The Lime Twig (11 page)

“Ducky,” she whispered then, no longer sobbing, “Ducky. …”

Monica’s head was lifted and the neck was stretched. There was a white thread hanging from the opened lips and it blew gently in the vibrations of the scream. The tooth-marked cake was on the wardrobe behind her.

“Ducky … wake up now, Ducky.”

She was not awake yet, but she began to move: the graceless motions of the undressed dreaming child, fumbling off the bed, crouching and bending over as if the dream lay in the white innocent oval of her belly, stooped but holding the tiny hands out trembling to sense the night, and neither falling nor gliding across the distance between the beds yet coming on with a kind of limbless instinct, all disarrayed as an adult woman walking in the night. Until suddenly the little girl collapsed, fell forward, and buried the scream between Margaret’s cheek and the ticking. And by touch of the child’s skin, she knew that her own cheek was wet.

“Wake up, wake up,” she whispered, and still Thick snored and she could not hold the girl.

But Monica’s hands were clinging. She smelled the odors of soap and Paradise Shore and there was a hand upon her own shoulder making the flesh feel large, and
the other small wedge-shaped hand was thrust between the mattress and her breast. Her lips were against the child’s eyes and she could taste them. Somewhere she was losing blood, but there was no longer any sobbing or screaming. Only the melting dream, the feel of a dangling hairpin and at the foot of the empty bed next her own the dark-blue shade of one of Monica’s sandals.

“Ducky,” whispering against the eyes, “feeling a little better? There’s a girl.”

In the silence, glancing away from the face, she felt the child’s fingers and touch of the cameo ring starting again at the round of her own shoulder; then traveling lightly away to the elbow and reaching the wrists, stopping. And followed by the other hand until both the child’s arms were outstretched and come to a point atop her own, so that despite the cold and numbness she felt the grip, while somewhere below her waist she seemed to be sinking, caving in wall by tissue wall.

“Poor Margaret,” said the little girl, “I could cry, I could. …”

“See can you do anything with the knots,” she whispered then.

Monica knelt on the ticking near Margaret’s head—a thin bent back, silver between the ribs, bowed as if for an old woman’s drunken hand—and tried to work the rope ends.

“I can’t,” leaving off, soothing her fingers against the coolness of the brass. “What are we going to do?”

“Perhaps you could put a coat round me,” she whispered at last. “If only Michael knew. …”

So the child fetched Little Dora’s coat and spread it over Margaret and brought a glass of water and Banks’ wife drank—some of it spilled and wet the mattress— and Monica dressed herself in the discarded green dress and sandals and socks. And on her own bare bed again: “Larry’ll make him turn you loose. I promise.”

“Yes. Go to sleep now, Monica.” She watched the child lying firmly in the moonlight, watched two small hands carry the cake up and into the shadow of the mouth, listened to the rigid and fragile sounds of chewing. Later she heard Monica brush away the crumbs, lie still again.

Outside on a branch above the garbage receptacle, an oven tit was stirring: not singing but moving testily amidst the disorder of leaf, straw sprig, remnant of gorse, fluttering now and then or scratching, making no attempt to disguise the mood, the pallidness, which later it would affect to conceal in liveliness and muted song. A warbler. But a sleepless bird and irritable. Through drowsiness and barge-heavy pain she noticed the sounds of it and did not smile; saw rather a panorama of chimneys, fine rain, officers of the law and low yards empty of children; farther off there was a heap of tile and a young woman in rubber shoes, an apron and wide white cap, and there were bloodstains on the ticking.

She heard the door, and when it closed again it shook the picture of the woman bending at the pond. He was swaying in the room and stately drunk. Without feigning sleep and in innocence Margaret watched him, wondering what had changed him now, and smelled the dark
rum which had stained the teeth, the lips, the tongue. The light was more than a wash—it seemed to come off the wardrobe’s empty saucer, shine from the print of the pond, rise up from the worn flooring beneath his feet. Or the light was coming off the man himself.

Finally she understood this much: he was not fully dressed. The coat, the tie, the chemise-soft shirt, the undervest, were gone. And she was staring at naked arms, at white face and soot-black hair, at something silver that stretched and reflected the moon’s pale tone from below his bare neck to the belted line of his trousers. And she thought that softly, ever so softly, he was humming as he swayed there, some sort of regimental march perhaps.

He moved then. Bringing the light, the glow, still closer—without any motion—he started down between the two brass beds, stopped—breathing near her shoulder—and fumbled in his pocket until he found and opened a little penknife that was only a sparkle before the curved sheet of steel. Despite the cold light of his chest she knew beforehand that his fingers would be hot, and his fingers were hot when, back turned to Monica, he stooped and reached—her own eyes were to the side and up and she saw the shining links like fish scales, and pressed to them the triangular black shape of the pistol —and began to cut. Once she saw his face, and it was the angel’s whiteness except for a broken place at the comer of his mouth which set her trembling.

She waited and felt triumph while he cut. Then burning. For all his gestures were considerate, performed
calmly and with care. There was sureness and the heated fingers. Yet there came his sound of breathing, and with exactitude he was yet slashing and the blade that went through Thick’s ropes went into her wrists, her own wrists as well. They too began to bleed.

Even now, after how many hours, being able to move her arms, drag them back to her sides then cross them upon her stomach, chafe them, touch the welted wrists, even now there was little pleasure in it, feeling the scratches, cuts, stinging of the blood. “You’ve wounded me,” she whispered, eyes to the ceiling and in darkness. “You cut me.”

He said only: “I meant to cut you, Miss. …”

So sometime after 4 A.M. she tried to use her numb and sleeping arms, twice struck out at him, then found her hands, the bleeding wrists, the elbows, and at last her cheek going down beneath and against the solid sheen of his bullet-proof vest. At that moment sunlight roused the day’s first warbling of the heavy oven tit, and Monica slipped away through the unguarded door.

Sparrow, having changed from wine to whisky and being drunk but not stately drunk, knelt in the middle of Larry’s room and, surrounded by weapons of countless shape and caliber—black and oily, loaded, strewn across the floor and piled on the bed and on the horsehair rocker and the footstool, a collection of Webleys, Bren guns, automatics and revolvers to make the Violet Lane men whistle—and fumbling with string and paper, beret pushed all the way back and cupping the bald spot
that protruded from the rear of his skull, fumbling and paying no attention to the woman crouched in the comer and sneering, tried to wrap something into a passable packet and failed until he cried, “Come over here, Little Dora, and give us a hand with this present for my boy Arthur.”

“Don’t you know what eggs are good for, Michael?”

The hall bulb shone orange through the cracks round the door and moonlight was coming through the cobwebbed window. Across the floor boards the moon was one square and silver-tinted patch of light within which, in a silken heap, lay a stocking that wanted fingering; next to it a safety pin which, by moonlight and with point unclasped, looked charmed and filigreed, as personal as a young girl’s fallen brooch. There was no sign
of Cowles. There was nothing left of the jockey, not a boot or rubber jersey. Though out of the sounds of bottles smashing downstairs there came bursts of Jimmy Needles’ laughter, loud and ribald and grievous.

It was 2 A.M. of the last night he spent alive—last darkness before the day and running of the Golden— and the covers were tossing. She had given a single promise and three times already made it good, so now he knew her habits, knew what to expect, the commotion she could cause in bed. And it was a way she had of rising and kicking off the covers with cartwheel liveliness and speed each time she lost a pearl—and she had lost three pearls—and asking him to hunt for it through the twisting and knotting of the sheets. Now the covers were cartwheeling and falling about his shoulders all at once and there was the fourth to find. At the end of the bedstead opposite the pillows she came to rest suddenly cross-legged and laughing, breathing so that he could see how far down she took the air.

“Don’t ask me, Mike,” hands above her head, hips wriggling a little at the apex of crossed legs, “I don’t intend to help you. …” Then with a catch of sheet she idly daubed herself and laughed some more.

He came up crawling on hands and knees, still lagging after the tremor, the fanciful sex, and began to feel about in the tumult she had made of the sheets, himself not yet recovered from the breath of her own revival, the swiftness with which she turned from deep climactic love to play. As if she always saved one drop unquenched, the drop inside her body or on the tongue that turned
her not back to passionate love but away from that and into attitudes of frolic. No moment of idleness or a yawn or slow recovery but each time surprising him by play and acrobatics, her fresh poses making his own dead self fire as if he had never touched her and making her body look tight and childish as if she had never been possessed by him.

“I can’t find the bloody thing,” he said.

“Go on,” she said, and changed again, took one knee beneath her chin, “you find it.” Then, while he searched beneath her pillow, felt down the center of the mattress and into the still warm hollows: “I’ve seduced you, haven’t I, Mike,” she said.

“You have,” he answered. “Good as your word.”

With Sybilline watching, he moved back and forth on the undulations of the springs, with moonlight striking across his spine, and his hands and knees softly sinking; and felt at last the opalescence, the hard tiny tear of pearl on its needle shank, and held it up by the point for her to see.

“You’re a charmer, Mike,” she said.

He reached out then to the skirt flung over the chair and stuck the pearl in the row of three. There were no pearls left in her reddish pompadour, only the thick round of the hair and, as if it had been rumpled, a coil coming down her neck and tickling. The bottles were still crashing below them and someone was playing the widow’s piano so quickly, heavily, that Needles might have been running up and down the keyboard in his naked feet. But it was all bubbles of talk and musk and
closeness in the room and Banks cared nothing for the noise. As he turned to face his Sybilline, began on hands and knees the several awkward motions it took to reach her, he knew remorse for the empty face of himself once more: because her eyes were big and brown, steady and temperate as those of a girl peering over a stile, while the rest of her was still animated, quivering, with the fun. Thrice she had taken him and he had thrice returned, riding into the bower that remains secretive and replete after blouse and skirt and safety pin, silks and straps, have all been discarded, flung about helter-skelter on the thorns. No more now, he was fast returning to the old man. While she, his Sybilline, was still tasting of that little shocking drop of incompletion that gave her a maiden’s blush, a shine between the breasts, as if she was always ready for another go at it, another lovely toss.

After searching for all her pearls he was tangled in the covers now himself. His skin was gray. His head was hanging but he smelled the delicate stuff and blindly put his hand on her leg’s underside, touched the mild flesh for an instant, then let his fingers drag away. She wriggled and was laughing.

“Be a sweet boy, Mike,” she said, secluded with him from the party, moving her bare shoulders in childish sailor fashion, “and fetch the stocking.”

So at two o’clock in the morning he labored off the bed—she gave his arm a push—and took several steps until the moonlight caught him round the skinny ankles. Standing there, with sheep passing outside through darkened fields and the jockey screaming the first bars of an
enticing song, he could hear the girl behind him—and that was the fine thing about Sybilline, the way she could kiss and play and let her spangles fall, keep track of all the chemistry and her good time, and yet be sighing, sighing like a young girl in love.

He stooped, picked up the stocking, turned to hear her whistling through puckered lips.

Then: “I’ll take that if you please, sweet Michael.” She held the length of silk in her hands and he was scrambling over the tossed pillows, down the crumpled sheets, until the two of them were facing and once more cross-legged. The pharmacist’s cure for women was on the edge of the sink, the smells were of the shores of paradise. Before his eyes and with the ends of her fingers, Sybilline drew the stocking out full length, held it swinging by the wide top and little toe, then in a quick gesture ran the whole porous line of it across her face and under her nose, just touching her nose, smelled it deeply and winked as she did so. And suddenly made a flimsy ball of it and with one hand lightly on his knee, reached forward and thrust the round of silk between his widespread legs and against the depths of his loin, rubbing, pushing, laughing. He flushed.

“You see,” whispering, “you can win if you want to, Mike, my dear. But that’s all for now.” With lively arm she threw the balled stocking at the dusty moonlit glass and hopped off the bed.

He watched her dance round to the chair, dangle the blouse and skirt, replace the pearls and do a faint jazz step that kept her moving nowhere. Then she posed in
the unbuttoned blouse and her fingers were sending off kisses and her legs, friendly and white and long, were the legs he had seen bare in the undergarment ads. Then she whispered through the oval of the skirt she was just dropping over her head: “Put on your trousers, Mike … we’ll join the fun downstairs.”

They stepped into the light of the orange bulb, held hands, walked along the widow’s carpet to the start of the rail with grapes carved on the post. The hallway smelled of dust and nuptials; a rag was lying on the carpet. “We’ll go down together,” she said, and gave his arm a pinch. “We’ll let them see we’re untidy. But Michael,” holding him midway on the stairs, “all the girls will love you, Michael. You’re alluring! So don’t forget, Mike, come back for me.” And she kissed him, she whom he would never kiss in privacy again.

“I couldn’t lose you, Syb.”

She laughed for the two of them at the bottom of the stairs and her hair was redder than at any time that day. The lamplight shone upon it—lamps were lit all about the room, small bulbs and large, glass shades chiming and tinkling and strung with beads—and her eyes were brown and moist.

“There’s that lovely girl!” shouted the widow, “and our funny boy. And look what she’s done to him!”

Not only Jimmy Needles was playing the piano, but Larry as well, jockey and Larry having a duet together side by side and beating on the keys with nearly equal strength. On the bench before the upright, the little man in color and the large man in navy blue—hour by hour
the wrinkles in the dampened suit were flattening—kept talking all the while they played and a bottle of rum stood on the seat between them. And Little Dora tried to listen. Sunk in a velvet armchair, wearing her lopsided matron’s hat with a bit of feather now, her upper lip of pale hair wet with gin, eyes surly and black behind the glasses, stretched and recumbent on cushions as near as possible to the piano bench, she watched them, listened, in a torporous and deadly mood.

Sparrow was there. He was drinking whisky out of the widow’s cup. The widow’s daughter was in the crowd—a big girl in a child’s dress pulled high who sat straight up and kept both hands on her knees, laughing and smiling out of a loose mouth and enormous eyes. And all the room was brown and filled with smoke and toy alligators and donkeys. Newspapers were strewn across the rug faded and worn with the footpaths of long-dead residents. A portrait of a Spanish nobleman hung above the mantel on which there burned a candelabra with smoky wicks and molten wax; and duplicates of Little Dora’s chair, soft mauve contrivances on wheels, made humps along the walls. In volume nearly as loud as the piano the black wireless was turned up and an orchestra played out of the tufted speaker.

Kissing, noise, and singing: a late hour in the widow’s parlor, and Banks saw Sparrow wave, watched Sybilline sit on the arm of Little Dora’s chair and swing her foot, and noticed that the widow was keeping her eye on him. Plump, wearing the tasseled shawl, she suddenly leaned over Syb and the slouching woman, and after a moment
Dora jerked round her head and stared at him. Then all three were laughing—even his own dear girl—and he started toward them, took a place at the jockey’s side.

A barracks song was coming from the coffin box of the piano, old, fast-stepping. A golden mermaid stood holding a pitchfork on the ebony and she was bounded by wreaths, her fishtail curved over her head. Scars and finger-length burns marked the ebony, ivory was missing from the keys. Banks leaned against the trembling wood, and there was a pile of tattered sheet music ready to fall from the top and he had never heard such noise. Yet Larry went on talking—audibly enough, considering— and the jockey was nodding and beating upon the last key of the scale.

"… And I told the Inspector he was making a horrible botch of it. I said it would never do. Who’s pulling the strings I told him and he got huffy, huffy, mind you. I said the killing of the kids was no concern of mine but the hanging of Knifeblade was not acceptable, not in the least acceptable. You’d best not interfere, I said. There’s power in this world you never dreamed of, I told him. Why, you don’t stand a showing even with a little crowd at the seaside … and you’d better not bother with my business or my amusements. …”

“But didn’t he try to stick you none the same,” said the jockey.

“He did, but he failed. I knew him in Artillery, I knew his line. …”

Banks listened, looked at the white craven half of his face, the slicked black hair, the fingers hammering. He
saw the man lift the bottle several times to his lips.

The jockey’s sleeves were puffing out, the small black boots were hanging limp, one hand snatched down the goggles and through isinglass he peered at the single key and at the two gray fingers he was striking it with— a rider who had a face shot full of holes and shoulders like the fragile forks of a wishbone on either side of the hump inside the silk. Banks put a sheet of the music on the rack and said, “Play us this piece, Needles. …” But the jockey did not reply.

There was a fire in the kitchen and it was Sybilline who told him to take the chair—“Don’t you know what eggs are good for, Michael?”—and stood near him with her smile and the flush creeping up her cheek. They formed a regular crew: his Syb, the widow, the other one who looked as if she wanted to fight. Syb’s throat was bare, the widow had plump hips and she was giggling. He could smell them: above the heat and moisture of the fire, the spice and flour odors of the laden shelves, the sweetness of old tarts and bread, he could smell the women strongest. And Sybilline kissed him immediately —leaning over, putting her face into his and her hand upon his neck—so that the other two could see. Still with mouths together, he found her breast for a moment and opened his eyes, saw the widow smiling—but it was a smile set and strained as if she could hardly keep from offering advice—and the other woman was smiling and Banks didn’t care.