Polystom (12 page)

‘You don’t wish to be
owned
by me,’ he said, fiercely. ‘Very well. But you are my wife. We are married. I am a Steward of this System, and it is not possible for us to unknit our bond. It would be untenable, for me. You understand this?’

She was looking at him. It was only a look, but it fired up his rage again. He could hardly bear to be in the same room as his wife now. ‘Say yes,’ he barked at her. ‘Say that you understand what I’ve just said to you.’

Her eyes were almost placid.

Stom crashed out of the room and went upstairs, to the
Lesser Library. It was maddening, impossible. He marched the length of his room, spun like a jaguar in a cage, and marched back again. How to reach her? To compel her – to
make
her understand the idiocy she pursued?

With whatever thready knits of commonsense still holding his sanity together, he knew that he could not confront her in his present mood. He needed to be calm with her, and rational. He understood that she would rebuff any too aggressive insistence on his part with an automatic stubbornness of personality over which – perhaps – she had little control. It was infuriating, but he would have to cool himself down, and try and reach her with a more rational discourse. She could hardly fail to see how her present behaviour contributed to her own as well as his unhappiness, provided only that she thought through her actions intellectually.

Stom called for Nestor, and had him bring up some lunch, a bottle of blue-wine, and a gramophone. He would, he decided, sit and collect himself, listening to some music. ‘Bring up the disks for
Nephelai
,’ he told Nestor. ‘I want to listen to the final arias.’

And so he sat, drinking, whilst Nestor busied himself plugging in the gramophone machine and pulling out the final one of the seven disks from the box marked
Nephelai
. He set the machine playing, and slid away. Polystom wriggled himself deeper into the cushioning of his settee and let the music wash through him. Erodeo had composed few operas, but those few were all masterpieces. The tenor was Hippocles, and the soprano Meleta, and their voices intertwined and arched into the ether of pure song. She – Nephela – had been betrayed by her lover, and was consoled by her childhood friend Touto, but he hesitated to declare his own passion, believing himself unworthy of her. The delicious, agonising, uncertainty of the middle act of the opera was precisely captured in Erodeos’s extraordinary,
stichometric music, which managed somehow to be simultaneously brittle and yearning. Then, as that act closed, Touto had resolved to declare his love, regardless of its impossibility.

But Nephela, never suspecting that her friend carried adoration for her in his heart, has learned that her first love, a warrior called Stasimon, is returning from his distant campaign. She plans a spectacular suicide, eating a certain poison that will (with the strange logic that is found in operas) cause her flesh to dissolve and disappear into the air over a period of hours. She vows to attend Stasimon’s homecoming rally with this poison in her system, and to sing her final song of love rejected to him and his followers as she passes away. Touto discovers the empty phial of poison too late, and the tragic conclusion is inevitable. This was the scene to which Polystom was now listening: Nephela sings her great aria, declaring that she will soon die, but that a fading-away death is inevitable for those spurned in love. There is consternation amongst the followers of Stasimon; but before the soldier can himself reply, Touto rushes onstage declaring that love can be spurned by fate as well as by individuals, and singing a matching aria that bewails circumstance and the poison, now rooted in her flesh and unretrievable. Stasimon himself now intervenes, with a song to a martial melody but in a minor key, where he reveals that he has loved Nephela all along, and had returned specifically to claim her as his bride. But the poison is now taking effect, and Nephela is fading away, dissipating into the cosmos, something Erodeos captures in music with a long drawn-out diminuendo, very difficult for a singer to sustain. In this final aria she sings of the beauty of the air into which her constituent elements will soon dissolve; of the clouds moving slowly like lovers’ limbs and the birds fluttering like lovers’ hearts, of the warmth of the sun and the cool of the night like an indrawn and outward breath, repeated through eternity. Then, softer and softer,
she sings that her love for Stasimon had been a kind of illusion, fostered by his magnificent reputation and his splendid armour; but that she has come to realise that her true love was for Touto. As both men weep, she passes away on an upward-drifting melody line of such sweetness that Polystom, listening to it, cannot prevent tears from coming out. The softness of the music is so exquisite that it brings the hairs at the back of his neck ticklishly to life.

She dies into silence, and silence is maintained upon the stage for fully four minutes, a bold move for a composer of operas (whose job, after all, is to fill his listener’s ears with music). Then Touto and Stasimon conclude the piece with a mournful coda-duet, in which they declare their intentions to act as brothers to one another, and return to the wars to seek an honourable death.

For some reason, Stom’s tears, and the blue-wine he had drunk, had exhausted him, and he found he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He slept. He awoke with a jolt, the turntable of the gramophone still rotating, and sat up with his mouth dry and his head strained almost to the point of headache.

He switched off the machine, and poured a glass of water from the jug Nestor had left for him.

He descended the stairs with Erodeos’s melody still in his head, humming it as he stepped down,
Patros ap’ Okeanou baruacheos
. But there was confusion downstairs, people hurrying back and forth across the hallway and spilling out through the front door. Stom, his tranquil mood dissipating, dissolving into air like Nephela’s dying body, found Nestor waiting just outside the front door.

Beeswing had disappeared again.

‘How can she be gone?’ Polystom blustered at Nestor. The butler had fortified himself with company before breaking the news to his master, gathering round him half a dozen anguish-faced underbutlers.

‘Sir,’ said Nestor, ‘she just slipped away.’

‘A nurse was with her!’

‘Chrysorosa,’ confirmed the butler. ‘Yes, sir. A pantry and laundry girl, normally. The Lady seemed to get on with her. She liked few enough of the servants, to be truthful, sir, but she tolerated Chrysorosa.’

‘Collusion?’ shouted Polystom, his anger now feeding on itself. ‘Between mistress and maid?’

‘Almost certainly not, sir,’ said Nestor, involuntarily stepping back half a pace, his normally slow eyes darting back and forth. ‘Almost certainly not. They were in the garden. The Lady sent her in to fetch a shawl. When she came back out the Lady had gone.’

‘Why didn’t you wake me immediately?’

‘This was only ten minutes since, sir. Perhaps twenty. I thought to . . . recover the Lady, and . . .’

‘You searched the woods,’ interrupted Stom, his rage riding him. ‘The orchard? The greenhouse? What about the boathouse?’

‘I’ve had men in all these places. Immediately, sir, I sent men out to look for her – as soon as—’

Strom hit him, a cross between a backhand slap and a rabbit punch, on his cheek. Not hard, but it froze the scene completely.

Everything hung, for an awkward moment.

‘I,’ said Stom, feeling as if he ought to explain himself, and yet feeling even more furious that he felt that need (to a
servant!
) ‘I left her in your trust! I trusted you!’

‘Sir, I’m sorry,’ said Nestor, quietly but a little hoarsely. A red patch like a blush rouged his cheek. Stom saw, uncomfortably, Nestor’s wearied age – he’d never really
noticed before how old the butler was looking. There were dark areas of tiredness below his eyes, like drooping petals. His skin looked thin, its wrinkles more like cracks in a potter’s glaze than creases.

‘She can’t be far away,’ said Stom. His innards were tumbling with impotent anger, leavened with fear, and a kind of self-disgust that was an unfamiliar and unpleasant sensation. ‘She’s ill! She’s still wearing the bandages on her head, isn’t she – the doctor said she should stay in bed – this might
kill
her,’ he added with a nauseous glee compounded of anxiety and hope. ‘She might
die
, if we don’t get to her soon. Send the men out again – we’ll search again.’

‘The men are still out, sir,’ said Nestor.

‘Then, more. Send out everybody. Where would she go? Where would
you
go?’

But this was an impossible thing for Nestor to imagine (a servant? Running away?).

‘Did she take a boat again?’

‘No, sir, all the boats are accounted for. And cars.’

Polystom had the weeping nurse-servant brought to him, but she had no idea where her mistress could have gone, and could barely speak through her enormous, epileptic sobs and the copiousness of her tears.

Stom hurried out of the house, agitated by emotions greater than he could articulate. He took two young under-butlers whom he sent off left and right on little running excursions. For some reason he got it into his head that she was hiding in the glasshouses; and so he had both exits manned and went inside. Nestor assured him that the place had been thoroughly checked, but he looked through each of the glass rooms anyway, finding only the hot plants waving their fronds and leaves at him in the draught he caused, in what he took to be languid mockery of him; and one broken pane of glass whose punched-out hole formed a jagged heart-shape.

Made even more furious by this wasted time, Stom
hurried to the waterfront. The tide was out, and the beach dotted with servants checking the great haystack heaps of seaweed. The stone pier lay over the beach like a great serpent. Prompted by something, he didn’t know what, Stom ran all the way along to the end of this, to where the water still sucked at the base of stone. He tried to fight the sense of certainty, rising inside him like bile, that Beeswing had simply come down to the water and drowned herself. Perhaps she had flown along the spine of this very pier, on her delicate feet, to drop herself off the end into the water. He wanted to order servants to drag the water below him, but the words stuck in his throat. It couldn’t be. Was she there, below him now, mocking him again in death? Should he leap into the water and dive down to try and find her?

Stupid thoughts. ‘A net,’ he yelled. ‘Somebody bring a net down here!’

As figures scurried in response to his words, Stom looked out again at the shuffling surface of the Middenstead. It stretched away to the horizon; and beyond that, he knew, it reached as far again, before sweeping eastward in a great arc and filling a large depression that reached as far as the southern hemisphere. Its immensity, like the immensity of the sky above him, had always given Stom a sense of security, of being surrounded by a greatness that supported and sustained him. He thought of the fishing trips he had taken with his father and co-father; of swimming expeditions from boats or from this very pier. Had Beeswing polluted even that childhood memory with the ultimate transgression? Had she filled his sea, his childhood bathing ground, with death?

Nestor was at his side now. ‘The tide turned only quarter of an hour ago, sir, if that,’ he said breathlessly. ‘If she went in the water it won’t be far from here.’

But even as men arrived with the weighted net, and others came dragging a boat over the sand, Polystom felt the urgency go out of his body. He turned, waving Nestor
on, and started walking back along the pier. There was an utter certainty in him, as deep as his bones, that his wife was dead, and sodden in the water behind him. The awfulness of it settled over the surface of his thoughts like snow; but deeper down was a curious feeling of vacancy.

He reached the grass, when he was overtaken by shouting. Men were running down from the west. ‘The woods! The woods!’

Stom’s heart leapt up again. ‘Is it her?’ he called, breaking into a jog. ‘The woods?’

‘Sir!’ called his servants. ‘Sir!’

Nestor, despite being twice his master’s age, was at his side in moments. They ran together up the sloping grass, past the orchard to their left and towards the gesticulating men at the borders of the forest.

‘Did you deal with the fishers?—’ Stom gasped.

‘Yes sir!’ bolted Nestor.

‘—with the fishermen?—’

‘Yes sir!’

‘Was she heading in their direction again?’ Stom asked. ‘Is she going that way?’

They ran for two minutes, three, before a growl behind them announced one of Stom’s automobiles, creeping over the grass on its narrow wheels, driven by a jerky-faced undermechanic. Stom spun about and pulled the door open, heaved the driver out, clambered in. The engine grumbled, and caught, and he drove up the slope and between the wide gatepillars of the trees, leaving a wake of two lines behind him, tyre marks deeply scored into the turf.

He drove as far as he could, Nestor running in front of him and the hallooing of other servants audible through the open window, until the trees were too narrow to pass between. Then he tumbled out of the car and sprinted the last hundred yards to a knot of people. Pushing them aside, he saw, with déjà vu, the crumpled heap of clothes on the
forest floor, a flimsy silk gown, a pair of house slippers, and the turbaned mass of bandages.

‘How is she?’ he asked.

‘Breathing,’ said somebody.

Stom gripped her tiny shoulder, and pulled her body over. Her eyes were open; her expression looked, indeed, rather comical, mouth pursed and eye-shaped. She met his eyes.

‘Did you trip over a tree root?’ he asked her.

‘Yes,’ she said, in a voice small but not diminished. And then, miraculously, a smile flicked over her mouth. It only lasted a moment, but it completely changed the mood of the moment.

Stom sat down on the pine needles beside his wife. ‘Where did you think you were going?’ he asked, not unkindly. The entire encounter, its emotional swellings and anticlimaxes, had now taken on the flavour of a ridiculous comedy.