Heroes and Villains (11 page)

‘So it would seem,’ he replied.

She kicked a tuft of briars.

‘My father said it would be a deep spiritual experience,’ she remarked bitterly.

‘What?’

‘Defloration. And presumably marriage, for he saw the two as complementary.’

‘He went in for that kind of thing, did he?’ said Jewel.

‘He was only married the once.’

‘What I meant was, he had the time to think about things, did he?’ explained Jewel laboriously.

‘Thinking was his function.’

‘Are they going to pickle his brain and keep it in a jar?’ demanded Jewel. ‘Or was he a preserved brain at the best of times?’

‘Talk like that about my father and I’ll kill you.’

‘You wouldn’t know how,’ he said.

He saw another rabbit and shot it; that made two. When they came in sight of the house again, her courage almost failed her and she tried to run away. He tripped her up easily. Her face was naked with misery and nausea; he shrugged, set the muzzle of the rifle between her shoulders and walked her in this fashion into the courtyard at the back of the house. Here, Mrs Green squatted on the ground scraping food from a frying pan into the half-witted boy’s dish. He raced round at the end of his chain, yelping.

‘Right or wrong, he’s going to get a square meal, whatever Donally says,’ she said. Then, blinking, she recognized the figures before her.

‘What have you been doing to her?’

Jewel lowered his rifle and laid the dead rabbits in his foster-mother’s arms. Marianne stared at the ground, her face stiff with silence; he took hold of her chin, and, raising her face, forced her to look him in the eyes.

‘The lady has lost her smile in the woods,’ he said.

‘And not only her smile, you villain,’ said Mrs Green, hitting him a great blow with the back of the hand that did not hold the frying pan and rabbits. ‘Haven’t you got no respect for anything?’

The boy fell on his food with grunts of pleasure, elbowing away a ravenous mastiff attracted by the smell of meat. Jewel rubbed the mark on his face where his foster-mother hit him.

‘It’s not true, what they say about such girls,’ he remarked.

‘I hate you,’ said Marianne.

‘Very likely,’ he said. ‘That’s only natural.’

He knelt down beside the Doctor’s son and slipped his hand under the collar. The boy shook himself but went on eating. Jewel stroked and clapped the boy with his free hand and they murmured to one another at the back of their throats as if in brutish communication.

‘The collar’s rubbed his flesh all raw,’ said Jewel. ‘No wonder he howls.’

‘You come inside and have a wash, dear,’ said Mrs Green to Marianne. ‘After all, it’s not as bad as all that, is it? He’s going to marry you tomorrow.’

Distressed as she was, Marianne could understand why Jewel began again to laugh. She gave him a backward glance as Mrs Green led her into the house but he did not look up. He had stopped laughing, had taken out a knife and seemed to be cutting open the collar the boy wore, unless he were slitting his throat. Marianne was in too much confusion to be quite sure which eventuality was most likely.

‘That kid pulled through,’ said Mrs Green. ‘Isn’t it a wonder. His fever just went, just went away like that and he’s in a lovely, natural sleep. And the others are brighter, as well. Oh, what a blessing. Usually something like that goes through all the little ones, goes right through them all and most die.’

‘Nobody will blame me for it, then, if the child has got better,’ said Marianne.

‘So you see how their minds work, do you, dear? They always look round for something to blame when things go badly, that’s them, like kids. Like little kids. I feel so sorry for them, dear, so terribly sorry.’

They made their way gingerly through the heaped ordure in the hall and climbed up to her room. Written on the wall by Donally’s door was a new slogan:
ONENESS WITH DESTINY GIVES STYLE AND DISTINCTION.
This time in black. Marianne did not understand it but she spat at it as she passed by.

As its inflictor predicted, her pain went away quite soon but her vindictiveness increased for she was more cruelly wounded in her pride than in her body and, besides, she felt herself quite trapped and entirely without hope. She remained in an agony of despair, cocooned in blankets upon the mattress in Mrs Green’s room, refusing food and speech. The sunlight faded from the discoloured wall. At last Mrs Green arrived with the lamp and undressed for bed. The wick dipped and flickered; Mrs Green appeared to flicker.

‘Last time you’ll be sleeping with me,’ said Mrs Green, intermittently visible as she was. ‘Tomorrow you’ll have to sleep with Jewel, won’t you. That’s the way of the world.’

At that, Marianne sprang up, her cold eyes sparking.

‘All this is a bad dream,’ she said. ‘It can’t happen, it didn’t happen and it won’t happen.’

‘Young men will always take advantage, dear,’ said Mrs Green. ‘And we all have to take what we can get.’

She sighed. But all the same, she was as smug and comfortable as if wolves and tigers did not roam forests where no trees had grown previously and Marianne must learn to reconcile herself to everything from rape to mortality, just as her father had also told her she would have to do. Mrs Green’s photograph flashed in the lamplight, picture of a woman who could have been Marianne’s mother; Mrs Green might also feel a certain pleasure that her wild foster-son should marry so far above his class, pleasure and revenge, perhaps. Clearly she thought Marianne had learned a lesson and would not try to run away again for, after she had fed the girl the next morning, she left her to her own devices while she went off on her tour of inspection of the camp

Certainly Marianne did not intend to run away again yet, even though today was her wedding day, for she knew she would be tracked by cunning huntsmen, subjected, perhaps, to fresh humiliations and returned to the stinking castle once more at gun point. Instead, she went straight to the Doctor’s study.

As she went down the staircase, she heard again the sound of the curious music which had haunted her during the days of her imprisonment; chords and crescendos of a small organ emanated from the chapel where Donally lived and he played with such violence the rotten stone appeared to shiver. She had never heard organ music before but she could tell the instrument was out of tune. The fugue approached its peak. Last night’s sign was wiped off the wall; in its place was painted,
MISTRUST APPEARANCES, THEY NEVER CONCEAL ANYTHING
. She flung open the door and cried ‘Charlatan!’ at the top of her voice.

Her voice rang in accord with the music round the vaulted ceiling and both died away together. The room was almost in darkness, the windows quite covered with hides although outside the sun streamed down for it was another beautiful day. But here the baleful obscurity of the glow from the little stove concealed the whereabouts of the unseen organist until she saw the last patches of gilding left on a set of organ pipes gave off a faint gleam; a lighted candle was stuck by its own grease to the manual of a small, baroque organ perhaps late seventeenth or early eighteenth century in origin. She could make out the battered faces of one or two cherubim still smiling down on the worm-eaten oak. Donally prised away the candle and, holding it aloft, stepped down from the bench. His wiry hair stuck out all round his head like an immense halo of spikes. He had left off his dark glasses and seemed friendly and cheerful, which immediately made her suspicious. His son appeared, cowering, out of the shadows; he was panting and must have been working the organ pump.

‘Run along and play,’ said the Doctor benignly to the boy, who shot him a scared glance and bolted from the room, slamming the door behind him. He wore no collar today, though the ring of raw flesh round his neck was still fresh and he looked extremely cowed. He had one black eye.

‘Maybe you were a Professor of Music, once,’ said Marianne, glancing
at the organ and, in spite of herself, impressed, for she had before heard only the martial sounds of her uncle’s military band.

He made no reply but placed his candle on a book-littered, quaking table some distance from the altar and gestured Marianne to sit down upon his chair. She refused. In his own room, he chose to wear a neat, dark suit, a white shirt and a black tie, no talismans or jewellery at all, no fur or feathers. He lit a few more candles, enough for her to see a little by, to see the mossy pillars which held up the vaulted roof all clogged with cobwebs, the filthy rag of a flag upon a gilded pole propped against the altar, the brass eagles of a lectern turned bright green with verdigris, some shapes of figures of wax and stone in embrasures. But the small, pale candle flame served mainly to delineate the areas of artificial shadow, though Marianne could clearly inspect Donally’s eyes. These were grey veined with green, like certain kinds of stones, and his eyeballs were lightly veined with red lines. She noticed he had plucked his eyebrows into neat, thin arcs, a queer vanity for a man who lived nowhere.

‘Tell me why it’s necessary for you to marry me to that Yahoo who raped me yesterday afternoon about what used to be teatime.’

‘Consider and make the best of things,’ said Donally, stroking the purple half of his beard. ‘He is probably the most beautiful man left in the world.’

‘You told me yourself to mistrust appearances; and his beauty didn’t make it hurt less nor make it any less humiliating. The reverse, in fact.’

‘Domiciled as you are among the Yahoos, you might as well be Queen of the midden. Don’t you know the meaning of the word “ambition”?’

She shook her head impatiently.

‘Come, come, now,’ said Donally encouragingly. ‘There must be something you want. Power? I can offer you a little power.’

He suggested the idea as if it were a delicious goody.

‘All I want is for my father to be alive,’ she said, overcome with misery; she sank down upon Donally’s chair.

‘Gather yourself together, young lady. Marry the Prince of Darkness. You’ll find him very sophisticated. Though his sophistication has always been superior to his opportunities, he does the very best he can.’

She looked over his books and saw names she remembered from the
spines in her father’s study, Teilhard de Chardin, Lévi-Strauss, Weber, Durkheim and so on, all marked by fire and flood. He had been reading some books about society.

‘Where do you come from, why are you here? Why didn’t you stay where you belonged, editing texts or doing research? I suppose you might have been a Professor of Sociology, once, though only a crazy literato would call that animal you keep the Prince of Darkness, for he was a gentleman, as I remember.’

‘I was bored,’ said Donally. ‘I was ambitious. I wanted to see the world.’

A draught made the flames of the candles dance and the air grew thick with the smell of hot wax. Marianne’s eyes had grown more and more accustomed to the candlelight and she made out knobs and swags of carving in the ceiling, flowers, cherubs, jacks-in-the-green, death’s heads, hourglasses and memento mori, all covered with dust. Trunks, chests and cases were littered everywhere, covered with dusty utensils and more books even than in her father’s study. He must have a special cart to himself to transport them all. Yellow weeds blossomed in the walls and somewhere moisture dripped.

‘Well, here you are at the end of the road, holed up in a ruin with your rotten library, aren’t you?’ she said nastily. ‘Why did you never teach Jewel to read?’

‘Self-defence, in the first instance,’ he explained briskly. ‘On the second count, I wanted to maintain him in a crude state of unrefined energy.’

‘What, keep him beautifully savage?’

‘Why, yes. Exactly,’ said Donally. His eyelids fluttered; he continued to stroke his purple hairs with a fine, white hand, now contemplating Marianne as if she were a good deal more clever than he had ever suspected.

‘Our Jewel is more savage than he is barbarous; literacy would blur his outlines, you wouldn’t see which way he was going any more.’

The smells of hot wax and the vile brew he stewed on his stove combined to make Marianne dizzy, though Donally’s voice and intonation were so familiar there was almost some comfort to be derived from them, though everything he said seemed wilfully perverse. When
he moved, a faint perfume of lemon verbena drifted from his shirt, a clean, refreshing smell which cleared her head.

‘Why have you only communicated with me so far by means of your nasty graffiti?’

‘So nobody could hear what I was saying,’ he replied. ‘Besides, there’s nothing much to do in the evenings except coin an aphorism or two.’

‘I should have thought you were a man of many interests.’

‘I run through the occasional fugue. And, then, I’ve my fits to practise, of course; I understand they’re very impressive.’

‘Also you cultivate your serpentarium,’ she said. ‘Jewel told me about your snake, unless I was imagining it.’

‘It seemed to me that the collapse of civilization in the form that intellectuals such as ourselves understood it might be as good a time as any for crafting a new religion,’ he said modestly. ‘If they won’t take to the snake for a symbol, we’ll think of something else suitable, in time. I still use most of the forms of the Church of England. I find they’re infinitely adaptable. Religion is a device for instituting the sense of a privileged group, you understand; many are called but few are chosen and, coaxed from incoherence, we shall leave the indecent condition of barbarism and aspire towards that of the honest savage, maintaining some kind of commonwealth. Let me give you a quotation.’

He riffled through a book sprouting with markers and found his place; he coughed and read aloud:

‘The passion to be reckoned upon is fear; whereof there be two very general objects: one, the power of spirits invisible, the other, the power of those men they shall therein offend.’

‘My father had that book,’ said Marianne. ‘Only he didn’t like it much.’

‘Doubtless he hoped for the best,’ said Donally. ‘He didn’t have to create a power structure and fortify it by any means at his disposal. He was sustained by ritual and tradition; both of which I must invent. I think the wedding ceremony will be more impressive if it takes place at night. I have a very frightening dress for you to wear, all ready prepared. You have no choice at all, you know. It’s marry or burn.’