Killing Violets Read online

  When she woke in the morning, the bed was empty but for herself. But she had woken because two of the maids were rustling in through the door.

  In the half-dark of the closed curtains, they looked undeniably malign in their beetle black, and starched headdresses. Two preying insects that perhaps had meant to crawl up on the bed.

  But one said, “Goomorna, muz,” and they both executed their absurd little ‘bob’.

  Before Anna could say a word, the speaking one glided to the curtains and flung them wide.

  Excruciating light exploded about the room.

  Anna winced.

  The other maid seemed to be trying to haul her to a sitting position. It was too late, Anna’s white breasts with their pink buds had been popped out over the sheet. The maid did not react at all, only immediately brought the robe from the bed’s foot and draped it over Anna.

  Now there was a breakfast tray on her knees. Good heavens. The English breakfast. Toast in a silver cage, a silver teapot and china cup, butter and jams, and the huge warm plate, covered by a silver bulb.

  They shook and fluttered the napkin, and laid it on her like an honourable flag.

  The light from the windows was not so bright, in fact. A day pale grey as a dove, the ghosts of the foggy mountain-hills.

  “Issum ovuthan you reguire?” asked one of the maids.

  I don’t require most of it, Anna thought. She said, “Thank you. Oh, yes. Thank you.”

  They hovered. What now? Would they try to feed her? She had penetrated their accent rather better today. Or were they enunciating more carefully for her dunce’s ear?

  “Do go,” she said, “please do. Thank you.”

  When they were bobbingly gone – did they titter in the corridor? No, they were machines – Anna pushed the tray aside. She went into the bathroom to relieve herself, clean her teeth and wash her face.

  When she came back she inspected the hidden plate with startled wonder.

  There were two thick slices of crisped ham or gammon, two perfect poached eggs, some sort of garnish, like a sort of solid sauce mixed with cream, black mushrooms.

  She ate the toast and drank all the tea, then flushed the eggs and mushrooms and garnish down the lavatory. She folded the gammon into the napkin. There might be a dog she could feed it to. Didn’t the English always keep dogs? Dogs, and horses.

  Where was Raoul? There was one black hair lying in her bed, like a token. Had he pulled it out for her on purpose?

  She thought of Psyche in the legend, who never met her lover by day, only during the exquisite passions of the night, in blackness, unseen.

  Psyche’s lover had been a god. When she found that out, he left her.

  Anna bathed, and dressed in a day dress bought in Paris, far too plain and chic to be suitable here.

  With the napkin of pig-meat in her bag, she left her room and went out through the house by the route the map had shown her yesterday.

  But she took a wrong turning, somehow. It had seemed straightforward, the previous night. The gallery did not appear, whatever the case. The corridors led into and out of each other, papered in heavy damask, red, cream, gold, fleur de lys and Tudor roses, or so she thought…

  There were bewildering windows, now looking out to the drive and parkland, now back at the mountains and the fields where the lorn cows meandered by the river, next into a walled garden with broken roses clambering everywhere, their cups smashed by coarse rain. It was drizzling again.

  Once a black and white maid approached, scuttling. Not one Anna had seen before, but there were doubtless dozens here, in this large mansion. Upstairs maids, downstairs maids, ’tweenies for the between-stairs – whatever that meant. Maids for scullery and kitchen, assistants to the cook who had fried up the gammon, whisked the sauce-thing. And ladies’ maids, like Lily Sister. Then there were footmen, boys of this and that. Grooms for the horses. A whole regiment. An army.

  “Oh – excuse me. I’m lost,” she said to the maid, who had already bobbed, and cowered her face away as if to pass in terror, then brought it reluctantly back to attend. “I’m trying to get to the stairs…”

  “Tuz thaway, mss,” said the maid, pointing the way Anna had been going.

  “Thank you so much. Thanks.”

  Bob. Scuttle. The creature turned the corner, vanished.

  But Anna still did not come to the stairs, or only to a smaller stair that led up, and this she unwillingly took.

  Then she was in a corridor damasked light green, and then there was an open door. A man came out. Raoul’s brother, or the husband of Raoul’s sister. No, not that one, for that one, recollect, had the tiny scar through his left eyebrow. Brother then.

  He was so like Raoul. The black eyes and smooth black hair, the long chin and aquiline nose and lips neither thin nor full, so well-shaped, made for kissing, just as Raoul’s were. The figure too. The body. And the hands, with their shortish, capable yet sensitive fingers, and broad palms. And this one, the brother, had a ring on his finger. A dull gold signet. Another identifying mark for future reference.

  He smiled gravely at her. Not put out, apparently. “Hallo. You’re exploring?”

  “I’m lost.”

  “Of course.”

  They began to walk together along the corridor. Probably this was not as curious as it seemed.

  “I hope you slept well,” he said.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  The corridor gave on another short flight of steps, with a runner, and then they were in a greenhouse, a glass conservatory perched up on a tower, perhaps, for it commanded views on every side. Water struck and beaded on the panes and birds flew endlessly over. The wind had risen. It coiled and uncoiled, making a sound that Anna could only describe as a whistle, yet that wasn’t really it.

  “You can see for miles,” he said, “on a clear day.”

  “Yes. Are those mountains?”

  “The locals call them mountains. They’re hills.”

  “And the cows.”

  “Yes, there are cows.”

  He offered her a chair, and sat facing her across a table. The conservatory was quite cold, but in sunlight would be scaldingly hot, for the roof was also pure glass. The rain slashed, made the noise of thrown dried peas, or small bullets.

  On the table were books, about thirty or forty of them, and cigarettes, and a decanter of something.

  “How are you settling in?” he asked.

  Anna glanced at him. She said, quietly, experimentally, “Well, I’m not, very much. I haven’t seen Raoul. I don’t even know any of your names.”

  “Not seen Raoul? But didn’t he come up to your room, to say good-night?”

  The black eyes were intent, devoid of any subterfuge. She read them, and realised.

  She said, “What should I call you?”

  “Why don’t you…” He smiled again. He had the same beautiful teeth. “Why don’t you call me Raoul,” he suggested, “Anna.”

  “I must have done,” she said. “Did I?”

  “I can’t remember. Only your lovely transports. He’s very lucky. Do you mind?”

  “Raoul must do.”

  “I’m sorry, Anna, but he won’t. Don’t you think he might have been somewhere else? That is, if he wasn’t with you. I don’t mean the stable.”

  “Another woman,” said Anna.

  Raoul’s brother, who last night had got into her bed, made love to her, left her one black hair, now offered her a cigarette.

  “I’m afraid so. Is it an awful blow?”

  “Yes,” she said flatly, indifferently.

  “Do you want to know who?”

  “Not really.”

  “You’re used to being treated like this.”

  Anna let him light the cigarette. She had half anticipated the butler, or someone, would materialize from the glass wall to do it.

  “I expect you want me to leave,” she said.

  Surreptitiously she tried to ease the diamond ring off her finger, but it had
tightened into her flesh, and wouldn’t come.

  “It’s not like that,” said the second Raoul. “This woman, it’s just someone he’s always had. He’s faithful to her, in a way. He must have thought you’d understand. But you mustn’t go.”

  The wind slapped the greenhouse. Plants in pots shook and the panes reverberated.

  “Perhaps I need to speak to Raoul.”

  “I regret he’s off at the moment, Anna. He’s been away some months, you see, and Father had things for him to do. He’ll be back by lunch, I’d think.”

  “Your father’s so young,” she said, irrelevantly?

  “Isn’t he,” said Raoul, who was not Raoul.

  “And your mother.”

  “Mother had a very expensive face-lift in Switzerland. Sometimes you see it on a woman, and it looks bloody, but she was lucky. She paid the earth for it. They say it only lasts two years. Isn’t that sad, Anna? But then you’ll never have to worry, I mean, about getting old. You’ve got such good bones. When you’re ninety you’ll be stunning.”

  Anna said, “You all look so alike.”

  “Yes. We’re terribly inbred.”

  “But your sister’s husband isn’t a Basulte.”

  “But he is. A cousin. Just distant enough it was allowed. By the church, I mean.”

  Anna said, too dramatically she felt, “Can I ask you not to deceive me again, I mean not to come into my room. Until I speak to Raoul.”

  “Oh, yes. That’s understandable. When you get his agreement, will you consent?”

  “I don’t know.” She lowered her eyes. Her pulse was beating, and in her groin quivers of feeling disturbed her. She thought he might seize her and possess her, here in this box of glass, shivering with cold, kicking through the panes…

  She stood up.

  “I think I’ll go down.”

  “Just a minute.”

  He reached right across the table and she felt her mouth go dry, her limbs melt. But it was her bag he took hold of. Without asking her, he undid the clasp, and drew out the napkin of gammon.

  “You don’t want, this, do you? It’s rather heady.”

  “No. I was… going to look for a dog.”

  He laughed. “We don’t have any dogs. Not the doggy sort. I sometimes think of the servants that way. Loyal and useful, obedient, waiting on our whim. I suppose you wouldn’t ever think like that. You’re rational and modern. But I was brought up here.”

  The meat, laid bare now on the table among the books, glistened with its fawn fats. They both stared down at it for some while, before Anna left the conservatory.

  Chapter Two: The English Country Walk; With Coda

  “She’s so pale, very blonde, and such a white skin. Even the eyes. And her features. One would never automatically take her for a Jew.”

  Anna paused, listening.

  Out in the gallery stood the Mother and Sister of Raoul. They were posed idly beneath a picture five feet in height, of a big satiny woman in a low-breasted gown, holding a white dog on a leash.

  “It’s ironic, really,” said the Sister of Raoul. “We’re so much darker. Yet, no one could take us for Hebrews, could they?”

  They chuckled.

  The white dog had a horn. It was a unicorn.

  “Oh, Lilian,” said the Mother to the Sister of Raoul, whose name must be Lilian, “no one ever would.”

  Anna thought of her passport. Anna Moll. Europe seethed with hatred of the Jews. Had always done so. Recall the dense red walls of the ghetto in Venice. The secret mediaeval pits where they had been left to starve, near Warsaw, unless, unless that was a lie.

  “But there,” said Lilian, Raoul’s sister.

  Anna came out into the gallery, her heels making a crisp noise. They would have heard her, anyway, and heard her stop.

  The other women looked up, unflurried. “Ah, Anna. We take luncheon at one. Shall we go down?”

  There were four men at lunch. One of them must be Raoul. Not the one with grey in his hair, or the scarred one, or the one with the gold signet ring. Anyway, obviously, she could recognise him at once, in the daylight of the small dining-room. Against the plummy reds splashed with green, the original Raoul. His nose was a little more crooked, wasn’t it, and his hands rather more fine, the fingers longer; one with a tiny dark freckle always under the nail… She was taking note of landmarks, surely.

  When she came in between the Basulte Mother and the woman called Lilian, the original Raoul turned to her smiling, and she thought, Was it all a joke? But if it was a joke, what joke precisely? Had the brother lied? Or had the brother and Raoul devised the lie between them, like a test of female virtue in a play by Shakespeare? Would she fail if she spoke of it to him, or fail if she did not?

  She should not stay here. She should find a means to go. But how, where? This had always been the problem.

  “You look edible, Anna,” murmured Raoul, with the freckle under his nail.

  He had, after his first avowal concerning love – or something – at first sight, not mentioned loving her again.

  They ate lunch.

  The women both wore green. Anna too had selected a green dress. To match the rooms.

  During the meal, the men spoke about an estate, presumably the lands of the house. Horses and fields, something about ‘gamebirds’ in the ‘old days’. The husband of the sister called Lilian said something about some drunken affray at the public house in the village.

  The sister remarked to Raoul, “You ought to show Anna the village. It’s awfully quaint.” She added to Anna, “Some of the houses were built in the 15th century.”

  Anna looked at her. The eyes of the woman were hard as the polished diamond, though black. A mediaeval village, how suitable for the Jewess, who in those days would have been confined behind a wall, or burned for cooking Christian children.

  In the harsh pale light, the Mother’s face did seem rather odd, young and too tight on the neck, which was itself hidden in an eau de nil scarf. Her hands were old, like claws, painted bright red at the tips. Like the hands of a madam.

  The Father was not much more than forty, though, Anna thought. Men wore better anyway. They had a natural inclination to the carven and the rough, it was more fitting, this deep line by the mouth, the coarsening skin.

  Will I ever be old? Anna glanced at her idea. Whenever she looked ahead, there was only a dim void. She fell softly into it, down and down. It didn’t hurt.

  The lunch was over. Now there was coffee in the salon.

  “Would you like to go to the village, Anna?”

  “Why not?”

  When they were upstairs, he followed her to her bedroom and went in with her. He pushed her to the wall, pulled up her skirt and dragged away her flimsy knickers like paper. He was finished in much less than a minute.

  This surprised her, not the act, (she had known it happen this way before), but from him.

  “I’m so sorry, Anna. That was selfish and brutish. Please forgive me. I just couldn’t wait. It’s been foul, not having you.”

  Anna stepped from her ruined underclothes and drew down her skirt. She made a decision. Or, she made a decision as she always did, on the moment’s spur, not reasoning.

  “But you were here last, night. You came in when I was asleep.”

  Raoul too was adjusting his garments. He was flushed and lit a cigarette. “Oh. That.”

  She waited. Then she said, “Do you mean it didn’t count?”

  “It wasn’t enough.”

  “But – it was you?”

  He shot her a look, grinning. “Who do you think?”

  She went into the bathroom and cleaned herself. When she came out, he was sitting on the window seat gazing out at the overcast, the hill-mountains, cows.

  “You know,” said Raoul, “my family don’t always behave as they should. I should have warned you, Anna. It was remiss of me.”

  “How don’t they?” she said.

  “It’s in their blood. This lord of the manor
thing. They behave like potentates. Basultes have owned this land since the Conquest.”

  “Which… conquest?”

  “Centuries ago. You can see, we’re that black Franco-Celtic Norman strain.”

  “I heard your mother and sister,” Anna said, “discussing my blonde Jewishness.”

  “Take no notice. None of them has ever been out of this house. Well, I mean, they have, physically, to France, Italy, Switzerland, that sort of thing. But they don’t see anything. What do they know?”

  She said, “Do you wish I wasn’t here? Shall I go away?” When she had said it, she waited in suspense, nearly terror, not knowing what she dreaded the most, his rejection, or some vow of need.

  But Raoul said nothing, and then he said, “If we’re going out, let’s do it soon, Anna. My father wants to talk over some business with me after four.”

  They walked. She had been lent galoshes and a hideous waterproof and a sort of sou’wester, the sort of hat fishermen wore, apparently, or was that the men who rescued fishermen?

  The housekeeper had overseen the maid who brought these items. The maid was Lily Sister.

  Anna had been struck suddenly by the names, Lily Sister, Sister Lilian.

  “What is that girl’s name?” she asked Raoul, as they clumped along the muddy, squelching drive.

  “Which girl?”

  “The maid with the boots and coat.”

  “Let me think. God knows. Oh yes. Lilith Izzard.”

  “Izzard.” She had thought for a second he said lizard.

  “Lily,” he said. “They call her that, I believe.”

  Anna breathed the wet tree-dripping country air. It had an English smell, what she would have expected.

  “I don’t know the names of any of your family.”

  “Oh, Anna. So much to remember. Poor girl.”

  “I didn’t forget. They didn’t tell me.”

  “Oh, they must have. Never mind.”

  The long flags of chestnut leaves, grainy and veined as ageing skin, painfully green; the wet flopping down in enormous droplets. Black clouds bubbled over the sky.

  “Your sister is called Lilian,” said Anna.