The Lime Twig (10 page)

It seemed hardly more than teatime but it was dusk, fast coming on to nightfall when there’s a fluttering in steeples and the hedgerow turns lavender, when lamps are lit on ancient taxis and the men are parading slowly in the yards of jails. Castles, cottages and jails, a country
preparing for night, and time to set out the shabbiness for the day to come, time for a drink.

Sparrow felt the mood: “Give us another liter of that Itie stuff,” he said. The waiter filled their glasses and Larry heaped the plates with second servings of the spaghetti and tomato sauce. The waiter could see the blue butt and shoulder holster inside his coat. “Cheers,” said Sparrow, while Jimmy Needles drank his health.

And between the tables: “You dance divine,” said Sybilline, “just divine. …”

A quartet of scar-faced Negroes was playing something Banks had first heard out of gramophones in Violet Lane, something whistled by the factory girls on their way to work. No favorite now, no waltz carried on the tones of an old comet, but music that set him trying to pump Syb’s hand up and down in time with the piano player’s tapping shoe. There was a trumpet, a marimba and bass and the piano on which a white girl was supposed to sit and sing. Beside his bench was a flabby fern in a bucket and the piano player kept a bottle there, under the dead green leaves. Banks could clearly hear the fellow’s foot going above the syncopation of the racy song.

Banks had never learned to dance but he was dancing now. He pumped her hand and Syb wasn’t afraid to move, wasn’t afraid to laugh, and he found her spangled slippers everywhere he stepped and saw the drops of candlelight—on the tables there were candles fixed to the bottoms of inverted tumblers—swelling the tiny pearls pushed into the fiery hair. For a moment, admiring the
decorative row of pearls, he thought of the faces children model out of bread dough and of the eyes they fashion by sinking raisins into the dough with their stubby thumbs. Then, with the hand on her waist, he felt a bit of Sybilline’s blouse pulling out of her skirt and heard her voice, flitting everywhere fast as her feet, saying, “Let’s have a drink-up, Mike, a rum and a toss. …”

The room was filled with people from the Damps—a racing crowd. In this room in the town surrounded by farm and vicarage and throaty nightingale there were people who did their banking in High Fleet Seven and others who did their figuring in the slums, all sporting now—it was the night before the running of the Golden—and ordering Spumoni’s best. Like a theater crowd, a society in which the small person of Needles could go unnoticed, though wearing rainbow silks and cap and a numbered placard on his puffy sleeve. And Banks felt that he too went unnoticed, felt that he could drink and dance and breathe unobserved at last. There were enormous black-and-white paintings of horses about the walls along with the penciled handwritten names of endless guests. There was the odor of whisky and Italian cooking, and the Negroes never ceased their melody of love and Lambeth Walk.

“Coo, Mike,” she said just before they reached the table, “it’s going to be a jolly evening.” In Syb’s voice he heard laughter, motor cars and lovely moonlit trees, beds and silk stockings in the middle of the floor.

Glasses in hand they did not sit, but stood beside the table, because she wanted to dance again and couldn’t
bear sitting down. They held hands while the small exsoldier poured and Needles sucked in his cigarette and looked up at him.

“Mr. Banks,” and it was Larry, lifting the fork, letting the candle shine across his face, “feeling a little better now?”

“Quite nicely, thanks,” he answered.

“Bottom’s up!” the girl said suddenly, and swallowed off the wine, balancing against his arm and tilting so that he saw the heart throb, the wine’s passage down the throat from which she was capable of laughing, crying, whispering. So he drank also and it was the hard dry dusty taste of wine and he was warmed and pleasurably composed. He remembered not the Baths, the Damps, poor wretched Cowles, nor the rooms in Dreary Station, but a love note he had written at the age of twelve when the city was on fire. And remembering it he looked at Sybilline and saw in her eyes the eyes of an animal that has seen a lantern swinging on a blackened hill.

“Excuse us,” he said, and put down the glass. “This is our melody.”

In his arms she was like the women he had thought of coming out of comfort rooms. Or it was what they had done in the shelters or when the bands were marching—upright, holding each other close before the parting. One of his hands was on her body and the sequins kept falling off her blouse to the floor. They were dancing on sequins. He was able now, while holding her, to try and tuck in the blouse.

“It’s shrunk,” she murmured, “it’ll never stay.” But
his fingers pushed in the cloth, and over the top of her auburn head he saw the piano player leaning to drink from the bottle pulled out of the bucket and saw the marimba player’s black dusty hands—there was a big gold wedding band on one finger—shaking, trembling in mid-air. Everyone was talking horses, talking the Golden, but he was moving round the little floor with Syb.

“You know,” pulling her head away from his brown lapels, but dancing, dancing, “that other chap was hopeless. Wouldn’t even buy me an ice. But whatever did you do with his binoculars?”

He waited and then: “Gave them to a fellow selling tickets.”

Later still, when she happened to see the jockey holding his head and Sparrow slipping something to the waiter—a Neapolitan with dirty shirt and mustaches—when the candles were softly dying and the wine was dregs—and still they were turning on the floor—then she laughed, spoke against his chest: “It’ll be a jolly evening, Mike. I promise. We’ll go to bed and you’ll like my bed, Michael. …” And then in the middle of the floor with the others watching and Larry pulling sharply on his coat over the holster, sending Needles out for the hired car, then she gave him her own lips soft, venereal, sweet and tasting of sex.

But Sparrow stopped them kissing, tapped on his arm. “Come now, Banks, Larry says we’re going to a proper place.”

It was 4 A.M. in the darkness that had begun with bees and warbling and the fading of bells, and Thick had
used the ropes. Now she was bound, her wrists were tied together to the bedpost of brass, and Thick was snoring. He had somehow got her back into the white gown but had left the ties unfastened. It hardly covered her and despite the pain she could feel the gauzy touch of the old hat against one bare leg. Despite the darkness of the night she could faintly see the shreds of the long tasseled gown which he had ripped with his knife, muttering, “… Try to get big Thick in trouble, eh, try to make Thick look a fool. …” and had strewed viciously about the room, across the floor. A torn piece of the bodice was hanging over the closet door. And the little steamer trunk—how desperately she had found it, rummaged through the clothes of the long-dead woman. Cursing her, he had locked the little steamer in the cellar. Locked all escape away, then beaten her. And she had gone unconscious for an hour, for several hours, but there was no sleep for her. A bed she could not know— upon it violence that seemed not meant for her—this hour in which she could not sleep, arms drawn back and flesh captured with Thick’s rope, so tightly that her hands were cold: she knew now the hunger of the abducted, knew how the poor girls felt when they were seized.

Four A.M. and she was one of the abducted. She wanted to stand at the window, hear a voice through the wall, find a flower pressed between the pages of a book, eat from a plate she recognized. But there was only the darkness smelling so unfamiliar and the ropes that cut and burned. She knew there was enormous penalty for what they had done to her—but she could not conceive 
of that, did not require that: she only wanted a little comfort, a bit of charity; with the awfulness, the unknowable, removed. Once when a girl—and she had been a girl—they had sent her away somewhere, and now the soreness, the sleeplessness, the sensation of invisible bruises reminded her of the hearth with an uneasy fire on it and an old woman threading buttons, an endless number of buttons—blue and white and violet—on a string. She was a child anything could be done to—and now, now a docile captive. And when Monica, the little girl, awoke about this hour with her nightmares, Margaret took them to be her own bad dreams, as if in soothing the child she could soothe herself.

But it wasn’t soothing she wanted, it was a task or other to do. She hadn’t believed Thick’s beating, really, though it put her out for an hour or more. Later, lying strapped to the bed, she told herself it was what she might have expected: it was something done to abducted girls, that’s all. She thought she had read a piece about a beating. And yet when it came it surprised her. Though thinking now, listening, looking back through the dark, she realized—this despite the article she had read—it was something they couldn’t even show in films.

Because his sweat smelled raw when he tied her. And because after that, after he had grunted making the knots and cursed carrying the trunk down, he had become silent and watched her for a while, his precious radio telling them the time and starting a symphony, and then he had told her he might have to tape her mouth and she hardly heard it, listening to the low music and still
feeling the hurt in her wrists and to herself considering that never before had her hands been tied.

And he remarked: “You don’t look half bad. Like that. …”

But he hadn’t forgiven her, because it was then that he stepped nearly out of sight across the room and she, hurting in the armpits as well as wrists, decided to try just how much freedom she really had—with only her arms drawn back to the post—and flexed a knee, the other knee, moved one foot far on the mattress and rolled her hips as much as she could. Until something told her she was being watched by Thick.

Then he came at her with the truncheon in his hand— it made her think of a bean bag, an amusement for a child—and wearing only his undervest and the trousers with the top two buttons open. He was in his stockinged feet and cigarette smoke was still coming out of his nose. She could see the dial of the little dry-cell radio in his glasses.

“I’ve beat girls before,” whispering, holding the truncheon in the dark, bracing himself with one fat hand against the wall, “and I don’t leave bruises. When it’s done you won’t be able to tell, you see. Plenty of girls— maids, the nude down in Robin’s Egg Blue, the tarts who run the stitching machines, a kid named Sally. Used to operate in Violet Lane, I did. Gaslight scenes is my attraction. And if I happened to be without my weapon,” raising a little the whiteness, the rubber, “the next best thing is a newspaper rolled and soaking wet. But here, get the feel of it, Miss.” He reached down for her and
she felt the truncheon nudging against her thigh, gently, like a man’s cane in a crowd.

“It ain’t so bad,” he whispered.

She was lying face up and hardly trembling, not offering to pull her leg away. The position she was tied in made her think of exercises she had heard were good for the figure. She smelled gun oil—the men who visited the room had guns—and a sour odor inside the mattress. Perhaps the little one called Sparrow had left it there. Or even Thick, now standing beside her in the dark, because Thick liked to sleep on it in the afternoons. She remembered how earlier he had slept and how, after she and the child returned to the table, Monica had found a jack, as she thought she might, and won the game. And now, hearing the music, the symphony that old men were listening to in clubs, now she no longer would be able to play with Monica. She cared for nothing that Thick could do, but she would miss the games. There was a shadow on the wall like a rocking chair; her fingers were going to sleep; she thought that a wet newspaper would be unbearable.

Then something happened to his face. To the mouth, really. The sour sweat was there and the mouth went white, so rigid and distended that for a moment he couldn’t speak: yet all at once she knew, knew well enough the kinds of things he was saying—to himself, to her—and in the darkness and hearing the faint symphonic program, she was suddenly surprised that he could say such things.

His arm went up quivering, over his head with the
truncheon falling back, and came down hard and solid as a length of cold fat stripped from a pig, and the truncheon beat into her just above the knee; then into the flesh of her mid-thigh; then on her hips; and on the tops of her legs. And each blow quicker and harder than the last, until the strokes went wild and he was aiming randomly at abdomen and loins, the thin fat and the flesh that was deeper, each time letting the rubber lie where it landed then drawing the length of it across stomach or pit of stomach or hip before raising it to the air once more and swinging it down. It made a sound like a dead bird falling to empty field. Once he stopped to increase the volume of the radio, but returned to the bedside, shuffling, squinting down at her, his mouth a separate organ paralyzed in the lower part of his face, and paused deceptively and then made a rapid swing at her, a feint and then the loudest blow of all so swiftly that she could not gasp. When he finally stopped for good she was bleeding, but not from any wound she could see.

For how many minutes he had kept it up, she did not know. Nor how long ago it was when he started. Because when she first opened her eyes he was snoring and the radio had changed. Comics were talking and she could not understand a word of it. And because now she was like a convent girl accepting the mysteries—and still Thick snored—and no matter how much she accepted she knew it now: something they couldn’t show in films. What a sight if they flashed this view of herself on the screen of the old Victoria Hall where she had seen a few
pictures with Michael. What a view of shame. She had always dressed in more modest brown, bought the more modest cod, prayed for modesty, desired it. Now she was hurt—badly hurt, she expected. And she remembered a woman in the basement flat being run down by a bus and telling it: and she felt that way herself—still bleeding—felt the damage deep inside, aching in unanticipated places, paining within. There wasn’t any Mrs. Stickley now, and that other woman—in the basement flat—had died.

She felt that she herself could die. In those early hours she had not thought to scream. But now she was prostrate in Little Dora’s Roost and even Little Dora, who hated them playing cards, was gone. And without the presence of some other woman, any woman, she could die. Thick had been too rough with her, treated her too roughly, and some things didn’t tolerate surviving, some parts of her couldn’t stand a beating. She hadn’t even her free hands with which to rub them.

So finally she sobbed several times in this hour before the dawn. The moon had failed, the last clothes off her back were torn to shreds, the ginger cake they had given her at noon sat half-eaten and bearing her teeth marks in a chipped saucer atop the wardrobe. The moonlight’s wash reached the window and fell across the brass and Margaret on the bed: a body having shiny knees, white gown twisted to the waist, arms stretched horizontal to the end of the bed and crossed; gray mattress-ticking beneath the legs whose calves were swollen into curves, and the head itself turned flat in the same direction she
had raised one hip, away from the farther wall against which Thick snored; and a wetness under the eye exposed to the wash of light and the sobs just bubbling on the lips. Margaret inert, immobile, young woman with insides ruptured and fingers curling at the moment of giving sound to her grievance.

The sobs were not sweet. They were short, moist, lower than contralto, louder than she intended; the moanings of a creature no one could love. But Monica must have heard them—Monica whom Little Dora had brought back to the Roost after Thick himself had gone to sleep—or perhaps those sobs merely coincided with sobs of the child’s own. Because when Margaret sobbed aloud, Monica sat up screaming.

The girl was given to having nightmares. All day long she was clever, turning away her inoculated arm, hiding inside her fists the little sharp black lines of her fingernails, walking on heels to prevent the sole of her left sandal from flapping, winning every afternoon at cards, though she had no use for horses. At the sink in the closet she spent time daubing herself with drops of Paradise Shore from a vial—shaped like a slipper—which she carried in a small white purse with a handle. She was forever finding hairpins on the floor and putting them quickly to her head. And she drank tea with her legs crossed and her good arm—the one without the scab—thrown over the back of the chair. Tall for her age, thin, not yet able to read, wearing socks that didn’t reach to her ankles and a cameo ring tied from finger to wrist with a length of green ribbon, readily speaking of
the pets—all suicides she said—which she had kept in their Farthing Maude flat, she was pale and bony and still smelling of dolls she had cared for, a girl expecting no favors in her bright-green dress, though sufficient enough in the daylight.

“She’s being too friendly with the prisoner,” Thick said whenever he could.

But at night there were horrors. At night she sweated her innocence and, bolting up in her shift, declared she’d been swimming in the petrol tank of a lorry, or watching three rubber dolls smartly burning, or sitting inside a great rubber tire and rolling down a steep cobbled hill in the darkness. And Margaret remembered these dreams.

Now Margaret’s sobs and Monica’s screams commenced together and continued together, variants of a single sound, screaming and weeping mingled. Margaret was lying with puffy red eyes closed but fully conscious of the mingling sounds. Monica was sitting upright on the brass bed next to her, not in the shift but merely in panties this night, and half the childish head of hair was down, the pins kept falling—a small body untouched, unidentified, except by arm bandage and the panties, and her eyes were shining open. Yet she was asleep, and between the two stripped beds and on the opposite wall the washed-back glow of the moon was lighting the cheap print in its glassless frame, print of a young woman who—in moonlight herself and with long hair drawn frontward across her chest, with two large butterflies sleeping upon her shoulders—was in the act of stepping into the silver pond to drink. So
Margaret felt the two sounds coming from herself, starting from the same oppressive breast, as if the other half of sadness was quite naturally fear. And Margaret then opened her eyes and her face was toward Monica’s bed and her arms were spasmodically flexing a little against rope and unyielding wrists and brass.