Heroes and Villains (13 page)

‘Is it a phallic snake, tonight?’ asked Marianne.

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ said Mrs Green. She took off her dirty apron and unfastened her dress. Beneath it, she wore a decent, high-necked petticoat cut out of sheeting. She found a clean dress identical with the first one in her private trunk and put it on, smoothing out the fold marks with her fingers. She wound up her hair with the skill of long habit and then she was ready, though she looked sad at heart.

‘I worked for the Professors till I was older than you are now and I always thought they were a heartless lot,’ she said suddenly. ‘Be good to my Jewel, be kind.’

‘Kind?’ exclaimed Marianne, bewildered. ‘Kind?’

‘There you are,’ said Mrs Green with a victorious melancholy. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘Just yesterday he jumped on me with appalling brutality, he has the hands of a butcher and eyes like trick mirrors that can see out but cannot be seen through. We have nothing whatever in common and now you tell me to be kind to him!’

‘You don’t understand at all,’ repeated Mrs Green. ‘Now, put on a
haughty face because they think you’re something quite out of the ordinary. Though perhaps you look quite haughty enough, as it is.’

Marianne gathered up her voluminous petticoats disdainfully; Mrs Green’s mouth was turned down in lines of disapproval but, all the same, she felt sorry for Marianne and this offended her most of all.

The ancient chapel was full of wild people in rags and fur. Their hoops, clasps and collars of glass, metal and bone caught the light of hundreds of candles attached to the stonework, so many candles the room was ablaze, everything visible, the flags, the organ, the carving, the lectern, the altar covered with candles and roses, an effigy of a woman in a blue robe made of coloured wax which had melted over the years so she looked dropsical. Somebody had picked every rose in the rose garden and brought them to the chapel; they lay about in dying heaps. The atmosphere, compounded of unwashed flesh, roses and candles, was solid as cheese. It seemed that every member of the tribe was present and all were perfectly still and silent, the babies silent at their mothers’ breasts and children clinging to skirts and peering through the wood of legs at this apparition of another world in a dress as old as their misfortunes, picking its way delicately through them. As soon as Marianne appeared, a susurration of clothing indicated that everyone there except Jewel and his brothers was making the sign against the evil eye.

She was prepared for the unexpected; even so, the bizarre phenomenon of Donally took her by surprise. He was perched on the altar like a grotesque bird. He had donned a mask of carved wood painted with blue, green, purple and black blotches, dark red spots and scarlet streaks which covered all his face but for the bristling parti-coloured beard. He was robed from head to foot in a garment woven from the plumage of birds. In his arms, he carried a plastic and wire cage of the kind in which budgerigars had been kept before the war. This was twined with plastic flowers cracked with age and half-melted, and also ribbons and feathers so the adder presumably inside could not be seen. She wondered if Donally would conclude the ceremony by attaching the snake to her breast, like Cleopatra’s asp. This black fancy gripped her so tenaciously she found the palms of her hands were sweating and wiped them furtively on her net skirts. The texture of the rushes on the floor under
her bare feet seemed to her the most ancient sensation in the world, archaic as the taste of cold water.

The brothers stood in a body behind Donally. They were wholly barbarian as she had first seen the Barbarians, nightmare incarnate. Each was painted with black round the eyes, white on the forehead and mouth and red on the cheekbones. Their long hair was as intricately plaited and ringletted as the wigs worn by the kings of Ancient Egypt. They were lavishly garnished with jewellery, some of which was of gold and precious stones, grubbed for in the deepest of the ruins, tarnished or in part reburnished. The three youngest even seemed to be wearing some pieces of armour, of all things, but Jewel had on a stiff coat of scarlet interwoven with gold thread, perhaps once a bishop’s possession; he was as strangely magnificent as an Antediluvian king or a pre-Adamite sultan. Donally must have been robbing museums; perhaps he had been a Professor of History.

There were gold braid and feathers in Jewel’s hair and very long earrings of carved silver in his ears. Darkness was made explicit in the altered contours of his face. He was like a work of art, as if created, not begotten, a fantastic dandy of the void whose true nature had been entirely subsumed to the alien and terrible beauty of a rhetorical gesture. His appearance was abstracted from his body, and he was wilfully reduced to sign language. He had become the sign of an idea of a hero; and she herself had been forced to impersonate the sign of a memory of a bride. But though she knew quite well she herself was only impersonating this sign, she could not tell whether Jewel was impersonating that other sign or had, indeed, become it, for every line of his outlandish figure expressed the most arrogant contempt and it was impossible to tell whether or not this contempt was in his script.

‘Dearly beloved,’ began Donally in a fat voice. ‘We are gathered together …’

And he might as well utilize the Book of Common Prayer as anything else, since whatever he said made no sense to the wild congregation who had ears only for his melodious and hieratic intonation. His voice issued with mysterious hollowness from behind the mask and the tribe sighed. Now Marianne was close to the cage, she could see the spotted snake was sleeping peacefully. The brothers stood still as figures painted
on the wall of a cave and watched her. She was glad the veil hid her face. A child grew bored or scared and began to cry; some woman shushed it unsuccessfully and then led it out by the hand. When the door opened, the sudden draught lifted the veil and wafted it right over Donally, momentarily clinging to his wooden brow and feathered shoulders like a sudden snowfall.

Irritation checked his smooth, oratorial flow for a moment and he pettishly brushed the veil aside so that her own face was partly visible. Then Jewel had to lean across and marry her with the first ring he came to on his forefinger, a signet ring with a lock of hair from the head of some dead person set in it. This ring hung so loosely on the fourth finger of her left hand that he jammed it over her thumb, instead, bruising the joint; he looked up at her sharply, as if this gratuitous piece of symbolism annoyed him beyond belief. He caught sight of her face at a new angle, half in shadows; the opaque brown discs of his eyes opened up and, for the first time, transmitted a message to her, a sudden and horrified flash of recognition. He dropped her hand as if it burned him. Meanwhile, the service went on.

She found Donally had incorporated a piece of ritual of his own invention, perhaps derived from a study of the culture of the Red Indians. He spread out his arms and nodded his wooden head, emulating the preening of a winged serpent. His beautiful plumage looked now like feathers, now like scales. All at once, the tribe broke rank and surged up and around the altar to see whatever was going to happen next more clearly, though they left a copious safety margin around Marianne’s dissolving perimeters. Jewel had closed his eyes so she could not see into them any more. Drops of sweat broke through the paint on his forehead. He took out and brusquely offered her the blade of his knife, as though to stab herself with it. She flinched involuntarily. His eyes snapped open; he grimaced and snatched at her hand. She writhed and struggled; she tried to shout but the drifting veil caught in her mouth and gagged her. Donally’s talons gripped her arm and she ceased to struggle, helplessly gazing on as Jewel advanced the blade towards her wrist. He made a little cut in the flesh and a few drops of blood oozed out. She had expected far worse. It hardly hurt at all. There was a tremendous rush of expelled breath in the chapel to see how red her blood was.

Jewel handed his knife to Johnny, who slit his brother’s wrist just as Jewel had slit Marianne’s. Jewel was shaking so much the knife made a dangerous, jagged gash and blood gushed vigorously over his brown skin; she realized he was choking back a fit of hysterical laughter as Donally leaned ceremoniously forward to clasp their two wounds together so that their bloods could be seen to mix. A good deal of blood splashed over her dress. When this rite was satisfactorily accomplished and Jewel was holding back the blood with his free hand, Donally leaped high into the air, screamed loudly once and flung himself down among the rushes, frothing and babbling in a tremendous fit.

He rolled and tossed like a tumultuous river, blowing out an incoherent spume of sound. The tribe pressed back against the walls to allow him room. Many children burst into tears while their parents stared from eyes round with fright and awe. The fit encompassed as many baroque variations as if he were playing the organ and lasted until the candles were half burned down and the snake continued to sleep all the time, even when Donally rolled and jolted against the cage, so Marianne wondered if it were a real snake or perhaps only a stuffed skin.

Spent and exhausted, Donally lay in a heap of plumage. Feathers were shed all over the floor and there was a sense of equal exhaustion in the room, as though the tribe had suffered through his crazy encounter with chaos with him. When he was still at last, the final few twitches done with, the tribe filed slowly out of the room until only the bride and groom, the brothers and Mrs Green were left. The brothers now stood at ease, scratching themselves and yawning.

‘My poor Jen,’ said Mrs Green. ‘She was wailing, ever-so.’

‘Give us a bit of bandage before I bleed to death,’ said Jewel. Mrs Green found a handkerchief and wrapped up his wrist.

‘There’s a feast,’ he added, keeping his eyes on the bandaging. ‘A wedding feast.’

The felled archaeopteryx on the floor reassembled itself briskly.

The table in the kitchen was spread with flat bread, joints of meat and jugs of the crude liquor they brewed themselves. Marianne tasted a little of it and spat it out. Dogs and babies jostled one another on the floor for tidbits while Marianne sat at one end of the table, carefully
arranged, laid out upright with the veil thrown back so they could all see her face, and Jewel sat at the other. He fed the food from his plate to a puppy and drank. The red and gold coat formed angular, sculptural folds at his arms; he was like a king on a playing card. When he sensed Marianne’s eyes upon him, he turned away from her and gripped the edge of the table so hard his knuckles went whiter than his own white paint.

Donally flitted around the table shedding fluff and feathers, smiling, chatting and joking; he had left his mask in the chapel and, with it, his wizardry. He created, as from thin air, a festive board and in his benign presence the Barbarians became simple peasants celebrating any wedding at any time, by the light of a great fire. The mood was thick and coarse. Later, there was music. Donally took up a fiddle and an old man played a mouth-organ. Two or three children had jews’ harps, which they twanged against their teeth. There was dancing. The brothers shone like dark fire and the shining pieces of metal with which they were decorated sent coruscating reflections of light spinning over the walls, though the eldest brother sat as if lost for ever in the scarlet recesses of his coat. He was a coloured structure and, the coat opened, might reveal only the lining of its own back, no body inside.

‘You must go to bed,’ said Mrs Green to Marianne. ‘Have a drop more to drink. You must go where Jewel sleeps.’

‘Will they all come with me to see that justice is done?’

Mrs Green peered at her, bewildered, and shook her head.

‘No, dear, they’ll leave you quite alone. What do you expect, a procession?’

‘I’m prepared for anything,’ said Marianne.

Jewel had found a room for himself high in the oldest part of the house. Through a low arch at the end of a long corridor above the chapel, Marianne found herself in a tower. A spiral staircase wound up and up; the treads were obliquely worn with age and very steep, she clung to the wall for safety as she followed Mrs Green’s guttering lamp. There was no other light. Rooms even the Barbarians left empty opened on either side of the staircase, full of cold, stagnant air; and now the fabric shuddered beneath their feet and she felt the walls grow moist and mossy. Now and then her hands encountered a knot of dripping
plants. Her bare feet touched all manner of wet, unseen things. Higher and higher they went, the lamp revealing only black stone before, behind and all around.

‘This place can’t be safe in a wind,’ observed Marianne.

‘Ah, but it’s private,’ said Mrs Green. ‘Grant him that.’

Marianne could almost feel the wind beneath her feet. It was like climbing up to the moon. At last they reached a little door, so low Marianne had to stoop, and they entered Jewel’s room. It seemed he preferred the open air, for much of the roof had fallen in, revealing a large expanse of rich, blue, night sky scattered with a handful of stars. Mrs Green put down the lamp on a wooden box which stood against a wall and, when the wick steadied, Marianne saw surroundings already half given over to the forest.

A red berry blown by the wind or dropped from the beak of a bird had rooted in a corner and grown into a small but sturdy holly bush which spread healthy branches hung with all of Jewel’s collection of necklaces he was not at that moment wearing, several items of clothing and a quantity of knives. The floor was littered with rubble, fallen tiles and a drifting tide of crisp dead leaves of many years, but enough of the floor had been cleared away to make room for a mattress heaped with furs for a primitive bride-bed and the wooden box, on which stood some little jars, a bowl of water, a towel, a gap-toothed comb and a razor. The old fireplace had been put back in order, for some sticks of dry wood were laid ready to burn in it. By a whim of chance, the heavy glass in the single, arched, tiny window had remained intact and Jewel had rubbed it clean, for some reason. Marianne saw the pale curve of a crescent moon above the forest through the window. Far away from the kitchen and the celebrating parts of the house, the wind whispered and murmured around the roof and she heard the heavy rattle of mice in the walls.