Piranha to Scurfy (17 page)

“What were you thinking of, Lavinia, to let Mr. Powell carry his own bags?”

Hearing his own name spoken like that, so casually, as if it were daily on the speaker’s lips, gave him a shock. Come to that, to hear it at all.... How did the man know? Already he knew there would be no explanation. He would never be able to fetch out an explanation, now or at any time—not, that is, a true one, a real, factual, honest account of why anything was or how. Somehow he knew that.

“Alexander Clements, Mr. Powell. Commonly known as Sandy.”

The girl followed him upstairs and showed him his bedroom. I’d told him to sleep where he liked, that he had the choice of four rooms, but the girl showed him to the big one in the front with the view of the lake.That was his room, she said. Would he like her to unpack for him? No one had ever asked him that before. He had never stayed in the kind of hotel where they did ask. He shook his head, bemused. She drew the curtains and turned down the bedcovers.

“It’s a nice big bed, sir. I put the clean sheets on for you myself.”

The smile returned, and then came a look of a kind he had never seen before—well, he had, but in films, in comedy westerns and a movie version of a Feydeau farce. At any rate, he recognized it for what it was. She looked over her shoulder at him. Her expression was one of sweet naughty coyness, her head dipped to one side. Her eyebrows went up and her eyes slanted toward him and away.

“You’ll be lonely in that big bed, won’t you?”

He wanted to laugh. He said in a stifled voice, “I’ll manage.”

“I’m sure you’ll
manage,
sir. It’s just Sandy I’m thinking of—I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of Sandy.”

He had no idea what she meant, but he got out of that bedroom quickly. Sandy was waiting for him downstairs and the table was laid for one, cold food on it and a bottle of wine.

“I hope everything’s to your liking, Mr. Powell?”

He said it was, thank you, but he hadn’t expected it, he hadn’t expected anyone to be here.

“Arrangements were made, sir. It’s my job to see things are done properly, and I hope they have been. Lavinia will be in to keep things shipshape for you and see to any necessary cookery. I’ll be on hand for the more masculine tasks, if you take my meaning, your motor and the electricals, et cetera. Never underrate the importance of organization.”

“What organization?” I said when he told me. “I didn’t arrange anything. I knew Sandy Clements still had a key, and I’ve been meaning to ask for it back. Still, as for asking him to organize anything, to make ‘arrangements’ ...”

“I thought you’d got them in, Sandy and the girl. I thought she came in to clean for you and you’d arranged it that she’d do the same for me. I didn’t want her, but I hardly liked to interfere with your arrangement.”

“No,” I said, “no, I see that.”

They stood there until he was seated at the table and unfolding the white napkin Lavinia had presumably provided. I don’t know where it came from; I haven’t any white table linen. Sandy opened the bottle of wine, which Ben saw to his dismay was a supermarket Riesling. The horror was compounded by Sandy’s pouring an inch of it into Ben’s wine-glass and watching while Ben tasted it.

He said he was almost paralyzed by this time, though seeing what he thought then was “the funny side.” After a while he didn’t find anything particularly funny, but he did that evening. They had cheered him up. He saw the girl as a sort of stage parlor maid. She was even dressed somewhat like that, a white apron with its sash tied tightly around her tiny waist, a white bow on her pale blond hair. He thought they were trying to please him. These unsophisticated rustics were doing their best, relying on an experience of magazines and television, to entertain the visitor from London in the style to which he was accustomed.

Once he’d started eating, they left. It was quite strange, the manner in which they left. Lavinia opened the door and let Sandy pass through ahead of her, looking back to give him another of those conspiratorial naughty looks. She delayed for longer than was necessary, her eyes meeting his until his turned away. A fleeting smile and then she was gone, the door and the front door closing behind her.

Only a few seconds passed before he heard the engine of Sandy’s van. He got up to draw the curtains and saw the van moving off down the road toward the village, its red taillights growing small and dimmer until they were altogether swallowed up in the dark. A bronze-colored light that seemed to be slowly ascending showed through the treetops. It took him a little while before he realized it was the moon he was looking at, the coppery-golden disk of the moon.

He ate some of the ham and cheese they had left him and managed to drink a glass of the wine. The deep silence that prevailed after Sandy and the girl had gone was now broken by birdsong, unearthly trills of sound he could hardly at first believe in, and he went outside to try to confirm that he had really heard birds singing in the dark.

The rich yet cold singing came from the nearest trees of the wood; it was clear and unmistakable, but it seemed unreal to him, on a par somehow with the behavior he had just witnessed, with the use of his name, with the fountain nymph’s coy glances and come-hither smiles.Yet when he came inside and phoned me, it was the nightingales’ song he talked about. He said nothing of the man and the girl, the food, the bed, the “arrangements.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked him when I came down for a weekend in June. “Why didn’t you say?”

“I don’t know. I consciously made up my mind I wouldn’t. You see, I thought they were ridiculous, but at the same time I thought they were your—well, help, your cleaner, your handyman. I felt I couldn’t thank you for making the arrangement with Lavinia without laughing about the way she dressed and the way Sandy talked. Surely you can see that?”

“But you never mentioned it. Not ever till now.”

“I know,” he said. “You can understand why, can’t you?”

2

When I first came to Gothic House, Sandy was about twenty-five, so by the time Ben went there he would have been seven years older than that, a tall, fair man with very regular features who still escaped being quite handsome. His eyes were too pale, and the white skin of his face had reddened, as it does with some of the locals after thirty.

He came to me soon after I’d bought Gothic House, offering his services. I told him I couldn’t afford a gardener or a handyman and I didn’t need anyone to wash my car. He held his head a little to one side. It’s an attitude that implies total understanding of the other person’s mind, and indulgence, even patience.

“I wouldn’t want paying.”

“And I wouldn’t consider employing you without paying you.”

He nodded. “We’ll see how things go then, shall we? We’ll leave things as they are for now.”

“For now” must have meant a couple of weeks. The next time I went to Gothic House for the weekend, the lawn in front of the house that slopes down to the wall above the lakeshore had been mowed. A strip of blocked gutter on the back that I had planned to see to had been cleared. If Sandy had presented himself while I was there, I would have repeated my refusal of his services, and done so in definite terms, for I was angry. But he didn’t present himself, and at that time I had no idea where he lived or even his name.

On my next visit I found part of the garden weeded. Next time the windows had been cleaned. It was only when I came down and found a window catch mended, a repair that could only have been done after entry to the house, that I went down into the village to try to find Sandy.

That was my first real exploration of the village, the first time I noticed how beautiful it was and how unspoiled. Its center, the green, was a triangle of lawn on which the trees were the kind generally seen on park-land, cedars and unusual oaks and a swamp cypress. The houses and cottages either had rendered walls or were faced with flints, their roofs of slate or thatch. It was high summer, and the gardens, the tubs, the window boxes were full of flowers. Fuchsia hedges had leaves of a deep, soft green, spangled with sharp red blossoms. The whole place smelled of roses. It was the sort of village television-production companies dream of finding when they film Jane Austen serials. The cars would have to be hidden, but otherwise it looked unchanged from an earlier century.

A woman in the shop identified Sandy for me and told me where he lived. She smiled and spoke about him with a kind of affectionate admiration. Sandy, yes, of course, Sandy was much in demand. But he wouldn’t be at home that morning, he’d be up at Marion Kirkman’s. This was a cottage facing the pretty green and easily found. I recognized Sandy’s van parked outside, opened the gate, and went into the garden.

By this time my anger had cooled—the shopwoman’s obvious liking for and trust of Sandy had cooled it—and I asked myself if I could legitimately go up to someone’s front door, demand to see her gardener, and harangue him in front of her. In the event, I didn’t have to do that. I walked round to the back, hoping to find him alone there, and I found him—with her.

They had their backs to me, a tall, fair man and a tall, fair woman, his arm around her shoulders, hers around his waist. They were looking at something, a flower on a climber or an alighted butterfly perhaps, and then they turned to face each other and kissed. A light, gentle, loving kiss such as lovers give each other after desire has been satisfied, after desire has been satisfied many times over months or even years, a kiss of acceptance and trust and deep mutual knowledge.

It was not so much the kiss as their reaction to my presence that decided me. They turned around. They were not in the least taken aback, and they were quite without guilt. For a few moments they left their arms where they were while smiling at me in innocent friendliness. And I could see at once what I’d stumbled upon—a long-standing loving relationship and one that, in spite of Marion Kirkman’s evident seniority, would likely result in marriage.

Two women, then, in the space of twenty minutes, had given their accolade to Sandy. I asked him only how he had got into my house.

“Oh, I’ve keys to a good many houses around here,” he said.

“Sandy makes it his business to have keys,” Marion Kirkman said. “For the security, isn’t it, Sandy?”

“Like a neighborhood watch, you might say.”

I couldn’t quite see where security came into it, understanding as I always had that the fewer keys around, the safer. But the two of them, so relaxed, so smiling, so firm in their acceptance of Sandy’s perfect right of access to anyone’s house, seemed pillars of society, earnest upholders of social order. I accepted Marion’s invitation to a cup of coffee. We sat in a bright kitchen, all its cupboards refitted by Sandy, I was told, the previous year. It was then that I said I supposed it would be all right, that of course he must come and do these jobs for me.

“You’ll be alone in this village otherwise,” said Marion, laughing, and Sandy gave her another kiss, this time planted in the center of her smooth pink cheek.

“But I’m going to insist on paying you.”

“I won’t say no,” said Sandy. “I’m not an arguing man.”

And after that he performed all these necessary tasks for me, regularly, unobtrusively, efficiently, winning my trust, until one day things (as he might have put it) changed. Or they would have changed, had Sandy had his way. Of course they changed anyway; life can never be the same between two people after such a happening. But though Sandy kept my key he was no longer my handyman, and I ceased paying him. I believed that I was in control.

So why did I say nothing of this to Ben before he went to Gothic House? Because I was sure, for reasons obvious to me, that the same sort of thing couldn’t happen to him.

The therapist Ben had been seeing since his divorce had advised him to keep a diary. He was to set down his thoughts and feelings, his emotions and his dreams, rather than the actual events of each day. Now, Ben had never done this, he had never “got around to it,” until he came to Gothic House. There, perhaps because—at first—he had few distractions and there wasn’t much to do once he’d worked on his translation and been out for a walk, he began a daily noting down of what passed through his mind.

This was the diary he later allowed me to see part of; other entries he read aloud to me, and he had it by him to refer to when he recounted the events of that summer. It had its sensational parts, but to me much of it was almost painfully familiar. At first, though, he confined himself to descriptions of his state of mind, his all-pervading sadness, a feeling that his life was over, and the beauties of the place, the lake, the woodland, the sunshine, the huge blue cirrus-patterned sky, somehow remote from him, belonging to other people.

He walked daily: around the lake, along a footpath high above damp meadows crossed by ditches full of watercress; down the lane to a hamlet where there was a green and a crossroads and a pub, though he never at that time ventured into the forest. Once he went to the village and back, but saw no one. Though it was warm and dry, nobody was about. He knew he was watched—he saw eyes looking at him from windows— but that was natural and to be expected. Villagers were always inquisitive about and even antagonistic to newcomers; that was a cliché that even he, as a townee, had grown up with. Not that he met with antagonism. The postman, collecting from the pillar-box, hailed him and wished him good morning. Anne Whiteson, the shopwoman, was friendly and pleasant when he went into the shop for tea bags and a loaf. He supposed he couldn’t have a newspaper delivered? He could. Indeed he could. He had only to say what he wanted and “someone” would bring it up every morning.

The “someone” turned out to be Sandy, arriving at eight-thirty with his
Independent.
Lavinia Fowler had already been twice, but this was the first time he had seen Sandy since that first evening. Though unasked, Lavinia brought tea for both of them, so Ben was obliged to put up with Sandy’s company in the kitchen while he drank it. How was he getting on with Lavinia? Was she giving satisfaction?

Ben thought this a strange, almost archaic term. Or should another construction be put on it? Apparently it should, for Sandy followed up his inquiry by asking if Ben didn’t think Lavinia a most attractive girl.The last thing Ben intended to do, he told me, was enter into this sort of conversation with the handyman. He was rather short with Sandy after that, saying he had work to do and to excuse him.

But he found it hard to settle down to
The Golden Apple.
He had come to a description of the contest between the three goddesses, when Paris asks Aphrodite to remove her clothes and let fall her magic girdle, but he could hear sounds from the kitchen, once or twice a giggle, the soft murmur of voices. Too soft, he said, too languorous and cajoling, so in spite of himself, he got up and went to listen at the door.

He heard no more and shortly afterward saw Sandy’s van departing along the lakeshore. But as a result of what Sandy had said, he found himself looking at Lavinia with new eyes. Principally, she had ceased to be a joke to him, and when she came in with his midmorning coffee he was powerfully aware of her femininity, that fragile quality of hers, her vulnerability. She was so slender, so pale, and her thin white skin looked— these were his words, the words he put in his diary—as if waiting to be bruised.

Her fair hair was as fine and soft as a baby’s but longer than any baby had ever had, a gauzy veil, almost waist length, very clean and smelling faintly of some herb. Thyme, perhaps, or oregano. As she bent over his desk to put the cup down, her hair just brushed his cheek, and he felt that touch with a kind of inner shiver just as he felt the touch of her finger. For he put out his hand to take the coffee mug while she still held it. Instead of immediately relinquishing her hold she left her forefinger where it was for a moment, perhaps thirty seconds, so that it lay alongside his own forefinger and skin delicately touched skin.

Again he thought, before he abruptly pulled his hand away, of skin waiting to be bruised, of how it would be if he took that white wrist, thin as a child’s, blue veined, in a harsh grip and squeezed, his fingers more than meeting, overlapping and crushing until she cried out. He had never had such thoughts before, never before about anyone, and they made him uncomfortable. Departing from the room, she again gave him one of those over-the-shoulder glances, but this time wistful—disappointed?

Yet she didn’t attract him, he insisted on that. He was very honest with me about all of it. She didn’t attract him except in a way he didn’t wish to be attracted. Oenone, the shepherdess and daughter of the river, was how he saw her. Her fragility, her look of utter weakness, as of a girl to be blown over by the wind or felled by a single touch, inspired in him only what he insisted it would inspire in all men, a desire to ravish, to crush, to injure, and to conquer.

“Ravish” was his word, not “rape.”

“You really felt all that?” I asked.

“I thought about it afterward. I don’t say I felt that at the time. I thought about it and that’s how I felt about her. It didn’t make me happy, you know—I wasn’t proud of myself. I’m trying to tell you the honest truth.”

“She was”—I hesitated—“offering herself to you?”

“She had been from the first. Every time we encountered each other she was telling me by her looks and her gestures that she was available, that I could have her. And, you know, I’d never come across anything quite like that before.”

Since the separation from his wife he had been celibate. And he could see no end to his celibacy; he thought it would go on for the rest of his life, for the step that must be taken to end it seemed too great for him to consider, let alone take. Now someone else was taking that step for him. He had only to respond, only to return that glance, let his finger lie a little longer against that finger, close his fingers around that wrist.

Any of these responses were also too great to make. Besides, he was afraid. He was afraid of himself, of those horrors that presented themselves to him as his need. His active imagination showed him how it would be with him when he saw her damaged and at his hands, the bruised whiteness, the abraded skin. But her image came into his consciousness many times throughout that day and visited him in the night like a succubus. He stood at the open window listening to the nightingales, and felt her come into the room behind him, could have sworn one of those transparent fingers of hers softly brushed his neck.When he spun round no one was there, nothing was there but the faint herby smell of her, left behind from that morning.

That night was the first time he dreamed of the lake and the tower.

The lake was as it was in his conscious hours, a sheet of water that took twenty minutes to walk around, but the tower on Gothic House was immensely large, as high as a church spire. It had absorbed the house— there was no house, only this tall and broad tower with crenellated top and oeil-de-boeuf windows, as might be part of a battlemented castle. He had seen the tower and then he was on the tower, as is the way in dreams, and Lavinia, the river god’s daughter, was walking out of the lake, water streaming from her body and her uplifted arms. She came to the tower and embraced it, pressing her wet body against the stone. But the curious thing, he said, was that by then
he
had become the tower, the tower was himself, stone still but about to be metamorphosed, he felt, into flesh that could respond and act. He woke up before that happened and he was soaking wet, as if a real woman had come out from the lake and embraced him.

“Sweat,” he said, “and—well, you can have wet dreams even at my age.”

“Why not?” I said, though at that time, in those early days, I was still surprised by his openness.

“Henry James uses that imagery, the tower for the man and the lake for the woman.
The Turn of the Screw,
isn’t it? I haven’t read it for a hundred years, but I suppose my unconscious remembered.”

Lavinia didn’t come the next day. It wasn’t one of her days.That Friday he prepared himself for her coming—nervous, excited, afraid of himself and her, recalling always the dream and the feel against his body of her wet, slippery skin, her small, soft breasts. He put in the diary that he remembered water trickling down her breasts and spilling from the nipples.