Heroes and Villains (7 page)

‘Precious,’ said Jewel. ‘My precious.’ Not for some time did Marianne realize that Precious was the boy’s name; the Barbarians used whatever forenames they found lying about, as long as they glittered and shone and attracted them.

All around her she saw the behaviour of the woman in the wood repeated over and over again. First, they looked at Jewel with trepidation, in case he was really dead but had returned all the same, and then they saw he left footprints in the ground and was substantial and kissed his brother with no harm done so they swarmed around him, all trying to hug some part of him, and everybody was crying with joy, for they wore their hearts upon their faces, an openness to which she was not accustomed. But when they saw Marianne, they drew back. Jewel let go of her hand to embrace his brother, who was about Marianne’s age; she stood still and let him go on, down to the river, and the tribe surged with him and left her behind.

Men, women and children continued to stream from the house. A brown, naked child, sodden from the river, bounced up into Jewel’s arms and he hugged her. She wondered if this could be his own daughter for he kissed her with the greatest affection and laughed. The ground was marshy and gave beneath Marianne’s feet.

Some of the people glanced back at her and made vague, fluttering, protective gestures. The sun was shining but she felt very cold. A little boy about four years old made a sudden dart at her and ripped a strip off her skirt before she could stop him. He retreated a few yards, squatted down and chewed at the relic as if expecting some immediate magic effect from it while he shot her glances of be-wilderment and fright. But most of the tribe ignored her completely. They all began to wade back across the river and she was left alone, for Jewel appeared
to have quite forgotten her since he was so glad to be home.

The middle-aged woman she had seen on the road came from the house. She was enveloped in a large apron of astonishing whiteness and her sleeves were rolled up, revealing forearms of great strength and size. She ran along the terrace and down the crumbling steps with the flapping, ungainly run of a fat woman; although Marianne was so far away from her, she could see the woman’s grey hair uncoiling from the bun on top of her head. The people parted to let her through and she hugged Jewel harder than any of them. Then she looked across the river and Marianne saw the clean woman’s forefinger pointing at her. Jewel at once turned and hurried back.

‘You forgot me,’ she said, accusingly.

‘I was overcome,’ he replied. ‘It’s not every day you rise from the dead. Can you still walk?’

But she found it very difficult to start walking again once she had stopped. He carried her over the river and set her down in front of the clean woman, whose name was Mrs Green. She was his foster-mother. She had a broad, doughy face covered with freckles. She kissed Marianne; she smelled of baking.

‘Don’t be scared,’ she said. ‘He’s not a bad boy at heart; none of them are bad boys, in spite of appearances.’

The little girl clambered up Jewel’s trunk as simply as if it were that of a tree and sat on his shoulders, pulling his hair. He slapped her. Marianne was now so dizzy the brown faces danced around her like dead leaves. When the Barbarians saw Mrs Green had not turned to stone as a result of her kiss, they clustered round Marianne with a braver curiosity and she felt moist, exploring hands on her arms, legs and bare neck and somebody tugging at the crude bandage on her leg.

‘Leave her alone,’ said Jewel. ‘The snake bit her but she didn’t die.’

He gave them this information contemptuously but they hushed and drew away from her. The crowd now began gradually to melt away, going back to former occupations such as tanning hide, sharpening knives and making pots, while Jewel, his foster-mother, his half-brother and Mrs Green’s grandchild, the little girl, went towards the house.

‘And Joseph,’ said Jewel. ‘How is Joseph?’

‘Blue all over,’ said Precious. ‘It’s no joke, I can tell you.’

‘Dead by night, I reckon,’ said Mrs Green. ‘Oh, my poor boy. And such pain and Donally won’t leave him alone nor ease him, either.’

‘And him only twenty-two years old,’ said Jewel. ‘The first of us to go.’

Mrs Green put her hand confidentially on Jewel’s arm and her voice sank to a whisper.

‘Jewel, my love, ease him.’

‘I won’t kill him!’ he said.

Marianne stumbled and cried out. They ignored her.

‘You mean I should put him out of his misery like a horse with a broken leg, ease him with death, is it? With a knife, or a gun, which would be best, do you think?’

‘It’s a brother’s duty,’ said Mrs Green sententiously. ‘You don’t need to lose your temper, do you. I’d do it myself, but it’s no job for a woman and, besides, Donally won’t let me into the room.’

Jewel changed moods with extreme swiftness. He stood in the benign sunshine and, though tears of joy were still drying on his cheeks, he exuded the bleakest despair.

‘I won’t kill him,’ he said. ‘No, never.’

‘Ease him, my love,’ she said, as if she had not heard him. ‘You know what I mean.’

The small group went on walking towards the house.

‘Such pain you never saw,’ said the old woman. ‘And calling out longingly for death to come. It is your duty; he is your responsibility.’

Jewel put his hand over her mouth to shut her up.

‘Take care of the girl, then. Give her something to eat and put her to bed or she’ll be ill, too, and what’s to be done, then?’

‘I’m coming with you to make sure,’ said Mrs Green. ‘Didn’t I feed Joseph my own milk when he was a baby, like I did you? Isn’t he flesh of my flesh, almost? Here, our Jen, take the girl up to my room and make her lie down.’

The old woman and the two young men broke into a run without a backward glance and went up the stairs to the terrace to vanish through the grandiloquent doorway of the house, where a worm-eaten door hung open off its hinges. Marianne was left alone with the child,
who plumped down on the grass beside her with a sigh. She wore nothing but a daisy chain. She had ringworm.

‘You’re from the Professors,’ she told Marianne firmly. She had a very deep voice for so young a child.

‘Yes,’ said Marianne.

‘You killed my father,’ said Jen accusingly.

‘Not I, myself,’ said Marianne with a contraction of the heart she did not understand. ‘They did it out of self-protection.’

‘He dressed up and went away and he didn’t come back and the Professors had killed him and baked him and eaten him with salt,’ said Jen firmly. ‘That’s what my mother said.’

‘That’s what they all say,’ said Marianne, but she did not pacify the child, whose face contorted as she spat. The gob of saliva clung to Marianne’s skirt like a weird gemstone. Jen walked away with dignity. There was an open sore on her backside. Marianne was sick with pain and alone. She dragged herself up the staircase in front of the house by the rotten stone handrail. Her eyes kept misting over and she thought she saw furred animals inside the front door but she was mistaken; all that met her when she entered the house was the reek of open sewers.

The Barbarians did not wonder why the house still existed; it offered them shelter so they moved in and filled it with the smoke of their fires and their abominable refuse. The hall was very dark but Marianne could make out some old carvings on the walls and a curving marble staircase sweeping upwards. The smell of roasting meat mingled with that of ordure. She was still clutching her sprig of honeysuckle and she pressed it against her face, smelling the outdoors upon it. A woman came from the shadows at the back of the hall, raised her heavy skirt, squatted and urinated.

‘Where has Jewel gone?’ asked Marianne.

The woman wobbled in the middle of the spreading puddle, made the sign against the evil eye and wailed.

‘Oh, don’t be stupid,’ said Marianne angrily. ‘I’m flesh and blood and I want to find Jewel.’

The woman seemed impressed by Marianne’s anger and said: ‘Upstairs, in Donally’s room.’ She glanced warily at the young girl before
she darted back through a doorway into a black hole where there was a fire. Marianne limped upstairs and saw an open door.

Perhaps this room had been a chapel for it seemed the most ancient part of the house, a high, narrow vault of dark stone. The arched windows were covered with animal hides and the only light came from some guttering candles stuck to plane surfaces of stone. Weeds were growing out of cracks in the walls. Someone had ingeniously contrived a stove out of a large saucepan and made a funnel arrangement so that most of the smoke was taken out through a hole in the window, behind the hides; on this stove, a pot simmered and sent out a green scent of herbs which hovered on top of the reek of putrefaction which filled the room. It was as if all the appalling smells which had ever assailed her reached a peak and culmination; she had never smelled decaying flesh before. The honeysuckle dropped from her hand. A bundle of blankets lay on a mattress in the centre of the floor and she guessed this was the man who was dying of a mortifying wound.

In a corner, the young boy she had seen in the forest sat chained to a staple in the wall, gnawing upon a bone. There were rushes on the floor and everywhere a litter of books, bottles, vessels, strangely shaped utensils and bundles of dried plants. The youngest brother pushed past her abruptly, leaned over the banister of the staircase and vomited lengthily into the hall. She could make out nothing of what was going on in the room except for some moving figures by the improvised bed and the sudden flash of Mrs Green’s apron; there was a good deal of confusion, some angry voices, some terrible screams and babblings and then Marianne fainted.

Mrs Green had a room to herself because she was old and dignified. She also insisted upon a proper chamberpot of her own. She kept a faded photograph of the wife of a Professor of Economics for whom she had once worked in a tarnished silver frame on the wooden box in which she kept her personal belongings, a few dresses, several aprons, her hairpins and a book which was no less precious to her because she had forgotten how to read it. This book was a copy of
Great Expectations
. She also kept the first tooth which Jewel had shed, wrapped up in a twist of paper, and also a lock of his first hair.

The walls of her room were still stuck here and there with a paper
of red flock, furry to the touch, which, peeling, showed huge patches of plaster where various colours of damp and rot combined to give the appearance of a gigantic bruise. While Mrs Green bathed Marianne’s leg with warm water and put clean bandages on it, she stared at this bruise, which changed its shapes continually and all were familiar but none were recognizable.

Mrs Green gave up her own bed to Marianne, a hay-stuffed mattress spread with linen sheets and some blankets, all stolen. While Marianne was ill, she stayed with her much of the time and, though she rarely spoke to her, she sometimes sang her lullabies like those her nurse had sung. Marianne was very ill for a long time and sometimes delirious, when she would confuse Mrs Green with her nurse and be either comforted or distressed according to whether she remembered her childhood or her nurse’s last days. When she was delirious, the room would also fill with multiple images of snakes and knives or would become the forest and she alone in it. But one night she woke from an unusually deep and dreamless sleep and saw that the room, though full of unpredictable shadows and silence, was only a room with red walls and a fire was alight in the hearth.

The companion of her journey crouched before it. She knew him immediately. Mrs Green, a solid and at last unmistakable figure, sat beside him on a chunk of wood cut from a piece of tree and slowly combed out his long, black hair. She held his head on her aproned knees and the firelight lent them both a dramatic yet dignified chiaroscuro. Marianne raised herself on her elbow to watch them, for she had never seen anything so ancient or so romantic, except in woodcuts at the head of ballads in her father’s rarest books.

‘The girl’s woken up,’ observed Mrs Green. ‘My, she’s a lucky girl to get over a snakebite.’

‘Is she all right?’ he asked drowsily.

Marianne nodded. She was lucid and recovered; she knew herself to be well again and thinking coherently.

‘She’s a tough little girl,’ said Jewel. ‘I’ll say that for her.’

‘She’s a long way from home,’ said Mrs Green. ‘And I’ll thank you to keep your hands off her, my duck; you just watch out.’

‘And did your brother die, in the end?’ asked Marianne, and shivered.

Jewel looked down at his fingers and she realized she had been tactless.

‘Oh, yes. He died before I had to exercise the dubious prerogative of mercy. All I had to do was dig his grave. I’m the public executioner, see, and also the fucking grave-digger.’

‘Watch your language in front of the young lady!’ exclaimed Mrs Green.

He glanced at her as if amazed and laughed, but the laughter turned into another shattering fit of coughing. He fell on the floor and was wracked, while Mrs Green clucked uselessly and Marianne, watching him writhe, choke and gasp, thought remotely: ‘He’s going to die young.’

‘The thing to remember about them is, they don’t think,’ said Mrs Green. ‘They jump from one thing to the next like kids jumping stepping stones and so they go on until they fall in the water.’

‘Does Jewel never think, although he is educated?’

‘Sometimes he does,’ said Mrs Green. She was taking in the seams of an embroidered shirt so that Marianne would have something to wear. She used needles from a little case she had carefully kept with her since one wild night when she was eighteen years old and she saw her home burning and her husband’s head shot clean from his shoulders. Since her husband had been an old man who often beat her and demanded unnatural practices in bed, she had then said: ‘Take me with you’ to some horseman as he reloaded his rifle and he lifted her up behind his saddle and subsequently gave her a number of children until another night attack, from which he never returned. And this was how Mrs Green first arrived in the tribe.

‘Sometimes Jewel thinks but usually he gets the Doctor to do his thinking for him.’