They would have to assemble the bed before they could put their heads down to sleep tonight, and they had yet to decide which room they would use as the master bedroom. She would do that now, she elected, and so avoid having to return to the front room, and to ever-mournful Kirsty.
The bell was still pealing when she opened the door of the front room on the second floor. It was the largest of the three upper rooms – a natural choice – but the sun had not got in today (or any other day this summer) because the blinds were drawn across the window. The room was consequently chillier than anywhere else in the house; the air stagnant. She crossed the stained floorboards to the window, intending to remove the blind.
At the sill, a strange thing. The blind had been securely nailed to the window-frame, effectively cutting out the least intrusion of life from the sunlit street beyond. She tried to pull the material free, but failed. The workman, whoever he’d been, had done a thorough job.
No matter, she’d have Rory take a claw-hammer to the nails when he got back. She turned from the window, and as she did so she was suddenly and forcibly aware that the bell was still summoning the faithful. Were they not coming tonight? Was the hook not sufficiently baited with promises of paradise? The thought was only half alive; it withered in moments. But the bell rolled on, reverberating around the room. Her limbs, already aching with fatigue, seemed dragged down further by each peal. Her head throbbed intolerably.
The room was hateful, she’d decided; it was stale, and its benighted walls clammy. Despite its size, she would not let Rory persuade her into using it as the master bedroom. Let it rot.
She started towards the door, but as she came within a yard of it, the corners of the room seemed to creak, and the door slammed. Her nerves jangled. It was all she could do to prevent herself from sobbing.
Instead she simply said: ‘Go to hell,’ and snatched at the handle. It turned easily (why should it not?; yet she was relieved) and the door swung open. From the hall below, a splash of warmth and ochre light.
She closed the door behind her and, with a queer satisfaction the root of which she couldn’t or wouldn’t fathom, turned the key in the lock.
As she did so, the bell stopped.
4
‘But it’s the biggest of the rooms…’
‘I don’t like it, Rory. It’s damp. We can use the back room.’
‘If we can get the bloody bed through the door.’
‘Of course we can. You know we can.’
‘Seems a waste of a good room,’ he protested, knowing full well that this was a fait accompli.
‘Mother knows best,’ she told him, and smiled at him with eyes whose lustre was far from maternal.
The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they may be cured of their excesses.
Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness.
Even winter – the hardest season, the most implacable – dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.
So August gave way to September and there were few complaints.
2
With work, the house on Lodovico Street began to look more hospitable. There were even visits from neighbours, who – after sizing up the couple – spoke freely of how happy they were to have number fifty-five occupied again. Only one of them made any mention of Frank, referring in passing to the odd fellow who’d lived in the house for a few weeks the previous summer. There was a moment of embarrassment when Rory revealed the tenant to have been his brother, but it was soon glossed over by Julia, whose power to charm knew no bounds.
Rory had seldom made mention of Frank during the years of his marriage to Julia, though he and his brother were only eighteen months apart in age, and as children had been inseparable. This Julia had learned on an occasion of drunken reminiscing – a month or two before the wedding – when Rory had spoken at length about Frank. It had been melancholy talk. The brothers’ paths had diverged considerably once they’d passed through adolescence, and Rory regretted it. Regretted still more the pain Frank’s wild life-style had brought to their parents. It seemed that when Frank appeared, once in a blue moon, from whichever corner of the globe he was presently laying waste, he only brought grief. His tales of adventures in the shallows of criminality, his talk of whores and petty theft, all appalled the family. But there had been worse, or so Rory had said. In his wilder moments Frank had talked of life lived in delirium; of an appetite for experience that conceded no moral imperative.
Was it the tone of Rory’s telling, a mixture of revulsion and envy, that had so piqued Julia’s curiosity? Whatever the reason, she had been quickly seized by an unquenchable curiosity concerning this madman.
Then, barely a fortnight before the wedding, the black sheep had appeared in the flesh. Things had gone well for him of late. He was wearing gold rings on his fingers, and his skin was tight and tanned. There was little outward sign of the monster Rory had described. Brother Frank was smooth as a polished stone. She had succumbed to his charm within hours.
A strange time ensued. As the days crept towards the date of the wedding she found herself thinking less and less of her husband to be, and more and more of his brother. They were not wholly dissimilar; a certain lilt in their voices, and their easy manner, marked them as siblings. But to Rory’s qualities Frank brought something his brother would never have: a beautiful desperation.
Perhaps what had happened next had been inevitable; and no matter how hard she’d fought her instincts, she would only have postponed the consummation of their feelings for each other. At least that was how she tried to excuse herself later. But when all the self-recrimination was done with she still treasured the memory of their first – and last – encounter.
Kirsty had been at the house, hadn’t she, on some matrimonial business, when Frank had arrived. But by that telepathy which comes with desire (and fades with it) Julia had known that today was the day. She’d left Kirsty to her list-making or suchlike, and taken Frank upstairs on the pretext of showing him the wedding dress. That was how she remembered it; that he’d asked to see the dress, and she’d put the veil on, laughing to think of herself in white, and then he’d been at her shoulder, lifting the veil, and she’d laughed on, laughed and laughed, as though to test the strength of his purpose. He had not been cooled by her mirth however, nor had he wasted time with the niceties of a seduction. The smooth exterior gave way to cruder stuff almost immediately. Their coupling had had, in every regard but the matter of her acquiescence, all the aggression and the joylessness of rape.
Memory sweetened events, of course, and in the four years (and five months) since that afternoon, she’d replayed the scene often. Now, in remembering it, the bruises were trophies of their passion; her tears proof positive of her feelings for him.
The day following, he’d disappeared. Flitted off to Bangkok or Easter Island, some place where he had no debts to answer. She’d mourned him; couldn’t help it. Nor had her mourning gone