A Maggot - John Fowles (5 page)

Now she takes the blue bottle and moistens a corner
of her linen towel in the liquid it contains, which she dabs here and
there about her bared body; at the sides of her neck, beside her
armpits, and somewhere in front. A perfume of Hungary water creeps
down the room.

She reaches sideways for her smicket and puts it on
again. And now she does turn, and brings the candle to the bed,
beside the man. She sits. Another little china pot is taken - the
ball of soap has been carefully dried and replaced in its own
container - and set beside the candle. It contains ceruse, a white
cream or unguent made of lead carbonate, a universal cosmetic of her
age, more properly seen as a lethal poison. She takes some on a
forefinger and rubs it on her cheeks, then all over her face with
little circular movements. The neck receives similar treatment; the
tops of the shoulders. She reaches next back to the bundle an takes
the mirror and one of the minuscule blue bottles, stoppered with a
cork. She examines her face for a moment. The light o this improvised
dressing-table is too far away; picking up th candlestick, she turns
towards the man, indicating where she wants it held, closer.

He comes forward and takes it, and holds it slightly
to one side, within a foot of the girl's face. She spreads the linen
towel on he lap, carefully unlids the last small gallipot; it holds a
carmine ointment. A minute amount of this she touches across her lips
spreading the colouring first with her tongue, next, mirror in hand,
with a fingertip; every so often she touches the fingertip against
each cheekbone and rubs the colouring there as well, using it as a
rouge as well as a lip-salve. At last, satisfied with the effect, she
puts the mirror down and relids the gallipot. Having done that, she
pushes the human candle-holder's wrist gently away and reaches for
another blue bottle. That has a goose quill in its cork when it is
opened. To apply its colourless liquid she tilts her head back and
allows one drop to fall into each opened eye. Perhaps it stings, for
she blinks rapidly on each occasion. That bottle is recorked; and
only then does she look up at the man.

The brilliance of her eyes, already dilating under
the influence of the belladonna, the heightened colour of her mouth
and cheeks - the carmine is not a natural red at all - make it clear
that this is no maid, though the effect is far more doll-like than
aphrodisiac. Only those tawny irises, in their enlarging pupils,
remain of the simple young woman who dozed on the bed fifteen minutes
before. The corner of her red lips curve just enough to hint at a
smile; yet innocently, almost as if she is the staring man's sister,
indulging some harmless foible in him. After a few moments she closes
her eyes, without altering the upward angle of her face.

Another might have assumed it was an invitation to
kiss, but this man's only reaction is to move the candle a little
closer; to one side, to the other. He seems to search every inch of
that faintly waxlike facial skin, every curve, every feature, as if
somewhere among them lies a minute lost object, a hidden symptom, an
answer; and his face grows mysterious in its intensity of
concentration, its absence of emotion. The impression is of a
profound innonence, such as congenital idiots sometimes display; of
in some way seeing her more sustainedly, more wholly than normal
intelligence could. Yet there is nothing of the idiot about his own
face. Beneath its regularity, even handsomeness - the mouth is

particularly strong and well shaped - there lurks a
kind of imperturbable gravity, an otherness.

She bears this silent scrutiny for nearly a minute.
His free hand rises, hesitates, gently touches her right temple. He
traces the line of her face, down her cheek to the jawbone and chin,
as if she is indeed not flesh, but wax, painted marble, a death-mask.
The tracing continues, and she closes her eyes again: the forehead,
the eyebrows, the eyelids, the nose, the mouth itself. Her lips do
not move against the fingers that brush across them.

Suddenly the man falls to his knees, putting the
candle upon the floor at her feet; and sinks his face into her lap,
almost as if he cannot stand further sight of what he has caressed,
and yet is at its mercy. She does not flinch or seem surprised at
this; but stares down for a long moment at the back of the head
buried against her; then reaches her left hand and strokes the bound
hair. She whispers, so softly it seems to be to herself, not to him.

'Oh my poor Dick. Poor Dick.'

He does not answer, seems once again frozen. She
continues slowly to stroke his hair and pat it for a minute or more,
in the silence. At last she gently pushes him away, and stands,
though only to turn to her opened bundle and from it to unroll an
oyster-pink gown and petticoat, which she smoothes out flat, as if
preparing to put them on. Still he kneels, with his head bowed, it
might seem in some kind of submission or supplication. The candle on
the floor lights something that suggests neither, and at which he
stares down, as hypnotized by it as he has been by her face; and that
both his hands clutch, as a drowning man a branch, though they do not
move. The top of his breeches have been torn aside, and what he
clutches is no branch, but a large, naked and erect penis. The young
woman shows no shock or outrage when she realizes this obscenity,
though her hands are arrested in their smoothing. She goes quietly to
the top of her truckle-bed, where the violets still lie strewn on the
rough pillow; gathers them up, and returns to where he kneels, to
toss them, it seems casually, almost mockingly under the down-turned
face and across the hands and the monstrous blood-filled glans.

His face jerks up as in an
agony at the painted one above, and they stare for a moment into each
other's eyes. She steps round him and unlatches the door and stands
holding it open, for poor Dick to leave; at which, clutching his
opened breeches, he struggles clumsily to his feet and without
looking at her, and still in obscene disarray, lurches through the
open door. She steps into the doorway, it seems to give him light
down the dark stairway to the landing below. Some draught threatens
to extinguish the candle, and she draws back, shielding the guttering
flame, like a figure from a Chardin painting, and closes the door
with her back. She leans against it, and stares down at the pink
brocaded clothes on the truckle-bed. There is no one to see she has
tears in her eyes, besides the belladonna.

* * *

Dick had been, during his absence upstairs, briefly a
subject of conversation at the long table in the inn kitchen. Such
kitchens were once semi-public and as much the centre of the inn's
life, for the humbler traveller or the servants of grander ones, as
the equivalent room in the old farmhouse. If not finer, the food
eaten there - and no doubt the company - was certainly warmer than in
the more public parlours or private chambers. The inn servants
welcomed the gossip, news and entertainment brought by strangers of
their own approximate class and kind. The undisputed king of the
Black Hart's kitchen, that evening, and from the moment he had
stamped through the door from the stableyard, cutlass and cased
blunderbuss under one arm, and managed, in one comprehensive removal
of his hat and sweep of his eyes, to ogle kitchen maids, cook and
Dorcas the inn maid, had been he of the scarlet coat, soon
self-announced as Sergeant Farthing.

He was, it equally soon seemed, of that ancient type-
as ancient as the human race, or certainly as human war - the Roman
comedians dubbed the miles gloriosus; the military boaster, or
eternal bag of bullshit. Even to be a modest soldier was no
recommendation in eighteenth-century England. The monarchs and their
ministers might argue the need for a standing army; to everyone else
soldiers seemed an accursed nuisance (and insult, when they were
foreign mercenaries), an intolerable expense both upon the nation and
whatever particular and unfortunate place they were quartered in.
Farthing appeared oblivious to this, and immoderately confident of
his own credentials: how he was (despite his present dress) an
ex-sergeant of marines, how as a drummer boy he had been on Byng's
flagship during the glorious engagement of Cape Passaro in 't8, where
the Spaniards were given such a drubbing; had been commended for his
courage by Admiral Byng himself (not the one to be filled with
Portsmouth lead in 1757 to encourage the others, but his father),
though 'no bigger than that lad' ... the potboy. He had a way of
fixing attention; and not letting it go, once it was fixed. There was
certainly no one in that kitchen to challenge such a self-proclaimed
man of war, and of the outer world. He had in addition a bold eye for
his female listeners, since like all his kind he knew very well that
half the trick of getting an audience into the palm of one's hand is
flattering them. He also ate and drank copiously, and praised each
drop and mouthful; perhaps the most truthful sentence he spoke was
when he said he knew good cider when he tasted it.

Of course he was questioned in return, as to the
present journey. The younger gentleman and his uncle were riding, it
seemed, to pay court to a lady who was respectively their aunt and
their sister: a lady as rich as a supercargo, old and ailing besides,
who lived at Bideford or thereabout; who had never married, but
inherited lands and property fit for a duchess. Various winks and
nose-taps glossed this already sufficiently explicit information: the
young gentleman, it was hinted, had not always in the past been a
model of assiduity, and lay even now in debt. The wench upstairs was
a London lady's maid, destined for the aunt's service, while he,
Timothy Farthing, had come as a service to the uncle, with whom he
had been long acquainted and who was of nervous disposition as
regards highwaymen, footpads and almost any other human face met more
than a mile from St Paul's. Though he said it himself, they had
travelled thus far under his vigilant eye as safe as with a company
of foot.

And this uncle? He was a man of means, a substantial
merchant in the City of London, however with children of his own to
provide for. His brother, the younger gentleman's father, had died
improvidently some years before, and the uncle stood as his nephew's
effective guardian and mentor.

Only once had he broken off during all this discourse
or quasi-monologue; and that was when Dick had come from the stables
and stood, as if lost; uncomprehending, unsmiling, in the doorway.
Farthing had bunched fingers to his mouth and pointed to an empty
place on the far side of the table, then winked at Puddicombe, the
landlord.

'Hears naught, says naught. Born deaf and mute,
Master Thomas. And simple into the bargain. But a good fellow. My
younger gentleman's servant, despite his clothes. Sit you down, Dick.
Eat your share, we've met none so good as this on our way. Now where
was I?'

How as you came on the Spainer's tail,' ventured the
potboy.

Now and again, while the silent servant ate, Farthing
did appeal to him. 'Isn't that so, Dick?' Or, 'Ecod, Dick could tell
more if he had a tongue - or a mind to wield it.'

It was not that these appeals were answered, indeed
Dick seemed oblivious to them, even when his vacant blue eyes were on
Farthing and he was being addressed; yet his companion seemingly
wanted to show avuncularity among all his other virtues. The eyes of
the maids, however, did wander the deaf-mute's way more and more
frequently; perhaps it was curiosity, perhaps it was a kind of
wistfulness, that so well-proportioned and fundamentally attractive a
young male face, for all its expressionlessness and lack of humour,
should belong to such a pitiful creature mentally.

There had been one other interruption: the 'wench
upstairs' had appeared in the inner doorway towards the end of the
supper, bearing a tray with the remains of her own, and beckoned to
the inn maid Dorcas, who rose to speak there with her. Some low words
were exchanged between them, and Dorcas looked round at the
deaf-mute. Farthing would have had the newcomer join them, but she
declined, and pertly.

'I have heard all your bloodthirsty tales, I thank
you.'

The little curtsey she gave as she retreated was
almost as much a snub as her words. The ex-sergeant touched up his
right moustache and sought sympathy from the landlord.

'There's London for you, Master Thomas. I'll warrant
you that girl was as pleasant and fresh of face as yon Dorcas a few
years ago. Now the chit's all Frenchified airs, like her name, that
I'll warrant she never was born with. She'd be all pale civility,
nice as a nun's hen, as the saying goes.' He put on an affected
voice. 'Would the man I love best were here, that I might treat him
like a dog. So's her kind. I tell you, you'd have ten times more a
better treating from her mistress than a maid like Louise. Louise,
what name is that for an Englishwoman, I ask you, sir. Isn't it so,
Dick?'

Dick stared and said nothing.

'Poor Dick. He has her mincing manners up with him
all day long. Don't you, lad?' He went through a pantomine, cocking
his thumb towards the door through which the mincing manners had Just
departed, then mimicking by means of forked fingers two people riding
together. Finally he pushed up his nose and once more cocked his
thumb at the door. The deaf-mute still stared blankly back at him.
Farthing winked at the landlord. 'I' faith, I know blocks of wood
with more wit.'

However, a little later, when he saw Dorcas filling
the brass jug from the copper in which it had heated, since that had
evidently been the matter discussed with the girl upstairs, the
deaf-mute stood and waited to take it; and again at the door, where
the maid handed him an earthenware bowl from a dresser. He even
nodded, in some token of thanks for her help; but she turned to
Farthing as if in doubt.