Heroes and Villains (12 page)

He smiled at her again; then he took up his candle and walked briskly to the wall. Raising the candle, he illuminated a stone fissure so she
could see within a grinning medieval skeleton who carried a stone banner engraved with the motto:
AS I AM, SO YE SHALL BE
. Marianne gave the Doctor a thin, pale smile and rushed headlong from the room, accompanied by the well-bred cadences of his laughter.

Outside in the brilliant sunshine, naked children played a game of tig along the terrace and through the rose garden. Marianne came out of the front door and a communal sigh went up. The children scattered at once but Mrs Green’s granddaughter went down the stairs so fast she tripped and rolled head over heels to the bottom, where she lay yowling in a clump of long grass. Marianne went down the staircase, set the child upright and dusted earth from the wrinkles in her bare stomach. Jen scowled.

‘I hope Jewel shows you what’s what,’ she said. ‘I hope he beats you with his fists, once he’s married to you.’

‘News certainly travels fast,’ said Marianne. ‘Who told you he was marrying me?’

‘I hope he keeps you in a cage, like that snake,’ said the child. ‘And I’ll come and poke a stick through the bars.’

She squinted at Marianne malevolently and all at once lost interest. She stuck her dirty thumb in her mouth and wandered off, through the rose trees where her friends were playing a new game. The overblown, dishevelled roses cast down petals on all sides; in this romantic setting, the children pelted the half-witted boy with stones. He crouched under a white rose tree which, shaken by the frequent impact of the stones, snowed him with petals. He was protecting his eyes with his hands.

‘I can see you!’ snarled Marianne with considerable ferocity, parting the spiky branches and glaring at the children. Once again, they scattered and the boy collapsed, weeping, on his face.

She walked towards the river, across the meadow where ponies and horses were grazing. They raised their heads and fluttered their velvet nostrils at her; the gentleness of their eyes comforted her but the unnatural beauty of the valley made her sad, for the banners of purple loosestrife streaming from the roof in the sunshine were like the triumphant flags of nature herself, staking her claim to the building. She walked a little way up the river, towards the point where it disappeared into the woods, and saw Precious there. He had ridden a
horse into the river, to water it. He wore hardly more clothes than the children did.

He did not see Marianne. His black hair hung down over his cheek, hiding the marks of the tattooing needle, and he twisted his fingers in the black mane of a bay horse and sang a very simple tune to himself; he repeated the tritonic phrase over and over again almost as though he had forgotten he were singing. The bones had not yet formed an implacable casque beneath the soft flesh of his face and his thin, brown, adolescent legs dangled against the pony’s flank negligently. Precious had not finished growing. He waded downstream, the horse parted the reeds in the dark water and Marianne gasped, for the rider looked just as if he had come from the hands of original nature, an animal weaker than some and less agile than others, but, taking him all round, the most advantageously organized of any, pure essence of man in his most innocent state, more nearly related to the river than to herself. His eyes were closed, perhaps he was dreaming; but she could not conceive what dreams the Barbarians dreamed, unless she herself was playing a part in one of their dreams.

‘I thought things would be more simple, among the Barbarians,’ said Marianne to herself and all at once felt lonely.

‘Why did you stay? Tell me the real reason,’ she said to Mrs Green later, when they were in the kitchen by themselves and Mrs Green was heating water in a black iron pot, to wash Marianne with. Mrs Green tested the water with her elbow and smiled gently into its wrinkling surface where little bubbles were rising.

‘They left the prints of the heels of their boots on my heart,’ she said.

‘I saw them first when I was a little girl. I saw them riding into the village and everyone was so frightened and one of them killed my brother but I could tell, even then, that a horseman had very little chance against a disciplined soldier.’

‘Oh, they never win outright but, then, they don’t need to, do they? Just a bit of pillaging to bring back what we need. The flour and so on.’

‘Fear is their major weapon, so they need to get themselves up to look like nothing on earth, not men at all.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Green. ‘It’s a right old raree show. Colourful.
You’d better wash down here and I’ll stay by the door so that nobody comes in. You wouldn’t want, say, Johnny to find you in your altogether.’

Marianne put the cauldron of water on the table and washed herself limb by limb. Mrs Green gave her a piece of soap she had secreted in the bottom of her trunk for years, in case of an occasion like this. The Barbarians made no soap themselves and rarely felt the need for it. As she washed her arms, the light in the kitchen darkened; looking up, she saw the half-witted boy, freed from his chain, sitting on the window ledge making signs and faces at her. She gave a little cry of surprise. Mrs Green was affronted and ran into the backyard to shoo him away. Marianne wrapped the skirt round herself and followed her; the boy was rolling on the ground and Mrs Green was trying to prise apart his fingers, which were tightly clasped around something he clearly did not wish to show her.

‘It’s for the Professor girl,’ he said. ‘It’s a wedding present.’

‘Here I am,’ said Marianne, kneeling beside him.

He grew quiet at once and sat up on his haunches. His chain and collar hung threateningly from the kennel but someone had rubbed fat on the sore place in his neck. The boy giggled and shuddered, hiding his face with his paw, and pressed the contents of the other fist into Marianne’s palm. The promised present comprised a few stalks of grass and some crumpled rose petals.

‘Thank you,’ said Marianne gravely, looking into his swimming eyes.

‘It was the best I could manage, in the circumstances,’ he said. His voice was as thin as his father’s and his articulation surprisingly precise.

‘Your father’ll beat the daylights out of you if he finds you roaming loose.’

‘He said I could go out, he was angry with Jewel for cutting the collar but he said I could go about loose because today was special and Jewel put grease on my sore because he said it was his wedding day.’

‘Well …’ said Mrs Green doubtfully, looking down at him in perplexity. ‘You can’t hang about looking through the windows, you know. You just lie down in your kennel like a good boy and I’ll go and get you a bite to eat.’

He crawled into the kennel and sat down with a sigh on a heap of filthy straw.

‘Can I have a bit of wedding cake, later?’

‘There isn’t any wedding cake, nowadays, there hasn’t been any wedding cake for years and years and years. How the hell did you get to hear about wedding cake?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the boy. ‘Somewhere.’

He sighed gustily again and began to masturbate. This shocked Mrs Green, who went: ‘Tsk, tsk,’ and hastily shepherded Marianne back into the kitchen, where she finished washing in the cooling water.

‘He’s no idiot,’ said Marianne. ‘Certainly no more of an idiot than anyone would be who had always been kept tied up on the end of a chain.’

‘He was ever so funny when he was a kid, drooling and that. And those fits, just like his dad, dreadful fits. Frothing at the mouth and gnashing his teeth. I hate to think what’ll happen to him in a year or two, with the girls and that. They go out and play with him and tease him now, as it is; it’s disgusting, and Donally beats him something dreadful, then, like it was his fault.’

She helped Marianne to dry herself and they went up to her room, where she lit the fire. A large metal box had been deposited on the floor in their absence.

‘Is that my wedding dress in there?’

‘I suppose so, dear.’

‘And when does the ceremony begin?’

‘About nightfall.’

Mrs Green produced her comb and began, unhappily, to comb Marianne’s hair, which surreptitiously she had kept cropped for fear of vermin by nibbling away at it with a little knife.

‘It’s all wrong for a girl to have hair as short as you,’ she said. ‘Why ever did they do it to you?’

‘I do it to myself.’

Mrs Green stared.

‘You’re an odd one, aren’t you. You can’t have fitted in.’

Marianne sat on the mattress with her arms locked around her knees, discontentedly contemplating whatever might happen to her next, for she had no control over it.

‘Open the box, Mrs Green, let me see my dress.’

Mrs Green lifted the creaking lid of the metal chest and unfolded a great deal of thin, yellow paper that crumpled away to dust beneath her fingers. Scooping away the paper, she dug down and unearthed a wedding dress such as Marianne had only seen in surviving photographs of the time before the war. She left the bed and crept near the chest, staring at its contents with amazement and a certain distaste.

The dress had a satin bodice, now fissured with innumerable fine cracks; long, tight, white sleeves that came to a point over the backs of the hands and an endless skirt of time-yellowed tulle. There was a vast acreage of net veil and a small garland of artificial pearls. Most of the pearl coating had detached itself from the surfaces so they were now only little globes of white glass. Mrs Green laid the dress out on the bed with a bemused expression on her face. Marianne screwed up a handful of the hem and watched the fabric shiver to dust between her fingers, just as the paper had done. There were shadows of mildew in every fold of the voluminous skirt and all smelled musty and stale.

‘How perfectly ludicrous!’ said Marianne. She could not control her laughter and Mrs Green laughed, also, though with an undertone of disquiet.

‘Oh, it’ll make an impression,’ she said. ‘It’s the kind of thing they think the Professors wear in the privacy of their own homes, you know.’

‘It’s far too big for me.’

‘Nobody will notice. There’s nothing else to compare it with. It’ll just be generally impressive.’

‘It’s horrible and disgusting,’ said Marianne. ‘And probably full of germs, too.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ said Mrs Green. She lingered at the door. ‘I’ve got to be going, dear, got to get ready a big meal, for afterwards.’

‘Festivities,’ suggested Marianne coldly. ‘Rejoicings.’

‘You just do what you’re told, get that dress on and wait,’ said Mrs Green angrily, her patience suddenly exhausted. ‘I’ll be back to fetch you when it’s time.’

Marianne heard her shift the log of wood against the door and knew she was locked in again. She retreated to the fireside, as far away from the dress as she could get, for she could not help watching it. As the room
grew dark, the dress took on a moon-like glimmer and seemed to send out more and more filaments of tulle, like a growth of pale fungus shooting out airy spores, a palpable white infection; viruses of plagues named after the labels on the test-tubes in which they had been bred might survive for years under the briars of a dead city, nesting invisibly in the contents of just such a Pandora’s box as this metal chest, starred with singed stickers of foreign places dating from those times when foreign places had more than an imaginative existence, for where was Paris any more, where they had briefly worshipped the goddess Reason.

She recoiled from the dress. It became an image of terror. Some young woman had worn it before her for a wedding in the old style with cake, wine and speeches; afterwards, the sky opened an umbrella of fire. Marianne pressed herself against the wall, face down on the floorboards, and screwed her eyes shut, clenching her fists, attempting to force herself into a condition of detachment menaced as she was by this crumbling anachronism. When the room was quite dark, the dress was still visible, glowing with the luminosity of hoar frost, or the green light of the evening star, and Mrs Green bustled back with a lamp.

She was flushed and breathless. She brought with her the sharp smell of burned fat and roasting meat. Her apron was splashed with dripping and her hair was coming loose from its coil.

‘You should have put the dress on,’ she said sharply.

She took up the dress, very tenderly, and approached Marianne, carrying it, with the heavy, inexorable tread of a determined old lady. Marianne knew there was nothing for it and she must undergo her ordeal; she began mechanically to unbutton her shirt. She was shaking and sweating but her ruling passion was always anger rather than fear and she turned into a mute, furious doll which allowed itself to be totally engulfed. The satin bodice slid down her flesh with sensations of slime and ice and the skirts rippled out in a friable lake for yards over the floor. But Mrs Green darted round her with pins and the veil finally concealed everything, even Marianne’s face, so at last she was quite transformed, now a pale bundle of aged fabric that disintegrated in little spurts with every movement she made. The bodice crackled and snapped.

‘They’ll have to marry me very quickly or every stitch will come apart and the dress vanish altogether,’ she said.

Mrs Green retreated to the other end of the room and looked Marianne’s yellowish, drifting, spectral figure up and down. The veil shook out in baleful streamers; Marianne extended her small, white, living hand to restrain it.

‘It’s not really very nice, is it,’ said Mrs Green. ‘You could never call me a superstitious woman but even so …’

Marianne saw a stain on the satin sleeve, where the original bride had spilled something, perhaps some wine. And maybe this other girl had been happy when she wore this dress and spilled her wine. Marianne’s hard anger began to melt a little; she was seized with sadness.

‘Who do you think wore it first?’ she asked and tentatively stroked the satin with her forefinger, almost gently, almost as if asking the dress to forgive her for disliking it so.

‘That way lies madness,’ said Mrs Green sententiously. ‘Oh, hell, you’ll make a show. What a show. He’s got the room all ready, candles everywhere, flowers. The snake in its little cage, he puts it on show in a little cage, see.’