The Lime Twig: Novel Read online

  “See can you do anything with the knots,” she whispered then.

  Monica knelt on the ticking near Margaret’s head—a thin bent back, silver between the ribs, bowed as if for an old woman’s drunken hand—and tried to work the rope ends.

  “I can’t,” leaving off, soothing her fingers against the coolness of the brass. “What are we going to do?”

  “Perhaps you could put a coat round me,” she whispered at last. “If only Michael knew. …”

  So the child fetched Little Dora’s coat and spread it over Margaret and brought a glass of water and Banks’ wife drank—some of it spilled and wet the mattress— and Monica dressed herself in the discarded green dress and sandals and socks. And on her own bare bed again: “Larry’ll make him turn you loose. I promise.”

  “Yes. Go to sleep now, Monica.” She watched the child lying firmly in the moonlight, watched two small hands carry the cake up and into the shadow of the mouth, listened to the rigid and fragile sounds of chewing. Later she heard Monica brush away the crumbs, lie still again.

  Outside on a branch above the garbage receptacle, an oven tit was stirring: not singing but moving testily amidst the disorder of leaf, straw sprig, remnant of gorse, fluttering now and then or scratching, making no attempt to disguise the mood, the pallidness, which later it would affect to conceal in liveliness and muted song. A warbler. But a sleepless bird and irritable. Through drowsiness and barge-heavy pain she noticed the sounds of it and did not smile; saw rather a panorama of chimneys, fine rain, officers of the law and low yards empty of children; farther off there was a heap of tile and a young woman in rubber shoes, an apron and wide white cap, and there were bloodstains on the ticking.

  She heard the door, and when it closed again it shook the picture of the woman bending at the pond. He was swaying in the room and stately drunk. Without feigning sleep and in innocence Margaret watched him, wondering what had changed him now, and smelled the dark rum which had stained the teeth, the lips, the tongue. The light was more than a wash—it seemed to come off the wardrobe’s empty saucer, shine from the print of the pond, rise up from the worn flooring beneath his feet. Or the light was coming off the man himself.

  Finally she understood this much: he was not fully dressed. The coat, the tie, the chemise-soft shirt, the undervest, were gone. And she was staring at naked arms, at white face and soot-black hair, at something silver that stretched and reflected the moon’s pale tone from below his bare neck to the belted line of his trousers. And she thought that softly, ever so softly, he was humming as he swayed there, some sort of regimental march perhaps.

  He moved then. Bringing the light, the glow, still closer—without any motion—he started down between the two brass beds, stopped—breathing near her shoulder—and fumbled in his pocket until he found and opened a little penknife that was only a sparkle before the curved sheet of steel. Despite the cold light of his chest she knew beforehand that his fingers would be hot, and his fingers were hot when, back turned to Monica, he stooped and reached—her own eyes were to the side and up and she saw the shining links like fish scales, and pressed to them the triangular black shape of the pistol —and began to cut. Once she saw his face, and it was the angel’s whiteness except for a broken place at the comer of his mouth which set her trembling.

  She waited and felt triumph while he cut. Then burning. For all his gestures were considerate, performed calmly and with care. There was sureness and the heated fingers. Yet there came his sound of breathing, and with exactitude he was yet slashing and the blade that went through Thick’s ropes went into her wrists, her own wrists as well. They too began to bleed.

  Even now, after how many hours, being able to move her arms, drag them back to her sides then cross them upon her stomach, chafe them, touch the welted wrists, even now there was little pleasure in it, feeling the scratches, cuts, stinging of the blood. “You’ve wounded me,” she whispered, eyes to the ceiling and in darkness. “You cut me.”

  He said only: “I meant to cut you, Miss. …”

  So sometime after 4 A.M. she tried to use her numb and sleeping arms, twice struck out at him, then found her hands, the bleeding wrists, the elbows, and at last her cheek going down beneath and against the solid sheen of his bullet-proof vest. At that moment sunlight roused the day’s first warbling of the heavy oven tit, and Monica slipped away through the unguarded door.

  Sparrow, having changed from wine to whisky and being drunk but not stately drunk, knelt in the middle of Larry’s room and, surrounded by weapons of countless shape and caliber—black and oily, loaded, strewn across the floor and piled on the bed and on the horsehair rocker and the footstool, a collection of Webleys, Bren guns, automatics and revolvers to make the Violet Lane men whistle—and fumbling with string and paper, beret pushed all the way back and cupping the bald spot that protruded from the rear of his skull, fumbling and paying no attention to the woman crouched in the comer and sneering, tried to wrap something into a passable packet and failed until he cried, “Come over here, Little Dora, and give us a hand with this present for my boy Arthur.”

  7

  SIDNEY SLYTER SAYS

  Racing World Awaits Running of the Golden Bowl …

  Classic Event Equivalent of Olympic Games …

  Rock Castle’s Owner: Pawn of Brutal Gang?

  Somebody—angel of Heaven or Hell, surely— knew it all before. Somebody, possessed of prescience and having time stuck safely like a revolver in his pocket, knew all this already and went about the business as sure of satisfaction as a fellow robbing graves in a plague. Knowing Rock Castle’s past, which was recorded; having only to know of that Danish blood which circulated beneath the skin, only to know that the fact of this Rock Castle—tom from his mare—predetermined the stallion’s cyclic emergence again and again, snorting, victorious, onto the salt-white racing course of the Aegean shore; needing only this intelligence, that the horse existed and that the horse would win. Then to make off with him, one night to take him from the purple fields of the woman and groom too old, too feeble, and too wise to care; then to choose and pose one ignorant and hungry man as owner and with threats and violence and the pleasures of life to hold him until the race was won. Simple. Easy. Like taking sweets. … It might have been Sidney Slyter, mightn’t it? Or Harry Bailey of East End? It might have been any one of us. … But it was Mr. Michael Banks. Because Mrs. Laval’s been holding out her hand and drawing near, enfolding him. Because she told me so and has warned me off again, warned me off. But what do women know of such mysteries? They know too bloody much, I’d say. And Mrs. Laval, like all the rest of them—the gang of them—Mrs. Laval knew it all already. Every bit of it planned and determined in advance—the kiss, the dance, the jealous deaths—all of them beforehand set in motion like figures walking in the folds of the dirty shroud. … What now of Sidney Slyter’s view of the world? What now of my prognostications? What of Marlowe’s Pippet? And the sport? But what power, force, justice, slender hand or sacrifice can stop Rock Castle, halt Rock Castle’s progress now? Sidney Slyter doesn’t know. … Nonetheless, Sidney Slyter will report the running of the Golden Bowl for you. …

  “Don’t you know what eggs are good for, Michael?”

  The hall bulb shone orange through the cracks round the door and moonlight was coming through the cobwebbed window. Across the floor boards the moon was one square and silver-tinted patch of light within which, in a silken heap, lay a stocking that wanted fingering; next to it a safety pin which, by moonlight and with point unclasped, looked charmed and filigreed, as personal as a young girl’s fallen brooch. There was no sign of Cowles. There was nothing left of the jockey, not a boot or rubber jersey. Though out of the sounds of bottles smashing downstairs there came bursts of Jimmy Needles’ laughter, loud and ribald and grievous.

  It was 2 A.M. of the last night he spent alive—last darkness before the day and running of the Golden— and the covers were tossing. She had given a single promise and three times alre
ady made it good, so now he knew her habits, knew what to expect, the commotion she could cause in bed. And it was a way she had of rising and kicking off the covers with cartwheel liveliness and speed each time she lost a pearl—and she had lost three pearls—and asking him to hunt for it through the twisting and knotting of the sheets. Now the covers were cartwheeling and falling about his shoulders all at once and there was the fourth to find. At the end of the bedstead opposite the pillows she came to rest suddenly cross-legged and laughing, breathing so that he could see how far down she took the air.

  “Don’t ask me, Mike,” hands above her head, hips wriggling a little at the apex of crossed legs, “I don’t intend to help you. …” Then with a catch of sheet she idly daubed herself and laughed some more.

  He came up crawling on hands and knees, still lagging after the tremor, the fanciful sex, and began to feel about in the tumult she had made of the sheets, himself not yet recovered from the breath of her own revival, the swiftness with which she turned from deep climactic love to play. As if she always saved one drop unquenched, the drop inside her body or on the tongue that turned her not back to passionate love but away from that and into attitudes of frolic. No moment of idleness or a yawn or slow recovery but each time surprising him by play and acrobatics, her fresh poses making his own dead self fire as if he had never touched her and making her body look tight and childish as if she had never been possessed by him.

  “I can’t find the bloody thing,” he said.

  “Go on,” she said, and changed again, took one knee beneath her chin, “you find it.” Then, while he searched beneath her pillow, felt down the center of the mattress and into the still warm hollows: “I’ve seduced you, haven’t I, Mike,” she said.

  “You have,” he answered. “Good as your word.”

  With Sybilline watching, he moved back and forth on the undulations of the springs, with moonlight striking across his spine, and his hands and knees softly sinking; and felt at last the opalescence, the hard tiny tear of pearl on its needle shank, and held it up by the point for her to see.

  “You’re a charmer, Mike,” she said.

  He reached out then to the skirt flung over the chair and stuck the pearl in the row of three. There were no pearls left in her reddish pompadour, only the thick round of the hair and, as if it had been rumpled, a coil coming down her neck and tickling. The bottles were still crashing below them and someone was playing the widow’s piano so quickly, heavily, that Needles might have been running up and down the keyboard in his naked feet. But it was all bubbles of talk and musk and closeness in the room and Banks cared nothing for the noise. As he turned to face his Sybilline, began on hands and knees the several awkward motions it took to reach her, he knew remorse for the empty face of himself once more: because her eyes were big and brown, steady and temperate as those of a girl peering over a stile, while the rest of her was still animated, quivering, with the fun. Thrice she had taken him and he had thrice returned, riding into the bower that remains secretive and replete after blouse and skirt and safety pin, silks and straps, have all been discarded, flung about helter-skelter on the thorns. No more now, he was fast returning to the old man. While she, his Sybilline, was still tasting of that little shocking drop of incompletion that gave her a maiden’s blush, a shine between the breasts, as if she was always ready for another go at it, another lovely toss.

  After searching for all her pearls he was tangled in the covers now himself. His skin was gray. His head was hanging but he smelled the delicate stuff and blindly put his hand on her leg’s underside, touched the mild flesh for an instant, then let his fingers drag away. She wriggled and was laughing.

  “Be a sweet boy, Mike,” she said, secluded with him from the party, moving her bare shoulders in childish sailor fashion, “and fetch the stocking.”

  So at two o’clock in the morning he labored off the bed—she gave his arm a push—and took several steps until the moonlight caught him round the skinny ankles. Standing there, with sheep passing outside through darkened fields and the jockey screaming the first bars of an enticing song, he could hear the girl behind him—and that was the fine thing about Sybilline, the way she could kiss and play and let her spangles fall, keep track of all the chemistry and her good time, and yet be sighing, sighing like a young girl in love.

  He stooped, picked up the stocking, turned to hear her whistling through puckered lips.

  Then: “I’ll take that if you please, sweet Michael.” She held the length of silk in her hands and he was scrambling over the tossed pillows, down the crumpled sheets, until the two of them were facing and once more cross-legged. The pharmacist’s cure for women was on the edge of the sink, the smells were of the shores of paradise. Before his eyes and with the ends of her fingers, Sybilline drew the stocking out full length, held it swinging by the wide top and little toe, then in a quick gesture ran the whole porous line of it across her face and under her nose, just touching her nose, smelled it deeply and winked as she did so. And suddenly made a flimsy ball of it and with one hand lightly on his knee, reached forward and thrust the round of silk between his widespread legs and against the depths of his loin, rubbing, pushing, laughing. He flushed.

  “You see,” whispering, “you can win if you want to, Mike, my dear. But that’s all for now.” With lively arm she threw the balled stocking at the dusty moonlit glass and hopped off the bed.

  He watched her dance round to the chair, dangle the blouse and skirt, replace the pearls and do a faint jazz step that kept her moving nowhere. Then she posed in the unbuttoned blouse and her fingers were sending off kisses and her legs, friendly and white and long, were the legs he had seen bare in the undergarment ads. Then she whispered through the oval of the skirt she was just dropping over her head: “Put on your trousers, Mike … we’ll join the fun downstairs.”

  They stepped into the light of the orange bulb, held hands, walked along the widow’s carpet to the start of the rail with grapes carved on the post. The hallway smelled of dust and nuptials; a rag was lying on the carpet. “We’ll go down together,” she said, and gave his arm a pinch. “We’ll let them see we’re untidy. But Michael,” holding him midway on the stairs, “all the girls will love you, Michael. You’re alluring! So don’t forget, Mike, come back for me.” And she kissed him, she whom he would never kiss in privacy again.

  “I couldn’t lose you, Syb.”

  She laughed for the two of them at the bottom of the stairs and her hair was redder than at any time that day. The lamplight shone upon it—lamps were lit all about the room, small bulbs and large, glass shades chiming and tinkling and strung with beads—and her eyes were brown and moist.

  “There’s that lovely girl!” shouted the widow, “and our funny boy. And look what she’s done to him!”

  Not only Jimmy Needles was playing the piano, but Larry as well, jockey and Larry having a duet together side by side and beating on the keys with nearly equal strength. On the bench before the upright, the little man in color and the large man in navy blue—hour by hour the wrinkles in the dampened suit were flattening—kept talking all the while they played and a bottle of rum stood on the seat between them. And Little Dora tried to listen. Sunk in a velvet armchair, wearing her lopsided matron’s hat with a bit of feather now, her upper lip of pale hair wet with gin, eyes surly and black behind the glasses, stretched and recumbent on cushions as near as possible to the piano bench, she watched them, listened, in a torporous and deadly mood.

  Sparrow was there. He was drinking whisky out of the widow’s cup. The widow’s daughter was in the crowd—a big girl in a child’s dress pulled high who sat straight up and kept both hands on her knees, laughing and smiling out of a loose mouth and enormous eyes. And all the room was brown and filled with smoke and toy alligators and donkeys. Newspapers were strewn across the rug faded and worn with the footpaths of long-dead residents. A portrait of a Spanish nobleman hung above the mantel on which there burned a candelabra with smoky wicks and mol
ten wax; and duplicates of Little Dora’s chair, soft mauve contrivances on wheels, made humps along the walls. In volume nearly as loud as the piano the black wireless was turned up and an orchestra played out of the tufted speaker.

  Kissing, noise, and singing: a late hour in the widow’s parlor, and Banks saw Sparrow wave, watched Sybilline sit on the arm of Little Dora’s chair and swing her foot, and noticed that the widow was keeping her eye on him. Plump, wearing the tasseled shawl, she suddenly leaned over Syb and the slouching woman, and after a moment Dora jerked round her head and stared at him. Then all three were laughing—even his own dear girl—and he started toward them, took a place at the jockey’s side.

  A barracks song was coming from the coffin box of the piano, old, fast-stepping. A golden mermaid stood holding a pitchfork on the ebony and she was bounded by wreaths, her fishtail curved over her head. Scars and finger-length burns marked the ebony, ivory was missing from the keys. Banks leaned against the trembling wood, and there was a pile of tattered sheet music ready to fall from the top and he had never heard such noise. Yet Larry went on talking—audibly enough, considering— and the jockey was nodding and beating upon the last key of the scale.

  "… And I told the Inspector he was making a horrible botch of it. I said it would never do. Who’s pulling the strings I told him and he got huffy, huffy, mind you. I said the killing of the kids was no concern of mine but the hanging of Knifeblade was not acceptable, not in the least acceptable. You’d best not interfere, I said. There’s power in this world you never dreamed of, I told him. Why, you don’t stand a showing even with a little crowd at the seaside … and you’d better not bother with my business or my amusements. …”

  “But didn’t he try to stick you none the same,” said the jockey.

  “He did, but he failed. I knew him in Artillery, I knew his line. …”