Heroes and Villains (14 page)

Mrs Green took a light from the lamp and lit the fire. Marianne bathed her cut wrist in the ferociously cold water; her blood, or Jewel’s, she could not tell which, eddied out in pale streaks but the wound itself had closed up. Mrs Green took the veil from her head and bundled it up.

‘Burn it,’ said Marianne.

‘It will set fire to the chimney.’

‘Burn it!’

Mrs Green shrugged and thrust the veil into the hearth, where it blazed up immediately and then subsided in a glowing network of ashes. Marianne stepped gladly out of the wreckage of the wedding dress and they burned that, also. The skirt vanished up the chimney in big, flaring rags and blackly collapsed while the little glass globes which had once been pearls rolled hither and thither among the flames like distressed insects. Then it was all gone and Mrs Green poked the unrecognizable fragments with a stick. Marianne shivered with cold. She saw Mrs Green had spread out one of her own nightdresses for her on the bed, a voluminous shroud of flannel with lace around the neck. She put it on.

‘The mixing of bloods, they didn’t tell me about that. I didn’t know they were going to do that. It upset me, you know, it did, really. What does he think he’s on at?’

‘I’m sure it was very impressive.’

‘Oh, no doubt. But you can go too far.’

‘I thought he was going to kill me, cut me up, fry me and distribute me in ritual gobbets to the tribe.’

‘Did you really?’ said Mrs Green, aghast. ‘Oh, that couldn’t happen here, not while the Bradleys still rule the roost.’

Marianne took a rug from the bed, dropped it by the fire and knelt on it, warming her cold hands at the flames.

‘Jewel is drunk,’ she said.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Green as though it were inevitable. ‘He’s in a horrible mood, as well. My poor boy, my poor boy’s got a chronic gift for unhappiness.’

‘Don’t get maudlin, you silly old woman. That’s the way mothers used to get at weddings; they always became sentimental, it was a tradition.’

She realized these words had accidentally conjured up the ghost of her own mother, who died for love of an only son, and she grew silent, fingering the fringes of the fur, rabbitskin or bunny. She kept a rabbit in a hutch and fed it with dandelion leaves, when she was four years old, before the Barbarians came; when she was a child, encapsulated in a safe, white tower with unreason at bay outside, beyond the barbed wire,
a community so rational that when her white rabbit died they cut it open to find out why.

‘My mother always loved my brother best,’ she said vaguely to Mrs Green who stood beside her staring at the fire with a face furrowed by unguessable worries. Marianne moved closer to her for comfort, though she did not know how Mrs Green could comfort her except by the repetition of certain old saws about human behaviour which might or might not any longer have application.

The wick of the little lamp slumped beneath the fat and the flame was extinguished. Firelight filled the room. The door crashed back on its hinges and the delicately balanced room shuddered as if about to cast its moorings and plunge from the top of the tower. Jewel had arrived. He dragged the scarlet coat on the floor behind him, it was already very dirty. He shed it on a pile of rubble. He did not acknowledge the presence of his bride or foster-mother but went to dip his face in the bowl of water; he shook out a cascade of water drops and wiped himself with the towel. Marianne thought all his features might come off with the paint and he would raise a smooth, eyeless egg of flesh towards her but, in fact, he was himself again, if this was himself, though streaked and sullen. He emanated disquiet. Mrs Green got to her feet nervously.

‘I’ll be going, then,’ she said.

Jewel said nothing. He took the silver earrings from his ears and dropped them on the floor. Marianne sat upright, bristling; some kind of electric charge filled the air, he sparked off antagonism and she began to enjoy herself. The dead leaves shifted about on the floor. Mrs Green took a brand from the fire to light her way downstairs; she glanced anxiously at the young man and young woman who glared at one another balefully and, huffing and puffing miserably, she took herself off. The door closed on her with a reverberating thud and a necklace of silver coins fell from the tree. Marianne decided to begin an offensive.

‘What a farce,’ she said as unpleasantly as she could. ‘How grotesque.’

He grunted and tried to revive the lamp but failed. Accompanied by a faint tintinnabulation of jewellery, he approached the fire and, ignoring her, sat down cross-legged at the far end of the fur, all hunched up. He attempted to unwind his intricate fleece but his fingers fumbled and the knots of the leather thongs had jammed like rusty locks.

‘Comb me,’ he ordered and she was pleased to see intense hostility in his face.

She took the comb from the wooden box and knelt down with a certain derision, freeing the hair from its myriad of little plaits. But she could not deny that he looked marvellously exotic, with grains of black paint in the corners of his eyes, eyes with extraordinarily heavy lids. As she continued with her task, tension diminished; it was an action altogether out of time, something she would never have believed possible for herself and, as she felt the dry, gleaming weight of his endless black hair slide through her fingers, the repetition and intimacy of her movements and the strangeness of the events of the day combined almost to subdue her. The acrid woodsmoke made her eyes smart and the glossy leaves of the tree in the corner shone like looking-glass, high in the sky above the world, and she felt a tranced bewilderment. She realized she was very tired.

When the plaits were undone, she continued mechanically to comb the amazing black waterfall, coarse and straight as horse-hair, and he moved a little under her touch, as if in recognition of the involuntary sensuality that caused her hand to move more and more slowly, with more and more dreamy a rhythm. The loose ring rolled off her thumb and away across the floor; this hushed chink was enough to wake her and, deliberately, she clasped her arms around the man’s neck and pressed his face into her breast, for she could not bear to wait any longer for something to happen.

He had also been waiting for something to happen. As if he expected her to embrace him all the time, he at once caught hold of her wrists and bent her backwards until she was stretched out on the skin rug with her arms pinned down to the floor behind her head. The brown man arched above her; he said: ‘I hate you.’

She was neither surprised nor shocked. If she had thought about it, she would have anticipated something like this reaction and, if he had said anything else under the circumstances, she would have been quite terrified, not knowing what to do. As it was, she waited calmly for him to release his hold. She inspected the hard jewel of dry blood on the inside of his forearm and a blue enamel pendant, a St Christopher medallion, now secular decoration unless he wore it for the travelling,
which hung from his neck among a shifting mass of glass beads.

‘I hate you,’ he repeated in a very soft voice. An owl hooted and a horse neighed; outside, and very faintly, she heard a woman scream and then laugh.

‘Why?’ she asked curiously, for she was very interested.

‘Because, because, because …’ He let go of her and sat upright again as if he had never moved at all, covering his face with his hands. She rubbed her wrists.

‘Because of your traditional hatred, dating back to the time of the deep shelters?’

He shook his head.

‘Because I’m cleverer than you?’

Stung, he replied: ‘I think that’s most unlikely,’ and relapsed again into silence.

‘You’re drunk,’ she said angrily. ‘Go to bed, go on; tell me in the morning.’

‘Come on, now,’ he said. ‘You can read, read me. I’ve seen you before, before you rescued me.’

He pushed back his hair as if presenting her his face displayed upon a platter, a face which at that moment appeared of such desolate beauty so far from the norm it was as fearful as a gross deformity. Her heart sank and she recognized him, though he had completely changed.

‘You were much younger, then,’ she said. ‘And looked more like Precious than yourself.’

‘I was fifteen, yes.’

‘It was my brother you killed.’

‘I expect so, yes.’

‘I remember everything perfectly.’

‘You’ve disguised yourself cunningly, haven’t you, cutting off your hair and all. Who’d have thought I ever could recognize you, unless what I thought was true, that this child who looked so severe would be the death of me.’

Marianne retreated from him backwards, across the room, until she found herself in the jewelled arms of the tree.

‘What ice-water eyes you have,’ he said. He pulled a knife from his
belt and threw it at her; she caught it by the handle. He fell backwards on the rug, tore open his shirt and offered her his bared breast.

‘Shall you kill me now or later?’ he asked.

‘Whichever you prefer,’ said Marianne impatiently.

She dropped the knife on the floor for she had no desire to kill him; after her first shock of surprise, she felt no desire for revenge, either, only an angry disquiet, as if he had broken into her most private place and stolen her most ambiguously cherished possession. Her memory was no longer her own; he shared it. She had never invited him there. Yet the thing that happened one May Day under her balcony seemed to have very little to do with either of them, since now she was a different person and currently pretending to be the memory of a bride. And, since she and the murderer were now incarnated as bride and groom, she felt the only action available to them was to go to bed together, according to the prescribed ritual. She came out of the shadow of the indoor branches, cool again.

‘You don’t believe in your own magics but you believe those of other people,’ she said in a very cruel voice. ‘I don’t think you’re clever at all.’

He stopped lying on the floor and, instead, crouched defensively.

‘I’m frightened of what I don’t know about,’ he said. ‘That seems reasonable to me.’

‘Well, you needn’t be frightened of me. You’ve made me bleed twice, no, three times already; you’re much stronger than I and, as far as it goes, more powerful –’

Then addressing words shaped by reason, no matter how roughly shaped, to the piece of darkness crouched beside the dying fire in the unlit room seemed to her so futile a task she stopped speaking in mid-sentence, gathered her engulfing nightdress around her and stalked to the mattress. She lay down between the covers. Hay rustled beneath her.

‘This little girl, she was about Jen’s age, looking down as if it were all an entertainment laid on for her benefit. And I thought, “If that’s the way they look at death, the sooner they all go the better.”’

She closed her eyes briefly.

‘Please stop. Please come to bed.’

‘The death of me,’ he repeated very softly.

‘You are very superstitious and very drunk,’ said Marianne austerely, determined to put an end to this. ‘I am only in your bed by accident, anyway. It’s your good fortune if this accident happens to serve you as a focus for your moral guilt.’

He shrieked with uncontrollable laughter, coughed for a few minutes, and then sat smarting with miserable fury.

‘She keeps her flag flying,’ he addressed the tree. ‘She keeps utilizing her perceptions until the very end.’

He rose to his knees and stretched his arms towards her.

‘Lead me by the hand. Lead me to the gates of paradise.’

‘Why are you putting me through this ordeal by imagery?’

‘Didn’t they use to wear black gloves at funerals? Donally must have shown me a picture. I always think of death as wearing black gloves but nobody wears them any more.’

‘Are you coming to bed or are you going to sleep on the floor?’

‘Lead me. Come on.’

She realized she would never get any sleep that night unless she brought him to the bed herself. But she saw with irritation and some perturbation that now he appeared an almost infinitesimal figure beside a fire at the other side of a hundred miles of yielding floorboards and heaped debris as of a battlefield. The room was growing very dark. She reluctantly got up from the mattress. Draughts played across the floor and blew her nightdress about. Any moment the room might blow away altogether and go whirling off through the night; or else it was being blown up like a huge balloon to become a round world itself, he at one pole and she at the other. It seemed to take hours to cross the floor and when she at last arrived beside him, they clutched one another’s hands with almost the same kind of terrified relief. She pulled him upright in an echoing jangle of jewellery.

‘Charms and amulets to keep away wild beasts, devils and sicknesses,’ he said. ‘To deflect the arrows of the Out People, the bullets of the Professors and who knows what else.’

He supported himself on her shoulder and scattered chains and necklaces about the floor. It was now very cold. Rings fell down from his fingers like a brilliant hail and she led him to the mattress. His clothes followed the jewellery; he left behind a trail of shed clothing until he was
as naked as the day he was born. They moved out of the last red light of the fire into the deepening shadows; when she got him under the covers, she could no longer see where the darkness ended and his body began.

‘I’m too drunk to screw you,’ he said.

‘One must be thankful for small mercies,’ she snapped. He laughed with apparently genuine delight.

‘Wit,’ he acknowledged. ‘Not very polished but, all the same, wit. A joke. We don’t have much time to practise that kind of thing.’

So they effected a truce. He threw his arms across her, perhaps for warmth, perhaps for peacefulness if not reconciliation, but, in any case, they both went to sleep immediately out of gratitude that the room had returned to its ordinary dimensions. But as soon as night started to roll back its heavy carpet and dawn came through the roof, she opened her eyes and found he was already awake, leaning over her and looking at her with assessment and surmise. She thought: ‘Perhaps my father was right, perhaps chaos is even more boring than order.’ She hoped she was dreaming him but one cannot dream the sensation of another person’s body heat. His body heat suffused her.