Blood 20 Read online

  The strong handsome face was bland – or was it blind?

  ‘None of us escapes death.’

  That cliché once more, masking the horror – but what was the horror? And was the use of the cliché only acceptance of the harsh world, precisely what Vonderjan must have set himself to learn?

  ‘Come to the house. Have a brandy,’ said Vonderjan.

  They went back, not the way they had come, but using another flight of stairs. Behind them the groom was clearing the beautiful dead horse like debris or garbage. Jeanjacques refused to look over his shoulder.

  Vonderjan’s study had no light until great storm-shutt­ers were undone. It must face, like the terrace, toward the sea.

  The brandy was hot.

  ‘All my life,’ said Vonderjan, sitting down on his own writing-table, suddenly unsolid, his eyes wide and unseeing, ‘I’ve had to deal with fucking death. You get sick of it. Sick to death of it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know you saw some things in France.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘How do we live with it, eh? Oh, you’re a young man. But when you get past forty, Christ, you feel it, breathing on the back of your neck. Every death you’ve seen. And I’ve seen plenty. My mother, and my wife. I mean, my first wife, Uteka. A beautiful woman, when I met her. Big, if you know I mean. White skin and raven hair, red-gold eyes. A Viking woman.’

  Jeanjacques was mesmerised, despite everything. He had never heard Vonderjan expatiate like this, not even in imagin­ation.

  They drank more brandy.

  Vonderjan said, ‘She died in my arms.’

  ‘I’m sorry –’

  ‘Yes. I wish I could have shot her, like the horses, to stop her suffering. But it was in Copenhagen, one summer. Her people everywhere. One thing, she hated sex.’

  Jeanjacques was shocked despite himself.

  ‘I found other women for that,’ said Vonderjan, as if, indifferently, to explain.

  The bottle was nearly empty. Vonderjan opened a cup­board and took out another bottle, and a slab of dry, apparently stale bread on a plate. He ripped off pieces of the bread and ate them.

  It was like a curious Communion, bread and wine, flesh, blood. (He offered none of the bread to Jeanjacques.)

  ‘I wanted,’ Vonderjan said, perhaps two hours later, as they sat in the hard stuffed chairs, the light no longer window-pane pure, ‘a woman who’d take that, from me. Who’d want me pushed and poured into her, like the sea, like they say a mermaid wants that. A woman who’d take. I heard of one. I went straight to her. It was true.’

  ‘Don’t all women –’ Jeanjacques faltered, drunk and heart racing, ‘take –?’

  ‘No. They give. Give, give, give. They give too bloody much.’

  Vonderjan was not drunk, and they had consumed two bottles of brandy, and Vonderjan most of it.

  ‘But she’s – she’s taken – she’s had your luck –’ Jeanjacques blurted.

  ‘Luck. I never wanted my luck.’

  ‘But you –’

  ‘Wake up. I had it, but who else did? Not Uteka, my wife. Not my wretched mother. I hate cruelty,’ Vonderjan said quietly. ‘And we note, this world’s very cruel. We should punish the world if we could. We should punish God if we could. Put Him on a cross? Yes. Be damned to this fucking God.’

  The clerk found he was on the ship, coming to the Island, but he knew he did not want to be on the Island. Yet of course, it was now too late to turn back. Something followed through the water. It was black and shining. A shark, maybe.

  When Jeanjacques came to, the day was nearly gone and evening was coming. His head banged and his heart galloped. The dead horse had possessed it. He wandered out of the study (now empty but for himself) and heard the terrible sound of a woman, sick-moaning in her death-throes: Uteka’s ghost. But then a sharp cry came; it was the other one, Vonderjan’s second wife, dying in his arms.

  As she put up her hair, Nanetta was thinking of whispers. She heard them in the room, echoes of all the other whispers in the house below.

  Black – it’s black – not black like a man is black … black as black is black …

  Beyond the fringe of palms, the edge of the forest trees stirred, as if something quite large were prowling about there. Nothing else moved.

  She drove a gold hairpin through her coiffure.

  He was with her, along the corridor. It had sometimes happened he would walk up here, in the afternoons. Not for a year, however.

  A bird began to shriek its strange stupid warning at the forest’s edge, the notes of which sounded like ‘J’ai des lits! J’ai des lits!’

  Nanetta had dreamed this afternoon, falling asleep in that chair near the window, that she was walking in the forest, barefoot, as she had done when a child. Through the trees behind her something crept, shadowing her. It was noiseless, and the forest also became utterly still with tension and fear. She had not dared look back, but sometimes, from the rim of her eye, she glimpsed a dark, pencil-straight shape, that might only have been the ebony trunk of a young tree.

  Then, pushing through the leaves and ropes of a wild fig, she saw it, in front of her not at her back, and woke, flinging herself forward with a choking gasp, so that she almost fell out of the chair.

  It was black, smooth. Perhaps, in the form of a man. Or was it a beast? Were there eyes? Or a mouth?

  In the house, a voice whispered, ‘Something is in the forest.’

  A shutter banged without wind.

  And outside, the bird screamed I have beds! I have beds!

  The salon: it was sunset and thin wine light was on the rich man’s china, and the Venice glass, what was left of it.

  Vonderjan considered the table, idly, smoking, for the meal had been served and consumed early. He had slept off his brandy in twenty minutes on Anna’s bed, then woken and had her a third time, before they separated.

  She had lain there on the sheet, her pale arms firm and damask with the soft nap of youth.

  ‘I can’t get up. I can’t stand up.’

  ‘Don’t get up. Stay where you are,’ he said. ‘They can bring you something on a tray.’

  ‘Bread,’ she said. ‘I want soft warm bread, and some soup. And a glass of wine.’

  ‘Stay there,’ he agreed again. ‘I’ll soon be back.’

  ‘Come back quickly,’ she said. And she held out the slender, strong white arms, all the rest of her flung there and limp as a broken snake.

  So he went back and slid his hand gently into her, teasing her, and she writhed on the point of his fingers, the way a doll would, should you put your hand up its skirt.

  ‘Is that so nice? Are you sure you like it?’

  ‘Don’t stop.’

  Vonderjan had thought he meant only to tantalise, per­haps to fulfil, but in the end he unbuttoned himself, the buttons he had only just done up, and put himself into her again, finishing both of them with swift hard thrusts.

  So, she had not been in to dine. And he sat here, ready for her again, quite ready. But he was used to that. He had, after all, stored all that, during his years with Uteka, who, so womanly in other ways, had loved to be held and petted like a child, and nothing more. Vonderjan had partly unavoidably felt that the disease that invaded her body had somehow been given entrance to it because of this omitting vacancy, which she had not been able to allow him to fill – as night rushed to engulf the sky once vacated by a sun.

  This evening the clerk looked very sallow, and had not eaten much. (Vonderjan had forgotten the effect brandy could have.) The black woman was definitely frightened. There was a type of magic going on, some ancient fear-ritual that unknown forces had stirred up among the people on the Island. It did not interest Vonderjan very much; nothing much did, now.

  He spoke to the clerk, congratulating him on the effic­iency of his lists and his evaluation, and the arrangements that had been postulated, when next the ship came to the Island.

  Jeanjacques rallied. He said, ‘The one thi
ng I couldn’t locate, sir, was a piano.’

  ‘Piano?’ Puzzled, Vonderjan looked at him.

  ‘I had understood you to say your wife – that she had a piano –’

  ‘Oh, I ordered one for her years ago. It never arrived. It was stolen, I suppose, or lost overboard, and they never admitted to it. Yes, I recall it now, a pianoforte. But the heat here would soon have ruined it anyway.’

  The candles abruptly flickered, for no reason. The light was going, night rushing in.

  Suddenly something, a huge impenetrable shadow, ran by the window.

  The woman, Nanetta, screamed. The housekeeper sat with her eyes almost starting out of her head. Jeanjacques cursed. ‘What was that?’

  As it had run by, fleet, leaping, a mouth gaped a hundred teeth – like the mouth of a shark breaking from the ocean. Or had they mistaken that?

  Did it have eyes, the great black animal that had run by the window?

  Surely it had eyes –?

  Vonderjan had stood up, and now he pulled a stick from a vase against the wall – as another man might pick up an umbrella, or a poker – and he was opening wide the doors, so the women shrank together and away.

  The light of day was gone. The sky was blushing to black. Nothing was there.

  Vonderjan called peremptorily into the darkness. To Jeanjacques the call sounded meaningless, gibberish, something like Hooh! Hoouah! Vonderjan was not afraid, possibly not even disconcerted or intrigued.

  Nothing moved. Then, below, lights broke out on the open space, a servant shouted shrilly in the patois.

  Vonderjan shouted down, saying it was nothing. ‘Go back inside.’ He turned and looked at the two women and the man in the salon. ‘Some animal.’ He banged the doors shut.

  ‘It – looked like a lion,’ Jeanjacques stammered. But no. It had been like a shark, a fish, that bounded on two or three legs, and stooping low.

  The servants must have seen it too. Alarmed and alerted, they were still disturbed, and generally calling out now. Another woman screamed, and then there was the crash of glass.

  ‘Fools,’ said Vonderjan, without any expression or contempt. He nodded at the housekeeper. ‘Go and tell them I say it’s all right.’

  The woman dithered, then scurried away – by the house door; avoiding the terrace. Nanetta too had stood up, and her eyes had their silver rings. They, more even than the thing that ran across the window, terrified Jeanjacques.

  ‘What was it? Was it a wild pig?’ asked the clerk, aware he sounded like a scared child.

  ‘A pig. What pig? No. Where could it go?’

  ‘Has it climbed up the wall?’ Jeanjacques rasped.

  The black woman began to speak the patois in a sing­song, and the hair crawled on Jeanjacques’ scalp.

  ‘Tell her to stop it, can’t you.’

  ‘Be quiet, Nanetta,’ said Vonderjan.

  She was silent.

  They stood there.

  Outside the closed windows, in the closed dark, the dis­turbed noises below were dying off.

  Had it had eyes? Where had it gone to?

  Jeanjacques remembered a story of Paris, how the guill­otine would leave its station by night and patrol the streets, searching for yet more blood. And during a siege of antique Rome, a giant phantom wolf had stalked the seven hills, tear­ing out the throats of citizens. These things were not real, even though they had been witnessed and attested, even though evidence and bodies were left in their wake. And, although unreal, yet they existed. They grew, such things, out of the material of the rational world, as maggots appeared spontan­eously in a corpse, or fungus formed on damp.

  The black woman had been keeping quiet. Now she made a tiny sound.

  They turned their heads.

  Beyond the windows – dark blotted dark, night on night.

  ‘It’s there.’

  A second time Vonderjan flung open the doors, and light flooded, by some trick of reflection in their glass, out across the place beyond.

  It crouches by the wall, where yester eve the man carn­ally had his wife, where a creeper grows, partly rent away by their movements.

  ‘In God’s sight,’ Vonderjan says, startled finally, but not afraid.

  He walks out, straight out, and they see the beast by the wall does not move, either to attack him or to flee.

  Jeanjacques can smell roses, honeysuckle. The wine glass drops out of his hand.

  Antoinelle dreams, now.

  She is back in the house of her aunt, where no-one would allow her to speak, or to play the piano. But she has slunk down in the dead of night, into the sitting-room, and rebelliously lifted the piano’s lid.

  A wonderful sweet smell comes up from the keys, sand she strokes them a moment, soundlessly. The feel … like skin. The skin of a man, over muscle, young, hard, smooth. Is it Justus she feels? (She knows this is very childish. Even her sexuality, although perhaps she does not know this, has the wanton ravening quality of the child’s single-minded demands.)

  There is a shell the inclement aunt keeps on top of the piano, along with some small framed miniatures of ugly relatives.

  Antoinelle lifts the shell, and puts it to her ear, listens to hear the sound of the sea. But instead, she hears a piano playing, softly and far off.

  The music, Antoinelle thinks, is a piece by Rameau, for the harpsichord, transposed.

  She looks at the keys. She has not touched them, or not enough to make them sound.

  Rameau’s music dies away.

  Antoinelle finds she is playing four single notes on the keys, she does not know why, and neither the notes, nor the word they spell, mean anything to her.

  And then, even in the piano-dream, she is aware her husband, Gregers Vonderjan, is in the bed with her, lying behind her, although in her dream she is standing upright.

  They would not let her speak or play the piano – they would not let her have what she must have, or make the sounds that she must make …

  Now she is a piano.

  He fingers her keys, gentle, next a little rough, next sensual, next with the crepitation of a feather. And, at each caress, she sounds, Antoinelle, who is a piano, a different note.

  His hands are over her breasts. (In the dream too, she realises, she has come into the room naked.) His fingers are on her naked breasts, fondling and describing, itching the buds at their centres. Antoinelle is being played. She gives off, note by note and chord by chord, her music.

  Still cupping, circling her breasts with his hungry hands, somehow his scalding tongue is on her spine. He is licking up and up the keys of her vertebrae, through her silk- thin skin.

  Standing upright, he is pressed behind her. While lying in the bed, he has rolled her over, crushing her breasts into his hands beneath her, lying on her back, his weight keeping her pinned, breathless.

  And now he is entering her body, his penis like a tower on fire.

  She spreads, opens, melts, dissolves for him. No matter how large, and he is now enormous, she will make way, then grip fierce and terrible upon him, her toothless springy lower mouth biting and cramming itself full of him, as if never to let go.

  They are swimming strongly together for the shore.

  How piercing the pleasure at her core, all through her now, the hammers hitting with a golden quake on every nerve string.

  And then, like a beast (a cat? a lion?) he has caught her by the throat, one side of her neck.

  As with the other entry, at her sex, her body gives way to allow him room. And, as at the very first, her virgin’s cry of pain changes almost at once into a wail of delight.

  Antoinelle begins to come (to enter, to arrive).

  Huge thick rollers of deliciousness, purple and crimson, dark and blazing, tumble rhythmically as dense waves upward, from her spine’s base to the windowed dome of her skull.

  Glorious starvation couples with feasting, itching with rubbing, constricting, bursting, with implosion, the architecture of her pelvis rocks, punches, roaring and spinning
in eating movements and swallowing gulps –

  If only this sensation might last and last.

  It lasts. It lasts.

  Antoinelle is burning bright. She is changing into stars. Her stars explode and shatter. There are greater stars she can make. She is going to make them. She does so. And greater. Still she is coming, entering, arriving.

  She has screamed. She has screamed until she no longer has any breath. Now she screams silently. Her nails gouge the bed-sheets. She feels the blood of her virginity falling drop by drop. She is the shell and her blood her sounding sea, and the sea is rising up and another mouth, the mouth of night, is taking it all, and she is made of silver for the night that devours her, and this will never end.

  And then she screams again, a terrible divine scream, dredged independently up from the depths of her concerto of ecstasy. And vaguely, as she flies crucified on the wings of the storm, she knows the body upon her body (its teeth in her throat) is not the body of Vonderjan, and that the fire-filled hands upon her breasts, the flaming stem within her, are black, not as black is black, but black as outer space, which she is filling now with her millions of wheeling, howling stars.

  VII

  The bird that cries Shadily! Shadily! flies over the Island above the boiling afternoon lofts, and is gone, back to the upp­er city mainland, where there are more trees, more shade.

  In the branches of the snake-willow, a wind-chime tinkles, once.

  Yse’s terrace is full of people, sitting and standing with bottles, glasses, cans, and laughing. Yse has thrown a party. Someone, drunk, is dog-paddling in the alley of water.

  Lucius, in his violet shirt, looks at the people. Sometimes Yse appears. She’s slim and ash-pale, with long, shining hair, about 25. Closer, 35, maybe.

  ‘Good party, Yse. Why you throw a party?’

  ‘I had to throw something. Throw a plate, or myself away. Or something.’