Polystom (10 page)

The tavern had no name, but Stom knew where it was, and inside he found his wife, sitting laughing in the midst of a crowd of fishermen and fisherwives. She was laughing at something an old man, amazingly creased and wrinkled, was saying to her. Even with bright sunshine outside the tavern was so murky that it was lit with two oil lamps, and in this red-orange light Stom took in the whole scene. The old fisherman was telling some anecdote, perhaps an old fishing story, to Beeswing, and she was laughing. There was something wrong with the old man’s face, more than just its wrinkles and great age; it was queerly distorted, as if it had been torn into half a dozen pieces by fate and reassembled indifferently. The right eye was a wide slit, pulling down into the cheek. The ear seemed to be missing; the nose was of unusual bulk and shaped like a piece of coral. Yet his
wife, his beautiful wife, seemed to be enjoying herself more than Stom had ever seen her.

He ducked his head to step inside the tavern, and of course all eyes turned to him. The chattering faded to silence; Beeswing’s smile slipped, settled into her more usual enigmatic expression.

‘My dear,’ he said, his voice unexpectedly booming in the enclosed space. ‘We were worried about you. The storm . . .’

He trailed off. Silence.

The gnarled-faced old man shifted his seat back, away from the Lady. She stood up. She did not need to hunch over, despite the low ceilings. With graceful step, she came over to her husband, and took his hand.

‘They were telling me,’ she announced, as much, it seemed, for the benefit of the whole room as for Polystom, ‘of the life they live; following the shoals through the Summer Year up and down the Middenstead. Of the amazing plenitude of fish in the Spring Year. It’s all so captivating. Captivating!’

The crowd, uneasy in the presence of their master, shuffled, smiled, settled. ‘Come along, dear,’ said Stom, his relief at finding her alive sliding into anger that they must act out this scene in front of nobodies, servants.

‘I’ll become a fisherwoman,’ she said. ‘I like the oceans. They are free and wide and open.’

‘And dangerous,’ chipped in the gnarled-faced old man from the back of the room.
Day-jrus
.

‘And in the danger,’ Beeswing continued blithely, ‘is the truest freedom. I told them that you’ll surely build me a little house here, in this village, so I can follow this life.’

But this, to Stom, was too absurd even for joking. ‘Come away,’ he said, more pressingly, taking her arm and tugging it. ‘Let’s not do this thing here.’

He led her down the slippery alleyway, and out to the twin-engine. One of his men would bring the other boat
back; Nestor piloted the twin-engine, and Stom sat in the back, his grip on his wife’s arm so fierce that she told him to lessen it several times.

After this Polystom made a decision. He called his chief butler to attend on him in his snug. His mind was made up. He informed Nestor that his wife must be restrained – ‘you understand, Nestor? This
running around
of hers is simply unacceptable. Think of it,’ Stom went on, leaning back in his chair expansively (although his palms were sticky with nervous sweat), ‘think of it as a kind of disease, I would like you to think of it as a sort of disease. Fever-germs agitate the body, making it shake and jerk; she has some subtle fever-germ in the mind that makes her run away. Do you see this?’

‘Yes sir,’ said Nestor, with the faintest colour of doubting in his voice.

‘We need to confine her,’ said Stom. ‘Confine her. Confinement is natural to womankind, you see?’ (He had only a vague notion of what ‘confinement’ involved, except that it was a condition into which women sometimes entered.) ‘We’ll lock her in the Yellow Room – yes?’

‘As you wish, sir,’ said Nestor. Stom caught a momentary glimpse of something in his servant then, like a fish coming up through water almost to the surface and visible from the air, something of Nestor’s own personality; his preciseness; of his minuscule discomfort at this stratagem, his distant coolness, of the impeccably structured and timetabled life he led. But then the fish sank away again into the indistinguishable grey depths, and Nestor was just a servant again.

Little insights like this, Stom often thought with regard to himself, were the hallmark of a poet.

When the day came, Polystom brought in one of the underbutlers – a tall, frothy-haired woman – to stand behind Nestor. This party of three came upon Beeswing in
the Main Library. She was squatting behind a mauve settee, reading a book with the almost feral intensity of a child devouring a sweetmeat. She looked up, almost startled, as the three shapes appeared over her. ‘My love,’ said Stom, his heart thumping hard, ‘there’s something I’d like to show you in the Yellow Room.’

‘The Yellow Room?’ she repeated in her limpid, little-girl’s voice.

‘The view,’ he said, extemporising. ‘I’ve fitted a fountain pump in the lake and you can see the effect best from the Yellow Room.’

She showed no suspicion at all at this unprecedented and rather implausible statement. She got to her feet and walked beside him, still carrying her book, out of the library, up the stairs, along the turf-soft carpeting of the upper corridor. She stepped blithely through into the Yellow Room. Polystom did not accompany her; he paused at the door as she stepped sleepily into the mustard-coloured space. Then, softly, almost like one trying not to disturb a light sleeper, he reached in, and tweaked the edge of the door so that it turned silently on its hinges towards him.

It closed with a click like a tongue popping against the roof of the mouth. Stom turned the key once and the bolt slid across with a deeper click, like a sombre echo of the former.

It was as simple as that.

For a moment he stood there, holding his breath. He didn’t know whether he was waiting for her to cry out, to shout in outrage, to pummel the door with her fists. But there was only silence.

He wanted, urgently, suddenly, to be out of the house – out altogether. He was at the front door in seconds, pausing only to fit on his out-boots, and then he was marching briskly away. He walked over the lawn, towards the orchards. Trying to push out of his head the thought of what he’d done, perhaps.

Outside, fresh air. One step after the other, and he was at the blossomy rows of fruit trees before he knew it.

Focusing himself. It was the best for her, that was why he had acted. Best not dwell on it, not think of it. But it was the
best thing
for her. He’d keep her in there a few days, that was all. Have Nestor put food on a tray. And a commode. A few days, or maybe a week.

The orchard was possessed by a positive blizzard of butterflies, blue as shards of sapphire. They crowded the air between the plumapple trees, all the way down to the greenhouses on the seaward side. Walking through them, all Polystom’s senses were taken up with their brief, seasonal joy – the dazzling sight of them, the sound of their papery burr as they flapped, even the feel of them bumping harmlessly against his face. On the edges of his vision he caught the ghostly bouncing shapes of nets, as servants harvested the swarm. But walking through the midst of it he was completely wrapped up in a vividly deep blue.

Best to put his mind somewhere else. Best not to think of his wife at all.

Soon enough he was out the far side. Skirting the green-houses, their roofs neon-bright in the sunshine to his left, he wandered into the forest proper, the fir woodland. The butterflies did not come here. They craved plumapple blossom, perhaps were even repelled by the resinous perfume of the pines, so that only one or two stragglers moved, lost and meandering like torn-up pieces of evening sky, through the shadows.

He walked a long circle, as far as the western foothills, and slowly back. Beeswing, in his mind, was a sort of blank. He did think of her, he couldn’t help himself, but he imagined her standing in the Yellow Room as motionless and empty as a stone statue. He thought of her looking out over the vista, through the window, mannequin-like. And vaguely, half-subconsciously, he imagined her mental processes, her brain ticking around its route like a clockwork
device, until the trigger arm was finally reached and flipped and she saw, she
understood
how foolish she had been. Vaguely, Stom thought of her enormous remorse, her penitence, her humility and love for him gushing through her at that moment like an ecstasy, forcing out sighs and tears with the sheer pressure of the passage, consummating her revelation as a sort of sexual climax.

Back at the house, Nestor was waiting by the front door.

‘My mistress,’ he said, giving the phrase a vaguely faded tone as if he used it only because a more accurate was unavailable, ‘has been, sir, calling out, and shouting.’

‘Calling out?’ repeated Stom, the unfocused mental image of his wife in an orgasmic intensity of remorse still swilling through the lower vesicles of his consciousness.

‘Screaming, I should say, sir. And banging.’

‘Banging?’

‘Hitting the door. Kicking it I’d say, sir, to judge by the sound she’s been making. It echoed through the whole house.’

Polystom kicked off his boots and went up the stairs, with Nestor behind him. ‘I can’t hear anything,’ he said as he ascended.

‘She stopped, perhaps half an hour ago. We weren’t sure whether to open the door, sir, but decided to wait until you returned.’

Stom reached the door of the Yellow Room. The place seemed as silent as he had left it, but the quietness seemed an oddly accusatory one. Something wrong, some joint not right in its socket. Polystom’s mouth was dry. Feeling the ridiculousness of his action, he knocked at the door. ‘Beeswing?’ he called out. ‘My darling?’

Nothing.

Gingerly, he unlocked the door and opened it. The collapsed mess of an old dress on the floor, topped with a sprawl of glossy black silk, was Beeswing’s supine body. Stom stepped over to her, and then stood, uncertain what
to do. Behind him, the door swung shut with a small groan, an uncanny and mournful noise. Its inside was spattered with blood. Polystom turned his wife’s body over with his hand to see her hair clogged with her own plasticky half-dried blood, and pour-marks and spots of red over her face.

They moved her to another bedroom, and called for a doctor, who came flying over the Western Mountains that same afternoon.

‘A terrible mix-up,’ Stom explained. ‘She got into some sort of fugue state in the Yellow Room. Couldn’t open the door, and became hysterical – ran at the door head down.’

‘Not once,’ said the doctor, ‘but several times. This sort of concussion is a serious business, of course, but probably not fatal. Have a servant watch her as she comes round; tell her not to move about too much. Bed-rest for her until the swelling around the temples goes down. A week at least, probably two.’

In the dark hallway outside, as Nestor sorted out the matter of fee, the doctor beckoned to Stom. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said. ‘I wanted to tell you. There’s a clinic, extremely well appointed, charming views over an ice-lake, on the moon of Rhum. Heated centrally throughout by means of hot-water piping,’ he added, folding his payment into his pocketbook, as if this architectural detail were particularly important. ‘I’ve referred a couple of hysterical wives and daughters there. I don’t say send her straight off, you understand, but keep it in mind. Eh?’

‘I will,’ said Stom softly. He went through the ritual of bidding the doctor farewell at the front door like a drugged man. He felt as stunned as if it had been
he
who had banged his head against the door. Of course the clinic was out of the question; it would be an unacceptable blow to his status, to his pride, if he were compelled to take that course, and if it became widely known. And anyway, her episode had been a one-off. Surely it had been a one-off.

He left a woman in Beeswing’s room, and went to his snug. It took several drinks before he began to feel more like himself. How could she do it?
Why
would she do such a thing? It passed beyond his comprehension. He tried to imagine himself, poet-like, into her body, but the effort was greater than his imagination could make. To put one’s head down, as if bowing, as if in homage to something, and then sprint as fast as one could, to build up as much acceleration as was possible in the small space,
knowing
that one was about to thunder head-first into a solid wooden door? It was almost monstrous, the willpower required.

The impulse to leave the house was strong upon him again. Maybe it would be better for him to go. Fly away; visit his uncle. Cleonicles had not been able to attend the wedding, and Stom hadn’t seen him since. Maybe a few days on the moon would be the best thing. Maybe he could return from such a little away-trip to a calmer, clearer sense of things between the two of them. The rightness of the idea seized him, with its deeper promise of removal from a source of pain, and he leapt up. He rushed through to his own bedroom, and started packing a satchel to carry with him. Uncle Cleonicles would have some advice for him, some guidance on how to resolve this sorry situation.

A serving girl was at his doorway. ‘Mistress is awake, sir,’ she said in a small voice.

‘Oh,’ said Stom, still thinking he could dash out. But it would be better to see her first. Better to let her know that he was going away, going partly to give her time to think through her own foolishness.

He traipsed through to the little bedroom where his wife lay, her head grown huge with bandages, inflated. She lay perfectly still, her arms straight at her sides, her eyes looking directly ahead.

Stom moved into her line of sight. ‘Hello,’ he said, forcing a goofy smile. ‘How you feeling, my dear?’

She breathed in, and released the air in one short sentence: ‘You locked me in.’

A hissy voice, snake-like. Stom almost stepped back, alarmed at the malicious power this tiny woman appeared to possess, almost scared by his own wife. Why should
he
feel bad? She was the one who’d surrendered herself to insanity.

‘You went a little crazy, I think,’ he said, forcing the smile again. ‘Why would you do such a thing, my darling? We were just on the other side of the door.’