First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (29 page)

“Why did your mother dislike me so much?” I asked her.

“During the big storm, when we were confined to The Motte, she saw me trying to wave to you.” She was smiling, or at least her eyes were smiling. “You remember we said we’d wave at three o’clock? She asked me what we’d been up to those days previously on the beach.”

“And you told her?”

“I didn’t want to, but I did,” she said. “No one ever taught me how to tell lies.”

I believed her. I believed her absolutely.

“But in addition to that, my mother was always superstitious. She said there was a legend on the Island about somebody from outside the town bringing disaster. She thought maybe it was you.” She smiled as she said this, and I was relieved.

“What about your father?” I asked. “Was he angry too?”

“No, I don’t think so. He laughed at her superstitions. He always seemed to like you,” she said. “I think he would have taken you with us if she’d let him.”

I asked her about the relationship between her parents. Her mother, I said, seemed to be the one in charge.

“That was just her way,” Maria said. “She didn’t want anyone, especially my father, to know how much she loved him and depended on him. But she followed him from one awful place to another all her life, so he knew all right.”

I may have looked sceptical.

“Love comes in many forms, Andrew,” she said. “But it’s still very rare. You must take it as and where you find it.” She glanced, perhaps unconsciously, at my gloved hand. So I said I had something to tell her, and I did tell her how the hand had been injured in an accident that I couldn’t remember anything about.

After dinner, we took a taxi to Pinewood, a hilly area near the university. Her house had been built on the model of one of those Olde Worlde cottages, like Aunt Lizzie’s cottage on St Jude.

As for the inside: everything was simple and elegant; the reproductions that adorned the walls were, I presumed, the essence of good taste.

She showed me up to her bedroom and I took her in my arms and kissed her. It seemed quite natural, the years stripped away, for us to undress and go to bed together. Her
body was now the body of a mature woman, and that was a delight to me. But I was afraid she might be repelled by me: I’d lost my plumpness, but there was still the arm, the hand, the purple stain.

She put her hand out and touched my withered arm and the claw at the end of it, to show she was not disgusted. Then she touched the stain on my chest as she had all those years ago on the beach. The stain seemed to me less innocent, less forgivable now, on a grown man. But she smiled, as she ran her fingers over it, as though it was the assurance she needed that I really was the boy she’d once known.

When we made love, it was nothing like the frenzy in the cove on St Jude. Then, we’d thrown our whole being into it. Now we were both quite restrained, even at the height. She closed her eyes and breathed hard but made no other sound. I was conscious of trying not to sweat. The love-making was satisfying, but the rawness was gone, as though time had dulled some vital nerve in each of us.

We lay silently in each other’s arms for a while, then we put on our clothes again, went downstairs to the living-room and drank a cup of coffee.

So Maria Hebblethwhaite was back in my life. We didn’t overdo things: we went out for dinner, or to a movie, once or twice a week. We stayed overnight at her place, or my place, but not too often.

After the first week, we didn’t talk so much about our shared past. It was like a book we’d both read long ago; we’d read too many others since. We were reading one now. I was so happy and enjoyed being with her so much I told her I loved her—I felt it was the least I could do. And she told me she loved me, perhaps for the same reason.

I used to watch her and wonder what was going on in her mind; sometimes I’d catch her looking at me, no
doubt wondering the same thing. She never said very much about her late husband. Maybe she meant one day to talk about him more. Maybe she thought I didn’t want to hear about him. She was right about that. I didn’t want to know too much about her life—the fact that there would always be great gaps in my knowledge of her was part of the attraction.

She didn’t seem to share that feeling. I suppose I wasn’t as forthcoming as she would have liked.

“I don’t believe love can survive too many secrets,” she said one night. We were lying in bed in my apartment at the time. That was when she asked me outright about the accident.

“I don’t know,” I said. “As I told you before, I didn’t remember then, and I still don’t.”

“I wonder why you don’t remember,” she said. Her eyes were trying to look inside me, but I was on my guard.

“I don’t know,” I said again. “I just don’t know. I don’t even think about it any more.” That wasn’t true.

The photograph of my parents was on the dresser, and she reached for it and studied it closely for a while.

“Where did you say this was taken?”

“Outside a motel,” I told her. “Doctor Giffen said that was where I was conceived.”

“Really?” she said. “I wonder who took the photo. Was it another guest? Was it someone they knew—a third person?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” I said. That wasn’t true either.

I asked her to marry me six months after our meeting in the Park.

The day of the marriage was late November, a cold day with a driving rain that was at times sleety. The ritual—really
just a bureaucratic act by a Justice of the Peace—was quickly performed in a bare office in the City Hall. The two witnesses were strangers who were impatient to be gone on their own business. I wouldn’t have recognized them if I saw them in the street five minutes later.

That was almost a year ago. Maria wanted to do something, so she found a job as archivist for the local government: it needed only three days a week. And we settled down.

Life together at first wasn’t easy. We’d each married someone who’d ceased to exist twenty years before. At times, when I kissed the roundness of her mouth, it would seem like a kind of zero. At times when I looked at her face, I didn’t see the beauty, but the pock-marks. At times, when she smiled at me, it seemed to me less a smile than an involuntary raising of the upper lip—the way Minnie did when she was using her extra cat’s sense to examine the scent of something unpleasant.

When I felt like this, Maria seemed to know, and she’d find an occasion to stare deliberately at my withered left arm and my claw. Can you imagine, she seemed to be saying, how it feels to have that thing roaming over warm, living flesh?

Nor can I forget how once, in the middle of the night, I woke up, terrified. I’d been dreaming that my dead hand was at her throat, and I could do nothing to stop it. The dream was so realistic, I even switched on the light and looked at Maria’s neck for bruises. She woke up.

“What is it?” she said.

“Only a dream,” I said. But after that, I was afraid to go back to sleep.

T
HE
C
OMET
Z
ABRINSKI
came and went. It was a disappointment to astronomers. It didn’t seem to want anything to do with our world, and remained invisible to the naked eye as it sped past this planet and back into the darkness.

My nightmares had come back, bad as they’d ever been. When I woke up, I’d be afraid to go back to sleep. I spent many nights on the couch, reading till dawn. Maria—the little sad birds were in the corners of her eyes again—wanted me to see Doctor Lu. I refused.

One night in bed—it was after midnight—I switched on the lamp and woke Maria.

“What is it?” she said.

“Listen to this,” I said. “A man’s standing with his back to a forest. He’s wearing an old coat. He’s looking down into a box-camera. He’s taking a photograph of a man and woman standing in front of a motel. There’s an old-fashioned car parked near them. He says, ‘Smile,’ and he snaps the shutter.”

Maria was wide awake. The photograph of my parents was on the dresser near the bed. She looked at it, then back at me.

“Who’s holding the camera?” she asked. “Who’s taking the photograph?”

“I am,” I said.

Her face was hard to read.

“Dreams,” she said. “They can be so strange.”

“It didn’t seem like a dream,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“It seemed more like a memory than a dream,” I said. “Could it be a memory?”

We were lying on our sides, facing each other. She put her hand on my shoulder.

“Andrew, Andrew. Don’t even think such things. The photograph was taken before you were even born. How could you possibly have been there? Just ask yourself that. Anyone could have taken it. Lots of people ask strangers to take photographs for them.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said. “I wish I could be sure.”

When I said that, she looked alarmed.

A few days later, I was drinking my breakfast coffee when Maria, across the table, said: “Amber Tristesse.”

I almost choked. I’d never ever mentioned that name to her. She was looking at me.

“Tell me about Amber Tristesse.”

“How do you know about her?” I asked.

Maria’s eyelids flickered the way they did sometimes when she was uncomfortable.

“You called out her name in your sleep,” she said.

I didn’t believe her. For the first time since she’d come back into my life, I didn’t believe her. In that instant, the idea came into my head that Maria Hebblethwaite wasn’t to be trusted. I wondered if she’d heard gossip. I even wondered if she’d somehow got in touch with Gordon Cacktail. That led me to start doubting everything about her. Maybe she only pretended not to see my faults, my withered hand, so that she could lure my secrets out of me. Maybe, like Amber Tristesse, she already knew much more about me than she’d claimed to, right from the start. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence she’d been in the Park the day I’d met her. Maybe she’d been searching for me all those years!

I knew my face was turning pale, but I tried not to
let her see how shocked I was at what was going through my head.

“I don’t want to talk about Amber Tristesse,” I said.

She had a puzzled and hurt look.

So, the nightmares were back and I’d lost faith in Maria. Those things were bad enough. But now, I began to fear something even worse: the mote. Yes, after all this time I was certain it had come back and was stalking me again. Not that I’d seen it; but I
felt
it was near, waiting to strike. And that was not a good feeling.

On a wet Saturday in October, Maria and I were sitting on our balcony watching the Harvest Parade. We hadn’t been doing much talking lately, and we were quiet now, wrapped in blankets, drinking hot cider. Sparse crowds lined the parade route. It was hard not to feel sorry for the marching bands and the baton twirlers, turned into stiff puppets by the cold rain.

While we were sitting there, I saw it coming: there, in the distance, a black shape, snarling and shimmering. I clutched the railing of the balcony and braced myself.

“What’s wrong?” Maria said. She looked along the street where I was looking. “What’s the matter? What is it you see?” She was looking at exactly the place. “I can’t see anything,” she said, “except the tail-end of the parade.”

I looked harder—and of course she was right. It wasn’t the mote. It was only a group of marchers, their black coats glistening in the rain. The snarl came from trumpets that were accompanied by the clatter of drums.

Then I saw who the marchers were.

They were dressed much the same as that day long ago in Stroven when they marched to the graveyard. They wore long black cloaks, but this time their heads were bare
to the wind and rain. They marched in platoons four abreast. They played kettle drums and snare drums; some played trumpets. Their march was ragged and the music was like the noisy breathing of some great beast.

Even at fifty yards away, I was sure I recognized some of the Stroven wives though I hadn’t seen them in many years: Mrs MacCallum of the bakery, Mrs Glenn of the pharmacy, Mrs Darvell of the grocery. All three with trumpets to their lips.

The procession came nearer and I saw something that took me by surprise: the Stroven men. They were wearing the black cloaks and they were beating drums: the Principal of Stroven School was there, and Provost Hawse, and Jamie Sprung, and Constable MacTaggart—and even Doctor Giffen, wearing a black hat with a black feather. The next drummer was the little clerk from the Hochmagandie, with his black nose-cone; then, fingering their trumpets, a group of bar-women. Now came a large platoon of men: the crew of the
Cumnock
—among them was Captain Stillar, with a wooden box under his arm; then Harry Greene reading a book opened on the top of his drum. At the back of that group, blowing her trumpet, marched the old widow who’d growled at me. Now came the islanders of St Jude. I knew them all: the entire Chapman family, with Sophie, the cat, perched on Mrs Chapman’s shoulder; Moses Atkinson, with his beard hanging over his drum; the gaunt figure of Uncle Norman; Doctor Hebblethwaite, smoking a cigarette; Mrs Hebblethwaite, my enemy, blowing sternly; Mr Rigg, the sexton, and Martha, his wife—she was holding the trumpet to her mouth with a contraption made of bones; then Commissioner Bonnar, staggering a little as he marched.

Most remarkably, none of the marchers had aged: they looked just the way they did when I knew them long ago.

Now came a squadron of nuns, trumpets protruding
from their tubular hoods—one of them, I was sure, had the walk of Sister Rose of the House of Mercy. After them, blowing loudly, marched Catherine Cleaves and shuffling Amber Tristesse. Then came an old woman with a trumpet held to her lips by a wire device so that her hands were free to knit as she marched—the desk clerk from the motel among the snowy hills; the nurse from the Invertay Hospital walked alongside her; they were followed by Doctor Burns with a kettle drum; and the hulking Gordon Cacktail, beating on a drum the size of a barrel.

The noise was at its height now, as a final trio of marchers came near. One of them was a plump, balding man who beat on a snare drum with one gloved hand. Two women walked beside him: a short one blowing a trumpet, and a tall one carrying a banner.