Rawblood Page 17

  Strangely, I am full of hope. I am resolved that this strange interlude, this sad chapter shall not be without result.

  Upon my return to London I shall take new lodgings. Farewell, Mrs Healey! I only bear with her, after all, because she does not mind, too much, my nocturnal pursuits. How did Canon Wilson put it? ‘Immorality, used in a special sense, which I need not define.’ Of course, by Koch’s definition, I with my ‘moral aberrations and behaviours’ also fall into the category of psychopastiche … But I will give all that up. The sordid toil of it. It is exhausting, in the end. I long for quiet. I shall enquire for a country practice. I will tell Mrs Bantry to prepare Meg to join me in a few months. I had not thought I should ever have her with me. I thought myself unfit for the young. But I believe all that can be at an end. I believe some form of peace is not beyond my grasp. This has been a great purging of the soul. Perhaps, perhaps I will go to Grimstock to fetch Meg myself … Perhaps I will look once more on those cold grey hills where I was born. And perhaps it will not be as terrible as all that. I think I understand, for the first time, forgiveness.

  I believe I can begin anew. Redemption … I am testing the word on my tongue. By the longest of paths, by trials of fire and long endurance – I have come closer to God.

  So, strange as it may seem, I owe Alonso thanks, in the end.

  ‘For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.’

  Proverbs 14:2

  *

  O, O God, preserve m[ ]eliver us from t[ ] evil y hand shakes so I fe r I canno wr te it O O I hav een such a thing.

  Still my limbs o still my beating heart. What to fix on, what to think, or be, my God, my dear God … And prayer is of no use for did I not cry out the Lord’s prayer? And it went unanswered. I thought Alonso was the fearful thing. I was wrong. Oh, God, her eyes,

  her eyes

  What deep hole in th[ ]orld did that white thing crawl[ ]rom. The slender tips of ten white fingers reaching for my hear t

  She ha[ ]ite cur g rms. How c[ ] was put there. Wh[ ] ould be capable of su[ ]eed? And how could I not see? My merciful Lor[

  and the eyes

  DAWN

  Praise God. Praise God for the light, and for the day.

  I am on the hill in my nightshirt and overcoat. I am chilled to the bone – but I could not spend a moment more within the house. I would have fled from my room in the night, but the thought of encountering that monstrous thing, in a dark corridor, seeing the guttering light fall upon that white form – it could not be borne. I did not sleep again, but lit the candle and counted the hours until dawn.

  When blessed day became perceptible through the quarries I rose from the bed. All was strange – shadows fell too short or too long, and the pale grey light abused my aching eyes. I could not feel relief. It was gone, yes: but it had heard my feeble cry and responded. It had a mind and a will. I shiver now with dread, for it is filled with overwhelming and alien intent. I strenuously avoid naming it.

  But I am an observer, and a man of science, let me not forget it. All must yield to reason. I will diagnose.

  ________________

  Postulation the first:

  The severity of the situation can be assessed, to some degree, by establishing: what was the fate of the dog?

  ________________

  The resolution that was needed to screw myself to the sticking place was almost beyond my power. I sat on the grass, stroking it as if it were alive, feeling its texture, and breathing in the air, my ears filled with the hilarity of an early-morning cuckoo. This did my heart good. What do the grass, or the birds know of the treachery of man, or the foulness of that thing within? I should have obeyed those notes from my drugged self. I told me to flee; that is what I should have done.

  When I was calm I went in to that place quickly. It did not take long to find what I sought, and I came out again within a few minutes. Nothing occurred. But the very walls are loathsome to me now.

  Punch was curled still under the window seat. He was quite cold. I have brought him outside, not wishing to leave him in that place. He was a good little dog; he did well what dogs are meant to do. I became occupied at this juncture with the cramps, the dizziness and the tremors which shook my frame.

  We were sitting thus when I heard the sound of someone approaching from the copse. I was not frightened; I think that I may never feel fear again, for something has been taken from me that will not be given back.

  I noted presently that Alonso was seated beside me.

  ‘You have seen her,’ he said.

  I nodded my head.

  ‘You had locked your door, and I could not get in to you.’ He spoke gently, as I have heard him do, oh, an age ago, to children and horses. ‘You are not well.’ He slid his hand under my overcoat and laid it on my back, which was wet, as though I had been exposed to a sudden spring rain.

  He went to his pocket and brought forth the vial. I made to take it but he produced a syringe case from his pocket and fitted the vial in; I saw it was an ampoule.

  ‘Do you want it?’ he said.

  The itch on my flesh was too much to be believed. My very fingers curled with wanting it.

  He nodded, and said, ‘Better this way.’ He took my arm and found a vein, his fingers gentle, and it was in.

  I think he attended to himself after me. I do not recall for the world was turned to butter. Presently I felt that he lay along my side, both of us turned upward like daisies in the vertical sunlight, under the puzzling sky.

  ‘What is it? What manner of thing … What I saw in the night. My soul is riven by it. It is impossible that God and that thing both exist. One or the other is a fairy tale.’

  ‘Tell me what it is you saw,’ he said.

  I told. I was mildly irritated to find that I trembled as I spoke. ‘Her wounds,’ I said. ‘I cannot say. But she – it – bleeds. Is it a phantasmagoria couched in withdrawal from the morphia?’

  ‘Do you think it is?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She stood there, white and rotten …’ Once again the weakness came on me and I was convulsed with fear.

  ‘Tell me one thing,’ Alonso said. ‘Tell me one thing that makes it unlike every other thing.’

  ‘Her shoulder was dripping. She had a shorn head, and scars, like, I know not what. It was like the land, under the moon. There was a sound,’ I said, ‘like creaking. Or of stone, rubbed upon stone. Very old machines, which ground together like death. There was smoke, which filled the air like brimstone. The room seemed … ablaze, though there was no heat. Flame licked up the walls as though we were trapped in some prison, in the depths of hell.’ I felt once more the horror on me. I grasped his arm. ‘And the dog,’ I said. ‘It died of fear. How do you live? Knowing that such horror is in the house? Do you not see …’ I could not finish the thought.

  His hand trailed along the line of the collar of my nightshirt, leaving soft runnels in my flesh. ‘Strange to say,’ Alonso said, ‘she does not trouble me; the fact being so plain, perhaps, that I am already damned. Other things haunt my dreams. A small blessing, given to a fiend. No, as you may have guessed, it is the laudanum which keeps her away. I always know when she is near … But it is as if a veil separates us and she cannot get through.’

  ________________

  Postulation the second:

  Opiates offer a degree of protection. The apparition can have no effect if the subject’s mind is so dulled. The residual laudanum in my system saved me from her.

  ________________

  ‘It was her,’ I said. ‘That you wished to study. Not congenital disease. Well, she came to me, not you. Does it gall you? We have no sway over that thing,’ I told him. ‘That is certain. Did you expect that we would shake a microscope at it, and it would go away? Why did you think that she travels in the blood?’

  ‘Why,’ he said passionately, ‘in examining heredity, are we so bullish about what can be passed down? Foundlings, orphans who have later
been reclaimed by their families, why, you know this yourself, Charles, from Mayhew, they display family characteristics, tics such as nail-biting and fear of the dark, although they have been raised by strangers! If such intangible qualities can be passed down, why, why is it so impossible that an intelligence, an agency such as her should use a lineage, procreation as a vehicle? Congenital diseases like syphilis do precisely that. As a Roman nose is passed down … That Norwegian, who wrote the play … what was it …’

  ‘Alonso,’ I said. His feverish black eyes were an inch from mine. His breath was hot on my cheek.

  ‘Do listen, Charles. It was about syphilis, the play. About generations, and how they are all beholden, all to one another. It was named Gengangere in his tongue. What does it mean? Can you guess?’

  ‘No, Alonso, I cannot, and I cannot see the significance …’

  ‘Ghosts,’ he said. ‘Gengangere means ghosts. You cannot understand, Charles. You do not know what it is like, to live with her at your back. I keep her at bay by dulling my faculties, by living half a life. But she is all about me. In the air, in the dark before sleep … in every breath I take. And sometimes, Charles, I feel her. I feel her here.’ He tapped a blue vein, bulging in his pale wrist. ‘Within me. Coursing in my blood.’ He shook himself and went on: ‘You had no right to kill the rabbits. Once more, Charles, you have ruined me.’

  ‘You have used me abominably,’ I said, abruptly furious. ‘You play the victim but you have kept me here under the claim of friendship, lied to me and imperilled my life.’ I pointed towards Punch. ‘You have used me worse than that dog.’

  ‘I do not deny it.’

  I rose to go.

  Alonso reached up a long arm and grasped the collars of my nightshirt, pulling me to earth. He put his lips to my ear. ‘I do not understand God,’ he said. ‘But believe me, I begin to understand hell. And if I am to go there, I will do something first, and that is: finish the work! Give me your notes.’

  ‘Alonso,’ I said. ‘To speak plainly: you are addled with opiates. Once you were a clinician, a diagnostician of the first water and a man of medicine. But I was a fool to follow you in this. It will not work. We have tried. It will not! And as for the methods: nothing right or good would cost our souls so. I have been wrong about a great deal. I grant it. But know, Alonso, that I am right, in this.’ My eyes were clouded a little with tears. ‘For the opium has dulled the fine razor of your mind. If you cannot see it … then it is as I had suspected. Then in truth, you are no longer a doctor.’

  I removed his hand from me, and went into my book. I tore the pages of our records from the spine; our tallies; our notes; our whole work. Which was a cancer, I see it now. Remarkable that so much pain can be told in numerals, in India ink. I set a match to the sad scraps before me; they burned without a sound, blue and grey and orange. He cried out and reached for them. I believe he would have buried his hands in the fire. But a breeze came off the moor then. The pages went with it easily, out of reach, whirling into the sky. We watched the tiny points of flame rise in the early morning air.

  I said to him, ‘We must find our way to that lighted hall by other means than the kitchen.’

  His empty fingers trembled, held before him like a begging bowl. When he spoke it was savage. ‘Two decades I have wandered in the wasteland. My sole comfort was that you were ruined, also.’

  ‘You may be assured on that point,’ I said. ‘My life, since we parted, has been nothing but a long mourning.’ I put an arm over his shoulder, which heaved and shook. The shape of him was familiar to my arms. I held for a moment the young Alonso; I did not know where I was; this time was overlaid by that, like magic lantern slides.

  I said, ‘In the end, I have protected you, though I did not mean to do it. She would have taken you all those years ago, had you not been addicted to laudanum.’

  ‘Does that comfort you?’ he said. His face shone with contempt. ‘It should not. Do not spout such drivel at me. This was thrust upon me, and I am a servant – no! – a slave to it. How it offends the mind,’ and his hand was tight on my jaw. ‘How my senses and my reason are revolted! Order, logic, science. These are the systems to which I was devoted. You took them from me, like a thief. You are in the right of it. I am no longer a doctor. For you took my profession. You owe me at the least your life! I am unhinged. I will suffer this until I die. I do not sleep, I do not eat. I am beset all around by this. There was no Manning’s cure, Charles. Was there? It was no error of judgement. I know you better than any man alive. You were afraid of your God. You made me a slave to opium, to punish me for what you desired.’

  To give Alonso opium. A terrible lapse of judgement on my part, but a forgivable one. Sólo el amor. Etc. Etc. All this is acknowledged. It was an accident.

  Well. Here is the thing which I have never told, not to a soul. Our endeavour of fifty days was tainted from the start. He was everything that was bright, blinding to my eyes. I have said we were degenerate together and it is so, but it was more than that. Degeneracy alone would have been bearable. I had lived with my shame all my life. I think they might have put me in the pillory in Grimstock, had I not left. I am hardened to the fact of my degeneracy.

  But love, I did not know. It is a terrible, terrible thing. I was unprepared for the great fall. I did not know, before Alonso, how it strikes you down like sickness, like madness. I was unprepared for the fear. I feared Alonso was not the true moral deviant that I was. I feared that he could not for ever be satisfied with such a poor thing as me. I lay by him wakeful in the night, thinking of the time when he would go from me. I thought God would take him to punish me.

  When Alonso said to me, that first night before the fire, ‘Do you know what it will be, that you intend to administer?’ I said that I did not. It was a lie. I saw that the time had come to act, to bind him to me. I took his life as sure as a knife in the heart. And in the end he went from me anyway, so I destroyed the thing I love and all to no purpose.

  ‘You are right,’ I said. ‘There was no Manning’s cure.’

  ‘Very well,’ Alonso said. A tremor shook him. He sighed. ‘And I in turn will allow that I brought you here, willing to destroy you … I needed your eye for the work. And for you to be safe from her and fit to work you needed opiates. I thought I did not care what happened to you. I thought it was justice. Your debt to me, as it were. But you came, and it did not feel like revenge. Strange to say it was a great pleasure to be in your company.’ He passed a hand across his brow and grimaced. ‘I have deceived myself, Charles. I brought you to Rawblood not for any purpose, save the simple one that I wished for you. I missed you. It was selfish, and wrong.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It was not.’

  We looked at one another and it was the bleakest of things.

  Alonso said. ‘Once you had my trust, and my love. But you thought God did not like it. Foolish, foolish. Why could you not make peace with it, your heart? Such utter waste,’ he said. ‘Of our two lives.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It is my fault. All mine. And I have seen today … her. I have seen that God is a farce. I have lived my life always half in shadow. And for what? To appease whom?’

  He soothed me with a strong white hand. His black hair fell across his brow.

  ‘You look so well, now,’ I said. ‘You are better, Alonso. Younger. I do not know how it is so, but …’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, grim. ‘I think that is her doing. I think she likes us close. So what am I to do, now, Charles? Trapped here at Rawblood, in this dim half-death … What is my life to be?’

  ‘That, I do not know.’ The world spun, liquid.

  ________________

  Postulation the third:

  She is bound to the Villarcas, to Rawblood. And they to her: the Villarcas sicken, when away from Rawblood.

  ________________

  ‘We are a fine pair,’ I said. ‘The sodomite opium-eaters.’

  He said wearily, ‘You wear and wear away at things, Charles, but
never really face them. Sometimes one must draw a line under a subject for ever. There is a phrase which trots through my mind. Where did I happen upon it? I do not know. Some saying of Doctor Johnson, perhaps, from a trash thing I read on a train, once. A newspaper? Anyhow. It is that we never do anything consciously for the last time without sadness of heart. I would go further, and curtail the phrase after the word time …’

  ‘We never do anything consciously for the last time,’ said I. ‘Yes, there persists always the belief that we will come about.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there has been too much sadness. There must be a last time. I feel I am always looking back.’

  I said, ‘You have the right to use me any way you choose. And I deserve to die.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘That is precisely it. You do not. We must abandon grudges, revenge. Cease to quarrel over who wronged whom first and try to live. Let us try,’ he said, ‘to live in the morning light.’

  I laughed a little. ‘I was recently thinking – something similar. You make it sound an easy thing.’ I took him quickly to me; to feel the shape of his back, the line of his fierce head. I kissed him. Then I stood and went down the hill. I did not look back.

  ‘Come to the house,’ I said without turning, ‘when you have buried the dog.’

  ________________

  Conclusion:

  There can be none

  ________________

  I recall—oh so many things. But in particular one afternoon. We stood beside the river, drinking. We had been at the Inns with some legal fellow or other, who liked us, and then in rooms at the Temple. Deep drinking in those deep stone arches – it gives a young man a sense of grandeur. The Thames was quiet in the afternoon. There seemed to be no living soul on this stretch. Everything was scented deeply with wisteria. We leant over the river in the sunshine and saw ourselves in the swift brown water. Light played over Alonso’s face. He was lit through willow trees, golden, young. His cheek was full of the flush of pleasure. His eyes were wide and the sun lay in them. He offered his hand to me. I took it. In the water our reflections followed suit.