The Lime Twig: Novel Page 11

  “You know,” pulling her head away from his brown lapels, but dancing, dancing, “that other chap was hopeless. Wouldn’t even buy me an ice. But whatever did you do with his binoculars?”

  He waited and then: “Gave them to a fellow selling tickets.”

  Later still, when she happened to see the jockey holding his head and Sparrow slipping something to the waiter—a Neapolitan with dirty shirt and mustaches—when the candles were softly dying and the wine was dregs—and still they were turning on the floor—then she laughed, spoke against his chest: “It’ll be a jolly evening, Mike. I promise. We’ll go to bed and you’ll like my bed, Michael. …” And then in the middle of the floor with the others watching and Larry pulling sharply on his coat over the holster, sending Needles out for the hired car, then she gave him her own lips soft, venereal, sweet and tasting of sex.

  But Sparrow stopped them kissing, tapped on his arm. “Come now, Banks, Larry says we’re going to a proper place.”

  6

  SIDNEY SLYTER SAYS

  Marlowe’s Pippet Smart in Practice Whirls …

  Rock Castle Proves Ancient Champion …

  Mystery Horse Possesses Danish Blood …

  Harry Bailey of Poor Petitioners, Cock & Crown, East End, how right you were! Fly up to Aldington, Mr. Bailey, fly to Aldington with your poor lame sister, for Sidney Slyter says he needs you now! Five pounds? Not half enough, I’d say! Sidney—God’s silent servant—Sidney Slyter has his brimming glass, his fags, lighter embossed with crop and stirrup, his hotel beds, and ladies to converse with in the bars; has his hard sporting eyes red-rimmed or not and under his titfor leaves of information about the horses ever growing bone from bone and blood into blood. And Sidney Slyter’s got God’s own careless multitude to shelter in enjoyment and the luck of sport. But Mr. Bailey, my friend, it took you puzzling over the problem while rubbing your dog’s worn ear and hearing the dreams of your ever-innocent lame partner to perceive directly the horror at the end of our journey, you to phrase the spoils of our fate! The horse will win … the horse will win. … Amazing, Mr. Bailey, just amazing. … Because Eddie Reeves came ringing through my wires at 4 A.M. and what he read me was an accolade proper for the obituary of the King of the Turf: He’s run the Golden before, Sidney. Hear me Sidney? Entered in The Golden Bowl three times and three times the winner. Hear me Sidney? Then the dates; then Eddie coughing through the dawn; then the minutes of each winning race. Then reading on: Draftsman by Emperor’s Hand out of Shallow Draft by Amulet; Castle Churl by Draftsman out of Likely Castle by Cold Masonry; Rock Castle by Castle Churl out of Words on Rock by Plebeian—Bred by the Prince of Denmark, Sidney, bred by the Prince and commanded to win by the Prince and ordained to win by the Prince and forebears of that line, too. And by his order—just to get the royal stamp on him, Sidney—the King’s own surgeon transplanted a bone fragment from the skull of Emperor’s Hand into Rock Castle’s skull. Then presented by the Prince of Denmark to Lady Harvey-Harrow on her sixteenth birthday. The horse will win, Sidney, the horse will win. … Rigid; fixed; a prison of heritage in the victorious form; the gray shape that forever rages out round the ring of painted horses with the band music piping and clacking; indomitable. And somebody knew all this already, and it wasn’t Mr. Banks. But who? Sidney Slyter wants to know: and Sidney Slyter wants to know what’s the matter with Mr. Michael Banks. …

  It was 4 A.M. in the darkness that had begun with bees and warbling and the fading of bells, and Thick had used the ropes. Now she was bound, her wrists were tied together to the bedpost of brass, and Thick was snoring. He had somehow got her back into the white gown but had left the ties unfastened. It hardly covered her and despite the pain she could feel the gauzy touch of the old hat against one bare leg. Despite the darkness of the night she could faintly see the shreds of the long tasseled gown which he had ripped with his knife, muttering, “… Try to get big Thick in trouble, eh, try to make Thick look a fool. …” and had strewed viciously about the room, across the floor. A torn piece of the bodice was hanging over the closet door. And the little steamer trunk—how desperately she had found it, rummaged through the clothes of the long-dead woman. Cursing her, he had locked the little steamer in the cellar. Locked all escape away, then beaten her. And she had gone unconscious for an hour, for several hours, but there was no sleep for her. A bed she could not know— upon it violence that seemed not meant for her—this hour in which she could not sleep, arms drawn back and flesh captured with Thick’s rope, so tightly that her hands were cold: she knew now the hunger of the abducted, knew how the poor girls felt when they were seized.

  Four A.M. and she was one of the abducted. She wanted to stand at the window, hear a voice through the wall, find a flower pressed between the pages of a book, eat from a plate she recognized. But there was only the darkness smelling so unfamiliar and the ropes that cut and burned. She knew there was enormous penalty for what they had done to her—but she could not conceive of that, did not require that: she only wanted a little comfort, a bit of charity; with the awfulness, the unknowable, removed. Once when a girl—and she had been a girl—they had sent her away somewhere, and now the soreness, the sleeplessness, the sensation of invisible bruises reminded her of the hearth with an uneasy fire on it and an old woman threading buttons, an endless number of buttons—blue and white and violet—on a string. She was a child anything could be done to—and now, now a docile captive. And when Monica, the little girl, awoke about this hour with her nightmares, Margaret took them to be her own bad dreams, as if in soothing the child she could soothe herself.

  But it wasn’t soothing she wanted, it was a task or other to do. She hadn’t believed Thick’s beating, really, though it put her out for an hour or more. Later, lying strapped to the bed, she told herself it was what she might have expected: it was something done to abducted girls, that’s all. She thought she had read a piece about a beating. And yet when it came it surprised her. Though thinking now, listening, looking back through the dark, she realized—this despite the article she had read—it was something they couldn’t even show in films.

  Because his sweat smelled raw when he tied her. And because after that, after he had grunted making the knots and cursed carrying the trunk down, he had become silent and watched her for a while, his precious radio telling them the time and starting a symphony, and then he had told her he might have to tape her mouth and she hardly heard it, listening to the low music and still feeling the hurt in her wrists and to herself considering that never before had her hands been tied.

  And he remarked: “You don’t look half bad. Like that. …”

  But he hadn’t forgiven her, because it was then that he stepped nearly out of sight across the room and she, hurting in the armpits as well as wrists, decided to try just how much freedom she really had—with only her arms drawn back to the post—and flexed a knee, the other knee, moved one foot far on the mattress and rolled her hips as much as she could. Until something told her she was being watched by Thick.

  Then he came at her with the truncheon in his hand— it made her think of a bean bag, an amusement for a child—and wearing only his undervest and the trousers with the top two buttons open. He was in his stockinged feet and cigarette smoke was still coming out of his nose. She could see the dial of the little dry-cell radio in his glasses.

  “I’ve beat girls before,” whispering, holding the truncheon in the dark, bracing himself with one fat hand against the wall, “and I don’t leave bruises. When it’s done you won’t be able to tell, you see. Plenty of girls— maids, the nude down in Robin’s Egg Blue, the tarts who run the stitching machines, a kid named Sally. Used to operate in Violet Lane, I did. Gaslight scenes is my attraction. And if I happened to be without my weapon,” raising a little the whiteness, the rubber, “the next best thing is a newspaper rolled and soaking wet. But here, get the feel of it, Miss.” He reached down for her and she felt the truncheon nudging against her thigh, gently, like a man’s cane in a cr
owd.

  “It ain’t so bad,” he whispered.

  She was lying face up and hardly trembling, not offering to pull her leg away. The position she was tied in made her think of exercises she had heard were good for the figure. She smelled gun oil—the men who visited the room had guns—and a sour odor inside the mattress. Perhaps the little one called Sparrow had left it there. Or even Thick, now standing beside her in the dark, because Thick liked to sleep on it in the afternoons. She remembered how earlier he had slept and how, after she and the child returned to the table, Monica had found a jack, as she thought she might, and won the game. And now, hearing the music, the symphony that old men were listening to in clubs, now she no longer would be able to play with Monica. She cared for nothing that Thick could do, but she would miss the games. There was a shadow on the wall like a rocking chair; her fingers were going to sleep; she thought that a wet newspaper would be unbearable.

  Then something happened to his face. To the mouth, really. The sour sweat was there and the mouth went white, so rigid and distended that for a moment he couldn’t speak: yet all at once she knew, knew well enough the kinds of things he was saying—to himself, to her—and in the darkness and hearing the faint symphonic program, she was suddenly surprised that he could say such things.

  His arm went up quivering, over his head with the truncheon falling back, and came down hard and solid as a length of cold fat stripped from a pig, and the truncheon beat into her just above the knee; then into the flesh of her mid-thigh; then on her hips; and on the tops of her legs. And each blow quicker and harder than the last, until the strokes went wild and he was aiming randomly at abdomen and loins, the thin fat and the flesh that was deeper, each time letting the rubber lie where it landed then drawing the length of it across stomach or pit of stomach or hip before raising it to the air once more and swinging it down. It made a sound like a dead bird falling to empty field. Once he stopped to increase the volume of the radio, but returned to the bedside, shuffling, squinting down at her, his mouth a separate organ paralyzed in the lower part of his face, and paused deceptively and then made a rapid swing at her, a feint and then the loudest blow of all so swiftly that she could not gasp. When he finally stopped for good she was bleeding, but not from any wound she could see.

  For how many minutes he had kept it up, she did not know. Nor how long ago it was when he started. Because when she first opened her eyes he was snoring and the radio had changed. Comics were talking and she could not understand a word of it. And because now she was like a convent girl accepting the mysteries—and still Thick snored—and no matter how much she accepted she knew it now: something they couldn’t show in films. What a sight if they flashed this view of herself on the screen of the old Victoria Hall where she had seen a few pictures with Michael. What a view of shame. She had always dressed in more modest brown, bought the more modest cod, prayed for modesty, desired it. Now she was hurt—badly hurt, she expected. And she remembered a woman in the basement flat being run down by a bus and telling it: and she felt that way herself—still bleeding—felt the damage deep inside, aching in unanticipated places, paining within. There wasn’t any Mrs. Stickley now, and that other woman—in the basement flat—had died.

  She felt that she herself could die. In those early hours she had not thought to scream. But now she was prostrate in Little Dora’s Roost and even Little Dora, who hated them playing cards, was gone. And without the presence of some other woman, any woman, she could die. Thick had been too rough with her, treated her too roughly, and some things didn’t tolerate surviving, some parts of her couldn’t stand a beating. She hadn’t even her free hands with which to rub them.

  So finally she sobbed several times in this hour before the dawn. The moon had failed, the last clothes off her back were torn to shreds, the ginger cake they had given her at noon sat half-eaten and bearing her teeth marks in a chipped saucer atop the wardrobe. The moonlight’s wash reached the window and fell across the brass and Margaret on the bed: a body having shiny knees, white gown twisted to the waist, arms stretched horizontal to the end of the bed and crossed; gray mattress-ticking beneath the legs whose calves were swollen into curves, and the head itself turned flat in the same direction she had raised one hip, away from the farther wall against which Thick snored; and a wetness under the eye exposed to the wash of light and the sobs just bubbling on the lips. Margaret inert, immobile, young woman with insides ruptured and fingers curling at the moment of giving sound to her grievance.

  The sobs were not sweet. They were short, moist, lower than contralto, louder than she intended; the moanings of a creature no one could love. But Monica must have heard them—Monica whom Little Dora had brought back to the Roost after Thick himself had gone to sleep—or perhaps those sobs merely coincided with sobs of the child’s own. Because when Margaret sobbed aloud, Monica sat up screaming.

  The girl was given to having nightmares. All day long she was clever, turning away her inoculated arm, hiding inside her fists the little sharp black lines of her fingernails, walking on heels to prevent the sole of her left sandal from flapping, winning every afternoon at cards, though she had no use for horses. At the sink in the closet she spent time daubing herself with drops of Paradise Shore from a vial—shaped like a slipper—which she carried in a small white purse with a handle. She was forever finding hairpins on the floor and putting them quickly to her head. And she drank tea with her legs crossed and her good arm—the one without the scab—thrown over the back of the chair. Tall for her age, thin, not yet able to read, wearing socks that didn’t reach to her ankles and a cameo ring tied from finger to wrist with a length of green ribbon, readily speaking of the pets—all suicides she said—which she had kept in their Farthing Maude flat, she was pale and bony and still smelling of dolls she had cared for, a girl expecting no favors in her bright-green dress, though sufficient enough in the daylight.

  “She’s being too friendly with the prisoner,” Thick said whenever he could.

  But at night there were horrors. At night she sweated her innocence and, bolting up in her shift, declared she’d been swimming in the petrol tank of a lorry, or watching three rubber dolls smartly burning, or sitting inside a great rubber tire and rolling down a steep cobbled hill in the darkness. And Margaret remembered these dreams.

  Now Margaret’s sobs and Monica’s screams commenced together and continued together, variants of a single sound, screaming and weeping mingled. Margaret was lying with puffy red eyes closed but fully conscious of the mingling sounds. Monica was sitting upright on the brass bed next to her, not in the shift but merely in panties this night, and half the childish head of hair was down, the pins kept falling—a small body untouched, unidentified, except by arm bandage and the panties, and her eyes were shining open. Yet she was asleep, and between the two stripped beds and on the opposite wall the washed-back glow of the moon was lighting the cheap print in its glassless frame, print of a young woman who—in moonlight herself and with long hair drawn frontward across her chest, with two large butterflies sleeping upon her shoulders—was in the act of stepping into the silver pond to drink. So Margaret felt the two sounds coming from herself, starting from the same oppressive breast, as if the other half of sadness was quite naturally fear. And Margaret then opened her eyes and her face was toward Monica’s bed and her arms were spasmodically flexing a little against rope and unyielding wrists and brass.

  “Ducky,” she whispered then, no longer sobbing, “Ducky. …”

  Monica’s head was lifted and the neck was stretched. There was a white thread hanging from the opened lips and it blew gently in the vibrations of the scream. The tooth-marked cake was on the wardrobe behind her.

  “Ducky … wake up now, Ducky.”

  She was not awake yet, but she began to move: the graceless motions of the undressed dreaming child, fumbling off the bed, crouching and bending over as if the dream lay in the white innocent oval of her belly, stooped but holding the tiny hands out trembli
ng to sense the night, and neither falling nor gliding across the distance between the beds yet coming on with a kind of limbless instinct, all disarrayed as an adult woman walking in the night. Until suddenly the little girl collapsed, fell forward, and buried the scream between Margaret’s cheek and the ticking. And by touch of the child’s skin, she knew that her own cheek was wet.

  “Wake up, wake up,” she whispered, and still Thick snored and she could not hold the girl.

  But Monica’s hands were clinging. She smelled the odors of soap and Paradise Shore and there was a hand upon her own shoulder making the flesh feel large, and the other small wedge-shaped hand was thrust between the mattress and her breast. Her lips were against the child’s eyes and she could taste them. Somewhere she was losing blood, but there was no longer any sobbing or screaming. Only the melting dream, the feel of a dangling hairpin and at the foot of the empty bed next her own the dark-blue shade of one of Monica’s sandals.

  “Ducky,” whispering against the eyes, “feeling a little better? There’s a girl.”

  In the silence, glancing away from the face, she felt the child’s fingers and touch of the cameo ring starting again at the round of her own shoulder; then traveling lightly away to the elbow and reaching the wrists, stopping. And followed by the other hand until both the child’s arms were outstretched and come to a point atop her own, so that despite the cold and numbness she felt the grip, while somewhere below her waist she seemed to be sinking, caving in wall by tissue wall.

  “Poor Margaret,” said the little girl, “I could cry, I could. …”