Forests of the Night Page 5

  There is a picture by Botticelli entitled Venus and Mars. Mars lies asleep; Venus is wide awake, and watches with a slight, enigmatic, if impervious smile, as the third of four furry-legged satyrs blows the golden conch shell on Mars’ lance into the sleeping ear of the god. It is of course possible the shell does not at all act as a real conch, and will emit no sound. But why then the obvious effort of determined blowing depicted in the third satyr’s puffed cheeks and screwed-tight eyes? It is equally possible the shell does work, and that one instant later, in the next frame as it were, Mars will leap up bellowing, all his nakedness revealed, hurling howling satyrs for miles in every direction.

  No one seems to have remarked on this absurd and perhaps sinister aspect — why is Venus so complacent? — of an otherwise idyllically sensual painting. For centuries the drama has gone on, its quietude hanging by a thread and the sword descending…

  Jenver woke up and saw, across the darkened room, one long white finger of window. In the window, on the slope of the garden, Marcusine was standing in the snow. And beyond Marcusine, the tree. The tree was immense and winter-black, its huge arms outflung at the sky. Behind it the old orchard ran in parallel to the old house. Stripped and outlined on the snow, the ranks of the orchard had a wonderful medieval symmetry. But the tree was not symmetrical. It was barbaric, and leaning as it did towards the house, seemed about to fall on his sister.

  To his relief, at that moment she turned and came back to the window. Jenver stretched with a groan of displeasure. As she walked into the room, he touched the igniter, and a blazing fire sprang alive on the hearth.

  ‘Well, good morning,’ said Marcusine.

  ‘I wish this damned fire would stay alight. Can’t we alter the programme?’

  ‘It’s a safety device. I doubt it. It always switches off after three hours unless someone presses the button again.’

  ‘Damn it.’

  ‘You shouldn’t,’ she said, ‘keep falling asleep in the library. Why don’t you go to bed like everyone else?’

  ‘Marsh was playing one of his ghastly cantatas multo noiso.’

  ‘And you hate soundproofing your room — ’

  ‘Because I don’t like the generalised impression that I’ve gone deaf.’

  ‘You could speak to Marsh,’ said Marcusine. She knelt by the fire. Out of silhouette now, her dress was a winter colour, a sombre holly-leaf green. From its central parting her dark hair, fashionably unfashionable and timeless, fell to her shoulders.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Jenver, ‘speak to Marsh. It’s his house, too. I couldn’t make him feel he can’t do exactly as he wants because I don’t like it, could I?’ He was no longer thinking about his cousin Marsh. The fascinated love he felt for his sister was sweeping over him in waves, as it always did. He was not surprised that she, too, had lost track of their discussion. She raised her pale serious face and he looked at it, exploring every familiar angle, the slender, sharp cheekbones, the darkly polished eyes.

  ‘The tree,’ she said, ‘it really will have to come down.’

  ‘Is it worse?’

  ‘Yes. The roots are well out of the ground on the other side. In a high wind — or even this snow — it’s dangerous.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jenver said. ‘And even in summer it makes everything impossibly dark.’

  In summer a thick green treacle of shade invaded the library, and all this side of the house, the tree blotting out the sun so the lights must be used. Once, years ago, Stemyard had insisted on having a tea-party under the tree. She had held it alone. Even her sister Araige had refused to join in, while Stemyard’s two cats had hidden in the cellars pretending there were mice to be caught. There was something about the tree. Its wild unstable boughs, its knotted mast. Every year, it had grown a little stronger, every year the old house had decayed a little more, despite all the renovations and the ultra-modern improvements. The tree vampirised the house, sucked the life from it more and more along a system of green tubes hidden under the earth.

  ‘How old is it?’ Jenver suddenly asked. On the cold blank of the sky, the tree had seemed to tilt a fraction nearer. If it fell now it would at least shatter these three long windows. Its branches would fall on them like iron claws.

  ‘The house computer records it as approximately ten centuries, in the first entry.’

  ‘And the computer was put in about seventy years ago. It seems improbable.’

  ‘Not when you look at the tree,’ said Marcusine.

  They looked, through the closed glass window, at the tree.

  Jenver had slept all night with the tree facing him over the sloping lawn, ready to crash against the house. He shivered.

  Marcusine stood up.

  ‘Come to breakfast.’

  ‘Let me shower first, and change. I feel glued into these clothes.’

  ‘All right.’ She reached the library door, turned and smiled at him. She was four years older than he, her eyes full of strange wisdom. One could not tire of her gracefulness, the fire catching her one way, shadow another.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘No. I love you.’

  She went through the door and was gone.

  Stemyard had three cats now. They sat in a neat line on the wide window sill, looking out at the snow.

  Stemyard stood behind them, brushing her fair bob with brisk flat strokes.

  From this window, she could only see the edges and tips of the branches of the tree. Beyond, the orchard was a briary of dark silver, dotted with small dark birds which still bravely tweeted through the pitiless cold. Between the tree and the orchard, Araige, Stemyard’s sister, the youngest of all the cousins, had had put up a marble bird-table on a tall smooth pillar the cats could not climb. Araige would go out there later today, standing on the circle of the icy gravel, laying out nuts and fats and scraps. The birds knew about Araige. When she went towards them in her wild, multi-coloured clothes, crowned by the dab of pink hair, they did not fly away. When she had retreated again only four or five feet, they flew in to feed. Afterwards, they flew back to the orchard.

  They never came to perch on the tree.

  Very little snow had stayed on the tree, either.

  Stemyard leaned over the cats and stared sideways at the tree. It looked aloof today, disdainful. Stemyard had always deduced emotions from the tree. Contempt was the most frequently apparent, and sometimes the contemptuous sorrow of something so very ancient and alone. It had been here long, long before the house, long before the orchard, even, had sprung up. Occasionally, Stemyard sensed rage in the tree, perhaps only rage it could not die. To live such a span, to witness so much so helplessly, immovable… The boredom of its colossal life oppressed her.

  The cats assumed her proximity was a wish to be near them. Siddi rubbed his face against hers, Shoh purred spontaneously, Set shuffled away and slapped her with his tail. Set was the thoroughbred cat, a short-haired Reverse, a white beast with a coal-black belly, breast and under-chin, and high black socks, as if he had been walking slowly through ink. All the rest was unspotted save for the black insides of his ears and the black highwayman’s mask across his eyes, which spoilt his pedigree and insanely enhanced his extraordinary looks. The eyes themselves were yellow. Shoh was yellow-eyed too, another Reverse, with a ginger under-stripe and paws, but his white was freckled all over with orange and calico, as if — his programme-breeder had remarked in despair — he had been whirling in the womb. Siddi was not a bred cat but a random stray, a small pewter creature with lettuce-coloured eyes, possessed of great courtesy.

  Stemyard loved her cats. It was no psychological accident their names and hers began with the same letter. Of humans Stemyard tended to be fearful and jealous. Stemyard could get no control of this. Araige, for example, had a wanton courage and energy Stemyard utterly lacked. Next year, surely, Araige would be going abroad again, and Stemyard hoped secretly this time she would not come back to the house.

  Stemyard liked the house. She respected it, and
felt that it respected her, her need for study and for privacy, while the garden and the mildly savage land beyond were satisfying to her tame yearnings for nature. The outskirts of the city were only a mile away. But one could overlook that, even the industrious mechanised golden glow above the city on summer nights could be ignored or explained away.

  As for the tree, she could placate it. In childhood, once or twice, sensing its anger, she had taken the tree offerings — a locket buried between the roots under the full moon; a doll. Later, in adolescence, glasses of wine poured amidst its claws as they bitterly gripped the earth. And most recently — the night of a storm half a year ago — she had dashed a flagon of scent against the bole, smelling the sweetness mingling with rain and electricity, afraid lightning would strike both it and her.

  For no logical reason, Shoh the womb-whirler, still purring, turned and bit her wrist.

  ‘Blast you, Cat!’ Stemyard exclaimed, examining her flesh. This was always happening. Her right arm was covered with tiny bites at various levels of healing. She poked at Shoh, who hissed, and then curled directly into a smiling ball. It was Set who sprang away into the room with an offended squawk. Siddi, a study in puzzled tact, began to wash.

  Marsh woke late, hearing Araige fluting to the birds from the bird-table. Winged things were fluting with responsive excitement; this was what had roused him. He had been dreaming of a sinking liner, a dream that seemed always now to haunt his morning sleep. It did not fill him with particular terror or depression, but he was irritated by its sameness. He supposed in some way it was a reminder of the mass parental tragedy that had struck them all seventeen years ago. The others had really been too young to understand what had happened, except possibly for an eight-year-old Marcusine, who had come to him leading a minuscule four-year-old Jenver by the hand. ‘Are they all dead?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Why?’ He had tried to explain truthfully, succinctly, and ungraphically, about the party conducted on the private air-ship which subsequently fell blazing from the sky. He had been forty-four, and had been used to having the house full of persons of all ages, from his own mother, spry and attractive in her eighties, to the latest child of his youngest uncle, born only a few months previously. Suddenly he found himself alone with a quartet of miserable children. Marsh had never been able to cope with children. He left them to their hired companions and the infallible mechanical devices already installed all over the premises. Having grown up they did not like him, he thought, nor did he blame them for that. Nor did it much matter. The five of them owned the house jointly, but it was a massive place, rambling with rooms and individual suites. Two hundred years ago, it would have been unmanageable without servants. Now, of course, it would be unmanageable without machines.

  Marsh entered the en-suite bathroom. Emerging twenty minutes later after his usual disgusting confrontation with the mirrors, he sat listening to a sonatina by Cibienzi, letting the shaver cream-shave him, drinking the glass of cold sweet wine with which he began each day, early or late.

  He had played the cantata too loudly last night. No, actually at two this morning. He had had an argument with Jenver, and had wanted to pay him out in some way. It had worked. Jenver, who hated to soundproof his own suite across the passage, had gone out, slamming the door, and down — presumably to the library. What had the argument been about? Marsh idly racked his brain, but the orderly, scholarly rows of informative memory gave up no trace. The real problem was, in fact, that his cousin Jenver had turned out so very like the handsome boys Marsh had been keen on years ago. Not that Jenver was of their proclivity. Jenver was quite straightforward, except in his love for his sister, and that, though exceedingly passionate, was also completely physically unincestuous. Mentally, one noted though, perhaps not. Jenver’s amatory relationships were few and far between. No other woman had measured up to Marcusine. Definitely not the other cousins, sullen Stemyard with her bloody mad cats, or the soulless, woeful Araige, who filled the rooms with scent, smoke, and shed articles of jewellery, scarves, or cigarette papers.

  But, if only Jenver were now a little less. Well, it could scarcely be helped. This was Jenver’s house, too. One could not drive him away simply because he resembled the carnal ghosts of one’s past. Marsh had ended all such affairs when once he began to consider himself decaying and unacceptable. This, as it had not been with his mother, had seemed to happen very quickly. By his late fifties, Marsh found himself sexually unseemly. The sort of men he wanted did not naturally want him any more, and he became afraid of being made a fool of. The pretence that he himself had lost his appetite worked most of the time. Now his solace was music.

  It was rather curious that he should therefore use music as a weapon of war against Jenver.

  Outside, the birds were quieting down, flying back into the orchard, stuffed with bread like winged sausages.

  The shaver finished with him and patted astringent cologne on his cheeks. Marsh refused anymore, where it could be avoided, to touch himself, his own face or body. He hated and resented what time had done to him, and was doing, the flaccidity, the aridity, the decline and fall of the empire of the flesh.

  He lay back in the chair, finishing his sweet wine, looking at the lines the tree had scrawled over the sky. The tree was old, too, but it had only grown more vehement. Surely someone had said the roots were pulling out of the ground on one side? He ought to go and look at that. He would enjoy that. For years, it seemed, he had been wanting the tree to die.

  Araige paused on the lawn, and thought about herself for one minute.

  Her hair was the colour of a pale pink winter sunset. Her woollen coat was black, white and purple and her boots a crushed magenta. She was wearing hose, jade-green, long green stems of legs going into the boots, and a cream knitted shirt with a crimson rose pinned on the loose collar. She herself could smell the dusky aroma of her own perfume. Why was any of it significant? For whom had she dressed, for whom powdered her eyelids with golden dust and crayoned her lips with soft mulberry? For herself? She had wanted to stay in bed and cry and cry until she suffocated.

  She thought about Paris-Sur-Ône, and the man she had been in love with. She thought about the carnival on the ice, the spitting, stabilised torches and the sleighs with bells, and how he had rolled across her in front of the others, and to her protest had said, ‘You’re only a whore.’ The word was obsolete. He and she alone, because of their studies, knew what it meant. He was drunk. She told him to stop. ‘Do you think I care about you?’ he said. ‘Yes,’ she said, her heart gone to water and running away. He said, ‘You’re wrong.’

  How silly it was. It must have been a mistake of some kind. She would never forget the darkness of his eyes as he said it — ‘You’re wrong.’ — like black ice, and she slid from him, losing him, as he walked away.

  How quiet it was now the birds had stopped squabbling over the food.

  Araige liked to feed them.

  She seemed to have been feeding them, in just this way, for many years, many times a day. And yet she had not been here, had she, more than a month or so.

  ‘You’re wrong.’

  She started to cry. Her cosmetics would never smudge, and she could make out it was the cold air, to Marcusine, who had suddenly appeared from one of the library windows. But Marcusine seemed not to see her. She came round and stood beside the tree, looking down at its claws embedded in the snow. Then she walked back into the library and shut the window.

  Araige did not examine the tree. It meant nothing to her at all.

  She thought about her strawberry nails and the gold crescents on them, enamelled through a little stencil. By the time she reached the conservatory doors she had stopped crying.

  The machines had laid out a combination breakfast and lunch, eggs, fish, meats, breads, cakes, on nests of heat, juices and wines, in nests of cold. The tall coffee pots steamed. Only Stemyard was drinking tea. Siddishohset ate salmon close to the hearth. They were accustomed to being served by mechanicals. Only Siddi sometimes still
raised a paw to tap the air-borne entity pouring water in his dish.

  Jenver and Araige had finished their meal, if they had eaten. He sat reading among the cats. She was rolling a mauve cigarette. Marsh, who was not long in the room, helping himself to eggs and ham, puzzled over her colours. A soft rainbow in the dark chair, tinselled by a long scarf, and now by smoke. Araige had been five months old when the ship exploded in the sky. In Paris-Sur-Ône there had been some man, twenty-seven or -eight, too old for her. Her emotional and sex life had begun early, as his had done. He wondered if she, too, would grow old ungracefully.

  Marcusine came in from the conservatory.

  She stood at the edge of the room, and their eyes went to her almost inadvertently.

  ‘The tree,’ she said, without preliminary, ‘it really will have to come down.’

  There was, for some reason, something inexplicably tiresome about this pronouncement. Probably they had discussed the tree before. For years it had denied them natural light, blocked their views, threatened the foundations with its crawling talons.

  ‘Oh, the tree,’ said Araige, brightly, like an idiot, repeating things.

  Jenver lowered his book.

  ‘It’s worse?’

  ‘The roots are coming out of the ground on the far side. It’s dangerous. In a high wind, it could fall on its own.’

  ‘I imagine it would be easy enough to arrange,’ Marsh said. ‘Some sort of contractor.’

  ‘No!’ Stemyard shouted.

  They looked at her. She was white. Set spat by the hearth.

  ‘You can’t,’ Stemyard said. ‘It’s always been there. No.’

  ‘I know it’s very old,’ said Marcusine calmly. ‘But it truly is — ’

  ‘I won’t let you,’ said Stemyard.

  ‘Won’t let me?’ Marcusine gave no sign even of minor annoyance. ‘Well, perhaps we should — ’

  ‘It’s always been part of the house. Since we were children.’

  ‘Yes, Stemyard. Perhaps we should take a consensus. What do we all think?’