Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer: Expanded Edition (19 page)

The moon had begun to touch the lake to a polished surface, like a waxed table. Nothing marred its sheen. There were no lights discernible, save the sparse lights of the château round about.

Viktor took his book downstairs and sat brooding on it in a corner of the salon, so he could feel superior as his mother and his uncle squabbled over their cards.

At midnight, he woke to find the salon empty. From an adjacent room the notes of the piano softly came for a while, then ceased. “Go to bed,
mon fils,”
she called to him, followed by invisible rustlings of her garments as she went away. Tied to the brandy decanter, with the velvet ribbon she had worn at her throat, was a scrap of paper which read:
Un peu.
Viktor grimaced and poured himself one very large glass.

Presently he went out with the brandy onto the lawn before the house, and scanned again across the lake for pinpricks of light in the darkness. Nothing was to be seen. He thought of the boat, and wandered down the incline, between the willows, to the water’s edge, thinking of it, knowing he would not use it.

“Paris,” he said to his mother in his head. “Next year,” she said. “Perhaps.” A wave of sorrow washed over him. Even if he should ever get there, the world, too, might prove a disappointment, a crashing bore.

The brandy made him dizzy, heavy and sad.

He turned to go in, defeated. And at that moment, he saw the white movement in the water, troubling and beautiful. About ten boat-lengths away, a girl was swimming, slowly on her back, toward him. With each swanlike stroke of her arms, there came a white flash of flesh. It seemed she was naked. Amazed, Viktor stepped up into the black recess of the hanging trees. It was an instinct, not a wish to spy so much as a wish not to be discovered and reckoned spying. She had not seen him, could not have seen him. As the water shallowed toward the shore, she swung aside like a fish. Amongst the fronded trailers of the willows, not ten yards from him now, she raised her arms and effortlessly rose upright.

Her hair was blond, darkened and separated by water, and streaked across her body so her slender whiteness was concealed in hair, in leaves, in shadows. The water itself ringed her hips. She was naked, as he had thought. She parted the willow fronds with her hands, gazing between them, up the lawn toward the château, or so it seemed. It was pure luck she had beached exactly where he stood.

He was afraid she would hear his breathing. But she seemed wrapped in her own silence, so sure she was alone, she had remained alone, even with his eyes upon her.

Another whiteness flashed, and Viktor jumped upsetting the brandy, certain now she had heard him, his heart in his mouth. But she gave no sign of it. A swan cruised by her and between the willows, vanishing. A second bird, like a lily, floated far off.

A white girl swimming among the swans.

The water broke in silver rings. She had dived beneath the shallows and he had not seen it. He stared, and beheld her head, like a drowned moon, bob to the surface some distance off, then the dagger-cast of her slim back.

Without sound, she swam away toward the islands of invasion.

“My God,” he whispered. But it was not until he was in his room again that he dared to laugh, congratulating himself, unnerved. Lying down, he slept uneasily.

He was already in the grip, as Ilena would have said, of one of his obsessions.

* * * *

A day like any other day spread over the lake and the château, plaiting the willow trees with gold. Before noon, Viktor had one of the horses out and was riding on it around the lake, trying to find if the islands—her island—was accessible from shore. But it was not.

From a stand of birch trees it was just possible, however, to see the roofs of a house, and a little pavilion like white matchsticks near the water.

Viktor sat looking at it, in a sort of mindless reverie.

When he was thirteen years old, he had fallen wildly in love with one of the actresses in a minor production of
The Lady from the Sea
. This infatuation, tinged by tremors of earliest sexuality, but no more than tinged by them, was more a languid desperate ecstasy of the emotional parts, drenching him in a sort of rain—through which he saw the people he knew, and over the murmur of which he heard their voices, yet everything remote, none of it as real as the pale rouged face, the cochineal gown and thunderous hair. Never since had he felt such a thing for anyone. Not even that hoard of young women he had gazed after, then forgotten. Certainly not in the few, merely physical, pleasures he had experienced with the carefully selected paid women his walk of life gave access to.

But preposterously this—this was like that first soaring love. It was the artist in him, he supposed helplessly. For however poor his work, his soul was still that of the artist. The dazzle of pure whiteness on the dark lake, accented by swans, the sinking moon. He had been put in mind of a
rusalka,
the spirit of a drowned girl haunting water in a greed for male victims. And in this way, to his seemingly asexual desire was added a bizarre twist of dread, not asexual in the least.

“Been riding?” said Uncle Janov on his return. “Good, good.”

“I thought I might try the boat this afternoon,” said Viktor, with a malicious sense of the joy of implicit and unspoken things.

But he did not take the boat. He lay on the grass of the lawn, now, staring through the willows, over the bright water, toward the islands, all afternoon. In his head he attempted to compose a poem. White as snow, she moves among the swans…the snow of her hands, falling.… Disgusted with it, he would not even commit it to paper. Nor did he dare to make a drawing. His mother’s parasoled shadow falling over him at intervals as she patrolled the lawns, made any enterprise save thought far too conspicuous. Even to take the boat could be a disaster. “Where is that boy going? He’s too far out—”

Sugaring her conversation, as ever, fashionably with French, Ilena somehow made constant references to love throughout dinner. By a sort of telepathic means, she had lit on something to make Viktor suddenly as excruciatingly uncomfortable as a boy of thirteen. Finally she sought the piano, and played there, with Chopinesque melancholy and Mozartian frills, the old ballads of romance:
Desirée, Hélas, J’ai Perdu
. She could, of course, in fact know nothing. He himself scarcely knew. What on earth had got hold of him?

It was inevitable. To be so bored, so entrapped. There must be something to be interested in. He sprawled in a chair as Ilena plunged into
Lied,
trying longingly to remember the features of the girl’s face.

* * * *

When the house was quiet, save for some unaccountable vague noise the servants were making below, Viktor came downstairs and went out. He dragged the boat from its shed, pushed through the reeds, and started to row with a fine defiance.

There was no moon, which was excellent, even though he could not see where he was going.

An extraordinary scent lay over the lake, a smell of sheer openness. At first it went to his head. He felt exhilarated and completely in command of everything, himself, the night. He rowed powerfully, and the château, a dark wash of trees against the star-tipped sky, drew away and away. Then, unused to this particular form of labor, his arms and his back began to ache and burn. He became suddenly physically strained to the point of nausea, and collapsed on the oars, only too aware he would have to return by this modus operandi, and already certain he could not make another stroke in any direction.

But the rim of the island was now much closer than the far shore. He could distinguish the matchstick pavilion. Something white in the water shot blood through him like a charge of electricity, but it was only one of the swans mysteriously feeding or drinking from the lake.

Cursing softly, his teeth clenched, Viktor resumed work with the oars and pulled his way through the water until the boat bumped softly into the side of the island.

There was a post there among the reeds, sodden and rotted, but he tied the boat to it. The swan drifted away, weightless as if hollow.

Viktor scrambled up the incline. He stood beside the little pavilion, back broken, and full of a sinister excitement, trespassing and foolish and amused, and dimly afraid.

There was no music now, only the sound the lake made, and a soft intermittent susurrous of the leaves. Viktor glanced into the summer house, which was romantically neglected, conceivably even dangerous. Then, without hesitation, he began to make a way between the stalks of pine trees, and over the mounds of the grass, passing into the utter blankness of moonless overgrowth which had somehow seemed to make this venture permissible.

Beyond the trees was a house, surrounded by a wild lawn and a clutter of outbuildings. Viktor took a sudden notion of dogs, and checked, appalled, but nothing barked or scrabbled to get out at him.

There was something reassuringly ramshackle about the place. Even the house, far younger than the château, had a weird air of desuetude and decline. Viktor walked nearer and nearer through the rogue grass, passed under a rose-vine unraveling on a shed. A few feet from the veranda, in a clump of bushes, he came on a small china animal of indistinct species lying on its side as if dead, beside a wooden pole stuck in the ground. The purpose of the pole was moot. For the running up of a flag, perhaps?

Viktor laughed aloud, unable to prevent himself. To his outraged horror there came an echo, a feminine laughter that pealed out instantly upon his own.

“Good God,” he said.

“Good God,” said the voice.

Viktor, struck dumb, pulled himself together with an effort at the moment the echo voice said clearly: “Why don’t you come here?”

“Where?” said Viktor.

“Wait,” said the voice.

It seemed it was above him, and throwing back his head in a gesture of unnecessary violence, he noted a pale thing like tissue-paper in the act of turning away from a window. A moment later, he saw a light spring up and go traveling across the house. The impulse to flee was very strong. A lack of social etiquette had brought him here, but now the trauma of good manners, of all things, restrained him from flight. He felt a perfect fool. What would he say when the door opened? I was shipwrecked on your island by this terrible storm that has been silently and invisibly happening for the past hour?

Then the door opened and the light of a small oil lamp opened likewise, a large pale yellow chrysanthemum across the wooden veranda. There was a hammock strung there, and a little table, and in the dark oblong of the doorway, the lamp in her hand, the girl he had seen swimming, naked as a swan, in the lake.

Of course, he had known the second he heard her voice that it was she, no other.

“My God,” he said again. He had an insane impulse to tell her how he had looked on her before, and choked it back with the utmost difficulty.

“Won’t you come in?” said the girl.

He stared.

She wore a white frock, white stockings and shoes, her blond hair pinned on her head in an old-fashioned rather charming way, and in the thick yellow light she glowed. Her face was not pretty, but had an exquisite otherworldliness.

“I was looking for—that is, I think I have the wrong house—” he blurted.

“Well, never mind. Since you’re here, why don’t you come in?” And when he still hesitated, she said with the most winning innocence, devoid of all its implications, “There’s no one here but myself. My uncle is in town on business.”

Viktor discovered himself walking toward her. She smiled encouragement. There was not a trace of artifice about her, not even a hint of the powder he had learned to recognize, on her eggshell face.

She led him inside, and he had the impression of one space tumbling over into another in a mélange of panellings and furnishings, and huge crazed shadows flung by the lamp. Then he was himself falling over a little card table, righting it, glimpsing the open window framed in the wings of opened shutters, the tassel of the blind swinging idly in the night air. He saw the lawn he had stood upon, the flagpole and the dead china animal. It was uncanny, surreal almost to him in that moment, to see from her viewpoint the spot he had only just vacated. She was saying something.

“—Russian tea,” she finished. He turned too quickly, and observed a samovar. “Will you take some?” And he thought of Circe. He would drink the tea and change into a pig.

“Thank you.”

And beyond the samovar, a beast with a monstrous horn. He noted the source of yesterday’s music with another small shock. Not an orchestra at all. Of course not.

She had set the oil lamp on the card table, and the light had steadied. Presently they sat down and drank the dark sweet tea, looking at each other neatly over the rims of the cups. There was nothing special about the room. He had seen many rooms like it. It was rather untidy, that was all, and the paper on the walls was distressfully peeling, due to damp he supposed. But the room smelled of water, not dampness, and of the tea, and of some elusive perfume which he wondered about, for it did not seem to be hers.

They did not speak again for a long while. It was so absurd, the whole thing. He did not know what to say. And was afraid besides of letting slip some reference to her nocturnal swim.

But he must say
something
—

“The château—” he said.

She smiled at him, polite and friendly, hanging graciously on his words.

“My mother,” he said. “She owns—we live at the château.”

“Yes?” she said. “How nice.”

“And you,” he fumbled.

“I live here,” she said.

This was quite inane.

“It’s very beautiful here,” he said, inanely.

“Oh, yes.”

“You must be wondering,” he said, oddly aware she was not, “why I came up here.”

“You said you thought it was another house. Someone you were looking for.”

“Did I say that?” Yes, he had said it. “I’m afraid it was a lie. I came here out of curiosity. We used to own this land.” Oh God, how pompous. “I say ‘we.’ I mean my mother’s family. And I was…curious.”

She smiled enigmatically. He finished the scalding tea at a gulp that seared his throat and stomach. Oink?

“Well,” she said, standing up as if at a signal. “It was kind of you to call.” She held out her hand and, disbelievingly, he rose and took it. Was she dismissing him?

“Well…” he repeated. Unsure, he felt in that instant another very strong urge to escape. “I suppose I should go back. Thank you for being so hospitable to a lawless trespasser.” The words, gallant, buccaneering, pleased him. Cheered, he allowed her to lead him out to the veranda. “I heard your gramophone,” he said, “the other night. Sound carries sometimes over the lake.”