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off my feet for a while, and then slip out. Yet I must admit I felt a touch of
disappointment as time passed and I was forced reluctantly to abandon all hope
of an invitation to dinner. They'd forgotten all about me! Careless even of
their own games, they had left off playing in the middle of the chase, just as
the child had done, and retired into the immutable privacy of the rich. I
promised myself that at least I'd help myself to half a tumbler of good whisky
on my way out, to see me warmly back to the lane and the stark trudge home.
The child stirred in her sleep and muttered indecipherably. Her fists
clenched and unclenched. Her cheeks were delicately flushed a pale, luminous
pink. Such skin -- the fine texture of childhood, the incomparable down of
skin that has never gone out in the cold. The more I watched beside her, the
frailer she looked, the more transparent. I had never, in my life before,
watched beside a sleeping child. The milky smell of innocence and sentiment
suffused the night nursery.
I had anticipated, I suppose, some sort of gratified lust from this game
of hide-and-seek through the mansion if not the satisfaction of lust of the
flesh, then that of lust of the spirit, of vanity; but the more I mimicked
tenderness towards the sleeper, the more tender I became. Oh, my shabby-sordid
life! I thought. How she, in her untouchable sleep, judges me.
Yet she was not a peaceful sleeper. She twitched like a dog dreaming of
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rabbits and sometimes she moaned. She snuffled constantly and then, quite
loudly, coughed. The cough rumbled in her narrow chest for a long time and it
struck me that the child, so pale and sleeping with such racked exhaustion,
was a sick child. A sick, spoiled little girl who ruled the household with a
whim, and yet, poor little tyrant, went unloved; they must have been glad she
had dropped off to sleep, so they could abandon the game she had forced them
to play. She had fairy-tale, flaxen hair and eyelids so delicate the eyes
beneath them almost showed glowing through; and if, indeed, it had been she
who secreted all the grumbling grown-ups in their wardrobes and bathrooms and
wound me through the house on an invisible spool towards her, well, I could
scarcely begrudge her her fun. And her game had been as much with those
grown-ups as it had been with me; hadn't she tidied them all away as if they'd
been dolls she'd stowed in the huge toychest of this exquisite house?
When I thought of that, I went so far in forgiveness as to stroke her
eggshell cheek with my finger. Her skin was soft as plumage of snow and
sensitive as that of the princess in the story of the princess and the pea;
when I touched her, she stirred. She shrugged away from my touch, muttering,
and rolled over uneasily. As she did so, a gleaming bundle slithered from
between her covers on to the floor, banging its china head on the scrubbed
linoleum.
She must have tiptoed down to collect her forgotten doll while I went
prowling about the bedrooms. Here he was again, her Pierrot in his shining
white pyjamas, her little friend. Perhaps her only friend. I bent to pick him
up from the floor for her and, as I did so, something caught the light and
glittered at the corner of his huge, tragic, glass eye. A sequin? A brilliant?
The moon is your country, old chap; perhaps they've put stars in your eyes for
you.
I looked more closely.
It was wet.
It was a tear.
Then I felt a succinct blow on the back of my neck, so sudden, so
powerful, so unexpected that I felt only a vague astonishment as I pitched
forward on my face into a black vanishment.
When I opened my eyes, I saw a troubled absence of light around me; when
I tried to move, a dozen little daggers serrated me. It was terribly cold and
I was lying on, yes, marble, as if I was already dead, and I was trapped
inside a little hill of broken glass inside the wet carapace of Melissa's
husband's sheepskin coat that was sodden with melting snow.
After a few, careful, agonising twitches, I thought it best to stay
quite still in this dank, lightless hall where the snow drove in through an
open door whose outline I could dimly see against the white night outside.
Slow as a dream, the door shifted back and forth on rusty hinges with a
raucous, mechanical, monotonous caw, like that of crows.
I tried to piece together what had happened to me. I guessed I lay on
the floor of the hall of the house I could have sworn I'd just explored,
though I could see very little of its interior in the ghostly light -- but all
must once have been painted white, though now sadly and obscenely scribbled
over by rude village boys with paint and chalks. The despoiled pallor
reflected itself in a cracked mirror of immense size on the wall.
Perhaps I had been trapped by the fall of a chandelier. Certainly, I had
been caught in the half-shattered glass viscera of the chandelier that I
thought I'd just seen multiplying its reflections in another hall than the one
in which I lay and every bone in my body ached and throbbed. If time had
loosened the chandelier from its moorings in the flaking plaster above me, the
chandelier might very well have come tumbling down on me as I sheltered from
the storm that howled and gibbered around the house but then it might have
killed me and I knew by my throbbing bruises that I was still alive. But had I
not just walked through this very hall when it was warm and perfumed and suave
with money? Or had I not.
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Then I was pierced by a beam of light that struck cold green fire from
the prisms around me. The invisible behind the flashlight addressed me
unceremoniously in a cracked, old woman's voice, a crone's voice. Who be you?
What be you up to?
Trapped in the splintered glass, the splintered light, I told her how my
car had broken down in the snow and I had come here for assistance. This alibi
now seemed to me a very feeble one.
I could not see the old woman at all, could not even make out her vague
shape behind the light, but I told her I was staying with the Lady Melissa, to
impress her old country crone's snobbery. She exclaimed and muttered when she
heard Melissa's name; when she spoke again, her manner was almost excessively [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]