The Wine-Dark Sea (34 page)

When I reached what I had taken for a hedge, it proved to be the boundary of an extensive thicket. Autumn had infected much of the greenery with blotched and dropping senility; so that bare brown briars arched and tousled, and purple thorns tilted at all possible angles for blood. To go further would demand an axe. Either I must retraverse the dreary bog in the perceptibly waning light, or I must skirt the edge and seek an opening in the thicket. Undecided, I looked back. I realised that I had lost the gate through which I had entered upon the marsh on the other side. There was nothing to do but creep as best I could upon the still treacherous ground along the barrier of dead dog-roses, mildewed blackberries, and
rampant
nettles.

But it was not long before I reached a considerable gap, from which through the tangled vegetation seemed to lead a substantial track, although by no means a straight one. The track wound on unimpeded for a considerable distance, even becoming firmer underfoot; until I realised that the thicket had become an entirely indisputable wood. The brambles
clutching
maliciously from the sides had become watching
branches
above my head. I could not recall that the map had showed a wood. If, indeed, it had done so, I should not have entered upon the footpath, because the only previous occasion in my life when I had been truly lost, in the sense of being unable to find the way back as well as being unable to go on, had been when my father had once so effectively lost us in a wood that I have never again felt the same about woods. The fear I had felt for perhaps an hour and a half on that occasion, though told to no one, and swiftly evaporating from
consciousness
upon our emergence, had been the veritable fear of death. Now I drew the map from where it lay against my thigh in the big pocket of my dress. It was not until I tried to read it that I realised how near I was to night. Until it came to print, the problems of the route had given me cat’s eyes.

I peered, and there was no wood, no green patch on the map, but only the wavering line of dots advancing across contoured whiteness to the neck of yellow road where the short cut ended. But I did not reach any foolish conclusion. I simply guessed that I had strayed very badly; the map was spattered with green marks in places where I had no wish to be; and the only question was in which of those many thickets I now was. I could think of no way to find out. I was nearly lost, and this time I could not blame my father.

The track I had been following still stretched ahead, as yet not too indistinct; and I continued to follow it. As the trees around me became yet bigger and thicker, fear came upon me, though not the death fear of that previous occasion, I felt, now that I knew what was going to happen next; or, rather, I felt I knew one thing that was going to happen next, a thing which was but a small and far from central part of an obscure, inapprehensible totality. As one does on such occasions, I felt more than half outside my body. If I continued much further, I might change into somebody else.

But what happened was not what I expected. Suddenly I saw a flicker of light. It seemed to emerge from the left, to weave momentarily among the trees, and to disappear to the right. It was not what I expected, but it was scarcely
reassuring.
I wondered if it could be a will-o’-the-wisp, a thing I had never seen, but which I understood to be connected with marshes. Next a still more prosaic possibility occurred to me, one positively hopeful: the headlights of a motor car turning a corner. It seemed the likely answer, but my uneasiness did not perceptibly diminish.

I struggled on, and the light came again: a little stronger, and twisting through the trees around me. Of course another car at the same corner of the road was not an impossibility, even though it was an unpeopled area. Then, after a period of soft but not comforting dusk, it came a third time; and, soon, a fourth. There was no sound of an engine: and it seemed to me that the transit of the light was too swift and fleeting for any car.

And then what I had been awaiting happened. I came suddenly upon a huge square house. I had known it was coming, but still it struck at my heart.

It is not every day that one finds a dream come true; and, scared though I was, I noticed details: for example, that there did not seem to be those single lights burning in every upstairs window. Doubtless dreams, like poems, demand a certain licence; and, for the matter of that, I could not see all four sides of the house at once, as I had dreamed I had. But that perhaps was the worst of it: I was plainly not dreaming now.

A sudden greeny-pink radiance illuminated around me a morass of weed and neglect; and then seemed to hide itself among the trees on my right. The explanation of the darting lights was that a storm approached. But it was unlike other lightning I had encountered: being slower, more silent, more regular.

There seemed nothing to do but run away, though even then it seemed sensible not to run back into the wood. In the last memories of daylight, I began to wade through the dead knee-high grass of the lost lawn. It was still possible to see that the wood continued, opaque as ever, in a long line to my left; I felt my way along it, in order to keep as far as possible from the the house. I noticed, as I passed, the great portico, facing the direction from which I had emerged. Then, keeping my distance, I crept along the grey east front with its two tiers of pointed windows, all shut and one or two broken; and reached the southern parterre, visibly vaster, even in the storm-charged gloom, than the northern, but no less ravaged. Ahead, and at the side of the parterre far off to my right, ranged the encircling woodland. If no path manifested, my state would be hazardous indeed; and there seemed little reason for a path, as the approach to the house was provided by that along which I had come from the marsh.

As I struggled onwards, the whole scene was
transformed
: in a moment the sky became charged with roaring thunder, the earth with tumultuous rain. I tried to shelter in the adjacent wood, but instantly found myself enmeshed in bines and suckers, lacerated by invisible spears. In a minute I should be drenched. I plunged through the wet weeds towards the spreading portico.

Before the big doors I waited for several minutes,
watching
the lightning, and listening. The rain leapt up where it fell, as if the earth hurt it. A rising chill made the old grass shiver. It seemed unlikely that anyone could live in a house so dark; but suddenly I heard one of the doors behind me scrape open. I turned. A dark head protruded between the portals, like Punch from the side of his booth.

‘Oh.’ The shrill voice was of course surprised to see me.

I turned. ‘May I please wait until the rain stops?’

‘You can’t come inside.’

I drew back; so far back that a heavy drip fell on the back of my neck from the edge of the portico. With absurd melodrama, there was a loud roll of thunder.

‘I shouldn’t think of it,’ I said. ‘I must be on my way the moment the rain lets me.’ I could still see only the round head sticking out between the leaves of the door.

‘In the old days we often had visitors.’ This statement was made in the tone of a Cheltenham lady remarking that when a child she often spoke to gypsies. ‘I only peeped out to see the thunder.’

Now, within the house, I heard another, lower voice, although I could not hear what it said. Through the long crack between the doors, a light slid out across the flagstones of the porch and down the darkening steps.

‘She’s waiting for the rain to stop,’ said the shrill voice.

‘Tell her to come in,’ said the deep voice. ‘Really,
Emerald
, you forget your manners after all this time.’

‘I
have
told her,’ said Emerald very petulantly, and
withdrawing
her head. ‘She won’t do it.’

‘Nonsense,’ said the other. ‘You’re just telling lies.’ I got the idea that thus she always spoke to Emerald.

Then the doors opened, and I could see the two of them silhouetted in the light of a lamp which stood on a table behind them; one much the taller, but both with round heads, and both wearing long, unshapely garments. I wanted very much to escape, and failed to do so only because there seemed nowhere to go.

‘Please come in at once,’ said the taller figure, ‘and let us take off your wet clothes.’

‘Yes, yes,’ squeaked Emerald, unreasonably jubilant.

‘Thank you. But my clothes are not at all wet.’

‘None the less, please come in. We shall take it as a discourtesy if you refuse.’

Another roar of thunder emphasised the impracticability of continuing to refuse much longer. If this was a dream, doubtless, and to judge by experience, I should awake.

And a dream it must be, because there at the front door were two big wooden wedges; and there to the right of the Hall, shadowed in the lamplight, was the Trophy Room; although now the animal heads on the walls were shoddy, fungoid ruins, their sawdust spilled and clotted on the cracked and uneven flagstones of the floor.

‘You must forgive us,’ said my tall hostess. ‘Our landlord neglects us sadly, and we are far gone in wrack and ruin. In fact, I do not know what we should do were it not for our own resources.’ At this Emerald cackled. Then she came up to me, and began fingering my clothes.

The tall one shut the door.

‘Don’t touch,’ she shouted at Emerald, in her deep, rather grinding voice. ‘Keep your fingers off.’

She picked up the large oil lamp. Her hair was a
discoloured
white in its beams.

‘I apologise for my sister,’ she said. ‘We have all been so neglected that some of us have quite forgotten how to behave. Come, Emerald.’

Pushing Emerald before her, she led the way.

In the Occasional Room and the Morning Room, the gilt had flaked from the gingerbread furniture, the family portraits stared from their heavy frames, and the striped wallpaper drooped in the lamplight like an assembly of sodden,
half-inflated
balloons.

At the door of the Canton Cabinet, my hostess turned. ‘I am taking you to meet my sisters,’ she said.

‘I look forward to doing so,’ I replied, regardless of truth, as in childhood.

She nodded slightly, and proceeded. ‘Take care,’ she said. ‘The floor has weak places.’

In the little Canton Cabinet, the floor had, in fact, largely given way, and been plainly converted into a hospice for rats.

And then, there they all were, the remaining six of them thinly illumined by what must surely be rushlights in the four shapely chandeliers. But now, of course, I could see their faces.

‘We are all named after our birthstones,’ said my hostess. ‘Emerald you know. I am Opal. Here are Diamond and Garnet, Cornelian and Chrysolite. The one with the grey hair is Sardonyx, and the beautiful one is Turquoise.’

They all stood up. During the ceremony of introduction, they made odd little noises.

‘Emerald and I are the eldest, and Turquoise of course is the youngest.’

Emerald stood in the corner before me, rolling her
dyed-red
head. The Long Drawing Room was raddled with decay. The cobwebs gleamed like steel filigree in the beam of the lamp, and the sisters seemed to have been seated in cocoons of them, like cushions of gossamer.

‘There is one other sister, Topaz. But she is busy writing.’

‘Writing all our diaries,’ said Emerald.

‘Keeping the record,’ said my hostess.

A silence followed.

‘Let us sit down,’ said my hostess. ‘Let us make our visitor welcome.’

The six of them gently creaked and subsided into their former places. Emerald and my hostess remained standing.

‘Sit down, Emerald. Our visitor shall have
my
chair as it is the best.’ I realised that inevitably there was no extra seat.

‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I can only stay for a minute. I am waiting for the rain to stop,’ I explained feebly to the rest of them.

‘I insist,’ said my hostess.

I looked at the chair to which she was pointing. The padding was burst and rotten, the woodwork bleached and crumbling to collapse. All of them were watching me with round, vague eyes in their flat faces.

‘Really,’ I said, ‘no, thank you, It’s kind of you, but I must go.’ All the same, the surrounding wood and the dark marsh beyond it loomed scarcely less appalling than the house itself and its inmates.

‘We should have more to offer, more and better in every way, were it not for our landlord.’ She spoke with bitterness, and it seemed to me that on all the faces the expression changed. Emerald came towards me out of her corner, and again began to finger my clothes. But this time her sister did not correct her, and when I stepped away, she stepped after me and went on as before.

‘She has failed in the barest duty of sustentation.’

I could not prevent myself starting at the pronoun. At once, Emerald caught hold of my dress, and held it tightly.

‘But there is one place she cannot spoil for us. One place where we can entertain in our own way.’

‘Please,’ I cried. ‘Nothing more. I am going now.’

Emerald’s pygmy grip tautened.

‘It is the room where we eat.’

All the watching eyes lighted up, and became something they had not been before.

‘I may almost say where we feast.’

The six of them began again to rise from their spidery bowers.

‘Because
she
cannot go there.’

The sisters clapped their hands, like a rustle of leaves.

‘There we can be what we really are.’

The eight of them were now grouped round me. I noticed that the one pointed out as the youngest was passing her dry, pointed tongue over her lower lip.

‘Nothing unladylike, of course.’

‘Of course not,’ I agreed.

‘But firm,’ broke in Emerald, dragging at my dress as she spoke. ‘Father said that must always come first.’

‘Our father was a man of measureless wrath against a slight,’ said my hostess. ‘It is his continuing presence about the house which largely upholds us.’

‘Shall I show her?’ asked Emerald.