Harry Antlers, on his return to London for the weekend, found a letter from his late landlady’s solicitor giving him notice to leave. The house was up for sale. This spurred Harry to ring several estate agents and urge them to find him a penthouse flat. There was also a note, in uneducated writing, that had been delivered by hand:
Dear Mr Antlers, I have rung several times and left messages. Please could you phone me when you come back? I feel very wretched and would like to talk to you again. Yours, Annie Light.
The mystery of the anonymous voice on his answering machine thus solved, Harry sat down, heavy with disappointment. Remembering the girl, dark roots to her divided greasy hair, cruelly unlike Viola after a superficial glance, he made a note of her telephone number and angrily screwed up her letter.
Harry was very hungry. There was no food in his kitchen, no energy to go to the shops. He contemplated driving to Norfolk and peering through the bushes at Viola, her brother, most probably her doctor lover. But he felt no enthusiasm for such a trip: were he caught, things might be awkward. Instead, he wrote Viola another letter. Then the telephone rang. Hannah Bagle.
‘Harry? Hi. I’ve been calling constantly.’ Her annoyance was plain.
‘I’m only just back.’
‘How are you?’
‘Ravenous.’
Hannah laughed, misunderstanding him.
‘We can easily take care of that. Why not come on over? I’m at a horribly loose end, you could say. I’ll order you up a huge steak, French fries. Leave it to me.’
‘I’ll be with you in an hour,’ said Harry, his stomach aching at the thought of the food.
In the damp silence of his room he had a feeble battle with his conscience, but it was a fight quickly resolved. Once Viola was his, he would never go elsewhere. Until then, if other beautiful ladies wanted him, if others would assuage his hunger, why should he deny them?
He drove quickly to Hannah’s hotel. She opened the door of her suite to him wearing only a silk dressing-gown. His greeting was to tear the lapels apart, gaze upon her until his look shifted, even more hungrily, to the white-clothed table laid for two in the window.
‘Food first, if you don’t mind,’ he said.
They remained in the hotel for the rest of the weekend.
Viola and Gideon parted in London. Gideon was to spend a couple of days with Hannah, then they would return together to New York. It was quite apparent the prospect of this return held little joy for Gideon.
‘The week seems to have confirmed all my instincts,’ he told Viola. ‘Maybe it’s been the lever. Perhaps I shall be back quite soon.’
‘Wouldn’t that mean a lot of extricating?’
‘It would. But when I recognize the right time has come, I shall brace myself up for the severing.’ He looked far from happy as they said goodbye.
For her part, Viola took care to conceal from Gideon her own low spirits on her return to London. Entering her uncle’s house, the anguished figure of Edwin Hardley did nothing to cheer her.
‘Oh, you’ve been away,’ he groaned. ‘It’s been the longest week this summer.’
He carried her suitcase upstairs to the half-finished flat, made cups of coffee. Viola, in her melancholy, felt grateful to him.
‘You seem sad,’ said Edwin.
‘Not really. I never like coming back to London.’
‘It’s time we had another dinner. I shall tell you funny stories about a gathering of moth men last week. How about this evening?’
‘Not tonight,’ she said at last. ‘I think I must … resettle myself. Besides, I’m terribly behind with all this.’ Her eyes ran over the unpainted kitchen walls. ‘But it’s very kind of you. Perhaps next week.’ Next week, once Richard had come and gone, there would be nothing further to look forward to.
‘Very well.’
Edwin swilled out his cup under the tap, put it on a paintspattered draining board. He glanced around for a dish cloth. Seeing none, he seemed struck with unease, unnerved by the fact that he was unable to accomplish his job.
‘I shall wait to be summoned,’ he said, with a courageous smile, and put out a hand to touch Viola’s hair.
When he had gone, Viola reluctantly went to the bedroom. She knew the turmoil that awaited her: unpacked suitcases all over the floor, rolls of wallpaper waiting to be hung, stacks of pictures, unmade bed. She knew she should begin to establish some kind of order, but felt drained of energy. All she wanted was to shut her eyes and slowly, luxuriously, relive every moment of the week in Norfolk.
The room faced north. Despite the sun of the day, no warmth had reached it. In her thin dress Viola shivered. She sat on the cold, crumpled sheets of the bed and after a long time, listening to the absolute silence, feeling the weight of her body, she picked up the letter from Harry Antlers that had been waiting for her.
My beloved Viola, she read, What are you doing to us? Can you really want to lacerate a man’s heart so cruelly? Can you not understand the great love I have for you, and let me prove it to you? You resist, you scorn, you ignore: this surely must be out of innocence, because I cannot believe the creature I love would intentionally ruin a man’s life. However, I have patience. I shall wait, for ever if necessary. Such love as I have is not concerned with time, but it cannot be scorned, or wasted. So know that I shall never give up. I am sorry you did not find that little diamond star acceptable: I shall relieve you of it soon. I am sorry they were not greater diamonds, but they will be one day. Hope you had a good time in Norfolk with your lover. Think of me. H.A.
The old fear, almost quelled by the security of the week in Norfolk, shot back, dizzying. She felt a chill sweat, the stuff of her dress stuck icily to her back. She heard herself cry out loud, rending the silence of the darkening room. Such bleakness she had never known. She wondered where to turn.
Sated by quantities of good food at Hannah’s hotel, and by her own generous provision, Harry was able to return to Sweden in reasonable calm. He was not a little intrigued by Hannah’s apparent affection for him. Had Viola not existed, he reflected on several occasions, he might have been inclined to encourage her flattering desire. As it was, she was an agreeable vessel, and her infidelity would be useful ammunition some time in the future.
But the two lustful days with Hannah proved only a temporary antidote, inadequate balm to the real wounds of Harry’s heart. Within a few hours of his return to Sweden, he had forgotten Hannah, was suffering again, more acutely than ever, from his love of Viola. His pain was further exacerbated by lack of filling food, and with no care for the standard of his work he hurried through the last days of filming. Sleepless nights were spent planning his next move. This was to be the taking back of the diamond star, as he had warned Viola in his last letter.
The week of agonizing in Sweden finally came to an end, and the evening Harry chose for his next visit to Viola he was in good spirits. In his absence the estate agents had found him a flat. It was not quite the exotic penthouse he had imagined, but at least it was at the top of a tower block in Notting Hill Gate, with large windows and a fine view. It was in good order, merely needing repainting. Harry had hopes that Viola would be tempted by such a place, would willingly leave the gloom of the great house in Holland Park. So, he felt, he would be bringing good news, which would mean an auspicious start. Also, she would be touched that he intended to take back the diamond star in response to her wish. This, surely she would feel, showed dignity and understanding.
Harry spent an unusually long time preparing himself, rejecting all his man-made fibre shirts for the only one of pure cotton. Then he set about his normal method of inducing some semblance of calm: a four-course dinner in an Italian restaurant. The fact that Viola might be out had not come into his calculations. Instinct told him he would find her. With great hope of a rewarding evening, at last, Harry set off for Holland Park, stomach bulging.
He climbed the aristocratic flight of steps. The front door opened before he reached the top. A man stood there, carrying a briefcase. Of indeterminate appearance — in a seizure of suspicious fury Harry tried to imprint the lover’s features on his mind, but they slipped from him even as he looked — the man was grey-skinned and anxious looking. Harry reached the top step, heart pounding.
‘Ah,’ he said.
‘Were you coming in?’ asked the man, hand on the vast gold door knob, clutching it as if for support.
‘I was,’ said Harry. ‘Were you going out?’
Edwin licked his dry, grey lips.
‘I was,’ he said eventually. ‘But in fact I’ve forgotten a couple of books, so I’m returning to the library for a moment.’
‘Ah,’ said Harry again.
He followed the lover inside, noting the odious width of his shoulders, the salmon pink polyester of his shirt. Viola’s love for this creep must be quite blind to accept that. Harry would remember it, should it be necessary, to taunt her.
The two men stood in the dim speckled light of the hall weighing their mutual antipathy. It was an occasion that called for politeness above all else, Edwin thought. The hideous chap beside him, plainly deprived of public school good manners, should be treated courteously for Viola’s sake.
‘Are you looking for Viola?’ he offered.
‘I am.’
‘I believe you’ll find her in her flat at the top of the house.’
So that was it. Viola already had a penthouse — in Harry’s estimation any top-floor flat was a penthouse — Goddamn the spoilt little bitch. And where would that leave his plans?
‘She’s waiting for me,’ he managed to say. ‘I’ll go on up.’
He took a clumsy leap up the first two stairs, with an air of one familiar with grand staircases. In fact he was obliged to clutch at the mahogany balustrade to prevent himself from falling. Recovered, he sped on up three flights, the thick-piled alien carpet a deterrent to his impatient feet. The familiar sensation of a million pins piercing his veins was almost intolerable. He felt Edwin’s scornful little eyes upon him. Indeed, Edwin’s scornful eyes did follow Harry till he was out of sight. Then he made his own slower way to the library.
When the stairs ended at last, Harry found an ordinary door — there seemed to be an economy of mahogany towards the top of the house — half open. He paused, breathing noisily. He found himself to be hot, sweating, smelling. His plans, together with his intentions to present a calm and loving front, jeered through his head in tatters. The confrontation with the lover — dreadful, prying face of a medical man, he had — had quite unnerved him. His whole being seethed with outrage and self-pity.
But somewhere in the maelstrom of his despair a small voice of reason could be heard. Now, more than ever, Harry knew, it was essential he should contain himself. He must diffuse the wildness within, dwell on the moment later. If he was to win the heart of his beloved Viola, he should appear a rational man. He must pause and strive.
Sitting on the top stair, plump thighs supporting arms and head, Harry made the effort of a lifetime. Eyes shut, he willed pictures of tranquillity to flower in the darkness: slow clouds in a dull sky, grey rocking sea, a tablecloth of muted checks he had loved as a child — he remembered the comfort of twisting its soft stuff between his fingers. Music would have helped. Harry summoned Beethoven’s Seventh to his ears, but the imagined notes were no match for the real sound of his own breathing.
Gradually, the sweat on his body dried, though the smell remained pungent. Cold, now, he opened his eyes. He had no idea for how long he had fought his battle. Time had been immeasurable. Harry stood, calm. The effort had succeeded.
He tiptoed through the door. Within the flat, he found himself in a narrow passage of bare boards. At the end of the passage was an open door. Harry crept towards it.
Peering into the room he saw Viola, back to him, kneeling on the floor turning the pages of a leather-bound photograph album. There were others in a pile beside her, open. The wall to her left was entirely taken up with newly painted bookshelves, half filled with books, ornaments, glasses, and two bottles of wine. There was also a large photograph of a handsome elderly couple in sporting hats. They smiled from an expensive frame. Parents, no doubt. (Extraordinary idea, displaying a photograph of parents.) The room, like the passage, was uncarpeted. The wall opposite the bookshelves was painted the kind of arrogant scarlet that evoked Harry’s instant hostility, but he fought to control this reaction. The other two walls were as yet unpainted, though pots of scarlet paint on the floor indicated the end of their naked plaster state was imminent. There was no furniture, just two tea chests of objects wrapped in newspaper. No curtains in the single wide window. The darkening sun flared through Viola’s hair, making it translucent as the fluff of dandelions.
‘Hello, beloved lady,’ said Harry, at last.
Viola’s body snapped round to face him. Her beautiful mouth split into a hideous scream. She clutched at her ears through her hair, swaying. Harry felt himself smiling, seeing her as if through a sheet of protective glass. He squatted on the floor beside her. As he did so, he heard the rip of material: the zip of his flies had broken. Glancing down, he saw a tuft of white shirt protruding.
When the horrible noise of Viola’s scream had subsided, Harry eased himself into a more comfortable position on the floor. He was not shaped for sitting happily on floors, and in this position he was at a disadvantage. He moved to support himself against the bookshelves, thus freeing his hands to try to disguise the gaping of his trousers. As usual, everything had conspired against him, but for the moment, adrenalin pulsing happily through his veins, he was in command of the situation.
‘Calm down, beautiful Viola,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I should have taken you by surprise. I came merely to relieve you of the diamond star, as you requested. I’m sorry if it’s been a burden to you.’
He could see Viola’s heart pounding beneath the gossamer cotton of her jersey. He gripped his hands more tightly to prevent himself crushing the fearful creature to him. That would ruin everything.
Viola reached up to the bookshelves, took the small box with a shaking hand. She handed it to Harry.
‘Now will you go?’ she asked quietly.
‘Thank you.’
Harry put the box in the pocket of his jacket with one hand, leaving the other to guard the split in his trousers. But the small exertion, combined with the strain of taut stomach against waistband, was fatal: the single hook upon which the sole responsibility of keeping the trousers together now lay, snapped. Viola’s eyes joined Harry’s in falling to the general disarray of flesh and sprouting shirt. Viola had the grace to smile. Harry, relieved, gave a grim laugh, patting and tugging to no good effect.
‘Just my luck,’ he said.
He realized that in some peculiar way this inauspicious happening had brought Viola closer to him than he ever had been before. They were briefly joined in mirth. The joke dispelled the anger and the fear. Heavens, thought Harry, the gods act curiously: but they had given him an advantage he must surely take.
‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘Of course I’ll go. Who am I to stay, unwanted?’
‘You’re unreasonably persistent,’ said Viola, lightly, ‘considering you must know by now that pursuing me is hopeless.’
‘Ah, but there you’re wrong. It’s not hopeless, and I’ve only just begun.’ Harry, too, tried for lightness: he did not want to scare her with what might sound like threats. ‘My aim, of course, you beautiful, beautiful creature, is to make you realize your love for me, which up to now you’ve been fighting against like a wild cat.’ Viola gave a small laugh. ‘That’s so often how real love starts. A great fight against commitment, against acknowledgement. But you must know, in your heart of hearts, you’re as inextricably bound to me as I am to you … That evening in Norfolk, before I went berserk and did everything wrong, you standing there by the fire in your bloody great kitchen — you wanted me as passionately as I wanted you. I could feel it. Why else do you suppose I persisted, was eventually driven to violence by your stubborn refusal to recognize …?’
He saw her eyes widen. He was going too fast, too far, but she was still gazing at him, curiously. He still had her sympathy — just.
‘Dear God, my love. Here I am, desperately uncomfortable on this dreadful floor, trousers split, ridiculous … loving you with all my heart, asking you just to think a little of my plight. You try to be so heartless. But you aren’t, you aren’t.’
He put out a hand towards her. She shifted away. He returned it to its place on the trousers.
‘I’m sorry,’ Viola said, quite nicely, very practical. ‘But you’ve got it all wrong. You misjudged everything. You believe something that’s patently not true. I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you, tormented you, even, resisting you. But how can I make you see the truth? You’re a prisoner of some sort of wild delusion. It’ll go, it’ll die. Honestly.’
Harry swallowed. Paused. ‘It won’t,’ he said at last. ‘And it’s you who are mad, as you’ll realize when all these absurd preliminaries are over and we’re a happily married couple with four children. However, you must take your own time to understand yourself. I shall wait patiently, constantly, wishing you well with your pink-shirted doctor downstairs.’ His first mistake. Viola’s eyes hardened. ‘Well, whoever he is. Perhaps the doctor is in Norfolk? I get muddled, so many lovers … But let’s not speak of them. Let’s concern ourselves with us.’ He pronounced it uz.
Viola looked as if she had much to deny in response, but decided to resist. ‘Please go now,’ was all she answered. ‘I can see nothing I can say will make any difference to you. But if you really love me as you say, then perhaps you’ll be kind enough to leave me alone, as I want.’
Perhaps you’ll be kind enough to leave me alone: the triteness of the phrase swatted at Harry’s mind-shattering passion as if it was an annoying fly. Oh, she’d learn, the girl: she’d learn. Though if this kind of patience, the infinite gentleness of his manner this evening, achieved no response either, then perhaps he would have to rethink his strategy once again.
‘Very well: I’m going,’ Harry said.
The performance of rising to his feet Harry was not able to conduct with the dignity he would have liked. He had to try to keep his trousers together with one hand, while pushing himself up from the floor with the other. He found it intolerable that Viola, who had leapt up quickly in a single youthful movement, should be looking down on his struggle. Mocking, no doubt. Seeing him as a figure of ridicule. But as quickly as such thoughts about her came to him, they were dispelled by a firm hand holding his, pulling. With the politeness of her class, she was helping him, though the help meant no more than just that, of course. No one like the upper classes to help an enemy … And there he was, now, panting foolishly, but standing, very close to her, the sky almost dark behind her luminous hair, her huge eyes confronting him with the wary sightless look of the blind. The brief physical contact, Viola touching him for the first time, had further confused Harry Antlers. He felt the approach of sentimental tears, and in that weakened state took the risk of saying one thing further.
‘Viola Windrush, if you are never to be mine, then there is little point in continuing my life. I ask you to remember that.’
‘Rubbish,’ he heard her say, gently. ‘You should never make such foolish threats. Please.’
The sympathy in her voice — no mockery there, Harry could swear — was his undoing. He flung himself upon her, crashing his mouth down upon hers — a brief chink of teeth, he heard, before her screams. He felt her writhing, struggling, scratching, shouting for help, scotching instantly his loving desire. Rage slashed over him: he felt his hand squeezing Viola’s cheek, its soft pulp flashing him a memory of summer peaches he had tortured as a child, to bring forth the trickle of sweet juice — except that the juice he could see was blood. Blood! Dear God, here he was near to killing … Could nothing make her understand the love that lived behind his rage? And why would his hands not obey him, signalling what he really felt? With a great effort he tried gently to wipe the tracks of blood from Viola’s cheek, but he could tell by a flick of her head he was rough, hurting again.
Viola was trapped against the window. From Harry’s arms, curved crab-like, she could not escape. Wanting to roar his love for her, some indistinguishable abuse spewed forth, alarming him. He hit her on the bleeding cheek, saw her sway, moaning, left, right, left, about to fall. Then she splayed her arms out behind her against the window to support herself, and was still. Also, silent. She looked at him from the eye that remained open. Blood dripped from the corner of the other one, making a scarlet gash down her cheek, falling to spot the white of her jersey.
Silence, silence. Room nearly dark. Viola an immobile poster stuck to the window, spectral. The silence crashed in Harry Antlers’ ears, increasing the darkness in his eyes. Wrenching up the trousers, which were fast sliding over his hips, he lumbered across the bare floor to the pots of paint, kicked them over each in turn. Fascinated, he watched scarlet snakes sprout across the floor. Then he barged back to the bookshelves, both hands deserting trousers while he picked up the photograph of the parents with their nice kind smiles. He threw it to the ground. There was a crash of glass, miniscule splinters flew across the dark floor boards, glow worms in brief flight. He heard an intake of breath from the unmoving Viola.
‘Not that …’ she whispered.
‘I’ll destroy you, and everything that’s yours.’ This was a thick cry Harry did not recognize as his own. By now his arms were full of books. He threw them about the room, watching them land like clumsy birds in the red paint, their pages sprawled pathetically.
Shouting obscenities, Harry threw books more wildly, with both hands. In his preoccupation, he did not notice that his trousers had slipped below his knees. He took a step. They slid to his ankles. They fell.
From the small stone pebble of her mind, whose one eye could see but hazily, Viola Windrush watched Harry Antlers grovelling on the floor. He was both weeping and moaning at the same time, tears and spittle joining in the deep runnels at the sides of his mouth. His words were slurred, barely understandable: something about begging and forgiveness and madness, and Viola’s fault. He crawled backwards and forwards, an obscene monster baby, a caged and spent tiger, trousers twisted round his feet, flashes of appalling underpants beneath the drooping shirt.
Some infinitesimal part of Viola’s mind registered that had she not been involved in this melodrama, she would be able to appreciate the black humour. Men in the depths of their wretchedness can be shockingly absurd. She was reminded — in halting thought that came in single words — of an amateur production of Shakespeare, in which a slain man had not been able to bring himself to die, rolling round and round the stage in an extravagance of last breaths. The audience had laughed. Viola stretched the tight line of her clenched mouth just a fraction, and tasted blood.
‘Get up,’ she managed to say. ‘You’re a horrible sight.’
She thought: why am I here? A sane woman, pinned to my own window, bleeding, silent, forced to watch so degrading a scene? And why do I feel nothing, nothing?
The weeping and crawling continued for another couple of lengths of the room. But then, like an actor whose part is over and who must gather himself for his bow, Harry Antlers stood up surprisingly fast, considering the state of his trousers. Viola shut her good eye against the sight of thuggish thigh and bandy calf. Harry held on to his trousers with one hand, blew his nose with the other.
‘You can call the police, my love,’ he said. ‘It won’t matter. This is the end.’
Viola, opening her eye as he spoke, and seeing his loathsome face greasy with tears, shut it again. Thus she only heard him shuffle from the room, down the passage, and bang the door behind him.
When he had gone, she lowered her arms from their place across the window, dead, bloodless things which felt huge as balloons. She made her way through the dark passage to the bathroom, switched on the light. In the small mirror above the basin she observed the damage to her face. She bathed her closed eye with a sponge of cold water, wiped away the blood. She told herself she must find the energy to go downstairs and telephone the police. But, leaving the bathroom, savage pain began to fill her head, and such deadly tiredness accosted her that it was a wonder she made it to the bedroom. There, she pulled off her clothes and fell on to the bed. Blackness absorbed her, instantly.