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Authors: Hugh Fleetwood

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BOOK: The Beast
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He waited, with his back to her, for Meg to say
something
. And when, after half a minute, she still hadn’t made any comment, he turned and faced her, so that the sight
of the tears running down his cheeks, and his soft
quivering
mouth, might prompt her to tell him what he wanted to hear.

But Meg was simply staring at her hands, thoughtfully; and when she did, eventually, look up, it was only to give him a small smile and say ‘Oh Benjie, stop being so dramatic.’

That nearly made him snap at her; but he controlled himself and only let the tears run faster down his cheeks; and then, awkwardly, got down on his knees in front of Meg and took her hand.

‘Oh baby,’ he started.

But Meg interrupted him with a giggle, and said ‘Oh Benjie, do stand up.’ And when he didn’t, but stayed there, looking stricken, she went on ‘I know they’re not very nice people, nor easy people, but I’ve been thinking about them lately, and I think they really were only trying to do their best for us. It’s just that we weren’t—or you weren’t—the sort of son they’d been expecting to have, and they didn’t really know how to cope with you. I mean the only people they’d ever come into contact with really were other military men and their wives. They didn’t know anything about—’ Meg paused, and gave another little smile, ‘artists.’

There was only one thing to do; and Benjamin did it. Getting to his feet, not looking at Meg, and sounding as sulky as he possibly could, he said ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.’

And, of course, it worked. Meg jumped up and came over to him; and putting her arms round him, she whispered ‘Oh Benjie, please don’t. Not on our first
evening
together.’

Now it was his turn to say nothing; nor even to move.
And he wouldn’t, he told himself, until Meg had recanted; had taken back every word.

And it seemed she was going to.

‘You know I love you more than anything or anyone in the world,’ she began, and he allowed himself to relax slightly. ‘And you know if it hadn’t been for you I’d have had the most miserable, lonely childhood.’ He relaxed still further. ‘But really, enough’s enough. I don’t want to go on hating them. I don’t want to go on hating anyone. And really there’s no need to any more. It’s just that you’ve got too much imagination. You’ve invented a pair of terrible, evil parents. Just as you’ve invented me in a way. I mean, you think of me as much, much better than I am. I’m really very ordinary. I’m just a twenty-four year old who lives in Italy and works as a secretary to an English actor and wants to have a very ordinary life and—’

But he could stand no more; and with a little shrug, and a shiver, he broke free of Meg; and without looking back once, marched off to the room that Donald had prepared for him.

He locked the door when he got inside; though he need not have bothered. Because within seconds, as he stood there waiting for Meg to start rattling the handle, begging and imploring him to open the door, he heard her
footsteps
retreating through the apartment; and then heard the front door being opened, and closed …

Now he didn’t cry; nor did he pout. He stood still and breathed in deeply, and felt himself grow larger. He felt himself grow larger and larger, till he filled the room; and then broke through the ceiling, and the walls, and filled the whole building. And then larger still, till he filled half the world …

Invent them! He, invent them! Was she going mad?
Had she forgotten their cruelty, their madness? Had she forgotten how their strict military father, when he had been the military attaché in the embassy in Lagos, had taken their pet canary from its cage, held the struggling, fluttering little bird in his hand, and then slowly and deliberately closed a door on its head? Had she forgotten how their sensible golfing mother, when they had gone to spend their summers in whichever out-of-the-way foreign capital their father had been stationed at the time,
knowing
that they both liked to drink milk, every time she had found any had taken it away and hidden it on the excuse that milk was bad for them; till by the end of the summer, when they were due to go back to school—he in New York, and Meg in an American school in Paris, to be as far away from him as possible—every locked closet in the house, every drawer, contained rotting, stinking bottles and cartons of greenish, whitish, mouldy filth? Had she forgotten that? And had she forgotten how, from the time Meg was four, and he nine, they had lectured her on her brother’s selfishness, and sinfulness, and had told her that if she became too friendly with him her smooth little body would go hard and scaly and be covered with sores and scabs; yet had insisted, every year that they
did
go and spend their summers with them, that they sleep together in the same bed on the theory that ‘if you sleep by
yourselves
you’ll start interfering with yourselves and doing yourselves damage’? No, she couldn’t have; just as she couldn’t have forgotten how their father, who passed for a sort of liberal with his colleagues, had lectured them
endlessly
on the innate superiority of the white races whose historic duty it was to destroy all the inferior races, and how their mother, who was very religious, and who lectured them endlessly on the sacredness of their bodies
and the abomination of sex, had, when she had thought she was alone in the house (but on two different occasions they had been spying on her through key-holes), crouched in her bath and urinated on a bible, while giving little electric shocks to her nipples with a home-made gadget of batteries and wires.

And Meg had accused him of inventing them! Would that he had. Then perhaps, he could have made them pathetic, or even funny. As it was they were grey, hideous bringers of death; whom he had survived only by inventing other worlds to live in—other worlds that were both more real and more beautiful than the false, ugly, wicked world his parents had tried to make him believe in—and Meg had survived only because he, right from the beginning, had taken care of her, and given her enough glimpses of those other worlds to make her almost instinctively reject that of her mother and father.

Yes, they had survived, both of them; and now Meg wanted to go back to them, to put herself in danger once again. It was as if for years they had struggled to keep a dreadful monster prisoner—and had succeeded—and now she wanted to go and talk to it; talk to it, and pity it, and release it. But she couldn’t, he told himself. He wouldn’t allow it. For even now, even after all these years of captivity, it still had power, that monster; and though both he and Meg were grown up now, and could take care of themselves, there was still a corner of them—some tiny space in their hearts, let’s say—that was vulnerable. And if, as it might—for they had unerring eyes, monsters—it struck them right there, even now it would have been able to destroy them; or if not destroy them, at least damage them irreparably.

No, Benjamin thought, still standing motionless and vast
in his bedroom, Meg
mustn’t
go and see them; and she wouldn’t. Not if he had anything to do with it.

Though he was probably worrying unnecessarily, he told himself as he started at last to get undressed. Because surely, after they had been together a few days, and their summer took on the pattern of all their summers, she wouldn’t even mention their names, let alone talk about going to see them.

Of course she wouldn’t, he told himself as he got into bed and turned out the lights. And how he longed for tomorrow morning, when they would set off together; just the two of them …

*

Before they did set off however, Benjamin had to get through breakfast with Donald. And since he had slept badly, and woken up feeling ill-tempered and irritated rather than concerned now about Meg’s behaviour the night before—oh, let her go and see them if she wanted to!—and also wondering for the first time, if spending the summer with Meg was such a good idea—weren’t they perhaps getting a bit old for it now, and mightn’t he have had more fun if he had accepted the invitation, to name but one, to go cruising on the Rosenthals’ yacht?—he was even less prepared than yesterday evening to put up with Donald’s incessant chat about his sister; and once again Donald chatted incessantly about nothing else. It wasn’t either, this morning, that he felt put out because Donald asked him nothing about himself. Just that firstly he didn’t like to talk to anyone at breakfast, and secondly he was getting bored with hearing what a perfect, wonderful
creature
dear Meg was. For one thing, he knew she was, and for another—and although it was a flat contradiction—after last night he wasn’t altogether sure if she was.

‘I don’t think of Meg as a secretary,’ Donald said. ‘Nor even as an assistant. She’s a princess; a sort of mythical, fabulous creature sent to inspire me, and give me faith in life.’

Benjamin crunched into a piece of toast, stared dolefully at a glass of orange juice, and just managed to smile.

‘It’s extraordinary how some people—so few, alas—can have that effect on one, isn’t it? That way of drawing you up, of making you see things through their eyes—and of seeing things as beautiful. As
good.
After all, Meg’s
probably
come into contact with just as much meanness, evil, unpleasantness and all the rest as anyone else. Yet she can somehow see beyond it, through it—see it as a minor flaw in some vast and wonderful whole—while most of us just stare at the flaws and think “that’s it.”’

‘Yes,’ Benjamin said.

‘Such a dear, dear child. You know she—’

Benjamin either did know and didn’t want to hear it again, or didn’t know and didn’t want to. But in any case Donald told him, and by the time breakfast was over had put him in such a terrible mood that he did something he hadn’t been intending to do; something he didn’t know why he did, and something that shocked him.

He always, when he travelled, took along a few of his sketches; sketches for paintings he had since completed, sketches for paintings he knew he never would complete, or just sketches he had done in an odd moment, for no particular reason. He took them along to give as thank-you presents to anyone he felt grateful to; or to anyone he felt he should give a thank-you present to. Donald, he
supposed
, was such a person; even though he really hadn’t wanted to stay with him, and had found his company, particularly this morning, tiresome. But when he went into
his room, took a sketch from his bag, and presented it to Donald—who held the piece of paper, with its pen and wash design, first one way up and then the other, and finally said ‘Well it’s very beautiful Benjamin, and I’m most touched, and does it have any title?’—without a moment’s hesitation, and with only the barest glance at the sketch, he said ‘Yes. It’s the sketch of a dead girl.’

‘Oh,’ Donald murmured. ‘Oh dear. Does it have to be?’

Benjamin’s eyes bulged; his lips quivered. No, of course it didn’t have to be. And why
had
he said it? He didn’t know at all. Of course the shape of one side of the paper was vaguely feminine, and of course the lines and scrawls around it did seem to be holding it down, engulfing it; but even so, it could equally have been seen, if one had to see something in it, as a cloud, as a shadow, or—as almost anything. Added to which he never gave titles to his sketches—simply because it was so limiting—and only gave them to his paintings for commercial reasons. So why, why, why?—but he had done it, and now he couldn’t change his mind; so he said to Donald ‘Well I just thought—’, and shrugged; and then smiled, uncomfortably.

He got the feeling Donald would never hang it on his walls, amidst the photographs of his children and
grandchildren
, and his English landscapes …

Five minutes later—five minutes which he spent rather stiffly with Donald, answering, finally, some rather stiff questions about himself—Meg arrived; and Benjamin, still wincing because of the title he had given to the sketch—could he really have been so annoyed with Meg that he had felt she was dead to him, or was it an aftermath of his fears last night that if she went to see their parents they would still be capable of destroying her?—was so glad to see her that he forgot completely how they had parted last
night; and how he had thought about her when he had woken up and over breakfast. And Meg, too, seemed to have forgotten that there had been any unpleasantness between them. She kissed him; she asked him if he had slept well; she told him that she was ready, if he was; and she hold him how happy she was feeling.

‘Well, my dear,’ Donald said to her, ‘I promise I shall try not to call you, and have a wonderful time, and—take care.’

To Benjamin he said—slightly coldly?—‘Well Benjamin, I’m very happy to have met you. And—look after my princess for me.’

To both of them he said ‘Goodbye my dears. Goodbye.’

*

And now at last they could be alone together, the two of them. Or so Benjamin thought. Only as he and Meg walked down the old stone staircase from Donald’s
apartment
, carrying his bags, he was to hear of another hitch to his plans.

Assuming they were going to go to Gaeta by train, he murmured ‘Let’s get a taxi outside, go pick up your things, and then go straight to the station;’ at which Meg looked at him, surprised, and shook her head. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ she said cheerfully. ‘We’ve got a ride down.’

The great bulging eyes swivelled, and swum …

‘Alberto, my boy-friend, is going to drive us down.’

Benjamin was tired of saying ‘Oh Meg.’ He contented himself with a sigh, a pout, and a ‘Why didn’t you say?’

‘I forgot.’

It was too much. First having to put up with Donald, and now this. He thought of making a scene; of leaning his heavy, flabby body against the wall and saying ‘No Meg, enough’s enough. I want to be alone with you. And
I don’t want to have to put up with you jabbering in Italian to some youth.’ But what was the point? This Alberto was obviously already waiting for them. And it would only cause another fight with Meg, and do no good at all. Still, he was furious, and wished he had thought to hire a car and driver yesterday, at the airport. How could Meg do this to him? God knows, he didn’t object to her having a boy-friend—she had always had one, a different one, every summer since she had been fifteen—who could take her out dancing in the evening, take her out to lunch occasionally, and—if he asked Benjamin’s permission first—sleep with her. But never before had one been imposed on him in this way. Never before had one actually been involved in their holiday plans. All the others had either been local boys, from the place where they’d been staying, or had been boys on holiday; so that at the end of their month they all said goodbye to each other, and that was that.

BOOK: The Beast
2.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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