Blood 20 Read online

Carr and the fat man, they’ve got the two lids up off the piano by now. It won’t play, everyone knew it wouldn’t. Half the notes will not sound. Instead, a music centre, straddled between the piano’s legs, rigged via Yse’s generator, uncoils the blues.

  And this in turn has made the refrigerator tempera­mental. Twice people have gone to neighbours to get ice. And in turn these neighbours have been invited to the party.

  A new batch of lobsters bake on the griddle. Green grapes and yellow pineapples are pulled apart.

  ‘I was bored,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t get on with it, that vampire story.’

  ‘Let me read it.’

  ‘You won’t decipher my handwriting.’

  ‘Some. Enough.’

  ‘You think so? All right. But don’t make criticisms, don’t tell me what to do, Lucius, all right?’

  ‘Deal. How would I know?’

  He sits in the shady corner (Shadily! the bird cried mockingly (J’ai des lits!) from Yse’s roof), and now he reads.

  He can read her handwriting; it’s easier than she thinks.

  Sunset spreads an awning.

  Some of the guests go home, or go elsewhere, but still crowds sit along the wall, or on the steps, and in the loft people are dancing now to a rock band on the music centre.

  ‘Hey this piano don’t play!’ accusingly calls Big Eye, a late learner.

  Lucius takes a polite puff of a joint someone passes, and passes it on. He sits thinking.

  Sunset darkens, claret colour, and now the music centre plays Mozart.

  Yse sits down by Lucius on the wall.

  ‘Tell me, Yse, how does he get all his energy, this rich guy. He’s forty, you say, but you say that was like fifty, then. And he’s big, heavy. And he porks this Anna three, four times a night, and then goes on back for more.’

  ‘Oh that. Vonderjan and Antoinelle. It’s to do with obsession. They’re obsessive. When you have a kink for some­thing, you can do more, go on and on. Straight sex is never like that. It’s the perversity – so-called perversity. That revs it up.’

  ‘Strong guy, though.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Too strong for you?’

  ‘Too strong for me.’

  Lucius knew nothing about Yse’s ‘obsession’ with Per Laszd. But by now he knows there is something. There has never been a man in Yse’s life that Lucius has had to explain to that he, Lucius, is her friend only. Come to that, not any women in her life, either. But he has come across her work, read a little of it – never much – seen this image before, this big blond man. And the sex, for always, unlike the life of Yse, her books are full of it.

  Lucius says suddenly, ‘You liked him but you never got to have him, this feller.’

  She nods. As the light softens, she’s not a day over thirty, even from two feet away.

  ‘No. But I’m used to that.’

  ‘What is it then? You have a bone to pick with him for him getting old?’

  ‘The real living man you mean? He’s not old. About fifty-five, I suppose. He looks pretty wonderful to me still.’

  ‘You see him?’ Lucius is surprised.

  ‘I see him on TV. And he looks great. But he was – well, fabulous when he was younger. I mean actually like a man out of a fable, a myth.’

  She’s forgotten, he thinks, that she never confided like this in Lucius. Still though, she keeps back the name.

  Lucius doesn’t ask for the name.

  A name no longer matters, if it ever did.

  ‘You never want to try another guy?’

  ‘Who? Who’s offering?’ And she is angry, he sees it. Obviously, he is no use to her that way. But then, did she make a friendship with Lucius for just that reason?

  ‘You look good, Yse.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Cold. Better let her be. For a moment.

  A heavenly, unearthly scent is stealing over the evening air.

  Lucius has never seen the plant someone must have put in to produce this scent. Nothing grows on the terrace but for the snake-willow, and tonight people, lobster, pineapple, empty bottles.

  ‘This’ll be a mess to get straight,’ he says.

  ‘Are you volunteering?’

  ‘Just condoling, Yse.’

  The sunset totally fades. Stars light up. It’s so clear, you can see the Abacus Tower, like a Christmas tree, on the mainland.

  ‘What colour are his eyes, Yse?’

  ‘… Eyes? Blue. It’s in the story.’

  ‘No, girl, the other one.’

  ‘Which –? Oh, that one. The vampire. I don’t know. Your vampire had yellow eyes, you said.’

  ‘I said, he made me feel like a king. But the sex was good, then it was over. Not as you describe it, extended play. ‘

  ‘I did ask you not to criticise my work.’

  ‘No way. It’s sexy. But tell me his eye colour?’

  ‘Black, maybe. Or even white. The vampire is like the piano.’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t see that. Yse, why is it a piano?’

  ‘It could have been anything. The characters are the hotbed, and the vampire grows out of that. It just happens to form as a piano – a sort of piano. Like dropping a glass of wine, like a cloud – the stain, the cloud, just happen to take on a shape, randomly, that seems to resemble some familiar thing.’

  ‘Or is it because you can play it?’

  ‘Yes, that too.’

  ‘And it’s an animal.’

  ‘And a man. Or male. A male body.’

  ‘Black as black is black. Not skin-black.’

  ‘Blacker. As black as black can be.’

  He says quietly, ‘La Danse aux Vampires.’

  A glass breaks in the loft and wine spills on the wooden floor – shapelessly? Yse doesn’t bat an eyelash.

  ‘You used to fuss about your things.’

  ‘They’re only things.’

  ‘We’re all only things, Yse. What about the horses?’

  ‘You mean Vonderjan’s horses. This is turning into a real interrogation. All right. The last one, the white one like a fish, escapes, and gallops about the Island.’

  ‘You don’t seem stuck, Yse. You seem to know plenty enough to go on.’

  ‘Perhaps I’m tired of going on.’

  ‘Looked in the mirror?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Look in the mirror, Yse.’

  ‘Oh that. It’s not real. It won’t last.’

  ‘I never saw a woman could do that before, get 15 years younger in a month. Grow her hair fifty times as thick and twenty times longer. Lose forty pounds without trying, and nothing loose. How do feel, Yse?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘But do you feel good?’

  ‘I feel all right.’

  ‘It’s how they make you feel, Yse. You said it. They’re not beautiful, they don’t smell like flowers or the sea. They come out of the grave, out of beds of earth, out of the cess-pit shit at the bottom of your soul’s id. It’s how they make you feel, what they can do to change you. Hudja-magica. Not them. What they can do to you.’

  ‘You are crazy, Lucius. There’ve been some funny smokes on offer up here tonight.’

  He gets up.

  ‘Yse, did I say, the one I followed, when he went into his grave under the headstone, he said to me, You come in with me, Luce. Don’t mind the dark. I make sure you never notice it.’

  ‘And you said no.’

  ‘I took to my hot heels and ran for my fucking life.’

  ‘Then you didn’t love him, Lucius.’

  ‘I loved my fucking life.’

  She smiles, the white girl at his side. Hair and skin so ivory pale, white dress and shimmering eyes, and who in hell is she?

  ‘Take care, Yse.’

  ‘Night, Lucius. Sweet dreams.’

  The spilled wine on the floor has spilled a random shape that looks like a screwed-up sock.

  Her loft is empty. They have all gone.

  She lights the lamp on her desk, puts out
the others, sits, looking at the piano from the Sound, forty feet away, its hind lid and its fore lid now raised, eyes and mouth.

  Then she gets up and goes to the piano, and taps out on the keys four notes.

  Each one sounds.

  D, then E, then A. And then again D.

  It would be mort in French, dood in Dutch, tod in German. Danish, Czech, she isn’t sure … but it would not work.

  I saw in the mirror.

  PianO. O, pain.

  But, it doesn’t hurt.

  VIII: Danse Macabre

  A wind blew from the sea, and waxy petals fell from the vine, scattering the lid of the piano as it stood there, by the house wall.

  None of them spoke.

  Jeanjacques felt the dry parched cinnamon breath of Nanetta scorching on his neck, as she waited behind him. And in front of him was Vonderjan, examining the thing on the terr­ace.

  ‘How did it get up here?’ Jeanjacques asked, stupidly. He knew he was being stupid. The piano was supernatural. It had run up here.

  ‘Someone carried it. How else?’ replied Vonderjan.

  Did he believe this? Yes, it seemed so.

  Just then a stifled cry occurred above, detached itself and floated over them. For a moment none of them reacted to it; they had heard it so many times and in so many forms.

  But abruptly Vonderjan’s blond head went up, his eyes wide. He turned and strode away, half running. Reaching a stair that went to the gallery above, he bounded up it.

  It was the noise his wife made, of course. But she made it when he was with her (inside her). And he had been here –

  Neither Nanetta nor Jeanjacques went after Gregers Vond­erjan, and neither of them went any nearer the piano.

  ‘Could someone have carried it up here?’ Jeanjacques asked the black woman, in French.

  ‘Of course.’ But as she said this, she vehemently shook her head.

  They moved away from the piano.

  The wind came again, and petals fell again across the blackness of its carapace.

  Jeanjacques courteously allowed the woman to precede him into the salon, then shut both doors quietly.

  ‘What is it?’

  She looked up at him sleepily, deceitfully.

  ‘You called out.’

  ‘Did I? I was asleep. A dream …’

  ‘Now I’m here,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said, moving a little way from him. ‘I’m so sleepy. Later.’

  Vonderjan stood back from the bed. He gave a short laugh, at the absurdity of this. In the two years of their sexual marriage, she had never before said anything similar to him. (And he heard Uteka murmur sadly, ‘Please forgive me, Gregers. Please don’t be angry.’)

  ‘Very well.’

  Then Antoinelle turned and he saw the mark on her neck, glowing lushly scarlet as a flower or fruit, in the low lamp­light.

  ‘Something’s bitten you.’ He was alarmed. He thought at once of the horses dying. ‘Let me see.’

  ‘Bitten me? Oh, yes. And I scratched at it in my sleep, yes, I remember.’

  ‘Is that why you called out, Anna?’

  She was amused and secretive.

  Picking up the lamp, he bent over her, staring at the place.

  A little thread, like fire, still trickled from the wound, which was itself very small. There was the slightest bruising. It did not really look like a bite, more as if she had been stabbed on purpose by a hat-pin.

  Where he had let her put him off sexually, he would not let her do so now. He went out and came back, to mop up the little wound with alcohol.

  ‘Now you’ve made it sting. It didn’t before.’

  ‘You said it itched you.’

  ‘Yes, but it didn’t worry me.’

  ‘I’ll close the window.’

  ‘Why? It’s hot, so hot –’

  ‘To keep out these things that bite.’

  He noted her watching him. It was true she was mostly still asleep, yet despite this, and the air of deception and concealment that so oddly clung to her, for a moment he saw, in her eyes, that he was old.

  When her husband had gone, Antoinelle lay on her front, her head turned, so the blood continued for a while to soak into her pillow.

  She had dreamed the sort of dream she had sometimes dreamed before Vonderjan came into her life. Yet this had been much more intense. If she slept, would the dream return? But she slept quickly, and the dream did not happen.

  Two hours later, when Vonderjan came back to her bed, he could not at first wake her. Then, although she seemed to welcome him, for the first time he was unable to satisfy her.

  She writhed and wriggled beneath him, then petulantly flung herself back. ‘Oh finish then. I can’t. I don’t want to.’

  But he withdrew gently, and coaxed her. ‘What’s wrong, Anna? Aren’t you well tonight?’

  ‘Wrong? I want what you usually give me.’

  ‘Then let me give it to you.’

  ‘No. I’m too tired.’

  He tried to feel her forehead. She seemed too warm. Again, he had the thought of the horses, and he was uneasy. But she pulled away from him. ‘Oh, let me sleep, I must sleep.’

  Before returning here, he had gone down and questioned his servants. He had asked them if they had brought the piano up onto the terrace, and where they had found it.

  They were afraid, he could see that plainly. Afraid of unknown magic and the things they beheld in the leaves and on the wind, which he, Vonderjan, could not see and had never believed in. They were also afraid of a shadowy beast, which apparently they too had witnessed, and which he thought he had seen. And naturally, they were afraid of the piano, because it was out of its correct situation, because (and he already knew this perfectly well) they believed it had stolen by itself out of the forest, and run up on the terrace, and was the beast they had seen.

  At midnight, he went back down, unable to sleep, with a lamp and a bottle, and pushed up both the lids of the piano with ease.

  Petals showered away. And a wonderful perfume exploded from the inside of the instrument, and with it a dim cloud of dust, so he stepped off.

  As the film cleared, Vonderjan began to see that some­thing lay inside the piano. The greater hind lid had shut it in against the piano’s viscera of dulcimer hammers and brass-wire strings.

  When all the film had smoked away, Vonderjan once more went close and held the lamp above the piano, leaning down to look, as he had with his wife’s bitten throat.

  An embalmed mummy was curled up tight in the piano.

  That is, a twisted knotted thing, blackened as if by fire, lay folded round there in a preserved and tarry skin, tough as any bitumen, out of which, here and there, the dull white star of a partial bone poked through.

  This was not large enough, he thought, to be the remains of a normal adult. Yet the bones, so far as he could tell, were not those of a child, nor of an animal.

  Yet, it was most like the burnt and twisted carcass of a beast.

  He released and pushed down again upon the lid. He held the lid flat, as if it might lunge up and open again. Glancing at the keys, before he closed them away too, he saw a drop of vivid red, like a pearl of blood from his wife’s neck, but it was only a single red petal from the vine.

  Soft and loud. In his sleep, the clerk kept hearing these words. They troubled him, so he shifted and turned, almost woke, sank back uneasily. Soft and loud – which was what Pianoforte meant …

  Jeanjacques’ mother, who had been accustomed to thrash him, struck him round the head. A loud blow, but she was soft with grown men, yielding, pliant. And with him, too when grown, she would come to be soft and subserviently polite. But he never forgot the strap, and when she lay dying, he had gone nowhere near her. (His white half, from his father, had also made sure he went nowhere near his sire.)

  Nanetta lay under a black, heavily-furred animal, a great cat that kneaded her back and buttocks, purring. At first she was terrified, then she began to like it. Then she
knew she would die.

  Notes: The black keys are the black magic. The white keys are the white magic. (Both are evil.) Anything black, or white, must respond.

  Even if half-black, half-white.

  Notes: The living white horse has escaped. It gallops across the Island. It reaches the sea and finds the fans of the waves snorting at them, and canters through the surf along the beach­es, fish-white, and the sun begins to rise.

  Gregers Vonderjan dreams he is looking down at his dead wife (Uteka) in the rain, as he did in Copenhagen that year she died But in the dream she is not in a coffin, she is uncovered, and the soil is being thrown onto her vulnerable face. And he is sorry, because for all his wealth and personal magnitude, and power, he could not stop this happening to her. When the Island sunrise wakes him at Bleumaneer, the sorrow does not abate. He wishes now she had lived, and was here with him. (Nanetta would have eased him elsewhere, as she had often done in the past. Nanetta had been kind, and warm-blooded enough.) (Why speak of her as if she too were dead?)

  Although awake, he does not want to move. He cannot be bothered with it, the eternal and repetitive affair of gett­ing up, shaving and dressing, breakfasting, looking at the accounts, the lists the clerk has made, his possessions, which will shortly be gone.

  How has he arrived at this? He had seemed always on a threshold. There is no time left now. The threshold is that of the exit. It is all over, or soon will be.

  Almost all of them had left. The black servants and the white, from the kitchen and the lower rooms. The white housekeeper, despite her years and her pernickety adherences to the house. Vonderjan’s groom – he had let the last horse out, too, perhaps taken it with him.

  Even the bird had been let out of its cage in Antoinelle’s boudoir, and had flown off.

  Stronn stayed, Vonderjan’s man. His craggy indiffer­ent face said, So, have they left?

  And the young black woman, Nanetta, she was still there, sat with Antoinelle on the balcony, playing cards among the Spanish flowers, her silver and ruby earrings glittering.

  ‘Why?’ said Jeanjacques. But he knew.