Polystom (8 page)

Polystom had been witness to so many of these arguments that they ceased to alarm him. As he grew older he accepted it as simply the way his two fathers related to one another. On the rare occasion when he did think about it, he may have wondered why these two men, who were supposed to be in love, gave one another so much distress; but it wasn’t for him to say. They had made some secret pact with misery to spend their lives fighting, he assumed.

And yet they had lived together for many years, and it was only when they were both dead that Polystom realised they had been happy. That his quiet father had found a delight in the turmoil and passion of his partner; and that
boisterous co-father had found strength in the calmness of his. As he presided over the funeral of his co-father, his second family funeral in four weeks, he finally understood, or thought he did, that the outward trappings of a relationship hold no more truth to internal health than the plainness of a person’s face is an index to the beauty of their soul. At the funeral he read a poem from Phanicles, his father’s favourite poet. His co-father had not relished poetry, but somehow Polystom felt that a poem was an appropriate gesture at a funeral. Poetry adorned the ceremony, he felt; and so he read something from Phanicles:

the mountain silent after my lover’s gone
and ash like velvet on the hearthstone
and the comet with its great wind-sock of light
and ash like velvet, white
and shamrock, violet, hidden in the hedgebank by the stream
and the fire now slowly silting down
.

Polystom chose that poem because of the delicious sense of sadness it brought to his mind. It wasn’t specifically a funereal poem, although there seemed to Polystom to be something obliquely elegiac about the lines. But as he finished the final line he looked down from the funeral dais to see the bored, or even disgusted, faces of his co-father’s relatives. This shocked him, and with a potent sense of inner revelation he realised that just as he had seen his co-father’s blustery aggression as a flaw, a vulgarity, something to be disregarded before you could feel love for the man – just so, exactly, there were many people in the Stewardship who saw his own and his father’s quiet love for poetry in exactly the same way. For them it was a weakness, a blot on character, a distraction from the life of doing and overcoming that properly defined a man. In the pulpit Polystom had a nebulous sense of understanding of what the world must look like to his co-father’s kin; the way
it must have appeared to his co-father when alive. Polystom and his boy, the two of them hidden away in this foppish nothingness, burying their minds in this nonsense, blind to the world around them. Unmanning themselves with this mental decay called
poetry
, not pushing themselves into manly assertion. There were things to do! Leadership meant stepping out in front of the crowd, not hiding amongst the trees. It was a sort of sickness, a self indulgence, the very opposite of a self-discipline. Polystom looked down on the curled lips of his co-father’s brothers and cousins, and felt a needle of shame. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps it was a contemptible occupation for a man. Certainly it was inappropriate to read poetry at the funeral of his poetry-hating co-father. It was wrong because unmanly.

And with this realisation, Polystom felt a deeper awe at the strength of the bond that had tied his co-father to his father. That had kept the furious spirit of his co-father living in this house for nearly twenty years, cloistered away from the burly flurry of Stahlstadt where great men made great decisions, and shaped the destiny of the whole Stewardship of Worlds.

The two of them, father and co-father, had sometimes visited Stahlstadt of course, and on a few occasions young Polystom had accompanied them. The first time he had been overawed by the scale of the city, the luxuriance and heat of the planet of Bohemia on which it was located. The second time, he had swaggered more, being fourteen and of a swaggering age. The three of them stayed in the same hotel, his father and co-father in one room and Polystom in a room by himself. But he had not wanted the other people in the hotel to know how largely, still, the towers, high walkways and massy stone objects of the city intimidated him. He had pretended a world-weary confidence, strolling up and down the wide stone stairways, riding the sliding cars as if he had been doing it all his life. Everybody else seemed so much sleeker than he. Everybody else seemed to
fit in. Once, foolishly, he slipped off a sliding car and grazed his knee on the track. He never saw anybody else do that. On another occasion he walked down a main esplanade so caught up in admiration of the trio of colossal towers that dominated the city centre that he put his foot in a grille and fell over. People were too well bred to laugh openly, of course, but he sensed their amusement. Back in the hotel, as the three of them were leaving, a hotel servant dropped one of Polystom’s bags. There was nothing fragile in the bag, but Polystom beat the boy with a rage fuelled by relief that there were clumsier people on the planet than himself.

He had been glad to return home after the second visit, back to the estate where he knew every square metre of the wood around the house, where the servants respected him. He sank into his favourite poetry as a weary man sinks into a hot bath, for the comfort as well as the sensation of being cleaner afterwards. It was a month before his seventeenth birthday. He was reading Phanicles’ ‘Meadow Poems’.

He had visited the arable land south and east of the Middenstead often enough, and it was pretty countryside of course, but Polystom’s heart was in the woodlands. He wished fervently that Phanicles had written some ‘Forest Poems’, but there was a subject that had never inspired the great man. Polystom tried writing such poetry himself, tried to imagine himself becoming, after his father’s death, the Poet-Steward, the ruler with poetry in his soul. But somehow the poems fell flat. No matter how excited he had been writing them, no matter how much of the thrill and energy
of being in the forest he tried to pour into them, somehow they simply didn’t work as poems.

No, it was no good. He was ashamed to show his poetry to anybody in the family. He made his groomsman read it, but the fellow was a servant, and all he could do was nod and mutter appreciatively. One day, Polystom thought, one day I’ll have a soul mate, somebody who’ll understand my poetry and my love for poetry.

He told her, one breakfast, ‘We have not been together as man and wife for a week.’ He meant
we have not made love
, but could not bring himself to speak so directly.

She looked at him, but didn’t reply. She drank coffee for breakfast, ate no food. It was no wonder she was so slight in her frame. If she nibbled away a side of bread in a day it was a large meal for her. Eat! he shouted inwardly. Eat some damn food! Build up some small reservoir of strength, so that you can act as a woman and not as a ghost! But he didn’t say any of this out loud, nor did his inward fury inform his speaking voice.

She was looking past him now, out of the breakfast room window. A brisk spring wind was blowing straight up the Middenstead. The glass was rattling gently in its frames.

‘Nestor tells me,’ Polystom said, after a while, ‘that you have taken to sleeping in the Velvet Bedroom.’

She caught his eye briefly, with the most ghostly of smiles on her face. Was she mocking him?

‘He
also
tells me,’ Stom continued, gripping the handle of his butter spoon with unnecessary force, ‘that you don’t settle in any one bedroom for very long.’ If only you took
one
bedroom, he wanted to say. If only you
settled yourself somewhere
. Then I would know where to find you. He spooned a lump of butter onto his plate.

‘I found some sketches under the chaise-baissé in the Yellow Room,’ she said, unexpectedly. This wrong-footed Polystom, who had become used to her unbroken silence at breakfast. She couldn’t even be consistent in that!

‘Sketches?’ he snapped.

‘Of dogs, I think.’

It took a moment for Stom to locate himself. ‘My great grandfather used to sketch. He assembled a bestiary of animal sketches. Perhaps those were discards. Or copies. The original are now in private collection – my mother’s mother keeps them all.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Did you say dogs?’

She nodded.

‘There aren’t any dogs on Enting, you know,’ he said. ‘The climate doesn’t agree with them. Lots of insects in the air here, aboriginal insects, and their bite kills off almost all breeds.’

There was a silence after this little lecture, broken only by the fluttery rattle of the window panes in their frames.

Shortly, Beeswing slipped out of her chair and through the door, vanished, as insubstantial an exit as befitted her.

All that day Stom cursed himself inwardly, marching vigorously through the forest to try and burn off his sense of indignation. His mood wavered between fury and self-pity. For a while he would be spitting with frustration that there had been the chance of connection, that her observation on the sketches had suggested itself as a bridge, that if he hadn’t been so inwardly clotted with anger he might have responded kindly to her words, might have established a dialogue, and the two of them could have started the slow process of growing together. But this mood would flip about in moments and would be replaced by an anger as hard as knucklebones. What was the matter with her! Why couldn’t she be a more conventional wife! It
wasn’t
his fault, it really wasn’t, he had tried over and over. It was
her!
She had abdicated the proper responsibilities of a wife and partner. Even if she
fought
him it would be preferable; even if she spat at him and flashed her nails at his face. Anything would be better than this grey passivity, as if she weren’t entirely real, as if
he
weren’t substantial and important – the Steward of Enting, after all! By this stage Polystom was kicking great patches of last year’s pine
needles into the air, like winnowing wheat, with swooping great swings of his legs.

By his return to the house in the evening this rage had shrunk, distilled itself into a pearl of rancour seemingly located in his gut. His wife did not appear for supper. Stom sent the underbutler to seek her out, but after twenty minutes the young man returned, red with embarrassment, to say that mistress wasn’t hungry, chose not to dine with him. The rage flared in Polystom’s breast again – to humiliate him
via a servant!
It was too much. He ate his food with a savage deliberation, and then asked the underbutler where his wife might be found. In the Print Room.

He thumped his way along the corridors and to the Print Room furious, determined to vent his anger at Beeswing. He decided he was going to tell her that it wouldn’t do, that she was not acting in an appropriate manner, that she needed to pull herself together. But before he reached the door he was imagining both sides of the argument.
What have I done wrong?
he imagined her asking him.
In what ways, specifically, have I erred?
It wasn’t
like
that, Stom told himself. It wasn’t that he could say ‘you have over-stepped the mark in this or that regard’, or ‘this offends me’ or ‘that is unacceptable.’ It was more a question of her overall demeanour; her attitude, of her refusal to live the life demanded by the code that governed the whole of civilised life in the System. It was a sort of dumb insolence. And anyway (he was clenching his fists so hard that the muscles in his forearms were starting to ache) – and anyway! It wasn’t his responsibility to explain all this to her! Even if he could, even if he
could
lower his mind to an actuarial listing of specific instances, it would be inappropriate for him to act that way. It would be beneath him, in a very tangible sense. Couldn’t she see that? She was the maladjusted child of a lesser branch of blood. He was the Steward of Enting! His family line was one of the oldest, as well as the most distinguished, in the System. Presumably she had understood that, presumably that was why she had
agreed to marry him in the first place. It was
her
job to accommodate him, and
not
the other way around. If he were to settle down beside her and start listing all the things she was doing wrong, it would be demeaning not only to himself but to everything he represented. He had given her a particular gift by marrying her! He didn’t insist upon any sordid exchange-value propriety, of course, but surely she understood what it meant to be married to somebody so well bred? He
could
stoop, turn himself into an accountant of proper and improper behaviour; he
could
demean himself by turning into schoolteacher and take her step-and-step through the correct way of acting. But if he did that sort of stooping, he would make himself less worthy of her love in the first place!

Couldn’t she see that?

He knocked on the door of the Print Room, but there was no answer. Opened the door to find Beeswing sitting at the window. Somehow his resolve dripped away through him, like drainwater running down the pipe of his spine. She looked extraordinarily beautiful, her pale skin glazed with the windowlight, her eyes intensely focused on the outside, a weird and spiritual stillness in her posture. He joined her by the window, searching with his own eyes for whatever it is that has captured her spirit so completely. He couldn’t see anything special in the view. The light was grey, although it was a bright grey, and clouds scattered through the sky like suds. He looked out over the familiar view, the lawn of the garden falling and rising like green sighs, the orchard and a glint from the roofs of the glasshouses. The forest gloomed over to the right, but Beeswing’s eyes were on the sea, restless and full under the spring air, its surface further off (this was just visible) tickled by occasional showers.