Heroes and Villains (22 page)

‘Set your son free and you can stay.’

‘What will you do if I go away? Will you continue to rob and plunder or do you propose to settle and plant gardens?’

‘She’s clever. She’ll think of something.’

‘I’ll leave you,’ she said furiously. ‘As soon as the baby is born.’

‘You’ll never,’ said Jewel contemptuously. ‘You’re creaming for me now, this very minute.’

He thrust his hand between her legs but she said: ‘That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t leave you.’

‘Neither does it,’ he agreed. ‘But it suggests you might find going more difficult than coming.’

‘The candle is dying,’ observed Donally. ‘I’ll go to bed.’

‘I do believe we’ve come to the parting of the ways, at last.’

‘Do you?’ said Donally. He stood up and stretched. He appeared to reach to the top of the sky and the young man and woman cowered at his feet but this impression lasted only for a moment. He swung over the side of the cart and was gone, leaving only a burned-out candle lantern and an empty flask. Now only the stars and the cold, pale, crescent moon gave out a phantom light.

‘Everybody is asleep,’ said Jewel. ‘But my poor brother has his back on fire. Was it his son or Precious howling, do you think?’

Her fingers were all twisted in his golden leaves; suddenly he wrenched them away from her and said, in as cool and rational a voice as she had ever heard: ‘I am desperate; I am at the end of my tether.’

‘Don’t leave me by myself!’

But he had already shoved her against the sacks and was gone so she was quite alone with no protection at all, under the sky. Under the sky, the villagers slept sweetly behind barbed wire and armed watch towers which kept those on the outside from getting inside and those on the inside from getting out, except for this one female renegade who now stayed wide awake while the travellers slept rough upon the open heath and the Out People in subterranean dens slept, wild beasts slept in acrid dens and birds slept upon the sleeping trees so the ball of the world spinning in space was wholly possessed by a trustful sleep which rendered everything defenceless, a communal defencelessness which
obliterated the differences between them all under the sky, which pressed down inexorably on the fragile, mutable structures beneath it like a heavy cover crushing all to extinction. The idea of the round world became flat as the palm of Marianne’s hand and shook itself, shrank and changed until it became no more than the splintered wood beneath her, some textures of coarse wool and fur and the little world of herself which contained all that it was possible for her to know. As she gathered herself together, the sky returned to its proper place and Jewel came back. She was surprised; she thought he had gone for good.

‘I’ve brought you a present, a necklace, what you wanted.’

He carried several coils of cold metal; it was the boy’s chain. He fell down and feverishly tried to bind her up with it but she easily disengaged her arms.

‘Jewel Lee Bradley, you scabby robber, you’re drunk again.’

He asked her her own question of earlier in the evening, though with far greater intensity than she.

‘What do you see when you see me?’

‘I see your face when I close my eyes though I would much rather not.’

‘I thought as much,’ he said and let the chain slide to the ground. Then they went to sleep, for they were both exhausted. The next morning, he sent her to Mrs Green, who left off stirring the porridge, took her into the relative privacy of the ruined barn, undressed her and examined her.

‘You’re about three months gone, I reckon,’ she said.

Green juicy weeds flourished shoulder high around them and cast delicate green shadows on Marianne’s breasts.

‘Have you been missing your periods and all? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t notice.’

Mrs Green hugged her, kissed her and allowed her to dress herself. The chips of mirror on Marianne’s shirt shone with the refreshed light of morning like many small eyes opened after sleep.

‘You must take care of yourself, now; you can’t go trudging along in the dust and muck, it’s not right.’

‘I shall go wherever he goes,’ said Marianne composedly.

‘Is it as bad as that, dear?’ said Mrs Green with melancholy satisfaction and kissed her again. Marianne realized the woman had quite misinterpreted her and thought she meant she wanted to be Jewel’s shadow for ever; she was about to correct her when she saw a flash of scarlet through the doorway.

It was the boy, unchained, dressed up in Jewel Lee Bradley’s wedding coat of rotten scarlet silk which reached down stiffly to his bare feet. He was eating the meat off a chop bone. He wandered past the door, kicking the hem of the coat in front of him at each step, followed by a lean, balding brown dog who curiously sniffed the hem of his robe. He looked extremely happy, he beamed like the sun, which that morning shone with the tremulous light of the end of the year.

While Mrs Green was examining Marianne, Jewel went down to the stream and threw the boy’s chain into the water. When he returned to the camp, the Doctor sought him out and attempted to shoot him with a pearl-handled revolver but he missed. Jewel knocked him down. When Mrs Green and Marianne came out of the barn, they found Donally lying on his back in the grass beside the apple tree where Precious had been whipped. Jewel stood beside him, running his thumb down the edge of his knife and the entire tribe had gathered in a wide, wonder-struck and apprehensive circle round the fallen figure of the shaman.

‘I’ve not killed him yet,’ said Jewel to Marianne. ‘I wanted to ask your opinion.’

‘The porridge is burning,’ said Mrs Green and retreated to her cooking fire.

‘Your foster-mother has deserted you,’ said Dr Donally. His dark glasses lay in smashed fragments beside him and he blinked a little in the cool light of morning.

‘A public evisceration?’ said Jewel to Marianne but she knocked the knife out of his hand.

‘Look at them all, watching. Be careful, they respect him.’

‘You listen to her,’ said Donally approvingly. ‘She’s no fool.’

‘Keep quiet, you.’

It was like a parody of the performance of justice, only the audience had not the least idea what was happening or who was to be feared.

‘Let him go,’ said Marianne. ‘Put him on his donkey and send him away. Best not to murder him.’

‘Is it wise to let him loose?’

‘The wild beasts might eat him and do our job for us, in the natural state.’

‘You’ll be all alone without me,’ said the Doctor to Jewel. ‘All alone for ever and ever.’

Jewel kicked him. The boy appeared, red as a rose, with his arms full of old man’s beard and the feathery seeding heads of purple loosestrife; he took in the situation at a glance and, convulsed with mirth, scattered the soft, grey fruits over his father.

‘I see you ironically covered his nakedness with your wedding coat, Jewel,’ said Donally appreciatively.

‘I won’t have you using that name which was given me out of affection.’ He put away the knife with an air of decision. ‘But you can go, so then you won’t need to name me by anything.’

The boy danced backwards as Donally reared up, shedding a drifting cloud of purple blossom.

‘See how he treats his oldest friend!’ he declaimed to the wild gathering.

‘They’ll think what I tell them to think. That’s my privilege.’

‘Once I’m gone, no doubt you’ll start taking my advice; but you’ll be like an Eskimo trying to drive a train, you’ll be impotent.’

‘There’s mud all over you but I won’t let you clean yourself; go as you are.’

‘Am I allowed to take my books?’

‘I’ll burn them.’

‘My drugs?’

‘I’ll poison the nearest stream with them and all the fish will die.’

‘My son?’

‘If he wants to go, he can go. Otherwise, he can stay.’

‘That’s magnanimous,’ said Donally unpleasantly.

Johnny brought the donkey, ready saddled, and the Doctor mounted it with all his former
élan
. He bent down and pronounced his farewell in such loud and oracular tones everyone in the camp would hear it.

‘She shall have a vile childbed culminating in a monstrous birth and ultimately she will betray you in circumstances of unbelievable horror.’

Lightning should have flashed but did not.

‘Get going,’ said Jewel. He was battered and unkempt. He had
neglected to duly braid the locks that hung in jags and dags down his shoulders and he was barefoot and ragged, though shining as always with glass, gold and precious stones, the Prince of Darkness but no gentleman and surrounded by silence. Donally’s donkey lowered its head and cropped the grass; Donally abandoned his prophetic manner and instead childishly implored, in an intimate whisper:

‘Give me one last look at my masterpiece.’

‘I think not,’ said Jewel.

Marianne was afraid one or other of the company would break forward in defence of the magician, that a man would raise a rifle and shoot Jewel or a woman throw a stone at him, but nobody moved. Donally took his flute from an inner pocket and began to play sweet and penetrating music as if this were his last card and irresistible. Jewel snatched the flute from his lips and broke it across his knee. Donally petulantly threw up his hands and sighed.

‘Take me away,’ he said. ‘Throw me out. Throw out art, throw out culture, throw out wit and humour.’

Johnny’s eyes were fixed on Jewel, perhaps trying to learn some secret formula of expulsion. Marianne thought: ‘I will never trust Johnny.’ A smell of scorched porridge hung in the air; Mrs Green, watching nervously from beside her fire, neglected to stir.

‘Watch out nobody shoots me in the back,’ said Jewel to Johnny. After a moment, Johnny took his rifle and covered the crowd. Jewel slapped the donkey’s rump and took hold of its bridle; Marianne went with them but Donally’s son had lost interest in whatever was happening and now wandered off without a backward glance. The donkey stepped daintily between the sprawling briars on the ground, batting its spoon-shaped ears.

‘I shall burn the snake, alive or dead, and your mask and feather cloak,’ said Jewel. ‘It will be as if you never existed.’

‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’ve made my mark. And shall you really settle and plant gardens? You’ll be an idiot slave of nature, you’ll farm poisons, you’ll never be free.’

‘I am perfectly indifferent as regards the future. She can do a bit of thinking from time to time, perhaps.’

They arrived at the green road and stood looking at one another, in
a sudden last uncertainty as to where their three allegiances lay, for the young man and his tutor had the strange attachment of years between them, the girl and her husband the bemused attraction of a sense of fatality and the girl and the magician the bond of a common language. And the girl and the young man, also, each suffered from the loss of a father.

‘Come with me, both of you,’ said Donally. ‘I shall take both of you under my protection. I shall go to the Professors and tell them you are my son and daughter-in-law, snatched from the arboreal innocence of the forest. Then they will treat you with that awed respect, tinged with circumspection, which the savants of eighteenth-century France reserved for the Hurons and the Iroquois.’

Jewel hid his face behind his hands, confronted by this new, extraordinary possibility which rendered him speechless. At last he said:

‘I can’t help myself. I’m incorruptible.’

‘Marianne, come with me by yourself. Consider your researches into the
mœurs
of savage tribes completed.’

‘So that is what I’ve been doing!’ she thought.

Jewel watched her between his fingers. She was caught between the beams of their eyes and vacillated.

‘Not yet,’ she temporized. ‘They’re not completed yet.’

Donally’s face was suffused with such evil and baleful fury he grew as mottled as his own mask.

‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘you’ve made your bed and you must lie on it.’

With that, he moved off. He was so enormous he dwarfed the beast beneath him and distance rendered him down to a manageable size only very, very slowly. Marianne sat down on the bank while Jewel stood impassively in the middle of the road until Donally vanished round the bend. Just then, his son flung himself precipitously past Marianne and down the bank in a slither of pebbles; he was panting, he had been running fast.

‘Which way?’

Jewel pointed. The boy hurtled off like a scarlet bullet or a red ball propelled energetically along a green cloth in the direction which his father had taken until he, too, vanished. After a pause, Jewel began to laugh, shaking his head in bewilderment.

‘Blood is thicker than water,’ offered Marianne by way of a tentative explanation. ‘Can we live in the forest by ourselves?’

Until she spoke, she had no idea she would say this; when she perceived she and her Jewel were, in some way, related to one another she was filled with pain for her idea of her own autonomy might, in fact, be not the truth but a passionately held conviction. However, might not such a conviction serve her as well as a proven certainty? When she realized she had begun to think in such circuitous slogans as Donally might paint on his wall, she was abashed and fixed her eyes on the carpet of weeds in the roadway.

‘How would we live?’

‘In the ruins. Or a cave.’

‘And you’d have this baby all by yourself? Cut its string and wash off the grease and all, if I was killed? What would you do if I was hurt, would you know what to do? And nobody to get you things to eat and the Out People shooting off their arrows at you? And my brothers out looking for me with guns and nooses because I betrayed them?’

She could think of no immediate answer and shrugged.

‘We’ll go back, now.’

‘And do what?’

‘Eat.’

‘Then?’

‘Go on.’

‘Where?’

‘To the sea.’

‘And then?’

‘You talk too much,’ he said. The blue medal was a ring of sky at his throat.

‘St Christopher was the patron saint of travellers, when they had such things,’ she told him in a falsely encouraging voice.

‘There are more ghosts on the highway than anywhere else, such as ghosts of machines running along by themselves. Here, what did you do with your wedding ring?’