The Pyramid (8 page)

So strong is habit, even in as small a place as Stilbourne, that the last time I had been to the farther end was when I had been pushed in a chair as a small child. There was a wooden hut at the dead end on a piece of waste land, huddled under the slope up to the escarpment. I examined it curiously for I had never seen anything like it before. It was a Roman Catholic Church, and the notice outside said that Mass would be celebrated there whenever possible. This made me smile, despite my storm, for I had never met the Roman Catholic Church outside a history book. To come across it living, so to speak, was like finding a diplodocus. I began to laugh. Evie came out of the hut. She had a duster in one hand and began to flap it vigorously.

“Hullo, Evie!”

She glanced round, saw me, and caught her breath.

“I’m busy.”

I laughed again, jeeringly.

“I can wait. Got nothing to do.”

“Oh go away, Olly! Unless—”

“Unless what?”

“Nothing.”

She went back inside. I stood, examining the notice, the carved figure and sneered. I was fixed in a sneer.

After about twenty minutes, Evie came out again, brushing the front of her skirt down. I noticed that she had tied her silk square over her hair. The celebrated, the notorious cross hung outside her cotton dress. She paid very little attention to me but locked the door behind her and set off to walk back to Chandler’s Close as if I were no more than a bush.

“You been having a Mass or something, Evie?”

She gave a little laugh and walked on.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Come for a walk, then.”

“No.”

“Ha! No motor bike.”

“I been helping him as much as I can!”

“
You
can’t help him! What d’you think you are? A nurse?”

Evie said nothing but smiled a secret smile. She dropped the cross down inside her dress. I watched it disappear, with a sudden feeling of absolute determination and certainty.

“You don’t need to help him, anyway. He’s all right. Only bruised and a few ribs broken.”

Evie stopped, turned and faced me. I stopped too.

“What d’you mean, Olly? You mean he’s better?”

Bitterly, I felt the unfairness of it all—Robert getting a reputation for daring and all this sympathy and paying nothing for it. Evie was looking at me, through me, with a face of heavenly delight.

I spoke out of my certainty.

“Help
me
,
then.”

I glanced at the bushy track that led winding up the face of the escarpment. I turned back to her, and nodded solemnly.

“Yes. He’s all right. I’m not.”

“And he won’t be—”

“I’m not.”

Evie moved to go home. I caught her wrist as Sergeant Babbacombe had caught it and bore down on it, so that she stopped, staggered, then stood looking up at me.

“I’m not. You think you can do what you like, don’t you?” I walked to the beginning of the track, towing her.

“Olly! What you doing?”

I went on towing. The bushes and scrubby trees closed round us. I towed her up the steep path, not looking round.

“Little Olly isn’t a sucker any more. Little Olly is in charge from now on. And if Bobby gets better and starts anything, little Olly will break his neck.”

“Let me go, Olly!”

“And little Evie’s neck.”

She laughed her scandalized laugh and pawed at my swollen knuckles with her free hand. I shook it irritably. The path got narrower and the trees closed in over it. Evie’s hand relaxed and hung limp from mine. She no longer pulled back, but followed obediently. I laughed aloud.

“That’s better!”

“Listen, Olly. I got to explain.”

I answered her elaborately.

“No explanation is necessary, my dear young lady!”

“What I’m trying to say is, everything’s different—see—if you could only—”

“Here we are.”

I looked round me at the clump of trees, hardly hearing Evie’s voice as she went on talking. The edge of the
escarpment
concealed us from the town; and beneath the trees was a tangle of undergrowth, sown thick with flowers. I drew Evie round from behind me, and we were facing each other.

“You haven’t been listening!”

I put my arms round her and squeezed with that strange feeling of certainty. Her eyes closed, her head went back. I lowered my own and kissed her. She resisted me for a moment but for a moment only. Then she pulled her mouth away with a shocked giggle and tried to escape. To my surprise, that strength for carrying coal and chopping wood now seemed wholly inadequate.

“Let me go, Olly! I got to help Mum!”

I squeezed again, bore her back against a tree. She was solid and female and I did not know how to go on. Then, with primitive inspiration I took out the rigid and burning root of the matter and laid her unresisting hands on it. Evie’s eyes opened and she looked down. Her mouth went lopsided and instead of a smile there appeared a sneering grin, that was at once knowing and avid and contemptuous. Her voice was a hoarse and breathy mutter. Her chest started to go in and out.

“Should I have all that?”

Yes, I assured her, breathy and hoarse as she, so that the wood swung with it and jumped with heart-thump, yes, she should, she should. Her legs began to give, she was sliding down me. And through all the turmoil I heard her breathe at me.

“Get on with it, then.”

The clump settled back into place as my heart settled. I was lying flat, eyes half-open, and the leafy tops of the trees were out of focus. Each heart-thump shattered them like an image in suddenly disturbed water. I was aware of nothing but peace; peace in my blood and nerves, my bones, peace in my head and my deep breath and in my slowing heart. It was a good peace, that spread. Those were good leaves up there, with a good, bright sky beyond them. This was a good earth beneath my back, soft as a bed and all its unexamined depths was a good darkness. I let my head fall sideways and saw a white sock and brown sandal. The other was a yard away. I turned over and got on one elbow, and examined her feet and legs inch by inch in a deep, calm peace. My eye searched them, parted and slack, white, soft, gentle with wandering veins of faintest blue. It searched further, calmly past her thighs to her almost hairless body, where the evidence of my perilous onanism was scattered round her pink petals. It moved along, taking in the white arms on either side, hands open, to the shiver of pulse over her heart; inspected where she breathed, more quickly than I, so that the two smooth segments of spheres with their pink tips, bounced and quivered minutely, for all their firmness.

Triumph and delight began to burgeon and spread in me. I looked, smiling at the cotton dress, rucked, jammed up in a bundle from armpit to armpit. I lifted my chin and stared, laughing into her face. Her head was propped up a bit, eyes dark and deep and slitted between the shivering
paintbrushes
. Her lips were everted still more, her mouth
breathing
quickly as if it were the only way she could rid herself of her body’s heat. I sat upright and she gave a quick glance at me from far back in her head, then looked away again.

She muttered.

“That’s all I s’pose.”

Her dark hair lay strewn among the smashed and scattered bluebells. I bent quickly, and kissed the nearer pink tip and she shivered from head to foot. I kissed the other, laughing, then sat back and put the hair out of my eyes. As I did it I felt some discomfort, so lifted my left hand again and examined it. The knuckles were a mess, the whole thing puffed and ungainly. When I tried to flex my fingers, the pain stabbed up my arm.

“My God. I wonder why it’s begun to ache like this? It wasn’t aching before!”

Evie lifted her head and examined herself.

“Got what you want now, haven’t you?”

“Here. Have my handkerchief.”

“Ta.”

Possessively I reached to her breast, but she smacked my hand away.

“Leave me alone!”

She jumped up, and pulled at her dress so that it stretched down like a concertina.

“Look at all these creases—how am I—Oh!”

She stamped in the brown leaves, snatched her head square and her knickers from where I had thrown them.

“You’ve got some leaves in your hair. And a twig.”

“
Look
at these creases!”

They certainly told the story explicitly enough. I had a passing thought that Evie must surely have met this
particular
difficulty before, at least with Robert. I tried to help her, passing my hand heavily down her back, but she jerked away.

“Don’t think I belong to you, young Oliver!”

“I’m older than you are!”

She looked at me, not glinting or provocatively, but as a human being might look at an object. It was odd, I thought, how dark grey eyes can seem to be. She opened her mouth to speak, but shut it again and went on, smoothing and beating. Nevertheless, I thought—and the triumph that had been burgeoning, burst into sudden scarlet blossom—I had
had
this sulky, feminine, gorgeous creature!

“Hold still a moment, Evie. I’ll get the twig out.”

I untwisted her hair, smelt it, and the scent of the earth, and the faint, thin smell of the smashed flowers. I threw the twig away and hugged her. She was a sullen and passive lump in my arms.

Evie pulled away and picked among the trees towards the path. I followed. She began to walk faster, hurrying out of the trees, down between the bushes, broke into an uneven trot that she only interrupted where the brambles were too close together for anything but delicate negotiation. A few yards from Chandler’s Lane I stopped her.

“Evie—”

She looked up at me, smouldering.

“When shall we—”

“Don’t know.”

“Meet you here this evening.”

She smiled at that, a little of the lop-sided grimace I had seen once before.

“No fear.”

“Tomorrow then.”

“How should I know?”

“Tomorrow—after surgery. In the evening.”

“Want to bet, Mr. Clever?”

I took her firmly by the shoulders.

“Tomorrow evening after surgery. I’ll be waiting for you. We’ll have some more—”

She said nothing but stared darkly through my chest.

“Shan’t we, Evie? I said ‘Shan’t we?’”

Evie drooped a little between my hands.

I watched her slide, at her accustomed pace, past the vicarage and the cottages, down towards Chandler’s Close. I stood there, in the pride of possession, enjoying her bob, the swell of her seat and the little motion of her delicate arms. I went home and faced the music. There was plenty of it and all the more powerful for being muted. My father treated me with a serious concern that was as fearsome as open anger. Nobody mentioned the split panel of the piano. My mother thought I ought to be ashamed; but with such a desperately concealed fear for my sanity that it was very obvious to me. My father examined my hand, painted the cuts with iodine, and gave me some opening medicine. I apologized all round of course, saying I had not known what came over me. I would mend the piano or pay for it to be mended somehow when I could. I would not offend again; and yes, I felt perfectly
calm.
And once more, I was desperately sorry. But really, nothing touched me, not the smashed panel, nor my father’s deep anxiety. Not even my mother’s tears.

That evening when I went to bed, my left hand jumped and throbbed. I put it outside the bedclothes to cool it; and then, finding that not much relief, I propped my forearm on the pillow so that my hand was above my head in the air and some of the blood drained from it. It was extraordinary how different life had become. Even the thought of Imogen, though she caused me my usual pang, brought no more than a covered one, a pang with the point blunted. I pinned the memory of a scented, white body over it. I found myself wishing strange things, wishing that Imogen might know I had
had
Evie; that she might see—but she knew of course—how pretty was our local phenomenon, this hot bit of stuff through which I had achieved my deep calm. I found myself envisaging Stilbourne with college gents to the east, stable lads to the west, a spread of hot, sexy woodland to the south of it and only the bare escarpment to the north. Chandler’s Close to the Old Bridge—a silver thread, a safe, patrolled line; but Robert had tapped the line with his motor bike by way of side alleys; and I, the even safer thread between the Close and her wooden, ridiculous church. I had, in terms of set book, cuckolded Sergeant Babbacombe. I was a bit vague about cuckolding, but it seemed the right word. Most of all, I returned to her body, enjoying it again in detail. I knew about the details now. I began to plan new triumphs. Tomorrow, with careless grace and ease, I would weave a chain of kisses from one pink tit to the other, laughing, and enjoying the shivers and the tremors of my possession. Hand throbbing above my head, head filled with white femininity, it was after dawn, before I fell asleep.

The next day lingered even by breakfast time—stretched ahead an unendurable length. It was hot and bright and I could not think how to pass the time of waiting. My parents were still grave and anxious; so to make what amends I could I behaved as considerately as possible, helping with the washing up. I asked what I could do—shopping, perhaps; but my mother would not have it. When I went into the
dispensary
and asked my father if he would like me to deliver medicine—a thing I had not done for years—he merely shook his head. I could not go for a walk; for the opening medicine proved effective and powerful so that for most of the day I had to stay close to the house. Nor, with my swollen hand, could I play the piano. My father had taken the front off and put it in the dispensary against the wall so that he could mend it when he had time; and now when I sat on the music stool I was confronted not by music but by intricate works. This did not matter to me, though, and I was not particularly anxious to play. I did no more than try out with my right hand the chromatic scale of which I was proud because of its extreme velocity. The piano did not seem to have suffered much. Or rather, this last blow was no more than an additional damage to an instrument already punch drunk. Even the keys seemed to wear the ghastly yellow grin of someone determined at all costs to see the funny side of his own predicament and go down, game to the last.