In the King's Arms (7 page)

His hair was cold and black, and it spilled downward. Her breath rose upwards, to the grey sky, soaring light and free. Floating.
Bright, bright white wisps that met the flowing clouds above them. Julian pinned her down; the clouds drifted lazily by. It felt wonderful, the contrast. She wriggled under his weight, then lay still, letting it pour into her.

“Look at me,” he said, raising her face in his hands and focusing her eyes on his.

“What is your name?”

“Lily.”

“Are you sure?”

“No . . . .”

“Who am I?”

A moment passed before she answered, eyes wet,

“You’re mine.”

They began kissing blindly.

T
HERE WAS SOMETHING GOING ON between them, Mrs. Kendall was certain. Lately their low voices disturbed her sleep at night; they seemed to throb through the ceiling of the sitting room, invading her bedroom above.

It was so peculiar, their murmuring. Surreal, almost. One voice carried over the other, like a chant. Mrs. Kendall knew a great deal about plainsong from listening to Archibald’s explanation of it to Timothy. The sound was never abandoned to die. If a few monks should happen to grow short of breath (and with this she sympathized; Mrs. Kendall smoked cigarettes in endless chains), a few others lifted up their foundering note, and then they too were relieved, on and on, in alternation, forever. Endless. Endless!

Julian was developing large dark rings under his eyes. Did either of them ever sleep? Sometimes she peered, undetected, through the large glass sitting room doors. Her boy seemed so odd around Lily. He bit his nails to the quick; he flushed; he looked relieved and giggled; his eyes darted; he clasped his knees to his chin and wiggled an ankle. It was a wrenching sight for a mother to see. In the end, he was comfortless. The girl made him nervous. Once she saw him fall to his knees at Lily’s feet and offer his beautiful head to the mercy of her hands. And he had been crying. But Julian never cried! The girl had slowly circled each eye with one slender finger.

Mrs. Kendall went into the kitchen, lit a cigarette and stirred her tea. She suffered from this awful insomnia, but couldn’t the children get things done in daylight? It was as though the house had changed hands, with Lily its new mistress.
I’d
rather like to sit by the fire right now, she thought, staring at her dull grey tea under bulb light. Once she had come in to offer them some nice, dark fruitcake, but Lily had smilingly declined, and Julian had gazed at her like a mooncalf. Archibald could sleep through all of this, but she could not, she was afraid. His methodical snores nearly drowned out all that was happening below, but between the snores she could hear them so well that the fire nearly crackled in her hair.

Julian had always been the problem child. Peter was studious, even if he did need to get the better of everyone else and to have the last word. But Julian was the more sensitive. What didn’t he see from the very moment he breathed life? (He wasn’t a bit like Timothy, who took in just precisely what Archibald told him, and nothing more.) Julian had been a magical sort of child, like the creatures in fairy tales who sense the things that made you heart-weary. The magic horse with immortal head, and the magic Russian doll who spoke; oh, he and she had read them all together, hadn’t they? But he was indecisive too, and sometimes lazy, so lazy that he had fits of it, kicking at the rug for his own inertia. Of course Peter was going to finish his puzzles if Julian gave up in the middle. Why did he always lose heart so easily?

He was always being swept along. His passivity made people persistent; he made them ravenous . . . . Scarcely twenty, he looked years older, with his long strong legs and back, and his hard chin cleft like the devil’s foot. This had brought on the plague of girls and the flattery. He had broken some girl’s heart already; there was a photograph of a skinny girl laying her head tentatively on his
shoulder. That was the girl who had sent all the notes, probably, a full shoebox that, when removed for closet cleaning, had exhaled the scent of old violets. Julian had not seemed much altered by this affair. He was very given, though, to vanity, rearranging his father’s old bow ties on his neck (these festoons filled a drawer), dangling a cigarette from his lips, fixing the mirror with that insolent grin.

And now Oxford had rejected him. It was hard, with one boy in, and the other left out in the cold. It was hard, hearing Julian’s sour comments, comments that Peter himself might have made. “City of dreaming poofters.” “Black gowns and underaged buggery.” He couldn’t stand not being wanted. How clever of this girl to want him utterly, to step in just now and exploit his torment.

Mrs. Kendall thought of Lily’s finger, tracing the lines of her son’s rending face. The girl was surely older than he. She’d studied. She’d traveled. Quite energetic, wasn’t she? He was quite taken by it, in any case. Or being taken. Roughly opened. Trampled so the juices flowed. She certainly wasn’t lazy. Said she had glandular fever, but it hadn’t felled her. She slouched a bit and was often sighing, but that was the extent of its toll. Besides, Jews always sighed. Caught up in their greedy yearnings. A portable people, the Jews. Always coming from heaven knows where. Fragile as dandelions, as impossible to get rid of. Tough, too. Planted in your sitting room. This siren plainsong could go on forever, with or without support.

Helena Kendall stood by her thick glass doors. The fire had gutted; only a few embers glowed. In the arms of Julian lay Lily, curled up very small. He was stroking her hair, looking down into her eyes, and mumbling quietly. Lily made a little sound, and reached to be closer, like a newborn at the teat. Julian bent his head downward toward an engulfing, dark silence and remained. His mother, after a long instant, turned herself toward the stairway.

I
N TRUTH, it was not just the sitting room that Lily had usurped. Mrs. Kendall’s pantry teemed with the various jams she had captured in summer: gooseberry, strawberry, quince. These were perfect now, on hunks of her fresh-baked bread, at small hours, in the company of Julian. Lily had developed an enormous appetite in this house, and Julian’s grew sympathetically. He had never gorged, had never had so much the sensation that he was feasting.

They never ate in haste. They did not, with greedy fists, fling great gobs into their mouths. There was, instead, an air of earnest play about these secret meals, an elfin atmosphere in which work and play, fantasy and engineering, were deftly confused. They sawed on their crusts, groaning with a humorous heaviness, as soft powder dusted them white. Massy stickiness was mortared on layer after layer, slice after slice. Thus they built something, together, at the large wooden table of the Kendall home. It was their altar.

Their meals were always taken in the quick of night, in silence. Different words might have been exchanged at different times, their feelings might have grown deeper with every night’s passage, but the large wooden table was still and serene and constant. Winter was outside them, and a slumbering house around, but life was there, on the spot, with bread, and jam.

The table would be covered with a bright white glow, the moon peeping in through the darkness. Spot-lit hands fluttered toward mouths into darkness, then met, stroking slowly in the light. The world was safe, warm and glowing. Clocks could be heard ticking, a muffled, hibernatory sound. The house, in its dreaming, seemed close, a navy cape thrown over the two sleepwalkers it protected. Lily and Julian whispered when they spoke, but soon grasped that the night could insulate them completely. There was no need to modulate, no need to hide.

“Have you been wandering, too, Julian? I feel like a wandering Jew . . . .” Her voice was uninflected by worry. She was spilling over, lolling in the soul.

“I’ll wander with you,” he answered, rocking her. They were adrift together on the rolling seas. He rocked her far more slowly than the quick tick-tock of clocks. Even the big wooden grandfather clock seemed hasty now; Julian’s rhythm made time swell with a vast bounty.

I have all the time in the world, she thought, languidly. All the time in the whole, whole world. I can strain my gaze forever, until the figures on the pier are not just thumb-sized but invisible, all gone. And there’s time in what’s invisible, too. It rests there.

And still Julian rocked her, until he himself had disappeared to Lily, and all that remained was the rocking itself, and then sleep. The grandfather clock suddenly thought of something to say; it tolled: Bonnngggg . . . . Bonnngggg . . . . Bonnngggg . . ..

He scooped up the girl whose consciousness amazed him, and felt the sheer weight of her dead frame. Now she was unassuming. Her head fell back as he hoisted her aloft, fully exposing her white neck. It poured from the yoke of her dress like sand from an hourglass. Her bare feet tipped downward, her fingertips dangled, grazing,
at his knees. He stood for a moment, absorbed by the shadow the moonlight cast on the wall.

The night began to lift. Julian raised Lily’s head and watched her fluttering lids, pink under the rising sun. He sank his mouth upon hers, tasting hot berries. She bit him suddenly, knowingly, a small nip. Her legs kicked in tiny kicks in the air. She was half-heartedly searching for gravity. His arms felt strong.

He took her to the brightening window; they stared outwards together. The brilliant seal of the horizon stretched across their silent, awed faces.

A
PART FROM LILY, Julian had few loyalties. He did nothing with resistance. He was very fickle, although this trait often came across as adaptability. He took advice from everyone, found something to imitate in everyone. He had all the time in the world to hear the other point of view. The other point of view never annoyed him; he was spongy; he could take it in capaciously. Little phased him. Though a certain passion shone from his eyes, it was not a passion for depth but for breadth. Nor did he tend to look within himself; Julian beamed outward, attracting the excavators all around him.

He had been very happy to work with severely retarded adolescents. This era had been a peak in his short life. The project had been suggested by one of his public school tutors, who supposed it would teach him moral application. Julian was set to work among teenagers who, like all teenagers, wore T-shirts and sneakers and blue jeans, had young bodies and spotty faces. The girls, like all girls their age, had breasts and long, luxuriant hair. The paradox of nubility and malady might have unsettled some other novice, but not Julian. He had thrived.

Once, during an outing, Julian had photographed them all, one by one. There was something chilling in the care these photographs betrayed. They reflected a concentration that could never
be reciprocated, a “love,” perhaps, that could never be returned in kind, it was so abstract, so combinative a love. Did the girl with the curly red tendrils (her name was Betsy) know that the bluebell Julian had given her to hold had matched her eyes? Julian had caught her as the bluebell grazed her lid; she was smiling as though she sensed the visual pun. But in fact she did not even know the word for eyes.

There was also a photograph of Graham feeding the birds. A flock had descended, gathering around Graham like autograph seekers. Graham had time for every one of them, and the photograph showed this. It showed him on his hands and knees. There were birds on his head, birds on his ankle, and a huge bird-dropping on his shoulder. A beady-eyed bird on the outskirts who lacked several toes and appeared to have given up in the competition for crumbs. And Julian had caught this. Graham’s face was not too visible in the photograph; Julian, standing, had captured the scene from above. When the film was developed, Graham, completely apathetic to the picture of himself (perhaps because he did not recognize the top-view of his own head) smiled at the one of Anna, and would not let go.

The photograph of Anna was an accident, really. Anna was the most “normal” looking of the group. Julian had daydreamed, often, of kissing her, sometimes of exploring her body with the most exquisite care. She would probably not have minded, either: she was sweet, playful and trusting. But on the day of the outing, Anna had been in a bad mood, perhaps because she had dripped chocolate ice cream on her new pink dress. One sign that Anna was more aware than many of the others was her sensitivity to dirt on her person. Her mother had successfully toilet-trained her. Anna could even apply the word “dirty” in a broad, metaphorical sense,
as an insult or expletive. Now she was muttering “dirty . . . dirty . . . dirty . . .” sometimes at her dress, and sometimes angrily at Julian, who tried to cheer her up.

He had propped her against a tree, aimed his camera at her, and made her break into a smile by putting the camera down, running to her, and giving her a quick, tight hug. But when he returned to take the shot, her smile had faded; as he clicked the shutter he knew that it had faded. The photograph came out blurred: Anna was shown with her head moving downward toward her dress, still looking at the stain. Her arms remained outstretched from the hug that had filled them, and with her lowered head she looked a bit Christ-like, fragile, thin and wavering.

Even with Lily, Julian secretly relished a self-image as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a dream of villainous tyranny, even as he caressed the soft-bodied woman he kept in thrall. She trusts me, he would think, nerves prickling with desire, and I could tear her to pieces. He fed on her atavistic nightmares, her worried mouth, the eyes that would not settle. Julian was no longer the victim of circumstance; no, it would be she.

He sensed his own wild and delicate containment. Would he feast on her, his prey? In the midst of a deep embrace he would shove Lily’s head back and then, having contemplated her fragile skull at arm’s length, render the woman back, squeezing.

A King may look at a cat, he thought. And be very much fascinated. Pocket it in his purple robes, make it purr at the pulse-points. My Kingdom for a cat, dear Lily. Would you like to be the cat, hmmmm?