the air like a black slender butterfly separated in two. She seemed to be listening.

  ‘More,’ said Antoinelle.

  ‘Yes.’

  The brush began again.

  Antoinelle often did not rise until noon, frequently later. She would eat a little fruit, drink coffee, get up and wander about in flimsy undergarments. Now and then she would read a novel, or Nanetta would read one to her. Or they would play cards, sitting at the table on the balcony, among the pots of flowers.

  Nanetta had never seen Antoinelle do very much, and had never seen her agitated or even irritable.

  She lived for night.

  He, on the other hand, still got up mostly at sunrise, and no later than the hour after. His man, Stronn, would shave him. Vonderjan would breakfast downstairs in the courtyard, eating meat and bread, drinking black tea. Afterwards he might go over the accounts with the secretary. Sometimes the whole of the big house heard him shouting (except for his wife, who was generally still asleep). He regularly rode (two horses survived) round parts of the Island, and was gone until late afternoon, talking to the men and women in the fields, sitting to drink with them, rum and palm liquor, in the shade of plantains. He might return about the time Antoinelle was washing herself, powdering her arms and face, and putting on a dress for dinner.

  A bird trilled in a cage, hopped a few steps and flew up to its perch to trill again.

  The scent of dust and sweating trees came from the long windows, stagnant yet energising in the thickening yellow light.

  Nanetta half turned her head. Again she had heard something far away. She did not know what it was.

  ‘Shall I wear the emerald necklace tonight?’ asked Antoinelle, sleepily. ‘What do you think?’

  Nanetta was used to this. To finding an answer. ‘With the white dress? Yes, that would be effective.’

  ‘Put up my hair. Use the tortoiseshell combs.’

  Nanetta obeyed deftly.

  The satiny bright hair was no pleasure to touch, too electric, stickily clinging to the fingers – full of each night’s approaching storm. There would be no rain, not yet.

  Antoinelle watched as the black woman transformed her. Antoinelle liked this, having only to be, letting someone else put her together in this way. She had forgotten by now, but never liked, independence. She wanted only enjoyment, to be made and remade, although in a manner that pleased her, and that, after all, demonstrated her power over others.

  When she thought about Vonderjan, her husband, her loins cinched involuntarily, and a frisson ran through her, a shiver of heat. So she rationed her thoughts of him. During their meals together, she would hardly look at him, hardly speak, concentrating on the food, on the light of the candles reflecting in things, hypnotising herself and prolonging, unendurably, her famine, until at last she was able to return into the bed, cool by then, with clean sheets on it, and wait, giv­ing herself up to darkness and to fire.

  How could she live in any other way?

  Whatever had happened to her? Had the insensate cruelty of her relations pulped her down into a sponge that was ultim­ately receptive only to this? Or was this her true condition, which had always been trying to assert itself, and which, once connected to a suitable partner, did so, evolving also all the time, spreading itself higher and lower and in all directions, like some amoeba?

  She must have heard stories of him, his previous wife, and of a black mistress or two he had had here. But Antoinelle was not remotely jealous. She had no interest in what he did when not with her, when not about to be, or actually in her bed with her. As if all other facets, both of his existence and her own, had now absolutely no meaning at all.

  About the hour Antoinelle sat by the mirror, and Vonderjan, who had not gone out that day, was bathing, smoking one of the cig­ars as the steam curled round him, Jeanjacques stood among a wilderness of cane fields beyond the house.

  That cane was a type of grass that tended always to amaze him, these huge stripes of straddling stalks, rising five feet or more above his head. He felt himself to be a child lost in a luridly unnatural wood, and besides, when a black figure pass­ed across the view, moving from one subaqueous tunnel to another, they now supernaturally only glanced at him, cat-like, from the sides of their eyes.

  Jeanjacques had gone out walking, having deposited his itinerary and notes with Vonderjan in a morning room. The clerk took narrow tracks across the Island, stood on high places from which (as from the roof) coves and inlets of the sea might be glimpsed.

  The people of the Island had been faultlessly friendly and courteous, until he began to try to question them. Then they changed. He assumed at first they only hated his white skin, as had others he had met, who had refused to believe in his mixed blood. In that case, he could not blame them much for the hatred. Then he understood he had not assumed this at all. They were disturbed by something, afraid of something, and he knew it.

  Were they afraid of her – of the white girl in the house? Was it that? And why were they afraid? Why was he himself afraid? Because afraid of her he was. Oh yes, he was terrified.

  At midday he came to a group of hut-houses, patchily colour-washed and with palm-leaf roofs, and people were sat about there in the shade, drinking, and one man was splitting rosy gourds with a machete, so Jeanjacques thought of a guillotine a moment, the red juice spraying out and the thunk of the blade going through. (He had heard they had split imp­orted melons in Marseilles, to test the machine. But he was a boy when he heard this tale, and perhaps it was not true.)

  Jeanjacques stood there, looking on. Then a black woman got up, fat and not young, but comely, and brought him half a gourd, for him to try the dripping flesh.

  He took it, thanking her.

  ‘How is it going, Mother?’ he asked her, partly in French, but also with two words of the patois, which he had begun to recognise. To no particular effect.

  ‘It goes how it go, monsieur.’

  ‘You still take a share of your crop to the big house? She gave him the sidelong look. ‘But you’re free people, now.’

  One of the men called to her sharply. He was a tall black leopard, young and gorgeous as a carving from chocolate. The woman went away at once, and Jeanjacques heard again that phrase he had heard twice before that day. It was muttered somewhere at his back. He turned quickly, and there they sat, blacker in shade, eating from the flesh of the gourds, and drinking from a bottle passed around. Not looking at him, not at all.

  ‘What did you say?’

  A man glanced up. ‘It’s nothing, monsieur.’

  ‘Something came from the sea, you said?’

  ‘No, monsieur. Only a storm coming.’

  ‘It’s the stormy season. Wasn’t there something else?’

  They shook their heads. They looked helpful, and sorry they could not assist, and their eyes were painted glass.

  Something has come from the sea.

  They had said it too, at the other place, further down, when a child had brought him rum in a tin mug.

  What could come from the sea? Only weather, or men. Or the woman. She had come from there.

  They were afraid, and even if he had doubted his ears or his judgement, the way they would not say it straight out, that was enough to tell him he had not imagined this.

  Just then a breeze passed through the forest below, and then across the broad leaves above, shaking them. And the light changed a second, then back, like the blinking of the eye of God.

  They stirred, the people. It was as if they saw the wind, and the shape it had was fearful to them, yet known. Respected.

  As he was walking back by another of the tracks, he found a dead chicken laid on a banana leaf at the margin of a field. A proprietary offering? Nothing else had touched it; even a line of ants detoured out onto the track, to give it room.

  Jeanjacques walked into the cane fields and went on there for a while. And now and then other human things moved through, looking s
idelong at him.

  Then, when he paused among the tall stalks, he heard them whispering, whispering, the stalks of cane, or else the voices of the people. Had they followed him? Were they agg­ressive? They had every right to be, of course, even with his kind. Even so, he did not want to be beaten, or to die.

  He had invested such an amount of his life and wits in avoiding such things.

  But no-one approached. The whispers came and went.

  Now he was here, and he had made out, from the edge of this field, Vonderjan’s house with its fringe of palms and rhododendrons (Blue View) above him on the hill, only about half an hour away.

  In a full hour, the sun would dip. He would go to his room and there would be water for washing, and his other clothes laid out for the dinner.

  The whispering began again, suddenly, very close, so Jeanjacques spun about, horrified.

  But no-one was there, nothing was there.

  Only the breeze, that the black people could see, moved round among the stalks of the cane, that was itself like an Egyptian temple, its columns meant to be a forest of green papyrus.

  ‘It’s black,’ the voices whispered. ‘Black.’

  ‘Like a black man,’ Jeanjacques said hoarsely.

  ‘Black like black.’

  Again, God blinked his eyelid of sky. A figure seemed to be stood between the shafts of green cane. It said, ‘Not black like men. So black we filled with terror of it. Black like black of night is black.’

  ‘Black like black.’

  ‘Something from the sea.’

  Jeanjacques felt himself dropping, and then he was on his knees, and his forehead was pressed to the powdery plant-drained soil.