Coronach, page 20
Sometimes she called him son, little son, other times other names, unequivocally sexual, which shamed and aroused him. She did not allow him access to her nakedness, and never fully revealed his: the pleasure of this debauchery, a stripping of the rags of innocence, lay in a slower sexual torment, in frottage, in interrupted masturbation, in the blind explorations of the tongue, seducing, corrupting, never satisfying, until he was repulsed and enflamed and crazed with rage and frustration. And yet he could not divorce himself from her, or from the uncontrollable compulsion. With her all memory of another life became faint: she was the only reality, and the past and the future subdued themselves to her.
On the morning of the fifteenth of March he saw her at the abandoned croft. He dismounted, and walked with fear and a painful eagerness toward her.
“You can’t stay here.”
“And who are you to say so? Are you the factor now, coming to put a poor woman out of her house?”
“It isn’t your house.”
“Maybe I will make it mine. It is a quiet place, I am liking it well.”
“I don’t want you here,” he said.
She raised her fist, with the thumb between the index and middle fingers.
“I don’t give that for what you want.” The mouth smiled then, the irresistible invitation. “Come now, a churaidh. Come, my beautiful boy.”
Closing the door, enclosing him in the brothel she had prepared for him. There was fresh heather on the floor, and the blanket he had stolen for her. The crucifix had been taken down.
She brought a cuach from the dresser. He drank the raw spirit, and then she, where his lips had been. She walked to the bed, barefoot in the dimness, and paused there with her hands at her shirt.
“Come here.” Holding out the hand, more insistently. “Come.”
He allowed himself to be drawn down into the hot dark dream she offered him, the smell of arousal, the smell of the ground, of stone and of burning. He kissed her mouth with a fevered hunger, and the breast when it was given, and sucked it, trembling with exquisite shame. She was murmuring to him, stroking his penis, caressing his mouth with aromatic fingers, and he sucked them, sucking the essence of his sex and hers; and then, as always, the intolerable pleasure was withdrawn, the fingers injured, the lips cursed him. He fumbled with his clothing and with hers, calling her bitch, whore, cunt.
She said, “Come again tomorrow.”
He stumbled to his feet, sick with fury and humiliation, calling her the most obscene of a vocabulary of epithets, and she raised herself on an elbow and mocked his anguished, involuntary climax, and lay back again, revealing the swollen nipples where he had tongued and bitten her.
“Come to me tonight. I’ll give you what you want.” He swore at her again from the door. “Do you hear me? I want you to come to me. I want you.”
He stood at the door, tasting the tears and the semen, seeing the white mist on the furrows, knowing what the evening would bring, what blindness, what fears.
“Come,” she said, behind him.
He turned once more to the smoke and to her.
In the depths of the night, under the influence of opium, Ewen dreamed of a voice and a sound. The voice cried his name, only once: the heavy sound could not be distinguished. He drifted into deep sleep again.
He woke again and held his watch to the casement to see the time, and opened his door. The stain on the panel was invisible in the shadows; the gallery was empty. He returned to bed, shivering.
When the valet woke him, only the bitter dregs in his glass reminded him of the night and the dream.
The mist had yielded to rain and the day was dark, the clothing damp which had been laid out for him. He complained of it fretfully and went to breakfast.
Malcolm was in the dining room, drinking bitter coffee. When he heard Ewen he pushed the cup away and rose, and remained standing in the shadows.
Eventually he slumped into a chair at the far end of the table.
“You do not eat, Malcolm?”
He said, “Will you let me alone,” and the austerity of the formal vous was chilling.
“Certainly. I will... let you alone.” Ewen poured coffee for himself; his appetite was gone. “I did not hear you come in last night. Were you very late?” He became increasingly aware of the sound of his own voice. “My God, am I talking to myself? Take that hand away from your face and look at me.”
The eyes were bloodshot, and burningly hostile.
“Where were you?”
“I was out.”
“So late?”
He stood.
“Sit down, Malcolm.”
“I’ve said all I have to say.”
“You have not heard all I have to say. You live in my house, you are subject to my wishes. I regret, but I cannot and will not endure this behaviour on your part, this arrogant flouting of me. If you wish to disport yourself like a young profligate, I pray you do not do it in my house.”
“Then I’ll leave your fucking house. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“It is apparently what you want. You neither know nor care for my desires, and if you did, in your present state they would mean less than nothing to you.”
Craving solitude, he returned to his rooms. The valet was waiting for him.
“If Monseigneur will pardon me, there is something I think he should see.”
It was the door to Malcolm’s dressing room. The panelling was painted a pleasing greyish blue, there was a settee covered with fading silk and two chairs, and a scent of orris and cedar. A number of drawers were open, and on the carpet lay two or three crushed Turkish towels.
“It is blood, Monseigneur.”
He left him and went into the bedroom. The rain was running on the glass. He sat down and watched it.
When he tired of the rain he studied the worn carpet with its pattern of lilies and roses, and the dark red damask hangings of the bed, and the enigmatic figures on the japanned screen in the corner. The rain stopped and a weak sunlight came. Somewhere a clock was ticking: the room smelled of age and time. A book in calfskin binding lay on a table, a ribbon marker halfway through. The candles had been replaced for the night.
There were few possessions in this room, little to indicate that the tenant was anything but a temporary guest. Perhaps because he had arrived with nothing more than the shirt on his back, the boy had never been acquisitive; it seemed sometimes to Ewen that he lived always in readiness to leave the same way.
Ewen sat, waiting for him, and the pale sun vanished, and the room became dim. It was nearly six o’clock: he had spent the afternoon waiting for Malcolm to return.
He thought, oh God, let him not be sick, or hurt― do not take him from me, let me not lose him now.
Twilight filled the room: eventually he left it. Malcolm had come home by the time he took his cognac in the drawing room. He did not go to speak to him but read through an old number of the Edinburgh Evening Courant, frowning in the dimness, then he folded it and left it on the table. He paused before closing the doors to look back at the room, the rotting silk wallpaper and the scarred mantel of Italian marble, and the far end where he had kept his vigil beside Murdoch. The sky held something of the afterlight. The days had begun to lengthen toward spring.
He closed the doors quietly and went to his rooms.
There was a knock on his door a little after ten, and Malcolm came in. He seemed indefinably older, drawn, and very composed.
Ewen offered him cognac. He refused it courteously. They sat, observing one another in the candlelight.
“I hoped, but did not dare to expect this.”
“I was rude to you. I regret it.”
“This is all that matters to me.” He gazed at him. “How are you, Malcolm? Better than this morning, I trust.” A dismissive gesture. “Well, I was young too once and I was no angel....” Silence. “You were bleeding. Why?”
Silence.
“The towels you had hidden in your room. You must have known that Guillaume would find them.”
“I fell. I pissed myself. You would have been disgusted.”
He remembered his own nights of sickness and disgust.
“My God, what do you think I am? A saint? A monster?”
The candlelight was falling on the rough black hair, the strong jut of the cheekbone. Ewen watched him, wanting to embrace him, restrained by the austerity in his face.
“You never want to know the truth, man. I told you what I was.”
And whatever I am, I cannot be tolerated, or lived with, or forgiven.
“Well, we have never allowed one another much humanity, have we? You always thought I was a god and I thought you were an angel, and the reality is more than either of us can bear.” He walked to the window, stared out at the clear night. “Do you wish to go now? You have made your peace.”
The room was quiet behind him: he saw the reflected movement.
They stood together for a moment and he thought Malcolm would have spoken, and again he wanted to embrace him, but the eyes were remote, reticent, permitting nothing.
“Good night, mon cher. Sleep well. I am here if you need me.”
The brilliance of the eyes suggested tears: perhaps he only thought he saw what he wanted to see.
The door shut. He listened until the footsteps died away.
The valet woke him. Beyond him a tranquil dawn unfolded: the sky of March was delicate, lucid.
He sat up, transfixed by the man’s expression.
“Monseigneur―”
Malcolm had gone.
XI
A dream of France which had sustained him was dying, and without it he did not know how he should continue to live.
He submitted to the valet’s tyranny, to fittings for clothes he could not afford, to having his brows shaved and his hair pomaded and tortured into stiff side curls, but he had no notion of what was fashionable and he was without influential friends: had he desired the pleasures they offered, the salons, the gambling hells, the elegant houses of prostitution were as closed to him as to the merest beggar. He went to the Tuileries, where the sweating, milling crowds were mostly English; he went to the Grand Boulevard and sat on a straw-bottomed chair drinking sour wine and watching the parade of carriages. He went to the Comédie-Française, and during the interval a beautiful woman tapped on the door of his box; he had seen her alone and, flushing, had returned her smile. She seated herself beside him, sipped the champagne he offered her and laid her hand between his thighs, and he realized she was a whore, not merely some forward gentlewoman. He left her, but not before she called him homosexual, and, more wounding still, bourgeois.
He went out no more in the evenings.
He went to the Marais. He walked up the Rue des Quatre-Fils and stood in the hot sunlight gazing up at the house where he had been deflowered by one of his father’s mistresses, disporting himself in ecstasy in her fragrant bed only to learn later that his initiation had for an idle hour entertained James Bécu behind a spy-hole in the wall.
He was sixteen again and felt her moist lips parting his... then the taste of dust filled his mouth and the sun struck without pity at his sombre clothing and his fair, uncovered head. He leaned a moment against the wrought iron gate. A woman passed him with mincing steps, holding her skirts away from him, glancing back as she shut her door.
Sparrows came to flutter in the dust at his feet. The air was sullen; he heard distant thunder, and water playing languidly behind yet another impenetrable gate.
Eventually the faintness left him, and he made his way in the failing light to the corner. Disturbed, the birds fluttered up, then settled like dead leaves on the place where he had stood.
After the evening’s storm there was music again from the neighbouring house, and he listened in the darkness of his room and wept, although he did not know why.
He followed the directions of a tradesman into the sordid heart of the Quartier St-Severin. The spires of Notre-Dame were visible over the blackened rooftops: the stench of the Seine followed him into the alley off the Place Maubert where he found the lodgings he sought.
He sat in a darkened room with Elspeth’s sister, sipping with polite distaste a red wine as bitter as misery. Two candles were burning on a graceful walnut commode, all that remained of the household furniture he had known.
“Why did you leave the Marais, Jeanne? When did you leave?”
“We had no money. Where else were we to go?”
“The pension....”
“There is no pension. You sound like her... she always talks of the pension. You think the King remembers his dead chevalier?” She twisted the limp flounce at her elbow. “Have you been in Paris long?”
“No,” he lied.
“And how long do you stay?”
“A few days only.”
“And where do you stop, this not long time in town?”
Ashamed, he murmured, “The hôtel Saint-Arnaud.”
“Oh, yes, who could forget the so charming vicomtesse? Let me announce you to Maman, Ewen... she seems to be awake.”
“Jeanne―”
“I shall not be here when you come out. I must go and buy bread. Such a pleasure to have seen you again, so good of you to remember us.”
More candles, on either side of a mirror in a tortoiseshell frame. Janet Douglass received him. She was wearing a rusty black gown, a crucifix at her throat; and the hair he remembered was hidden by a grotesque wig. The mercury wash she used had begun to eat into her skin in a manner more often seen in old whores; she had brushed a hare’s foot of rouge over her ravaged cheeks and it lay with a pounce box and snuff in a clutter of spilled powder and broken jet beads.
She snapped her fingers and he went to her, and bowed.
“So it’s you again, is it, Stirling?” He carried the limp hand to his lips. “You still have that womanish face. What brings you back to France?”
“Your son proved himself unworthy of his charge.”
“You talk in riddles,” although he knew she had been fully apprised of Charles Arsène’s activities.
“He placed my child like an unwanted parcel on the Lyons-Paris chaise and decamped with his wife into Italy. I understand from my cousin Honorée that his creditors had threatened him.” Spots of shame were burning beneath her rouge. “I suspect he wrote to you for money?”
“You were a gambler too, Stirling.”
“I came to my senses, madame, as soon as I was married. And had our positions been reversed, I would not have betrayed a trust placed in me by Charles Arsène.”
After a time she said, with a fondness that was not for him, “How does it go for my dear child, my little grandson? He has a cough, if I recall... he wrote to me once and said so.”
“He has inherited my family’s unhappy weakness in the lungs.”
“Your family’s weakness was all here, Stirling, in the stomach and the loins. Your father was a lewd dog and your mother was no better, as silly as a girl. And all your brothers were the same.” Again, his appearance seemed to offer an affront. “You dress beyond your means: I always thought so. Weak and vain and foolish, that was what I thought from the first. I told my daughter. The eldest child of a chevalier― she could have had any one.” And then she began to speak of Elspeth, which he had dreaded. “She was only a toy to you, a plaything― and that monstrous letter you sent me, I shall never forgive you for it―”
He laid his hand gently on hers.
“Madame, my mother, please―”
She thrust his hand away.
“You were never my son!”
She turned her face aside. His reflection wavered in the clouded mirror, a stiff, slim figure, hair greyed by the candlelight.
“Permit me the honour of wishing you good-day.”
Jeanne had gone out. He stood in the filthy street, blinded by the sun on the cobbles, wondering in which direction she had walked. But then he knew it did not matter, whichever way she had gone it would always be one where he could not follow.
He returned to the Quartier St-Severin on the Thursday, to take his leave of Elspeth’s mother.
She received him as before in her airless, darkened room, and he thought of the squalid Italian village where his father had died, and could scarcely control his sense of being entombed with her.
He had brought her a gift of snuff, of a blend she had once favoured. She inhaled daintily, indicating her dressing table. He saw what she wanted and brought it to her, an old silver watch and seal.
“Give these to my grandson― they were his grandfather Douglass’s. I do not expect to see the child again.” She dabbed her eyes and turned them on him without love. “You look frail to me, Stirling. You do well to guard your health.”
“I do, madame, believe me.”
“I shall have trouble with Jeanne now. She is always peevish when some one comes and goes... but at my age life is only just that, comings and goings.” He took the watch with a slight, courteous bow. “Keep it well, Stirling. It survived Sheriffmuir and it was given him by a king. A king, mind you, his sainted Majesty. Give it to my grandson and see that he knows its worth. Douglass had it of a king.”
“He will be honoured, madame.”
“You may go now. I do not keep your hours. I must soon be abed.”
He rose.
“Adieu, madame. I do not think that we shall meet again.”
Jeanne, sewing in the other room, looked up.
“Give my love to my little nephew. Ask him to remember his Tante Jeanne.”
He left money on the table, his back half-turned so that she should not see what he was doing, and went out.
