Heroes and Villains (8 page)

A cold, wet wind blew in through the glassless window. Outside, it was raining; it was a cold, wet summer’s day. The shirt in Mrs Green’s hands was of fine wool, originally woven and sewn in a Professor village for intellectuals to wear but now it was covered all over with red and yellow daisies and little chips of mirror, a gaudy and totally changed garment.

‘They like bright colours, see,’ said Mrs Green with faint disparagement. ‘Bright colours, beads, things that shine. They’re like kids, I tell you.’

The colours of the Professors were browns and sepias, black, white and
various shades of grey. All the clothes Marianne had ever worn were muted and restrained and Mrs Green still dressed herself in dark shades, as if she refused to capitulate to the tribe at some final point. Perhaps somewhere in her mind she still hoped for another change. She talked about the tribe with detachment, although she was a woman of authority within it.

‘And I’d have run away if Jewel had been killed. They’re little kids that believe the first thing that comes into their heads, and I don’t trust the Doctor, I never have. I told Jewel to bump him off years ago but he wouldn’t, not after his dad died even, not even then he wouldn’t. And everyone else too scared. It’d be hell with your Dr Donally running everything, real hell, no respect for the old or nothing. Only tortures, mutilations and displays of magic.’

Marianne raised her eyebrows to hear this.

‘Hell,’ repeated Mrs Green. ‘Hell on earth.’

Her use of the word ‘hell’ indicated to Marianne that Mrs Green had belonged to one of the fiery religious sects that still flowered among some Professor communities, and, more exotically, among the Barbarians, also. These sects held in common the belief that the war had been the wrath of the Lord. The communities maintained Professors of Theology while the Barbarians (it was said) practised human sacrifice. Marianne recalled descriptions of hell in her father’s books, a place of fire and torment. The hard rain rattled into the room.

‘Would you have run away to the Professors, back to where you came from?’

Mrs Green stopped sewing for a moment and gazed at her needle as if recollecting the first things she had sewn with it.

‘You don’t understand a mother’s heart,’ she said. Her speech was studded with commonplaces.

‘No, but would you?’

‘I’m too old to change back, now,’ said Mrs Green. ‘I’ve got used to the travelling and all. I’d have taken, perhaps, my granddaughter, my little Jen, and gone down to the coast. Jen’s mother doesn’t take good care of her, she’s soft in the head, Jen’s mother, and Jen’s father, my son, that was, he’s dead. I’d have gone to the coast, I’ve got a daughter that married into the fishermen down there. Perhaps that’s where I’d go, if Jewel got killed, ever.’

‘And do you trust none of the other brothers? Aren’t they your foster-sons, too?’

‘Wild boys,’ said Mrs Green. ‘Wild boys, all.’

Marianne sat covered with furs against the cold while Mrs Green talked in a gentle, murmurous stream, talk of an old woman starved for company, and every other word she said betrayed her passion for her eldest foster-son. Marianne unblocked the dam; she said:

‘How can a man call himself Jewel without embarrassment?’

‘Jewel Lee Bradley, his mother was a Lee. The Lees are Old Believers, they’re clannish but they’ve got class. They were travellers before the war, you see. Jewel’s his mother’s boy, though he doesn’t recall her; she was ever such a good-looking woman and that pleased to see a boy, since she’d had two girls before. Both of which died. But she was so pleased to see a boy she called him Jewel, her Jewel. And then she died herself, poor thing; she had him and never stopped bleeding. All her blood ran out of her womb and I suckled her boy, since one of my own just died. They’re all dark, the Bradleys, like their father, old Bradley, he was black as pitch but then, he rarely washed, if ever. All the same, black as pitch under the dirt. And all the Lees are light on their feet and graceful, he gets that from his mother. And good with horses, the Lees are famous for it. Tamers of horses.’

Marianne was interested to find evidence of a Barbarian snobbery. If Jewel was an orphan of the hurricane, he was also one of its aristocrats, which might account for the extreme arrogance of his bearing. He did not come to get his foster-mother to comb his hair for him again; nobody visited her now she was well for now she was a prisoner. A hard scab covered the wound on her leg and she could walk as well as ever but Mrs Green still would not let her out of her room and Marianne no longer had any clear idea of how long she had been there.

If time was frozen among the Professors, here she lost the very idea of time, for the Barbarians did not segment their existence into hours nor even morning, afternoon and evening but left it raw in original shapes of light and darkness so the day was a featureless block of action and night of oblivion. Marianne was fastened into the room by means of the trunks of some trees which were placed across the door outside and she was left quite alone, for, now she was no longer sick, Mrs Green
occupied herself with her other duties about the house and only came to Marianne to bring her sad, heavy food or to lie down beside her on the mattress and sleep. The weather continued bad; she watched mists of rain shift and coalesce.

As it grew dark, apparitions of horsemen appeared between the melting trees. Leaving the woods, they crossed the river, their horses loaded with carcasses of deer, wild pig and sheep; and men in their dripping furs were so plastered with mud they seemed not men at all but rather emanations of the shaggy forest. Mud and weariness rendered every one anonymous and the wide, wet brims of their felt hats hid their faces; she could never distinguish Jewel among them. Miserable dogs lolloped beside them and they rode in silence.

She felt herself removed to a different planet. Here, the very air had a different substance, dank, chill and subtly flavoured with ordure, to be choked down, like bad food, rather than breathed easily. Even the flames in the hearth formed a different kind of fire, when Mrs Green lit it, a fire which menaced as it warmed and did not warm sufficiently while it puffed out such piercingly acrid smoke her eyes were always watering. Sounds drifted into the room, raucous cries and the neighing of horses. Sometimes she heard ferocious inhuman howlings, she thought these were the cries of wolves outside in the forest. And sometimes she thought she heard music which seemed to come from within the house itself, though often she confused it with the sound of the wind sighing in the branches outside. If Jewel did not come to visit her, then neither did his tutor; it was as though she were in quarantine.

‘Well, Donally reckons it’s all right for you to come downstairs in the morning,’ said Mrs Green one night, taking bone pins from her coil of hair which then fell down in thin, grey wisps round her creased neck. ‘But, here – I’ll say this, never eat anything that I haven’t cooked for you myself, nor given you with my own hands. And you keep beside me, mind, don’t go running off.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s what you might call a health precaution,’ said Mrs Green. She shrouded herself in a voluminous flannel nightdress and blew out the flame of the small, foul lamp. This lamp was nothing but a lint wick floating in a saucer of animal fat. Then the old woman lay down beside
Marianne; Marianne could just make out the shimmer of her fleshy back, a stout wall.

She watched Mrs Green prepare her some breakfast in the empty kitchen where the huntsmen had eaten hours before. Mrs Green used a metal pot over an open fire; she mixed flour from a sack stolen from those who had effortfully tilled the soil, kept good seed and sown it, reaped, harvested, milled, bagged and then been deprived, though they were the rightful bakers and eaters of the flour and its subsequent bread if there was such a thing as natural justice. Nevertheless, Mrs Green scooped up a handful of flour by right of conquest, since the need of the Barbarians was greater. To make her bread, she mixed the flour with salt, water and animal fat in a bowl of very rough pottery.

‘Bread’s a bit of a luxury,’ she said, but her unleavened bread was only a sour kind of biscuit. She also made a thin porridge with some other grain; this porridge tasted principally of smoke. There was cold meat. There was some milk for Marianne, though it was poor milk and Mrs Green mixed it with water to make it go further. Marianne sat at an immense, foundering table and ate the strange food that was now her regular diet.

The kitchen was more a cave. There was still glass in most of the windows but this glass was now so caked with the grime of years that only the great fire crackling on the hearth and the door, open to the morning, gave any light. Joints of meat either undergoing the process of smoking or smoked already hung everywhere from hooks and huge, lacquered bluebottles buzzed about. A few pieces of worm-eaten furniture still remained and the ancient dresser was still mysteriously loaded with cracked and ancient pottery which the tribe was too superstitious to utilize. There was a large sink full of a brilliant moss which also coated the flagstones underfoot with emeraldine fur. There was a smell of earth, of rotting food and of all-pervading excrement. Marianne drew herself coldly inside her skin and ate because to do so was necessary though by no means pleasant.

The child Jen sat on the table and squinted inquisitively at her. It was another cold day and Jen wore a tunic of long-haired fur that made her look like a little Ancient Briton. Marianne contemplated the archaic child and wondered if her clothing were proof of the speed with which
the Barbarians were sinking backwards or evidence of their adaption to new conditions. Then Jen slapped her hand. She spilled a spoonful of porridge.

‘I don’t like it when you stare at me,’ said Jen.

‘I don’t like it when you stare at me, either,’ snapped Marianne, furious.

‘Here, do I have to be friends with her?’ Jen asked her grandmother plaintively. Mrs Green watched a pan of bread cooking over the fire; the flames threw her shadow across the wall.

‘I dunno,’ said Mrs Green. ‘I’m not sure, nobody’s told me.’

‘What, the old man didn’t say?’

‘Nobody’s told me nothing except she’s to be looked after,’ said Mrs Green with a sigh. She stared at the girl and the child thoughtfully, considering; suddenly she issued a brusque and arbitrary order.

‘Give her a kiss. Go on. She’s real.’

Melodramatic amounts of smoke billowed from the chimney, blackening the bread with soot. Jen gave an astonished caw and flinched. The flinch persisted until it became a shudder; shuddering, she drew back, crawling backwards across the table, out of both daylight and firelight off into the shadow. She drew back so far she slipped off the far edge of the table, turned tail and fled from the kitchen into the passage. Her bare feet thudded softly on the stone as they receded into the depths of the house. Mrs Green shrugged, emptied the contents of the pan of bread on to a wooden dish and began to scrape off the soot with a knife.

‘Anyone can make mistakes,’ she said. ‘Thought she might give you a kiss, see. Thought it might make you seem more natural.’

Marianne perceived the child defined her as a witch, a definition which was in error but still reasonable from the child’s point of view. She felt a certain derisive pleasure. A dog came and nosed at her knee; she gave it the remains of her breakfast and the meal was over. Then the dog lifted its leg to urinate against the leg of the table and Mrs Green threw a dipperful of water at it, besides a volley of abuse.

She decided Mrs Green’s position was that of a housekeeper or, perhaps, more properly, some kind of domestic matriarch. All day long, Mrs Green walked about the house inspecting things; the house was a camp on several different levels. Under the broken, moulded ceilings,
the camp-fires of the ephemeral caravanserai flickered and reared and all appeared transitory though, if home was where the heart was, the children seemed sufficiently loved. The households were at work. Women prepared furs by various primitive methods, scraping away the flesh from the pelts with small knives. Others embroidered cloth with designs of cocks, roses, suns, cakes, knives, snakes and acorns. This seemed frivolous work to Marianne but it was carried out with as much concentration as that of curing the pelts; later, she found these designs had magic significance, though she probably would scarcely have believed this had she been told it the first day. Some old men were engaged in carving cups and platters from wood. Others had their hands up to the elbows in clay, for pottery. All the activity in the house was conducted in silence for there was little need to talk and very little to talk about, anyway. The adult men either worked outside with the horses or had gone to the woods, hunting.

The small family groups lived in such close contact the children were held almost in common. If one fell down and bruised itself and started to cry, the first woman to hand would take it into her arms and comfort it. But two of the babies were very sick. They lay in withy baskets and weakly puked their milk. Mrs Green gazed at them with fear and sadness, while the mother of one of the babies kept one hand defensively on a talisman hanging round her neck and trembled to see Marianne. This woman was perhaps a year or so younger than she, certainly very young. She had snakes tattooed around her wrists; the tail of each snake disappeared succinctly into its own mouth. She wore no stockings or shoes. Her dress was made of a stolen blanket patterned with large dark blue and black checks, a dress as rectangular in design as a box, cut deep at the breast for nursing. Her right knee showed through a tear. She wore a dead wrist watch on her arm, purely for decoration; it was a little corpse of time, having stopped for good and all at ten to three one distant and forgotten day. She had only one eye, the other was covered by a black patch. Marianne could hardly believe she and this woman were both of the same sex. She was heavily pregnant again, though her sick baby was less than a year old. Marianne guessed the baby was suffering from some gastric disorder.

‘I should keep them warm, if I were you,’ said Mrs Green.