John Brown's Body (17 page)

“I want to get away from here. There’s too much of it!”

“I’m sorry you don’t like the estuary. I’m rather fond of it. When the tide’s in it doesn’t look so big. And although all that mud looks empty it isn’t, it’s full of life. Crowded, in fact.”

“There’s too much life!”

“You can’t have too much life –” only a dealer in pesticides could – “or too much air or too much breath.”

“I can,” said Marise, “and there’s too much time to wait before it’s over.”

“All things bright and beautiful” were words that came into his head as he looked at her. She shone, but not like the estuary. She was probably the sum of bright things, of all beautiful creatures great and small. It must be the balance of Nature which caused her to talk like that, every bright and beautiful creature had to have its imperfections. But if she could only be faulted by her own unhappiness it was Tomelty, not Nature, who was making her unhappy.

“You’ve got to get away –” he held her bare wrists, the sleeves of the pony coat were too short, Tomelty couldn’t even get her size right – “you’ve got to leave him.”

“Leave who?”

“It won’t be wrong, it will be no crime, he’s not your husband in the true sense of the word.” The small cold bones of her wrists made him wild. “He’s only your keeper –”

“Leave Jack?”

“And come to me.” As he said it he saw pictures of his future, he saw the scene with Bertha, he was leaving her and she was crying: he saw the encounter with Pecry, he was leaving Pecry too, and he saw the confrontation with Tomelty who snarled like a dog. He saw Marise and himself indissolubly together at last.

With the power of the moment he bent to kiss her but she broke away.

“I can’t leave him.”

“You can, you must.”

“I can’t stay here, I’ll die!”

To his consternation she began to cry “I can’t bear it!” and to cover her ears with her hands and to sink to the ground. The tears came through her skin, her face was slippery with them but her eyes were dry. She was crying and fighting to get down to his feet and he believed she would have lain with her face in the earth if he hadn’t held her up by force. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!”

“We’ll get away, right away,” he said, not really knowing what it was all about. In desperation he half-carried her, shielding her face, holding down her fists. “Just a little farther and you won’t see it. It’s almost gone, we’re coming to houses, look – a street and houses –”

It was the middle of the morning and there were people about who turned and stared. They could hardly do otherwise, Marise was raging like a small storm and Ralph was at the centre of it. An unimportant part of his mind hoped that nobody knew him.

She calmed down when she felt the houses round her, she could only have felt them because she was past seeing and identifying. He judged her well advanced into hysteria and as she returned to normal he felt the full shock of it.

Guiding her into the lounge of a small hotel, a place he had not been into before, he said violently, “We’ll stay here and rest. We must rest –”

He was the one in need. Now that it was over, she looked almost unblemished. He saw that she was drying out like a plant in the sun, retaining only a slight extra tenderness after a storm.

Marise looked about. The brown Windsor dusk and the thick carpet solaced her.

“It’s nice here.”

Ralph felt shaken, extremes always did shake him. So far
as he was concerned both ends of the scale were unhappy, he trusted only in the medium. But this extreme of hers committed him even more deeply to her, and committed her to him. And he was glad, he was indebted to anything that did that.

“What frightened you?”  

“That place. I shall die in a big empty place.”  

“You don’t go out enough. You’re like a plant –” he was going to say “pot bound”, but it didn’t sound nice. “He’s done this to you,” he couldn’t bring himself to utter Tomelty’s name either. “You’re deprived of life.”

*

He had no key to Thorne. As Emmy said, it was unnecessary because she or Bertha would always be there to let him in. So he had been obliged to borrow Bertha’s key, without mentioning it, of course. He planned that when he and Marise left the house he would drop the key into some corner where Bertha would find it sooner or later. She often mislaid it so it wouldn’t seem curious.

But the nearer they drew to the house the uneasier he felt. At best the episode could only be a waste of the scant precious time they had together, at worst it would damage him, and if it didn’t go according to plan would lay him in ruins.

There wasn’t even a plan in the proper sense, simply an assumption that Bertha and Emmy would be out of the house. If they weren’t, if for any of fifty reasons they had stayed at home… It didn’t bear thinking about and thinking certainly didn’t help.

“It’s big.” When they came to the beginning of the track and Thorne was in sight Marise was surprised. “I didn’t think it was a big house.”

“There used to be a dairy and a farm kitchen. The dairy’s been made into a garage and the kitchen is used for storage. There’s not really all that much living space.” Emmy took the living space for her private battle, the estuary would not
have been too big for Emmy. He knew that he would know if she was in the house as soon as he opened the door.

“Why don’t you stay here? It’s nicer than Lilliput, that place is fit to drop.”

The car was missing from the garage and he saw grounds for optimism. Of course Bertha might have gone to Chelmsford leaving Emmy at home and it would be neither materially worse for Bertha’s not being here.

“Are we expected?” wondered Marise.

It was so quiet, as they walked across the grass she heard the stalks brushing her shoes. Naturally he would choose a lonely place.

“What a lot of flowers,” she said disapprovingly, looking at Emmy’s garden.

When Ralph opened the front door he confronted the very material difference of Emmy’s not being at Thorne. The place hung together, exhausted.

Now that Marise found herself where she had wanted to be she saw at once that the house was not as she had wanted. Things rarely came up to her expectation: she was happiest with expectations, could have a wonderful time, any time, expecting. She might, she supposed, come to want what this house was – if she could make up her mind what it was.

Ralph closed the door, resisting the impulse to carry in a parcel which the postman had left in the porch. A little thing like that could give them away.

“There’s no-one at home. Come and sit down, you must be tired.”

Marise hadn’t expected that they would be alone at Thorne. She had expected to see the women and talk to them. She expected them to tell her illuminating things.

“They’ve gone to Chelmsford shopping.”

She had expected to pity them. They were to be pitied, she thought, looking at Emmy’s Benares brass.

“Did you know they wouldn’t be here?”

“It makes matters easier anyway.”

What matters? It might become utterly illuminating being
here alone with him, miles from anywhere, beyond help. With a prickling of her shoulders and thighs she watched him opening doors and looking into rooms. He was making absolutely sure that they were alone.

“What are you going to do?”

He turned and looked at her for a long moment, he was thinking what he could do, she supposed, thinking what he had done last time.

“We’ll have a drink.”

From the window she saw that the trees and hedges stood closely round the house and the sky was slotted between, not enough sky to have any colour, less sky, even, than she could see from her window at Lilliput Lodge.

“Is there anyone next door?”

“Next door’s a mile or more away.”

No-one would hear her scream, if she screamed. That would depend on him, perhaps he had brought her here to scream, perhaps he fancied a little screaming.

“I didn’t think it would be like this.”

Indeed she did not, thought Ralph, she couldn’t imagine anything so alien as Thorne, the living couldn’t imagine partly-living.

“I come at week-ends and keep a razor and pyjamas here – and slippers, we don’t wear our slippers downstairs. You see, it isn’t my house to do as I like in.”

“In hotels you put on your shoes to have breakfast.”

“In hotels you pay to do as you like.”

“What are these?” She had seen the array of elephant whips and Khyber knives and Caucasian daggers. They were arranged in a circle on the wall above a stuffed oryx head.

“They’re relics of a fondness for killing.”

“There you are!”

“No, you are not. It wasn’t my fondness and they aren’t my relics.”

She stroked the oryx, pushing her fingers into the dead fur of its nose. Her back expressed non-hearing, it was the duck’s back and he was water running off it. She did not
hear Ralph Shilling, she heard John Brown, she saw John Brown in the Colonel’s hunting trophies, she would see him all over the house, she would have seen him in Emmy, she would even have seen him in Bertha.

“Did you expect to find Miss Fran’s head stuffed and hanging on the wall?”

“That’s not nice.”

“It’s nonsense. All of it’s nonsense.” He poured a shot of Emmy’s whisky. When he turned round Marise was taking off her coat.

“I want to see everything.”

“A guided tour of John Brown’s body’s place? Would you like a drink first?”

“Don’t you think about anything but heads and bodies?”

She said she wanted to see upstairs, where he slept with Bertha. She didn’t put it like that but he did: thinking of the double bed there was no other way of putting it. He couldn’t look anywhere in that room without seeing it. The bed – not putting too fine a point on – was the big white sign of his one and only fusion with Thorne.

Unwillingly, he took her upstairs. He didn’t wish to see her in his and Bertha’s room, it would be all wrong. And then, even as they went in, he was struck by the notion that if it became even more wrong, if he were to see her actually in that bed, in Bertha’s bed, it could tip over into being absolutely right.

“It’s small for two people.”

“Is it?”

“Isn’t there a bigger room?”

“On the other side of the house. That’s where Emmy sleeps.”

“She must be mean.”

“She isn’t. She thinks if there’s a stream this side it might be bad for her health.”

“Why?”

“Well, if she thinks so, I suppose it is. There’s power in thought.” He looked at her steadily. “Isn’t there?”

“If she thinks there’s a stream and there isn’t really – there’s isn’t really.” Marise went to the bed and prodded the pillow. “Hasn’t she ever looked?”

“She’s thinking of underground streams. There might be, I suppose, running into the estuary.”

“She’ll have to dig to find out, won’t she?”

“She wants me to get a water-diviner.”

“With a twig? To walk round with a twig? Can I come and watch?” She sat down on the bed. “It’s comfortable, I think I’ll lie here and rest.”

She did, she lay back on the pillow, the scanty skirt of her dress peeling up round her thighs, and she looked at him gravely.

“Tell me about your Emmy.”

He could hardly believe his eyes. Seeing her there was so wrong and so right, in Bertha’s place in Bertha’s bed was wrong. Then he forgot Bertha, for the Tightness of Marise was supreme. He knelt beside the bed and reached out for her.

Marise knew the gesture. She took a practical interest in sex as the means of getting her softer options and she kept a temperate eye on the reactions she aroused – the eye any mechanic with pressure to maintain might keep on a gauge. She had learned how to take evasive action and when it didn’t succeed in evading, how to keep herself for herself.

She rolled away across the bed and stood up on the other side. The eiderdown filled out as her body left it, Ralph was left with his arms in the pink satin billows.

Marise picked up a framed photograph of Ralph and Bertha on their wedding-day. “Is Emmy in love with you?”

“Emmy wouldn’t let herself get into love with anyone. She likes to keep tidy.”

He got up off his knees and brushed his trousers and Marise said, “So do you.”

He wondered if he should tell her that he was in love with her. But he didn’t think she knew the meaning of the words
if she could use them in connection with Emmy. Although she didn’t, of course, know Emmy.

Marise put down the photograph. “Why didn’t Bertha carry a bouquet for her wedding?”

“She carried a prayer book.”

Marise sat at the dressing-table. She took the lid off Bertha’s powder-bowl and smelt the powder and tried some on her face. It was too tawny and looked like mustard on her. She examined each item in turn with an interest that vexed him. Picking up Bertha’s hair-brush she gazed into the bristles. “I hope she’s not grey.”

He ought to get the situation in hand, he was allowing things to happen, prejudicial things, and since when had he been able to risk prejudice?

Marise imagined herself sitting at this mirror every day. It would be an enormous relief, like the cessation of life-long tooth-ache.

“I wish I could stay here,” she said, meaning from the moment on, so that her hairs were in the hair-brush and the furniture was hers in all the rooms and had never been anyone else’s and no-one had sat on the chairs and slept in the beds before her, nor would after her, so long as she lived.

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

The absurdity of what was happening, the sheer nonsense of it, made him hot. “For two good reasons – Emmy and Bertha.”

“Get rid of them.”

“What?”

“There must be a kind way, you like to be kind, don’t you?”

He watched her curl a strand of her hair in one of Bertha’s curlers. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll simply go away and take you with me.”

“I want to stay here.”

“We’ll find somewhere by the sea, the real sea – or in the
country if you don’t like the open space. I promise I won’t put you through that again. We’ll go as soon as I can make arrangements – it will only take me a day or two –”

“Talk, talk, talk!” She cried into the mirror, “Nothing happens any more. It’s all happened to other people!”