Nightshades Read online

  Kristian's tickets of course belonged to those rows where men in evening clothes smoked cigars and women with diamonds in their ears murmured over fans and programmes. Adam Quentin, feeling conspicuously undressed-up, took the seat beside Sovaz. He was appalled and fascinated that they should be sitting to watch a play by Euripides with all this burden of unsaid things between them.

  A gong roared somewhere beneath the stage. Immediate

  soundlessness responded from the upper tiers. Prepared for magic and superstition, the opening of hearts and minds was almost audible.

  Below, the intellectuals composed themselves differently, stubbing out their cigarettes.

  The palace of a Hellene king, a ruined altar with smoke stirring on it.

  Quentin saw Sovaz' eyes abruptly flicker, as if in recognition.

  The Bacchae. It would be performed in its intended Greek, so he would pick up one word in ten. Three years since he had read the

  play in translation, a minute here and there, in a drawing office in New York.

  A flute sounded in the sunset's scarlet stillness. The god was coming.

  The young man felt the atmosphere, with no warning, overwhelm him. He dimly realized the unfruitful communion with the woman beside him had quickened and made him ready, on these chill and flame-drunk hills.

  The sun left the incredible sky. Soon the evening would creep down the slopes to follow Dionysos, the shadow precious to his worship, and torches would flash, and Selene's altar-fire spring up. The god would come to the city of Thebes to establish his divinity. The Theban women, who had scorned and refused his gift of wine, he would send mad to the hills, to dance with wild beasts and to rend cattle with their teeth and nails. Pentheus, the king, who would attempt to imprison and humiliate him, Dionysos would send after them to spy on their rites, where, discovered, the king would be torn to pieces, and Agave his mother would wrench off his head.

  He came out with a deadly grace, an animal tread. The god. A sigh like a gust of wind surfed across the benches.

  The masks were in the true style, very lifelike. Dionysos' face, framed by supernatural hair, jet black yet somehow catching a gold highlight on every grape-cluster of curls, seemed living, though exalted. A pale, beautiful, unhuman face, matching exactly the almost naked body, dark white and slender, which, even in its fawnskin loincloth, breastless and male, was oddly hermaphrodite, an enticement to either or any sex.

  The demon.

  Sovaz sank back against the seat. The world seemed to go from under her.

  Dionysos. The features, which in her memory comprised no face, came suddenly together. A white mask with kohl-ringed, impenetrable eyes, its lips stained with wine, or blood.

  The headlights burst on the road before them. Objects seen beside the road, trees, walls, the abandoned corpse of a motorcycle, appeared to leap forward at the window.

  Suddenly Sovaz put her hand on Quentin's arm.

  'Stop the car.'

  She did not speak loudly, her touch was light, almost impersonal, yet a surge of adrenalin shot through him. He found he had jammed on the brakes as if a man had run into their path.

  The car stilled about them with small subsiding noises. The night came closer. Crickets ticked in the grass. He switched off the headlamps. He heard the door open, the rustle of her dress as she got out. Presently, opening his own door, he too came out and stood on the slope. He caught a glimpse of her face, pale as the dress, expressionless yet intent, before she turned. She began to walk up the slope. He followed her slowly, his mouth very dry.

  Wild olives clambered and clustered. Sovaz stopped in front of him.

  The shadow of the leaves, dappling her, gave her frock the strange look of a leopard skin, a Bacchic image, a maenad. As he came nearer, she moved round and caught his hand. Her own was icy and narrow.

  'You're cold,' he said, acutely aggravated at the idiocy of his own remark.

  'Yes.'

  She stood staring up at him. Her eyes did indeed contain terror, he could see it now.

  'Do you want to go back?' he said hesitantly.

  'Where? To Kristian's house? No.'

  Her hand slipped from his. She began to unbutton his shirt, then slid her arms about him. The touch of her cold, cold fingers burned on his skin. But her mouth, following, was warm.

  'Adam,' she said to him, as if to be certain who he might be. Her whole body was trembling. He caught her need inevitably, abruptly, like catching fire. Shadows, grass, the smoke of her hair; the dark roped them together inexorably. Yet, even as she clung to him, there seemed no energy in her, no fierceness or real intention. Lying down with her, the folds of her dress spread away from them over the uneven ground, shifting slightly in imitation of their movements. Her hands clutched his flesh in a drowning, strengthless motion, she cried

  out softly, and let go. She was one of those women who in orgasm seem possessed by a devil, which expels their reason, shakes and worries at their bodies.

  When, in a few moments, she opened her eyes and gazed at him, it was with a dull, amazed and bewildered expression.

  'And so you see,' she said, as if they had been speaking of it all along, and had paused only briefly, perhaps to admire the view, 'that everything you accused me of on the terrace, everything you thought of me, was quite correct.'

  His own eyes were wide open on her, by contrast very clear.

  'Sovaz… that doesn't matter any more.'

  'Poor Adam,' she said.

  'Sovaz -'

  The wind brushed over the tops of the olive trees.

  She shut her eyes. She lay void and joyless. The clamour of panic had faded. Now only the white mask hanging in her brain, the beautiful god with his dark gifts of blood and wine, and the human youth shipwrecked on her body, and the whisper of the wind in leaves.

  At about four thirty in the morning, strolling across the sprawling waterfront night market, Prescott found Adam Quentin seated on a bench beneath a canvas awning, among a row of derelicts smoking the cheap hashish sold on the quay.

  Prescott sat down opposite, and pushed away the old man who came immediately scampering to him, offering a pipe and squeaking.

  The rest of the market, having scented the dawn like a scurrilous and night-preying animal, was now in the process of packing itself up and sliding away down into the rat-hole crevasses of the city to hide from the sun. Lamps guttered out. Men cried hoarsely to one another.

  Canopies were dragged free and folded, charcoal stoves extinguished, goods thrown back into crates. All along the shore the pleasure boats were returning stealthily, black-winged across the moonless water, like vampires seeking their tombs. Only here and there the occasional island of humanity still unstirring - the brothel door, the booths of the opium eaters, the sellers of night flowers, the astrologer beside his

  crackpot telescope and tarot cards, placidly chewing a lemon.

  Adam looked up. The fact of seeing the Englishman did not appear to disturb him.

  This isn't the place for you,' Prescott said quietly. 'Here you will be cheated, robbed, probably followed afterwards, attacked or even killed. It's a popular theory that certain kitchens in the vicinity obtain their meat from dubious quarters.'

  Adam laughed.

  'I can recommend several establishments,' Prescott said, 'where you would be safe, and where the quality of the goods is also above reproach.'

  'Great. I guess the price matches the goods.'

  'Yes. We'll come to that presently. I'm surprised you've chosen this form of amusement. Have you enjoyed yourself?'

  'I surprised myself,' Quentin said. 'It's been a surprising night. No. It's been a night that was surprisingly unsurprising.' He looked at Prescott. 'Is that what I mean? No, I didn't enjoy it.'

  A man next to the American muttered and spat on the ground.

  Prescott spoke to him in the slum argot. The man's gaze darted and watered.

  Prescott rose and pulled th
e boy up, unresisting, by the arm. They walked into the wider open streets north of the market.

  The boy was unused, Prescott imagined, to the unclean mixed hashish of the old Arab's stall. His eyes were swimming and dreamlike.

  'What time is it?' he asked, without interest.

  'Almost dawn. Where are you living?'

  Adam leaned against a peeling wall.

  'I forget. Nowhere special.' His eyes swam leisurely across the sky.

  The eastern edges of faint clouds were beginning to become visible.

  'You're the rich man's agent, my mother's Greek jockey says. Did you follow us tonight?'

  'Follow? Whom?'

  'You know damn well whom. Who. Sovaz. You're paid to keep tabs

  on her for him, aren't you?'

  'Did Mikalides say that too?'

  'Maybe he did.'

  'Then maybe he was right.'

  'And now your boss told you to keep me out of trouble. Oh, man, I can believe it.'

  'I am authorized to offer you a sum of money,' Prescott said. 'Your inclination may be to refuse it, but you should consider first. The companion of Kristian's wife will need ready cash. She's used to the best.'

  Adam Quentin, still staring up at the sky, said, 'He's very generous, your master.'

  'Not exactly. You must remember the life style Madame enjoys; people know whose wife she is. Her reputation is valuable to him.'

  'Caesar's wife,' Adam said. 'But not above suspicion.'

  He eased himself from the wall and began to walk on, unsteadily.

  Prescott was oddly struck by the curious gracefulness of the young man's naivety. Here was a creature which was still openly amazed, moved, wounded by what took place about it, the somehow tragic aura of the young. A quality Sovaz had never possessed.

  'I shan't bother Caesar's wife any further. So forget the money. And forget seeing me to my door, will you?' Adam said abruptly, 'In the morning I think I'll take the goddamned train out of this place.'

  Prescott fell out of step with the young man, allowing him to proceed alone.

  The sky above the hills was turning to the colour of steel.

  How many of Sovaz' lovers had behaved in this fashion? Perhaps a third. Some actually escaped the city, then came back, like the addict.

  Prescott was not generally given to flights of fancy, yet in respect of Sovaz, highly coloured images sometimes suggested themselves to him. He supposed he too was not quite immune to the perfume, like that of some poisonous night-growing plant, that clung about her. He still vividly remembered finding her in the tenement attic, lying on the rotting French sofa, her hair burned a chemical yellow, her eyes eaten by night. In some extraordinary way she put him in mind, as

  she lay there, of a succubus, or the rakshas of Indian mythology. A stupid notion. She was then a pathetic and inexperienced young girl, without hope or common sense.

  Dawn had not yet touched the house, or the sea.

  Behind the sightless windows, the woman was lying on her bed, Stravinsky playing from the gramophone, the dark discordant harmonies washing over her, as the tides below washed over the rocks and sands and other detritus of the beach.

  Presently the record came to an end, though the turntable continued to revolve with the mindless beat of a mechanical heart.

  Sovaz opened her eyes. The room was all shadow, only the faint smoke rising from the joss sticks burning in the bronze bowl.

  She lifted herself on one elbow. Across the room, catching the angle of the mirrors, she saw her own face looking back at her, a mask, set with two black glass gems to give an illusion of sight. She touched at her face with her hand. Her eyes fell on the array of combs, perfumes, the crystal tray with its boxes of powder and sticks of kohl, the ivory jewel casket.

  Sovaz left the bed. She crossed the room (her feet were bare; the thick carpet had a feel of life, the pelt of some creature, lying supine).

  She set her fingers on the clasp of the ivory box. Heat burned up in her as she did so. She drew back her hand.

  She went out into the gallery. The house was breathing to itself like an animal.

  The smell of the library in the dark was heady, despite the open window. The balcony lamp was extinguished, yet there was light in the sky, for the room faced eastwards.

  In the rack of carved cedarwood stood the evening papers, neatly folded by Kristian's valet. Each sunset they were removed and replaced by fresh ones.

  Sovaz picked up a paper, turned it to the east.

  A woman had been murdered on the beach. The time of death was estimated at about three o'clock in the morning. She was twenty-nine years old, the wife of a minor official attached to the French

  consulate; she had had many lovers and was not particularly discreet.

  Her throat had been slashed, but she had not been robbed, the little diamonds were still in her ears and the garnet rings on her fingers.

  There was no sign of a struggle, or of sexual assault. The police patrol had found her. There had been in the city an identical case two months before, unsolved. And earlier…

  The light, falling on to the paper, was turning molten now.

  Below in the garden, birds were singing.

  Sovaz wrenched the page out of the paper.

  Going back to her bedroom she lifted the needle from the record. She opened the jewel box and placed the sheet of newsprint, folded very small, in the lowest compartment.

  She felt exhausted and did not properly know what she was doing.

  She took up the silver-backed brush and began to use it on her hair.

  There was light now too in the western windows.

  Somewhere in the city the American boy was walking or sleeping.

  She remembered now, only faintly, the wild olive grove in the hills.

  She did not at all remember parting with him, his eyes painfully searching her face for clues, the limousine materializing from shadow, the swift drive along the shore road.

  She did not want to sleep, could not bring herself to it.

  There was fresh blood inside the jewel casket.

  The black girl, presumably on Kristian's instructions, had replaced the rubies in the box. Sovaz lifted them out.

  Holding the necklace in her hand, she left the room a second time, went down through the house, descending blindly the marble stairway into the ballroom, opening the doors of the terrace, and stepping out.

  The scent of the sea, overriding the scent of the garden trees. She reached the narrow Moorish gate and thrust it wide. Below, the beach, the agate layers of water, stained now by the rising sun. At the horizon, like a flock of black gulls resting on the waves, the boats of the night fishermen.

  The dawn with its floods of light and colour, its avowal of radiance and heat, made her afraid. The shrill bird song was full of menace.

  She flung the rubies from her - down, beyond the steps, towards the beach, out of sight.

  The sea would take them away with the tide. Or some urchin searching for crabs would grab them up. You could not throw out rubies on the perimeter of the hungry city and hope to find them again. And yet, the small diamonds in her ears, the garnets on her knuckles… Perhaps it might have been better, driving on the fringes of the slums, to have tossed them into some filthy court, and seen the beggars and the sick tear themselves and the necklace apart.

  There was a man standing among the lemon trees.

  Her heart leaped up, choking her. She stumbled. He came quickly and caught her arm. It was the Englishman.

  'Are you quite all right, Madame Sovaz?'

  'Yes, thank you. Perfectly.'

  There was something she must eventually ask the Englishman. What was it? It had to do with Kristian's dinner party, the moon-drenched terrace.

  The Englishman held open the nearest terrace window for her.

  'Thank you,' she said, and passed through, out of the rays of the sun.

  FOUR

&
nbsp; One warm evening, when he was twenty-three years old, Kristian had seen his parents' car plunge off a mountain road and fall three hundred and eighty feet into the ravine below.

  They had been going to the theatre, he behind in the second car with various acquaintances, his father and mother alone in the first, the chauffeur left behind and his mother at the wheel. She had been wearing, he recollected after, a frock of amber silk, an Egyptian jade scarab ring on her right hand. Her thin mocking figure elegantly imposed on the last traces of the sunset, the cicadas buzzing, the darkening whiteness of the house against the backdrop of the great estate. She had said, he remembered, that she did not particularly want to see the play.

  There had been no warning. The Daimler was perhaps half a mile

  ahead of them, going quite fast. The final orange flash of the sun swelled like a spotlight across the road. Abruptly the great car seemed to swerve, as if at some unexpected obstacle, then swung on in a fluid motion, a sort of horrid gracefulness, crashed through the railing and was gone.

  The second car braked at once and disgorged its passengers in time for them to see the last of the Daimler's spinning descent. A ghastliness of predestination seized Kristian; the space of seconds seeming almost a full minute before the vehicle made impact below, those moments of time during which the occupants of the car still lived, screamed in the extremity of terror or possibly even hoped for some reprieve. Presently the car struck the rocks. Another instant of stasis followed. Then the explosion of the petrol tank, the blot of sound and colour on the porous paper of twilight. While figures ran back and forth along the road, Kristian sat beside the railing on the ground, watching the pyrotechnics alternately flare and fade, like a sleepy eye on the gathering night.

  Later he learned that his mother, at the time of the car accident, was dying of cancer. There was, after all, no inanimate obstacle on the mountain road from which she might have swerved. Certainly no small animal life would have disorganized her progress; once, driving back from a shooting party, proudly yet negligently displaying her bag, she had added: 'I have also littered the road with dead hares and foxes.' Kristian came to believe that his mother had chosen not to wait. The burning petrol took on fresh symbolism. She, in her beautiful clothes and jade jewelry, lying in the Daimler like a warrior in his finery and chariot, her cousort, either willing or unwilling, consumed at her side. He could visualize her, indeed frequently did so, letting go the wheel, her hands in her lap, perhaps smiling.