14

‘I’ve been so lonely,’ says Janice, from beneath Victor. ‘I’ve enjoyed it in a way but it’s been so unnatural.’

‘I can’t stand being an antique dealer,’ says Victor. ‘It’s all right as a hobby but as a way of life it’s too frightening.’

‘The house is in a dreadful mess.’

‘I don’t mind. What about this young man of Wendy’s?’

‘I don’t know. She only met him yesterday. What about that young girl of yours?’

‘She’ll be all right. She’s not particular as to who, or why, or where.’

‘Then she’ll get what she deserves,’ says Janice, looking up at Victor with one clear eye and one puffy one.

Victor slept. So did Janice.

Victor, waking, was restored to himself. He woke with a sense of relief, as one does from a bad dream, to find the real world again, and with Janice beside him. He shook her awake, and walked with her down the mock-marble stairs and along dim corridors to the kitchens, and through them to the courtyard, where he found the library ladder still leaning against the wall beside the dustbins. He sighed over its freshly broken rung, closed it, and tucked it under his arm.

‘Are you stealing it?’ asked the newly delinquent Janice.

‘Yes,’ said Victor, and they walked round through the back and into the garages, where his car was trapped behind closed doors. He folded down the back seat and laid the ladder tenderly in a blanket he kept for just such purposes. He started the engine, let it run for a few seconds, reversed as far as he could, and then drove the car at the garage doors. They were made, as he had surmised, of the same flimsy wood-simulating plastic which Hamish used to manufacture window-boxes. They splintered easily. Janice got in beside him, and Victor drove round to the front of the house and parked outside the french windows of the tea room.

He beckoned Wendy, who rose obediently and came to the car and got inside. Kim followed. Gemma came after them, but her chair could not traverse the step down from the french windows.

‘You can’t go,’ called Gemma. ‘I shan’t open the gates till I’m ready.’

But Victor, his family safely inside, and the library ladder saved from further dilapidation, aimed the car at the gates, and they gave before him, as had the garage doors, like a block of Greek halva before a determined spoon.

Elsa remains sitting with her head in her hands.

Presently Gemma rejoins her.

‘Never mind, Elsa,’ says Gemma. ‘I’ll look after you. You have nothing left, really. No family, no home, no job. No clothes, I suppose?’

‘Not to speak of.’

‘Of course not. You travel light. Nothing left: all gone with Victor. Nothing but remembered love. Well, it’s all any of us have, in the end,’ says Gemma, her worldly domain stretching high and wide around her. ‘Have another piece of cake. Didn’t it turn out well! I’m glad Alice didn’t make it sink: she might well have. And weren’t the Ramsbottles terrible! How dreadful the past is, and all its inhabitants. I’m sure I don’t know why I go on tormenting myself with it. One will never understand it; much less oneself.’

Gemma fingers her mother’s pendant.

‘I would like a change, Elsa,’ she confides, ‘but I don’t know how.’

And Gemma continues her story.

1966.

And Gemma’s ring finger is swollen and sore, and the two rings still upon it. Nevertheless Marion and Gemma set off for work with their bits and pieces in one of the new psychedelic plastic carrier bags. Gemma wore Marion’s gran’s gloves to make the rings on her fingers less conspicuous. The gloves were of special stretch open-weave, the better to enclose swollen arthritic joints. Mr Ramsbottle gave the girls a lift to the station in the Ford Cortina.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘After all that to-do last night. Perhaps you shouldn’t go off with Mr Fox just like that, Gemma. Call me old-fashioned if you like, but you should work up to grand holidays; otherwise you’ll spoil things for the rest of your life. Succession, that’s the secret of holidays. Who wants to go to Dieppe when you’ve had a good time in Monte Carlo? But Dieppe, if it’s only been Bournemouth before, appears as a seaside paradise. You’re welcome to come with us, Gemma, to the Isle of Capri. We could even see our way to advancing the fare.’

‘That’s very kind,’ said Gemma, in her most refined voice, ‘but no, thank you. I wouldn’t want to presume.’

What, Gemma go on holiday, on a package tour, with ordinary chip eating, tea-drinking people? Leon Fox’s true love? Someone wearing Queen Katharine’s ring on her finger, not to mention another she’d really rather not think about, but which a jeweller would surely, surely, manage to get off. Without cutting, of course. Mr Fox’s erotic circle could not be rudely broken. Stretched, perhaps. But not broken.

‘I think,’ said Marion, while they were strap-hanging on the underground, ‘you’d be wiser to have your finger cut off, than go to the office wearing those rings.’

‘It will only be till lunch-time, when I can get to a jeweller. Mr Fox will sleep all morning, and I’ll hide my hand if Mr First is about.’

And so he did, and so she did, and panic subsided.

But at lunch-time the jeweller was leaving for the pub just as Gemma arrived, and though she pleaded and cried, he would not deign to open up his workroom for her. He’d do it at five thirty-five, he said: stay in especially for her. And he looked briefly at the rings, and then with rather more interest at Gemma, and said, ‘Where did you get these from? Never mind, tell me all about it at half-past five. I can do it without filing, if I put my mind to it.’

‘I hope you can,’ said Gemma.

‘Depends on the degree of co-operation,’ he said, and off he went, beer-and-sandwich first, sex afterwards. Easy enough to deal with when the time came, thought Gemma, safe in the spiritual arms of Mr Fox.

During the morning Mr Fox had come bouncing down the stairs, nodded briefly to her – how her heart pounded – and went out. Shortly after lunch-time he returned. This time he appeared preoccupied and not to see her.

Marion remained closetted with Mr First. Presently Marion came out and went off to buy fresh coffee beans, and soon Mr First emerged from his office. Gemma smiled brightly and falsely and sat on both her hands.

‘Gemma smiled at me,’ croaked Mr First. ‘She smiled! I wonder if she thought I was someone else! You did, didn’t you! Yes. Do you hate me, Gemma Joseph?’

‘No.’

I fear you, but I don’t hate you. I wish I did. Hate is the easiest, most invigorating emotion of all: next, of course, to despising.

‘That’s something,’ said Mr First. ‘Not hate. But what do you think of when you think of me? When someone says Mr First what vision comes into your head?’

‘Your hands.’

Mr First was pleased.

‘Yes, I have nice hands. They’re very nimble. I’m quite a good typist, you know. Very good, in fact; better than you, and you’re not bad.’

‘A man! A typist!’ sneered Gemma, quite openly and for the first time Mr First appeared alarmed.

‘You don’t think that’s a manly thing to do?’

‘I don’t. It’s just silly. Anyway I was thinking about the skin on your hands.’

‘What about it?’

‘It’s old.’

‘And you are young, you mean.’

‘Yes.’

‘May and November can live together. I’ve known it happen. One gives wisdom, and the other gives strength. Would you marry me, Miss Joseph.’

‘No.’

‘I only enquired to hear the tone of your voice, which quite lived up to expectation. Horror and disgust. I am a lonely man, Gemma, and don’t know how to behave. You should have some pity on me. You could even marry me for my money. I have quite a future: even if this business fails, which I quite expect it to do. Money lies in the mass market, not the élite. Too many bad debts. I’m going into pot plants. Yes, marry me for my money, Gemma. I’ve known girls do that. Not many, in actual fact, not as many as you’d expect, but a few do manage.’

‘I have some pride,’ said Gemma, hoity-toity.

‘Pride! Remember the girl with the new red shoes! She flung her mother’s loaf of bread into the mud and used it as a stepping stone. And it sunk with her upon it, down, down, to the Halls of the Bog King, and she was compelled to dance before him for ever in her new red shoes, in the mud and the slime. Why are you sitting on your hands?’

‘It’s a habit of mine.’

‘Ask me a favour, Gemma. Anything. At least be grateful to me.’

‘Never.’

‘Show me your left hand, Gemma.’

‘No.’

Her heart beat strongly. She had never been so frightened, and yet she was brave.

Mr First put out his grey hand to hold her arm. Her flesh shuddered at its touch: it seemed to do so of its own volition, quite disregarding the normal circuit of sensations to the brain and back again.

He withdrew his hand, and smiled.

‘We could have lovely children, Gemma, you and me.’

So men have spoken to women from the beginning of language, against reason, against hope, driven by the steady wind of instinct on to the rocks of humiliation and disaster.

‘I see you as mother of my children. Marry me, Gemma.’

The rocks were sharp indeed. Spite and malice showed in Gemma’s face.

‘You’re mad. You’re disgusting. Pay someone to have your horrid children. All you’ll ever have is money. I’m never having children anyway. I hate children.’

Oh, Gemma! How could you! Great-Aunt May withdrew her protective strength, turned away in sorrow, bitterness. So, follow your mother. She never really wanted you, Gemma. You kept her there with me, an old woman even then, trapped in a miserable hovel, to catch her death of cold.

Mr First was angry, full of a hate which echoed Gemma’s own.

He caught her left hand and exerted his full strength to turn it, open it: yet it was not his strength but her nature which caused her flesh to capitulate, surrender.

‘Two rings!’ observed Mr First, mildly. Now he had her in his power his anger evaporated. ‘Greedy Gemma.’

‘I can’t get them off.’

‘I can see that. Your poor little finger!’

His dry hand caressed hers.

‘Marion put them there.’

‘Don’t tell tales,’ said Mr First. ‘It isn’t sporting. I was brought up in an orphanage. I got the cane for telling tales, and the cane for not telling tales. Life can be very difficult. What you have there, Gemma, is Queen Katharine’s ring, which should be in the bank as part of our security. And the one and only Diamond Dance. I offered it to Woolworths as a prototype for mass production.’

‘One of Mr Fox’s rings! For Woolworths?’ Gemma was horrified.

‘That was rather Mr Fox’s reaction,’ observed Mr First. ‘And the ring promptly disappeared. But now it’s rediscovered and we must waste no more time. I need it. Now.’

And Mr First caught up the paperknife and brandished it, in a friendly suggestive way, and she thought her end had come. Her throat first, her finger next.

‘How pale you look,’ said Mr First. ‘And so you should, you naughty, silly little girl. These are dangerous games you’re playing.’

But when she had well and truly shrunk into her chair with fear, he put down the knife, turned on his heel and went up the circular staircase to Mr Fox’s penthouse.

‘Stay there,’ he said. ‘Don’t move, on peril of your life. I’ll be back soon.’

And Gemma just sat. Nothing kept her there, at her desk, waiting for mutilation and death, except her own nature. There was the door, just there. All she had to do was get up and run out of it, to freedom and life.

Gemma stayed where she was, as requested. Likewise she had lain on the doctor’s examination couch, as requested, although the door was half open, and the doctor’s wife and decency only a few short yards away.

Don’t despise her. Thus we have all stayed to endure, when we need not. While teachers caned us, parents scolded us, meals upset our digestions. Sat at dinner and been abused: lain in beds, likewise. The door is there, and partly open. We seldom go out of it.

Gemma stayed, and waited for her destiny. Marion clumped up the stairs, red faced and breathless, holding not coffee beans but sharp pottery fragments in her hand, and a long, trailing, withered plant.

‘I was nearly killed just now,’ complained Marion. ‘Someone dropped a flowerpot on me from the penthouse.’

‘An accident –’ but Gemma knew it wasn’t, even as she spoke.

‘We’re going to die,’ said Gemma, calmly. ‘We’re both going to die. Mr First’s up there. He’s going to kill us both. He found out from Mr Fox about your dream, and what you saw. He tried to kill you with that Transylvanian vine.’

‘Not Mr First,’ shrieked Marion, ‘Mr Fox.’

‘You only say that because you’re in love with Mr First,’ shouted Gemma.

Their raised voices set off some kind of alarm amongst the parrots, who surged squawking out of their cage to flounder about the room. The seagulls outside, incensed, fluttered and banged against the window panes: one broke and the gull which caused the damage blundered blindly inside, to be mobbed and pecked by the parrots.

Marion stamped and shrieked and cried.

‘Yes I do love Mr First. It’s my secret. You’re not to tell my mum and dad. I respect him and he respects me: and he’s terribly, terribly kind. He’s protecting Mr Fox because Mr Fox is an artist, only quite quite mad. Murderous. Only now he wants me to have his baby, without being married to him; and I’ve no one to confide in. No one. And he makes love to me on the floor where it’s hard, because that’s what he likes: he’s a bit funny, but it’s not his fault, he had this dreadful childhood –’

The parrots flew up, united at last by some common instinct, and were off through the window: up and away. Some two thousand pounds’ worth of birds. The solitary seagull sat peacefully nodding, eyes glazing.

‘Mr First is the murderer,’ whispered Gemma into the sudden silence. ‘He tried to kill me. It’s he who’s mad. Not Mr Fox. And if you want to know, Mr First wants me to have his baby too. He asked me just now.’

Marion was silent. Great tears of real sorrow swelled in her puffy little eyes.

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Oh no.’

And for once she wept real quiet peaceful tears, as a girl does, when what she has always known can no longer be hidden. And Gemma crossed to her and stroked her slightly greasy hair (Marion had to wash it three times a week) with real affection and concern, and the jewels on her heavy left hand glinted with some kind of promise, some reassertion of happiness and good times to come; if the sorrow of the moment could only be lived through, survived.

Well, they were both young.

Gemma murmured something to this effect, and Marion sighed, and sighed again, and the sobs slowed.

‘A pretty sight,’ said a voice from above. ‘Whatever can be the matter?’

Mr Fox, smiling with all his teeth, dressed in pearlised navy-blue, descended the circular staircase. How light upon his feet he moved. How bright and sharp his eyes!

Gemma put her left hand behind her. Had she been betrayed? Did he know? Had he seen?

No. Still Mr Fox smiled. There was no anger in his eyes. Only kindness, and sympathy.

‘Someone dropped a Transylvanian vine on my head,’ complained Marion.

‘But it was terribly ugly,’ said Mr Fox, ‘it had to leave the office. It was a disgrace. Rampant at the best of times: and then it started to die for no reason at all.’

‘You might have killed an innocent passer-by.’

‘Passers-by are not necessarily innocent. They may well deserve to be killed. From this height, in any case, they are all insects, and hard to believe in. I’m sorry if I upset you, Marion, but I was upset myself. Mr First has a passion for mass production and was threatening to proliferate the Transylvanian vine. Can you imagine it? The lounges of the vulgar choking with the dreadful weed? I had to get it out of his hands. And I see the parrots have left! Well, they were noisy, messy birds, ungrateful, though I always did my best for them. Perhaps we should try fish, next. Porpoises, or sharks – the fish of the future, I feel. Gemma, will you come upstairs with me? Now?’

Gemma said nothing, did nothing. Love and fear struggled for supremacy.

‘What’s the matter? Mr First? Horrid Hamish? He’s left by the backstairs,’ Mr Fox assured Gemma. ‘There is nothing to be afraid of. You are far too good a typist to lose. And I shall always look after you, you know that.’

Behind Gemma was the door. Before her was her love, whose hands had rested on her naked breasts, and gently fingered her navel – that untidy hole, linking us back, and back, through our mothers, to the beginning of mammal life.

Gemma stepped forward; how could she not. Thus Mr First, earlier, had hurled himself upon the rocks. So did Gemma now. Mr Fox, Mr First! One or the other! What did it matter? What is a murderer but a man who makes the world safe for his own?

And she was his own. Yes, she was.

‘I want to make a coleslaw for supper,’ said Mr Fox. ‘I need someone to shred the cabbage, paper-thin. Such a boring task! I shall let you mix the salad, Gemma, as your reward. It must always be done with the hands, so as not to bruise the leaf tissues unnecessarily. Let me see your hands, Gemma. A salad can’t be mixed with ringed hands. Both suffer. Gold and silver tarnish in the vinaigrette; the salad becomes tainted.’

Gemma held out her left hand. Mr Fox smiled, gazed, lifted it to his lips; kissed the rings and not her fingers. Then he tried to remove them, with his own chilled, accustomed fingers. He failed.

Mr Fox’s eyes narrowed: his breath expelled.

Marion uttered a little cry, and ran out of the door. Gemma heard her footsteps running down the stairs to safety, running away, avoiding her destiny. Treacherous Marion! False friend.

But oh, Mr Fox, Gemma loves you. Pierce her with knives, or with your own body: it is all the same. Make your mark upon her; carry her off towards death, towards life: it is all the same. What’s done cannot be undone, in this world or the next. A long-lost spirit gazes at her, through familiar eyes. You have known each other through all eternity. Mr Fox and Gemma. Hand in hand through the corridors of heaven and hell.

‘Something so dreadful happened,’ said Gemma, ‘I wasn’t going to show you until I’d got it off. I thought you might be angry. You told me not to wear Queen Katharine’s ring where Mr First could see it, but of course now he has and we all have to be terribly careful, because he’s quite mad and murdered his sister, and I’m afraid he’ll murder all of us. We must go to the police at once.’

‘Come upstairs,’ said Mr Fox, ‘and watch me make the perfect vinaigrette. Be cool, be cool, my dear. If you accuse people of murder, do it with some style. Jokingly, I think would be appropriate, though I must say I haven’t had much practice. Where did you find the ring?’

‘On a finger.’

‘What, with no hand attached?’

‘A wandering finger,’ Gemma volunteered, following Mr Fox up the iron staircase.

If one tripped: if one fell? But girls in love do not fall. They are protected by magic.

‘That’s better,’ said Mr Fox. ‘There’s the beginning of a conversation with some style. So Marion’s dream was true?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am glad I have you safe up here,’ said Mr Fox, shutting the door behind them. ‘I must look after my rings. I can’t possibly let you go, my beautiful Gemma.’

‘Mr Fox, we have to do something about Mr First. If he killed his sister.’

‘Mr First is my partner. I’m sure a man’s entitled to kill his own sister. It’s not as if she was a perfect stranger.’

‘Stop teasing me!’

‘When you lift your hands to your head like that, you give me an idea. One could have a kind of golden chain, on the upper arms. A lacing. It would do well in Germany. Dearest Gemma, if you could just remove your blouse and bra while I find the calipers.’

Obediently, Gemma did so.

‘Gemma, look at yourself in the mirror. A skirt is a most unsightly garment while worn with nothing else. You should know that by now. Do your boy-friends teach you nothing?’

‘I have no boy-friends.’

‘Poor Gemma. All alone in the world.’

‘Yes.’

‘No one to miss you?’

‘Marion and her family would.’

Mr Fox frowned. Mr Fox’s frown cleared. Presumably he had thought of a way round that. Mr Fox measured Gemma’s upper arms. She had, obligingly, removed all her clothes. Gemma, you are too bold!

Then Mr Fox measured Gemma’s neck, and around it placed a heavy gold collar, on which was embossed a frieze of artistic if orgiastic couplings.

‘I don’t care for it myself,’ he said. ‘Too heavy and too uncomfortable, I imagine.’

‘Yes. It digs me in the back.’

Mr Fox stepped forward to take it off.

‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Fox. ‘The clasp seems to have wedged in some way. How on earth am I going to get that off?’

Where does one thing stop and another start? Where does desire end and murder begin?

Poor Mr Fox, with his sad, cold eyes, and his lost and horrible world. Where are his clients now? Dead and gone, early to their end from drugs, excess, and malnutrition; or washed away by the rising tides of necessity, of mortgages, children, boredom. Mr Fox, who could not be content with just killing himself, took out an axe; a pretty axe, its handle made of pink lacy plastic, but its blade pure shining steel.

‘Mr Fox,’ wailed Gemma. ‘My Mr Fox.’

‘Don’t wail,’ said Mr Fox, ‘it isn’t a pretty sound. The cabbage leaves will wither from shock. They have been flown in from Algeria. You have a soft and lovely voice. Don’t abuse it.’

‘But you killed Mr First’s sister. She got your ring stuck on her finger.’

‘She shouldn’t have eaten so much. It was her own fault. Nor should you. I did warn you, Gemma.’

‘It’s not a sin to be fat. Not a crime punishable by death.’

‘Yes it is.’

And Mr Fox advanced like some jungle beast on Gemma, crouching white, naked and glittering beneath a gently waving palm tree. Gemma shrieked, and ran to the door and tugged and tugged, and tugged again and this time it opened, and running down the stairs, no longer protected by love – for Mr Fox was clearly mad, and who can love a madman, what does that make of oneself? – tripped and fell, over the edge and round and down, and caught her necklet in a banister as she fell, and at the bottom lay helpless, unable to move, her left arm outstretched, and the rings glinting on them, in their marriage, or was it their sisterhood, of red and white. Rose Red and Snow White: and their friend, or was he their enemy, the bear? Sent by their mother, alarmed on their account, shuffling out into the snow, gruffly growling, sorrowful.

Mr First, Hamish, fumbling, kindly, dangerous beast. Mr Fox, predator, sharp with his teeth, his knives, his smile, wounding, piercing with his you-know-what –

Gemma, you should not have loved Mr Fox, now dancing on light feet down towards you, round and round, pretty lacy axe high in his hand –

‘I would have preferred to love you to death,’ says Mr Fox, ‘but want must be my master!’