Would you like to see the fox I shot this morning, he said, as he opened the gate in the wall.
This is a particular form of words. It is not a question. You do not say no. It appears to be polite – would you – but it leaves no room.
I went and saw the fox. Exquisite red creature. It does not know yet that it is dead. Its eye is not dim, its brush is defiant. Soon it will droop and decay and know its own mortality.
*
His name is Malcolm and he wishes to marry me. I am a 43-year-old virgin and my name is Gloria. An unsuitable name. Except when I sing Gloria in excelsis Deo. Not that I can sing. I lift up my head and open my mouth and pretend to be part of the glorious harmony of the choir. I open my mouth and no sound comes out, but the choir’s sound fills it. We are very proud of the choir at my school, it is one of the things we are famous for.
The girls are cruel. Generation after generation they come and flourish and go. They can take all sorts of forms, and one of them is tropical flowers, growing lustily on their vines, their preening tendrils twining and prying, threatening to crush the frail trellis of the school between their vigorous thighs. Flowers that are creamy, rosy, dusky, thickly petalled, with long fleshy throats full of pollen. Even when they sit demurely in class, their blue-checked dresses smoothed down as far as they will go over these strong thighs, the slit between them cries out, I am open and thickly pinkly flesh, I am filled with honey, my sticky juices are waiting for the protuberances of men to find me out and fill me. It is hard to close your eyes to these shameless songs, it is necessary to say in a clear hard voice the tenses of French verbs, words without sentences to give them meaning, possessing only syntax. Pay attention, girls, it is a matter simply of rote learning, of reciting over and over until you know by heart.
Their hearts beat, the buttons of their dresses rise and fall, they slide undone to show lacy bras and the smooth flesh with these powerful hearts beating.
The verbs though meaningless alone are a spell to keep lascivious scents at bay, otherwise their languid beguiling odour-songs would drive us all mad.
*
Would you like to see the fox I shot this morning, Malcolm said, and I went through the gate in the wall and down to the kitchen garden, where the fox hung, its tail bushy, its pointed little face open-mouthed as if to draw in air.
I could shoot a few and make you a fur coat, he said, and I remembered women of my grandmother’s age, wearing fox stoles with beady false black eyes and a little chain joining sharp-toothed mouth to legs, bony legs with padded paws. I always wondered how they could bear having a dead animal hanging round their necks. Even flattened out and lined with shiny brown satin.
Why do you shoot them? I asked Malcolm. Don’t they keep the rabbits in check?
I shoot the rabbits too, he said. I am cooking rabbit stew for dinner. You’ll enjoy its gamey flavour, not bland like farmed creatures.
He is a hunter. He wants to marry me. His name is John Malcolm Crape Pembroke. I saw it in a book. I would be the third Mrs Malcolm Pembroke. Though I could keep my own name. Gloria Jones. When the girls ask me for an example of bathos I am careful not to offer my own name.
The girls call me mademoiselle. I met Malcolm when his daughter was in the boarding house. He came to see each of her teachers when he picked her up at the end of term. She was a good French scholar. Now she lives in Aix-en-Provence, studying translation. She has a brother who is a merchant banker in London.
Malcolm lives deep in the high country in a tower. It’s old, built by convicts who first made the bricks. You can find arrows and marks like birds’ feet, which ask you to think of the men who made them. It’s like a medieval watchtower, designed to keep an eye out for marauding tribes. It is wide and tall, with one round room on each floor. In the basement is a studio, with presses and machines. Then a room with books and a harpsichord painted with blue-grey landscapes of weeping-barked eucalyptus trees. This floor is surrounded by a rim of rooms he calls his offices, a kitchen and scullery and pantry, a laundry and mudroom and storerooms, opening through arches and doors into the main room.
Upstairs is a room arranged for me, and then on the top floor his bedroom. A staircase zigzags round the walls to each floor and up through his bedroom to the battlemented roof. Last year the second Mrs Pembroke fell from this roof and died. He was away at the time. Was it an accident or did she do it on purpose? Who knows? She liked the roof and often sat on its turreted rim. She could see the bones of the garden from there, she said. So he told me.
How can I marry you, I said. I am a schoolteacher. I cannot live here and teach in my school.
I am a rich man, he said. You do not need to work.
I thought of the girls, blooming so tropically and self-regardingly, new ones year after year, hardly paying attention to the elderly virgin who teaches them French. Though they do learn the French, mostly, and pass their exams, and blow the air round my cheeks with kisses and thanks when they leave to truly blossom in the real world. Heedless they are, and cruel by nature but without malice. Could I give them up?
I did not find out then what he did for a living. Maybe I thought he was a rich man by inheritance, that the curious garden and the tower were not earned by him. I am used to rich parents at my school. Later I asked him.
I’m a writer, he said.
What of? I asked, because mostly writers I know are not rich.
When we are married I will show you, he said.
I asked if I would have seen any of his books. No, he said. I asked if he wrote under his own name. Two of them, he said. John Malcolm Crape Pembroke: I supposed his pen name would be John Crape. A strong and simple name.
I said, I am a 43-year-old virgin. How can want to marry me?
People think it is difficult to manage to be a 43-year-old virgin in this day and age, but it hasn’t been for me. It is something that happened quite naturally, and there I am sitting in my school like a rose hip on a branch, tight and firm and yellowish brown, contented. Slender, slim, thin, and that’s hard work, but who could expect otherwise?
Malcolm told me about being married to him. How we would live. The fruitful life in the tower. The delicious meals we would eat. The fine red wines. The garden. The seasons. The reading and music. The trips to cities. The trips overseas. The art galleries, the plays, the restaurants. It occurred to me that I would not stay slim in such a life. So rich, so full of event. Wonderful narratives, like a book he was giving me, inviting me to enjoy.
The thing I did not consider then is that a book is for reading. It is not a life. For the space of its turning pages you may believe you live in it, but sooner or later you must close it up. Put it back on the shelf, and look at the room you are in, a room which will say sternly to you, this is where you live, what are you making of this? The life that Malcolm had written for himself, was offering to write for me, it didn’t occur to me that it wasn’t my life.
*
My bedroom in the tower was like all the rooms, big. It had a bed with tester and curtains. In the middle was a bath in the shape of a marble boat. It sat on a carpet of pale turquoise wool ruffled like water. There was a table with a lamp, set up for writing. On it was a fat notebook, with marbled endpapers, opened at its first page, blank, and resting on it a pen with a marbled pattern to match. All this is yours, said Malcolm, and I took him to mean the book. I sat at the table and wrote in it. A woman who comes to live in a tower should keep a journal of her days. Of course I wasn’t living here then but visiting, and I was hardly the maiden who ought to inhabit such a story, or rather I was a maiden but not the beautiful young one the context expected. If you squinted, looked sideways, glanced at my childish figure against the light, then, perhaps, but is that a true story? All of these things could be written down, the gold nib of the pen sliding across the silky paper of the notebook, making words with perhaps no more intent or trickery than the fine black tendrils of the quince tree gazebo against the winter white sky.
The first morning he woke me to come and see the frost. He came walking down the winding stairs into my room. There were no locked doors in this house. No hidden rooms, no passageways. No desks with secret drawers. The staircases curved openly round the walls, and you entered each room on your way to the one above. It said to you, I am a house without secrets. No doors that must not be opened. No keys indelibly staining themselves with blood.
We went out into the grey morning, through French windows, on to a terrace and across meadow grass to a maze. Everything was powdered blue with frost. When you looked closely there were frail encrustations of ice, holding the cold morning light in their blue refractions. See how beautiful it is, said Malcolm. The hedges of the maze were so far only waist height, but you could still get lost, he said.
So you could get trapped, I said.
I think patience would find you a way out.
At the top of the slope was the quince-tree gazebo, a dome made of arches of iron, over which were espaliered bare branches, to replicate exactly the shape of the dome. There were spaces so you could walk inside and stand in a small house of intertwined branches. In summer, said Malcolm, the quinces hang upon it, golden globes of fruit.
At the bottom of the slope was a pond, or dam I suppose, with reeds and a punt and a small wooden shack. There are birds to be watched, said Malcolm.
When we got back to the house we found a pile of long white boxes on the terrace table. These are for you, he said. Inside were nests of tissue paper and in them stems and stems of red gladioli, every kind of red, crimson, scarlet, vermilion, rose. Malcolm fetched tall glass vases and we put them in, the green thick stems under water through the glass and then the red flower buds just beginning to open. I felt surrounded by tallness and redness.
*
My room, Malcolm calls this bedroom. Gloria’s room. The bath like a boat. The wide fireplace. The table with its marbled notebook and pen to match, inviting writing. The bed with tester and hangings in dark turquoise and indigo, the same heavy brocade at the windows. There is always a movement of air in the tower. The candle flames shimmer, the hangings stir, as the air moves through the rooms. As though the building were a creature who breathes, silently but heavily. Every now and then heaving a huge mute sigh. Draughts, I suppose they are, but not cold; the fireplaces are large and log fires burn intensely, but somewhere there is a furnace that pours hot air through the house. I lie in bed wondering if I shall wake to the faint grinding road of machinery, to find the tester a finger’s width from my face, or even not wake up at all because it will have wound its way right down and suffocated me.
But I slept, and woke to the sound of shots. Another fox. What do you do with them? I asked Malcolm. Until now, he said, I have given them to Anne the gardener, she buries them under the trees she plants. And last summer we had some fine vegetables grown over dead fox. But now – and Malcolm pulled the fox’s brush between his fingers so it sleeked down and then sprang out – now I am going to have them made into a fur coat. It will match your hair, he said.
For that is the colour of my hair. Reddish, russet, foxy coloured. By nature once, these days less so.
So, will I walk through the maze spangled blue with frost like a large dainty upright fox? In the borrowed pelts of a dead animal? Perhaps I will.
After breakfast Malcolm played the harpsichord, such gentle intricate music. You listen entranced to its melodic entwining and interleavings, it belongs to a world that is safe and ordered. Anne the gardener brought in wood and stacked it by the hearth. I sat and read. Malcolm went out again, in boots and coat and taking a gun. I didn’t go. I sat and read. I sat and looked at the room.
By the staircase was a big wooden sea chest, old, worn, polished. It had brass clasps and a lock with a key. After a little while I got up and turned the key, but the chest had not been locked, I had to turn it again. Inside were folded pieces of fabric, smelling of peppermint. Ikat, and batik, brocades, embroidery. Most of them were old, some ancient, most had had another existence. I sat on the edge of the chest and lifted them out, unfolding them a little to look at them.
Malcolm came back and I started, so engrossed was I in the chest’s contents, and nearly fell in. I remembered the story of the bride who disappears on her wedding day and is found decades later, a skeleton in a marriage dress, in a great chest. But Malcolm is here to save me. Unless it was the husband who shut her in. But Malcolm is not my husband yet, and he was saying with delight, Ah, you have found my treasure.
He shook out several pieces and held them up. It is a pity not to display them, he said, looking vaguely round. Perhaps, one day … though they are fragile.
He draped a piece of gossamer silk ikat against me. They are not for wearing, really, he said, not anymore, but please, look at them sometimes. They need looking at. All beautiful things need looking at.
*
I did marry Malcolm. You may wonder why. Out of a desire to be married, you might think. He did not actually speak of love, but of the delights of marriage. Perhaps because I had been for many years a schoolteacher, and for my girls their time at school is such an interim. It is a stage where they alight, birds with beautiful bejewelled feathers, preen briefly and then fly off to their real lives. I saw the chance for a life of my own, not of other people’s interims.
So, I married him. He chose a date in the spring. The ceremony was in the gazebo, which was covered in fresh green leaves and the starry flowers of the quince blossom. I wore a dress of greenish white satin – white because I was still a virgin, but greenish as well, to signify time – like a lily it sheathed my body and at wrists and neck unfolded in bias-cut furls edged with pale green piping. A graceful dress that followed the languid movements of my body. I carried a posy of lily of the valley with a wreath of it in my hair, and walked across the meadow thick with daffodils and bluebells, to the piping music of a recorder. Afterwards we spent the afternoon feasting at the long table; Malcolm and I sat together and watched and listened as people drank toasts and laughed and talked. The food was prepared by Gareth, the husband of Anne the gardener, who is a painter but sometimes cooks for Malcolm and cleans the house. He is not a very good painter, Malcolm says, but he can spend nearly all his time at it, which makes him happy. A trio played harpsichord and various recorders and viola da gamba, the lovely intricate slightly melancholic music which is the leitmotif of this house, and is in music what the delicate complicated espaliering of the quince trees is in gardens and my lily-sheath with ruffles at neck and wrist is in dresses.
At twilight Anne drove the guests back to town in the bus Malcolm had hired and we went up to my room where the fire was burning and champagne sat in a bucket, beside a large book covered in fine-grained red morocco. The candle flames shimmered in the warm draughts of air. Malcolm poured some wine into flutes and said, Now that we are married I will tell you what I write.
What he writes is pornography. One volume a year. Produced on his printing press in the basement, illustrated with etchings, or woodcuts. Limited editions of a hundred, selling for five thousand dollars each, more if he hand-washes them with watercolour. A lot of money.
What kind of pornography?
It varies, he says. Any kind, really.
Children?
Of course.
But that’s paedophilia, it’s disgusting.
No. It’s graceful and delicate, small pretty creatures. Remember, they’re not people, they’re not photographs, they’re drawings. No one is harmed by them.
The eyes that look at them are.
He shrugged.
And you, making them.
Do I seem damaged?
What else? I asked. Homosexuality?
He nodded.
Bestiality?
Yes. And harems. Orgies. Lesbians. Nubile schoolgirls. And the intercourse of beautiful ardent lovers.
I knew what he was talking about. The antique style of pornography. For rich men, whose wealth and honourable standing in the community was presumed to protect them from corruption. Not the vulgar cheap effects of television and movies. They use real people, said Malcolm, that is where corruption comes in, they are degrading their bodies for our delectation. But me, I am drawing lines on a page. No one is endangered.
He took up the red morocco book. It had nothing on the cover but the number ten tooled in gold. I opened it. It smelled of ink and rich paper. The pages were creamy and thick, the ink had that satisfying faint unevenness of hand printing. It was in the Japanese style, with woodblocks of lovers, entirely explicit. Had I been as ignorant as I was virginal, it would have been handy. As it was I had not quite considered that people could make love sitting up like that, opening themselves like flowers to one another’s gazes and fingers, looking into one another’s eyes as much as at their vigorous sexual parts. They were lewd, but tender and delicate as well.
My tongue felt thick in my throat and my skin was hot. So I had married a pornographer. I suppose I might have thought that it was not too late for an annulment, that the marriage had not been consummated. I think I thought, he will know what to do. I stood up. Malcolm unzipped the long sheath of my dress. Underneath I was naked, no lines of underwear to mar its fluid lines. I stood there in my white satin shoes. Dressed I had been a flower, elegant and languid, undressed I was my dry tight pod-like self. He took my hand and led me to the bed, tucked me in under the doona, took his clothes off and was soon white and naked and just a little chubby in the bed with me.
Taking off the dress was my true deflowering. What followed was … it was like acid, corrosive and rough. He dipped his fingers in a bowl of scented oils and anointed himself and me but still there was the tearing and piercing and stinging. His weight. The reluctant sticky brown blood. Is this what lies in wait for all the cruel innocent cheerful girls?
Malcolm said, It is hard, the first time. It will be better. He rolled over and went to sleep. I wished I were a delicate etching in a book, in hand-set type on creamy paper for a connoisseur to read.
He was right, of course. It does get better. And soon I think I shall begin to enjoy it.
*
I asked Malcolm if he would prefer me not to go up on the roof. If it was so dangerous. No, he said, why ever should that be? I said, your late wife, and he replied that it was hardly the roof. It was like a railway line, he said, not at all dangerous, unless you happened to lie on it when there was a train coming. Then of course it was lethal, but it was the train, not the line. The same was true for the roof; it was quite safe, it was the ground that had killed her.
I was not sure about this argument. There seemed some twist or bend in its logic, but I could not quite discern it. But then that is the thing with metaphoric language, it persuades you to see connections and parallels where there are none.
*
I wondered if the second Mrs Pembroke was up on the roof looking for marauding tribes. There never were any. Building a tower in this place against marauding tribes was like building a tower against ghosts, they melted through the landscape and you only saw them if they wanted you to. The beat of drums and the glint of sunlight on cuirass and helmet: they belong to the tales of other continents, other civilisations, they never translated here.
I am still Gloria Jones. When we go to Paris in the northern spring for our honeymoon, then I will be the third Mrs Pembroke.
*
I wondered about the first Mrs Pembroke. What she died of. Maybe she drowned in the pond. It is quite deep, and treacherous, Anne said, be careful not to fall out of the punt. Anne and Gareth are not chatty. They speak when necessary, but they do not converse. They go about their work quietly and say things like, We need some more toilet cleaner. Or, Mind the pond.
Your first wife, I said to Malcolm. How did she die?
I’m planning to have lunch with her, next week probably, he said. She’s not dead, we agreed to part, it’s amicable enough. Why don’t you come and meet her? It’s time we had a trip to Sydney.
I didn’t go. I didn’t care about meeting the first Mrs Pembroke; there could be time for that. I decided to stay in the tower. To go up on the roof. I sat on the crenellated parapet and looked at the bones of the garden. They were fleshing out with the spring growth. Maybe I could learn the pattern of the maze from here.
I felt but had no trouble resisting the pull of gravity, that seductive invitation to jump off, see what it’s like. People are supposed to be charmed by heights such as this and allow themselves to fall; they don’t want to die, they just can’t resist the pull. At least, people speak of this pull, but they don’t do it, they live to tell the tale.
Perhaps the second Mrs Pembroke was pushed. Not by her husband, he was elsewhere, so he said, and must have been believed. But maybe he hired a hit man. For not many thousands of dollars, I believe, you can hire somebody to kill a person for you, and Malcolm has a great deal of money.
I suppose a question is, why would he want to kill her? Why did Bluebeard kill his wives? Because that’s what he did. It’s a given. It’s the plot. Until the lucky one, who is saved.
The even more interesting question is: why did Mrs Bluebeard feel utterly unable to resist opening the door? Don’t we all think, when it comes to these stories, that we’d have made it work? So much freedom, and one tiny forbidden thing. Not important, a token in fact. So easy to obey so small a prohibition. We think, if I had been Eve I wouldn’t have picked the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, I wouldn’t have given a piece to Adam. I and my progeny down the millennia would still be multiplying fruitfully in the Garden of Eden.
How crowded it would be. For there would be no death. And there of course, when you think of it, is the answer. Eve had to do what she did. She was following the script. That was the story. The fruit must be picked. The room must be unlocked, and the lady turns the key, staining it with tell-tale blood. The pomegranate seeds must be nibbled, and Persephone complies. The box must be opened, and Pandora obliges. Otherwise there is no narrative, it is just endless shapeless vegetable calm.
And it is in the hands of the women that the narratives lie. They are the ones who must make the stories happen. All through history, they have been depended on, and never failed.
Malcolm is away, but he forbids me nothing. There are no locked rooms whose key I am not allowed to employ. No boxes I must not open, I am enjoined to look at everything. No fruits I must not eat. When the quinces are ripe, he will cook them for me himself, with honey and verjuice.
I am waiting for him to tell me what I must not do.
Shooting the Fox