The Hide Read online

  Then they called for Last Orders and Mortimer started talking in a way he sometimes has, half to me, half to himself, but in quite a loud voice. Closing time, he said. Stern daughter of the voice of God. Think of it, Josiah, he said. Use your visualising faculties, picture it on a national scale, all the pubs all over the country turning them out into the night. A million of them turned out the same time, all with a sodding skinful. If the sheer scale and concept is too much for you, think of it in concrete terms. Think of all the walls. Walls? I said. I was beginning to feel bad again. Think of it, he says. All the walls they are pissing up against, spewing up against, wanking up against, screwing the tarts up against, think of all the slimy walls, Josiah. The mind boggles. Think of all the things they are getting up to now in the back alleys and the bus shelters and the recreation grounds, all the blood, all the vomit, all the sperm, lakes of it, oceans of it—

  I feel sick, I said. I am going to be sick, Mortimer. I got up and got through the bar somehow, how I don’t know, I could hardly see, round to the Gents outside in the yard and I only just got in when the first lot come shooting out of me and I could feel Mortimer’s arm round me very tight, holding me together like, while I retched waiting for the next lot, a roaring in my ears, stink of disinfectant, Mortimer’s arm round me and Mortimer’s voice close to my ear saying, Marion wouldn’t do this for you, would she, your Marion wouldn’t do this.

  Simon . . .

  AS SOON AS I saw Miriam coming up the drive, in lime-green, dangling a barbaric bracelet, I knew she had come for a tête-à-tête with my sister and I resolved to listen in. I cannot afford to neglect such opportunities. I felt it proper, however, to smarten myself up a bit before eavesdropping, wash my hands and face and comb my hair; and this, while giving Audrey and Miriam time to settle themselves on the terrace, caused me to miss their opening remarks.

  Now there is a pause, presumably while they stir and sip. I hear the rattle of a cup in a saucer. In the silence of the sitting-room I picture the sunlit grounds with the secret, the slender thread of my tunnel waiting there for me. I maintain a rigid expectant posture, looking steadily at the open french window. If someone were to enter, Marion let us say, I could pretend to be looking for something, or I could pretend to be fastening my shoe laces. . . .

  ‘Such lovely warm weather,’ I hear Miriam say, and I know the expression which will be accompanying these words, the eyelids drooping, the thin lips conveying a spiteful relish.

  ‘To give you an instance of what I mean,’ Audrey says. ‘Take what happened a week ago. Sometimes one feels . . . lonely.’ This pause before the adjective is a familiar rhetorical device of Audrey’s and again I know without needing to see it, the gallant little smile, the accompanying gesture, quite invariable, she raises her right hand and places her middle finger on the centre of the forehead, smoothing it to the right as far as the temple, as though tracing the track of a pain or soothing one away. One is, after all, a woman.’

  ‘I think you manage marvellously, my dear.’

  ‘There are situations that are difficult to deal with, for a woman alone. My brother, of course, is not a great help to me.’ ‘By the way, Anne wants Mr Thebus to know that she bears him no ill-will, none at all. I have seen her several times since. She is still far from well, of course, but she does not hold him responsible.’

  ‘I do not think the responsibility is hers to allot. It was by the merest chance that the . . . object was discovered in her portion. No, it was aimed at me, quite clearly. I shall not forgive Simon whatever happens. I have told him to look for a place elsewhere.’

  ‘Well I’m sure you’re quite right dear, but Anne says now that Mr Thebus was simply the agency of an impersonal force. She has come round to the belief, she told me, that the teeth in the mousse was a symbolical revelation specially intended for her. Mr Thebus, on this view, was merely a vehicle. . . . Of course it was a shock to her, the whole system, well what a thing to find, but she told me herself it may all have been for the best, it is the sort of sudden shock, she said, that the Bhodisvattas aimed at, it may have put her on the track of higher things.’

  ‘She is at liberty to take whatever view she pleases. Personally I think she’s overdoing it, but that is neither here nor there. I shall continue to regard it as a disgusting practical joke of Simon’s, aimed deliberately at ruining the occasion. As I say, I have told him to make other arrangements.’

  ‘Well dear, not before time, I’ve told you over and over again, and as for Anne, between you and me, what I felt like saying was I hope it has put you on the track of not taking such large helpings of mousse, she is enormous and Dovecot seems to get thinner, they are quite grotesque together on stage, I don’t know what this professional producer is going to make of them. . . .’

  ‘Oh, they are going on with that, are they?’

  ‘Well you know what Major Donaldson is when he gets an idea. They have already advertised. I was against it from the start but I was overruled.’

  ‘We must hope for the best. I hope Anne will be quite recovered in time for the garden party, I am counting on her for some help.’

  ‘This garden party is a splendid idea of yours, Audrey. I know I am speaking for the whole committee when I say how much we appreciate your efforts . . . I believe you are going to read for the part of Mrs Alving next Tuesday evening?’

  ‘Yes, I thought I would have a try, you know . . .’

  ‘Well between you and me I think there is a very good chance of your being given the part, this is strictly confidential, of course, anything can happen, but I think there is a very good chance.’

  ‘It is a part I have always wanted to play.’

  ‘Yes, well, we must wait and see. How is your new gardener turning out?’

  ‘He’s not like a gardener at all really. He is very young, for one thing. I mean, I think of gardeners as middle-aged men with bands round their trouser-legs you know, but he comes to work in tight jeans.’

  Laughter. Miriam’s throaty and artificial, Audrey’s a series of very rapid staccato sounds expressing not amusement at all but a quality of excitement.

  ‘I know just what you mean, dear.’

  ‘He is only twenty you know, that is all I could think of to ask him when he came for the job. That is what I meant by being a woman alone, a man would have known what to ask. Simon should do all that of course, he should take all that off my hands. But you know what Simon is—’

  ‘I do, dear, I do.’

  ‘Anyway that is all I asked him, and he said twenty and I said, but that’s very young and he said, I’ll be older in time. He thought that was very clever.’

  One does not usually discuss a gardener in these terms, Audrey. Miriam, alerted by your volubility, says nothing. She is hoping you will go on. I myself need no further description. I can hear the aristocratic briskness with which you put that question and he, looking too, just as you were, for a meaning in the interview, found merely a tone of voice, a smart thing to say. Did you remark his eye, the vacuity, the vulnerable boldness? A savage eye. Howard’s eyes were grey, weren’t they, blinking civilised eyes that acknowledged things? Ridiculous to compare of course. That little scene must have taken it out of you both in your different ways. After he had gone his gingerly way back down the drive, what was there left for you to do? It is as though some sort of rearrangement, some very subtle displacement has occurred. You walk from the drawing-room, where the interview has been conducted, and turn right, intending to go along the passage, but almost at the back stairway it occurs to you that there is no earthly reason for you to be there. So you stop at the foot of the stairs, where I can observe you from the landing. You can hear Marion in the kitchen, preparing lunch. You stand still. There is no reason for going on nor any for refraining from going. You allow your body to droop. You regard the varnished banister, the plum-coloured strips of carpet seen through the rails, oppressively familiar. Your drooping body is present to your mind, the swollen veins in your right ca
lf, your thin arms, slack belly, dry breasts. . . . Howard is dead, his needs and the ways you met them dead. It isn’t Howard you are thinking of now as you brace yourself up again, raise your head. Perhaps you have recalled some other person, someone still alive, who laid his hands on your body when you were a girl and still preserves your youth in the lecherous amber of memory, perhaps attempting to revive his failing powers with it. Or is it something the gardener said? Do you feel perhaps you will be younger in time, Audrey? Upright now, shoulders back, you pass your hands slowly over your breasts.

  ‘He had been working up till then, by his own account, as an attendant at a rifle-range in that big fun fair down on the west shore, yes I know, not much connexion with gardening. . . .’

  With the utmost circumspection I make my way out of the room, along the passage, up the stairs. The door of Audrey’s room is not locked. It is cool and as it were . . . chaste, in here. Audrey strikes many persons, I know for a fact, as a rather affectedly gracious woman, too stately for most occasions. She always seems to be dispensing something or other to people, and while some of this may be due to shyness, I am sure myself that it is mainly because of that compulsive anticipatory quality that I believe I have mentioned before; she has adopted too soon the dignity and consequence of age. Anyone knowing only this public aspect of my sister would be astonished to find in this room evidences of another habit of mind entirely, an attachment to the past, the possessions of childhood, a sentimental sort of hoarding. A miniature tea set given to her by an uncle on her sixth birthday: small porcelain figures of domestic animals, pink pigs, a spotted dog; a row of dolls in national costume. There are drawers in this room containing little shoes she once tottered on, early suits of pyjamas, her first school uniform. And everywhere photographs of schooldays, blurred pigtailed friends, dim hockey groups, blind smiles on the promenades of remote school excursions. . . . There are no photographs of adults in the room at all, not even one of Howard. Clinging to the props of childhood, grasping prematurely for the exemptions of age, Audrey seems to have no middle period. . . .

  The room was cool, hushed, neutral-smelling. My eyes turned immediately to the little table beside the pink-quilted single bed: nothing there but aspirin and Rumer Godden. The dressing table beyond presented the usual features, cut-glass bottles, brushes backed with mother-of-pearl, a light dusting of face powder. Disappointed here, I began to go through the drawers of the tallboy against the wall and in the third one I found it, lying on its side, appearing to be sniffing or nibbling at a pale-blue undergarment of my sister’s. I did not realise how much importance I had been attaching to this horse until I actually saw it there, and then I experienced a sense of triumph almost suffocating in its intensity. When I was able to look closely at the horse I saw that it was now slightly discoloured along the back and part of the rump, the light-coloured wood was streaked darker. I was sure it had not been thus before. It was a stain of some kind, like paint or ink but irregular in outline as though not applied deliberately.

  I held the horse in my hands for some moments, looking closely at it. It really was a remarkably fine horse. There was a passionate quality, a sort of fierce nobility in the raised head, the flared nostrils; and a suggestion of fabulous fleetness in the whole body. I ran my finger down the arch of the neck, very slowly, then I replaced it in the drawer, taking care, of course, to leave it in precisely the same position.

  It was while I was actually closing the drawer, or possibly immediately after closing it that I happened to glance through the window. My sister’s room looks out over the west side of the grounds, where the proposed patio is, and so I was able to see Marion and the gardener standing quite close together, talking directly into each other’s faces. Marion raised her head slightly in a laughing manner and the gardener made a shrugging motion. Marion would know, of course, that Audrey was still on the terrace at the front of the house, so she felt safe here. Her hair seemed much less frizzy than usual. The gardener half turned, allowing me to see that the thumb of his left hand was heavily bandaged.

  Fosh . . .

  ART BOOKS, WHERE’D she get them all? Pictures a horses, pictures a bulls, pictures a women with nothing on, that last one art of Mesopoto something, great fat ’uns with about five hundred tits. Fertility goddess, she says. Her own words. Turning the big pages with her white fingers. Looking at me sideways, watching my face all the time. Fertility goddess, she says. Studded all over with tits, like pineapples. She did not ought to be showing me pictures like that. Symbol of fertility she says. Oh yes. I don’t say nothing but personally I think it is disgusting. She’ll go from that to pictures of little pot pigs, birds, anything. All in the same tone a voice. What I mean is, it don’t matter to her whether it is pot pigs or bare tits. She turns the pages over fast, I never get much time to look at what is written underneath. Most of the words are too long, anyway. Oh yes. Very interesting. Look at that arm, she says. The articulation, Josiah. Have you ever attempted the human figure? The naked human form, she says, is a marvellous structure. (I am giving her own words now.) Don’t you think so? she says. Depends, I says, on whose naked form it is. No, no, she says, smiling like, quite divorced I mean from sex. She keeps crossing and uncrossing her legs. She don’t bother too much where her skirt is. In the abstract I mean, she says, crossing them the other way. Most of the time I dunno what she is on about. I can see right along her left leg nearly up to the top of her stocking. I would not put my hand in there any more than in a mouse trap. I can see a varicose vein right through the stocking, just under the back of her knee. The human form divine, she says, smiling round at me. She has got clean white teeth and she doesn’t smell of herself but always of the clothes she’s got on, just a kind of faintly scented cloth smell so I get the feeling she don’t take her clothes off at night, just hangs herself up in the wardrobe, like.

  Where’d she get all them books from that’s what I’d like to know. Maybe she had them in the house before, stacked away somewhere. Maybe she keeps nipping out to buy one. (She don’t go out so often though.) I seen the inside cover on some of them, five guineas, seven guineas, that’s a lot of money for a book. She has got loads of money a course, with that big house. (But Marion says they only use four of the rooms, the others have got sheets over the furniture and nobody goes in them.) Anyrate, she has enough for books. I can’t get away from it, wherever I am in the grounds, its Jo—osh, yoo-hoo, and another art book. I am not a great reader, I said to her—I told her that straight off. Not a great one for reading, Mrs Wilcox. Oh, she said, but this will help you. You must know what has been achieved in your field.

  It is ever since I give her the horse. She changed after that. I could see she was struck with it at the time. The look she give me. Then the way she spoke, all sharp like to cover up that she was pleased with it. I can always sense them kind of things. It was a funny time to hand it over, just after she’d finished doing up my cut. Blood all over the place, on the floor, in the sink, all down my trousers.

  Maybe I got careless, coming near the end of it like, maybe I lost interest a bit because I was not going to give it to Mortimer, I dunno, I never cut myself before, never, you won’t find a scar anywhere on me, never broke no bones neither. I watched myself doing it, that was the funny thing. The knife slipped off the back and down like it was slow motion but my thumb still pressing hard on it right across the fleshy bit at the bottom of the left thumb. I didn’t feel nothing and that is how I knew it was a bad cut. It was only after I stood up that the blood really started coming but it still didn’t hurt. I didn’t look at it because I do not like the sight of blood. I do not like thinking about it neither, even in your veins I mean, I just don’t like to dwell on it. First thing I done was put the horse in my pocket. Then I started off towards the house. I was holding the cut hand palm up in the other. I got to the kitchen but there was nobody there. I thought Marion would of been there but she wasn’t. It was only when I was actually in the kitchen that I looked down at my hand a
nd I got a nasty shock because the way I was holding it sort of cupped my hand was full of blood like a bowl. Some was getting through my fingers and falling on the front of my trousers or on to my shoes. Then I got this kind of ringing in my ears and I couldn’t think what to do, I didn’t want to move because I didn’t want to lose my blood out of my hands on to the floor, well I lost my presence of mind as you might say and I just stood there. Till she come. I was standing there with my head ringing, looking down into my handful of blood, trying to keep it from spilling, when she come in from the passage and she took it in straightaway, she’s quick on the uptake, I’ll say that. What are you standing there for, she said. Get it under the tap. But I was in a bit of a state by this time, I could hear what she said clear enough but I didn’t want to move like. Next thing she had her hand under my elbow and she pushed me over to the sink, quite strong she is, stronger than what you’d think, and my handful of blood was splashed all over the place. She made me keep it there a long time. After that she put some stuff on it, bandaged it up. You ought to have a stitch or two in that, she said. You ought to see a doctor.