Piranha to Scurfy (16 page)

1

BEFORE BEN, I’d never lent the house to anyone. No one had ever asked. By the time Ben asked I had doubts about its being the kind of place to inflict on a friend, but I said yes because if I’d said no I couldn’t have explained why. I said nothing about the odd and disquieting things, only that I hadn’t been there myself for months.

I’m not talking about the house. The house was all right. Or it would have been if it hadn’t been where it was. A small gray Gothic house with a turret would have been fine by a Scottish loch or in some provincial town, only this one, mine, was in a forest. To put it precisely, on the edge of the great forest that lies on the western borders of—well, I won’t say where. Somewhere in England, a long drive from London. It was for its position that I’d bought it.This beautiful place, the village, the woods, the wetlands, changed very little while everything else all around was changing. My house was about a mile outside the village, at the head of a large man-made lake. And the western tip of the forest enclosed house and lake in a curved sweep with two embracing arms, the shape of a horseshoe.

It was the village that was wrong: right for the people and wrong for the others, a place to be born in, to live and die in, not for strangers.

Ben had been there once to stay with me. Just for the weekend. His wife was to have come too but cried off at the last moment. Ben said later she took her chance to spend a night with the man she’s with now. It was July and very hot. We went for a walk, but the heat was too much for us and we were glad to reach the shade of the trees on the lake’s eastern side. Then we saw the bathers. They must have gone into the water after we’d started our walk, for they were up near the house, had gone in from the little strip of gravel I called “my beach.”

The sky was cloudless and the sun hot in the way it is only in the east of England, brilliant white, dazzling, the clean hard light falling on a greenness that is so bright because it’s well watered. The lake water, absolutely calm, looked phosphorescent, as if a white fire burned on the flat surface. And out of that blinding fiery water we saw the bathers rise and extend their arms, stand up, and, with uplifted faces, slowly rotate their bodies to and away from the sun.

It hurt the eyes but we could see. They wanted us to see, or one of them did.

“They’re children,” I said.

“She’s not a child, Louise.”

She wasn’t, but I knew that.We’re all inhibited about nudity, especially when we come upon it by chance and in company, when we’re unprepared. It’s all right if we can see it when alone and ourselves unseen. Ben wasn’t especially prudish, but he was rather shy and he looked away.

The girl in the burning water, entirely naked, became more and more clearly visible to us, for we continued to walk toward her, though rather slowly now. We could have stopped and at once become voyeurs. Or turned back and provoked—I knew—laughter from her and her companions. And from God knows who else, hidden for all I could tell among the trees.

They were undoubtedly children, her companions, a boy and a girl. The three of them stretched upward and gazed at the dazzling blueness while the sun struck their wet bodies. That was another thing that troubled me,
that
sun, inflicting surely a fierce burning on white skin. For they were all white, white as milk, as white lilies, and the girl’s uplifted breasts, raised by her extended arms, were like plump white buds, tipped with rosy pink.

What Ben thought of it I didn’t quite know. He said nothing about it till much later. But his face flushed darkly, reddening as if with the sun, as those bodies should have reddened but somehow, I knew, would not— would stay, by the not always happy magic of this place, inviolable and unstained. He had taken his hands from his eyes and was feeling with his fingertips the hot red of his cheeks.

He didn’t look at the bathers again. He kept his head averted, staring into the wood as if spotting there an array of interesting wildlife. They waded out of the water as we approached, the children running off to the shelter of the trees. But the girl stood for a moment on the little beach, no longer exposing herself to us but rather as if—there is only one word I can use, only one that gives the real sense of how she was—as if
ashamed.
Her stance was that of Aphrodite on her shell in the painting, one hand covering the pale fleece of hair between her thighs, the other, the white arm glittering with water drops, across her breasts. But Aphrodite gazes innocently at the onlooker. This girl stood with hanging head, her long white-blond hair dripping, and, though there was nothing to detain her there, remained in her attitude of shame as might a slave exhibited in a marketplace.

Yet she was enjoying herself. She was acting a part and enjoying what she acted. You could tell. I thought even then, before I knew much, that she might equally have chosen to be the bold visitor to the nude beach or the flaunting stripper or the shopper surprised in the changing room, but she had chosen the slave. It was a game, yet it was part of her nature.

When we were some twenty yards from her, she lifted her head and behaved as if she had only just seen us. We were to think, for it can’t have been sincere, that until that moment she had been unconscious of our approach, of our being there at all. She gave a little artificial shriek, then a laugh of shocked merriment, waving her arms in a mime of someone grasping at clothes, seizing invisible garments out of the air and wrapping them around her, as she ran into the long grass, the low bushes, and at last into the tall, concealing trees.

“I don’t know who that was,” I said to him as we went into the house. “One of the village people, perhaps.”

“Why not a visitor?” he said.

“No, I’m sure. One of the village people.”

I was sure. There were ways of telling, though I hardly ever went near the village. Not by that time. Not to the church or the pub or the shop. And I didn’t take Ben there. The place was gradually becoming less and less attractive to me, Gothic House somewhere I thought I ought occasionally to go to but put off visiting.You could only reach it with ease by driving through the village, and I avoided that village as much as I could. By the time he asked me if he could borrow it, I had already decided to sell the house.

His wife had left him. Or made it plain to him that she expected him to leave her—leave her, that is, the house they lived in. He’d bought a flat in London, but before he’d ever lived in it he’d had a kind of breakdown from an accumulation of causes but mainly Margaret’s departure. He wanted to get away somewhere, to get away from everyone and everything he knew, the people and places and things that reminded him. And he wanted to be somewhere he could work in peace.

Ben is a translator. He translates from French and Italian, fiction and nonfiction, and was about to embark on the biggest and most complex work he’d ever undertaken, a book called
The Golden Apple
by a French psychoanalyst that examined from a Jungian viewpoint the myths attendant on the Trojan War, Helen of Troy and Paris, Priam and Hecuba and the human mind. He took his word processor with him, his Collins-Robert French dictionary, his Liddell and Scott Greek dictionary, and Graves’s
The Greek Myths.

I gave him a key to Gothic House. “There are only two in existence. Sandy has the other.”

“Who’s Sandy?”

“A sort of odd-job man. Someone has to be able to get in in case of fire or, more likely, flood.”

Perhaps I said it unhappily, for he gave me an inquiring look, but I didn’t enlighten him. What was there to say without saying it all?

There was nothing sinister about the village and its surroundings. It is important that you understand that. It was the most beautiful place, and in spite of all the trees, the crowding forest that stretched to the horizon, it wasn’t dark. The light even seemed to have a special quality there, the sky to be larger and the sun out for longer than elsewhere. I am sure there were more unclouded skies than to the north and south of us. Mostly, if you saw clouds, you saw them rolling away toward that bluish wooded horizon. Sunsets were pink, the color of a bullfinch’s breast.

I don’t know how it happened that the place was so unspoiled. Trunk roads passed within ten miles on either side, but the two roads into the village and the three out were narrow and winding. New building had taken place but not much, and what there was by some lucky chance was tasteful and plain. The old school still stood, no industry had come there, and no row of pylons marched across the fields of wheat and the fields of grazing beasts. Nothing interrupted the view everyone in the village had of the green forest of oak and ash and the black forest of fir and pine. The church had a round tower like a castle, but its surface was of cut flints.

That is not to say there were no strangenesses. I am sure there was much that was unique in the village and that much of what happened there happened nowhere else in England. Well, I know it now, of course, but even then, when I first came and in those first years . . .

I told Ben some of it before he left. I thought I owed him that.

“I shan’t want to socialize with a lot of middle-class people,” he said.

“You won’t be able to. There aren’t any.”

His lack of surprise was due, I think, to his ignorance of country life. I had told him that the usual mix of the working people whose families had been there for generations with commuters, doctors, solicitors, retired bank managers, university professors, schoolteachers, and businessmen wasn’t to be found. A parson had once been in the rectory, but for a couple of years the church had been served by the vicar of a parish some five miles away, who held a service once a week.

“I’d never thought of you as a snob, Louise,” said Ben.

“It isn’t snobbery,” I said. “It’s fact.”

There were no county people, no “squire,” no master of foxhounds or titled lady. No houses existed to put them in. A farmer from Lynn had bought the rectory. The hall, a pretty Georgian manor house of which a print hung in my house, had burned down in the fifties.

“It belongs to the people,” I said. “You’ll see.”

“A sort of ideal communism,” he said, “the kind we’re told never works.”

“It works. For them.”

Did it? I wondered, after I’d said it, what I’d meant. Did it really belong to the people? How could it? The people there were as poor and hard-pressed as anywhere else; there was the same unemployment, the same number living on benefit, the same lack of work for the agricultural laborer driven from the land by mechanization.Yet another strange thing was that the young people didn’t leave. There was no exodus of school graduates and the newly married. They stayed, and somehow there were enough houses to accommodate them. The old people, when they became infirm, were received, apparently with joy, into the homes of their children.

Ben went down there one afternoon in May, and he phoned that night to tell me he’d arrived and all was well. That was all he said then. Nothing about Sandy and the girl. For all I knew he had simply let himself into the house without seeing a soul.

“I can hear birds singing,” he said. “It’s dark, and I can hear birds. How can that be?”

“Nightingales,” I said.

“I didn’t know there were such things anymore.”

And though he didn’t say, I had the impression that he put the phone down quickly so that he could go outside and listen to the nightingales.

The front door was opened to him before he had a chance to use his key. They had heard the car or seen him coming from a window, having plenty of opportunity to do that, for he had stopped for a while at the point where the road comes closest to the lake. He wanted to look at the view.

He’d left London much later than I thought he would, not till after six, and the sun was setting.The lake was glazed with pink and purple, reflecting the sky, and it was perfectly calm, its smooth and glassy surface broken only by the dark green pallets of water-lily pads. Beyond the farther shore the forest grew black and mysterious as the light withdrew into that darkening sky. He’d been depressed, “feeling low,” as he put it, and the sight of the lake and the woodland, the calmness and the colors, if they hardly made him happy, comforted him and steadied him into a kind of acceptance of things. He must have stood there gazing, watching the light fade, for some minutes, perhaps ten, and they must have watched him and wondered how long it would be before he got back into the car.

The front door came open as he was feeling in his pocket for the key. A girl stood there, holding the door, not saying anything, not smiling, just holding the door and stepping back to let him come in. The absurd idea came to him that this was the
same
girl, the one he had seen bathing, and for a few minutes he was sure it was; it didn’t seem absurd to him.

He even gave some sort of utterance to that thought. “You,” he said. “What are you... ?”

“Just here to see everything’s all right, sir.” She spoke deferentially but in a practical way, a sensible way. “Making sure you’re comfortable.”

“But haven’t I—no. No, I’m sorry.” He saw his mistake in the light of the hallway. “I thought we’d”—
met
was not quite the word he wanted— “seen each other before.”

“Oh, no.” She looked at him gravely. “I’d remember if I’d seen you before.”

She spoke with the broad up-and-down intonation they have in this part of the country, a woodland singsong burr. He saw now in the lamplight that she was much younger than the woman he had seen bathing, though as tall. Her height had deceived him, that and her fairness and her pallor. He thought then that he had never seen anyone who was not ill look so delicate and so fragile.

“Like a drawing of a fairy,” he said to me, “in a children’s book. Does that give you an idea? Like a mythological creature from this book I’m translating, Oenone, the fountain nymph, perhaps. Tall but so slight and frail that you wonder that she can have a physical existence.”

She offered to carry his luggage upstairs for him. It seemed to him the most preposterous suggestion he had ever heard, that this fey being, a flower on a stalk, should be able to lift even his laptop. He fetched the cases himself and she watched him, smiling. Her smile was intimate, almost conspiratorial, as if they shared some past unforgettable experience. He was halfway up the stairs when the man spoke. It froze Ben, and he turned around.