Lovesong, p.18
Lovesong, page 18
Kadija, riding out the storm in the pretence that it was a passing thing, asked him cheerily when he returned, ‘And how is the lady?’
‘She was asleep,’ he said remotely. His frown implied she had shouted her question into the ear of a man with a blinding headache.
‘You stayed a long time, then, if she was asleep,’ said Kadija, exerting herself hugely to sound cheerful.
The frown dissolved. He was in need of a confidante. The comradeship in her voice undermined him. She had no right to question what he did, what he was thinking, but he did so lack for a friend to confide in. ‘Yes. I was looking. Just watching her sleep. She is so beautiful, isn’t she? Even now. Even battered about. She’s so … well…’
‘Beautiful. Yes, she’s very lovely,’ said Kadija, inexpressive. Her face registered nothing but impartiality. Only the child, whom she pulled close to her in a rigid, protective embrace, began to cry with intuitive fright.
After that, Oriole spent a great deal of time upstairs, watching the Lady Alazais sleep. He would stand at the foot of the bed, watching the soft rise and fall of the bedclothes as she breathed, watching her hands open and close as she dreamed, watching the eyeballs flickering beneath their purple-rimmed lids.
After a few days, it did not seem any great progression to squeeze between the bed and the wattle barrier separating his section of the roof void from next-door and to arrange her matted hair more agreeably on the bolster, to defend her from troublesome flies, to lift back the covers a shade to see how the bruises to her breast were turning from yellow to purple.
He did not question why she never disturbed out of sleep in all the times he stood looking at her. He never noticed that her eyes were sometimes so tightly shut as to trap the lashes at a different angle, and that her lids trembled. He was sunk so far into fantasy that he envisaged her sleep as something magical – a hundred-year suspension of suffering granted her by fairies for her marvellous goodness. Sometimes in the evening, when Kadija took her lentil broth, there was a murmur of voices like doves in the chimney. But he himself never saw Alazais awake.
Then at last, when his wife prepared a basin of warm water made disinfectant with wine, Oriole suddenly snatched the bowl from her and ran up the rungs of the ladder and drew the curtain closed across the entrance to the upper room. Kadija retreated down the ladder and stood at the bottom, her fingers clenched in her hair as she might clench the mane of a runaway horse. But she knew that no amount of tugging would restrain Oriole.
Any reins she had ever held were broken. He had been set loose in Paradise. His obsession had taken possession of him.
Oriole set by the bowl and drew back the covers, a priest uncovering the Holy Sacrament on Easter morning. Alazais, lying on her side, did not stir but the tendons in her back appeared to contract. He put his head close to her; she smelled of sweat and camphor, but beyond was a savour he had known all along would be there. It struck him as miraculous that he should have known her scent ahead of time. He even remarked on the wonder of it to Kadija, emerging from the bedroom in a trancelike stupor, wearing a foolish grin, easing the front of his shirt to allow his heart more scope.
She was a picture of domestic calm, sewing in the doorway for the sake of the light. A bobbin of thread lay spinning on the earthen floor, but he could not trouble to wonder what had set it spinning. The little girl was asleep, stretched out on a straw sack in the abandon of deep sleep, her head tipped back so that the lids stood half-open without her being awake. The whole scene was reassuring. It shored him up within his happiness. He needed to confide.
‘I love her so much,’ he said, sitting down opposite, bright-eyed like a child at its mother’s knee. He smiled remotely, his head tilted on one side. ‘Oh! Have you any idea how much I love her? She’s like a dragon inside me. I don’t know, though, no: it’s as if she can summon up a dragon from somewhere inside me – deep inside.’
‘Dragons do wicked things,’ said Kadija without looking up from her sewing.
‘No, no, no. Nothing that’s not in their nature! The birds and the beasts – they follow Nature’s way.’ An obliging skein of ducks flew over soon after, though, to Kadija, their honking sounded derisory. ‘See! Following the paths of instinct, that’s what they’re doing. If we could be high up like them and look down and see the natural path printed out…’
‘But instead we only have God,’ said Kadija deliberately. ‘Looking down.’
But Oriole was deaf to criticism. He had rescued a maiden from violence and calumny. He loved her with a love too magnificent to encompass anything unworthy; a love so white hot that it must scorch away any smut on the great shining disc of his heart’s escutcheon. He contemplated what he had seen in the upper room. The damage done to her face was no more than to a papier-mâché mask which, in this heightened, visionary state, he could lift off to see the unblemished perfection beneath. The bruises to the body he could not even see as he stared now, and stared and stared with the eyes of a seer, at the Grail of his quest.
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Kadija, though she knew already. Better than he did.
‘I shall look after her,’ said Oriole standing up reflexly. ‘I’ll take her to Fontevrault. She’ll be safe there. I shall dedicate myself to clearing her name. I shall lay my songs and skills at her disposal – for her to send me where she wants when she wants. I’ll…’
‘But first you’ll rape her.’
She did not appear even to have said it. Her head was still bent low over her sewing. Her needle still stabbed in and out, in and out. With an incandescent crackle of straw, the child woke and sprang up on to her knees, laughing:
‘What do you know about Love?’ blared Oriole, and crossed to the ladder and went up it so fast that its feet jumped in their worn sockets of earth. The child called after him, ‘Where did Papa go?’
In the upstairs room Alazais was awake too, raised up on her elbows, clutching all the bedding to her breast.
‘What does she know?’ said Oriole, declamatory as a Roman. Alazais said nothing. ‘I give my life into your service, lady!’
‘That’s more than I asked and more than I ever wanted,’ she said at last. ‘Perhaps a little help to reach Fontevrault…’ He had begun to take off his clothes and to lay them on the foot of the bed like tributes. She pulled the cover over her head and began to rock to and fro, saying, ‘Oh Christ Jesu, but I don’t love you! Not you. Not him. Not any of you!’ He did not seem to hear her. ‘What is this word?’ roared the voice beneath the covers. ‘You think you have only to say it and everything’s allowed. “Love!” Oh Christ! Oh Christ! Oh Christ! Do it, then! Do it, do it, do it and be damned to you. Then just let me go to Fontevrault!’
Inside Oriole, the dragon’s flame guttered. It was a conspiracy. Both women wanted to undermine him, wilfully misunderstanding him. Perhaps their female brains were too narrow to comprehend the full grandeur of Love. For a few moments, Oriole harboured thoroughly misogynistic feelings towards them both – a low-water of affection – before the tides of passion swept back and submerged Alazais’ unkind ness. A bitter outrage would always separate him now from his stupid, insensitive wife, he knew that, but no misunderstanding would be left standing between him and Alazais once he had broken down the barriers of flesh between their two souls. He sprang on to the bed and, holding her head between his two hands, kissed her.
She hardened her lips over her teeth and spat him out of her mouth. She turned her head aside and looked at the floor, her lilac eyes full of tears. She was not even willing to entrust him with her eyes.
The dragon fire within Oriole fizzled out and left rum stumbling about in clouds of black, choking smoke. He retreated, crammed to the jaw with self-pity, on the verge of tears himself, went outside and sat on the rungs of the ladder, halfway up, or rather halfway down from Paradise. It was cold, but although he gathered his clothes round him, a refugee’s baggage, he did not put them back on but sat still, staring into the lower room’s darkness.
It was a thick, material blackness. The daylight wedged in the door way and sifting through the damaged wattle walls was only a leak in the pitchy hull of darkness, a localised lack of darkness. Nothing at all impinged on the darkness within him, where his dragon-fire had burned.
But a man’s silhouette – no, several silhouettes – did impinge on the sunlight in the doorway. A priest stepped indoors with a presumption only priests can show towards privacy. Behind him, a head of fiery red hair glowed in the backlighting, incandescent: a corona round the black sun of an unlit face. In his surprise, Oriole stood up and his scalp grazed the joists of the floor above.
Behind Amaury came a whore from the brothel next door, with a mare’s nest of henna’d, purpling hair. Also two professional knights, ducking their heads under the door lintel, feet still planted in the sunshine.
‘Is she here?’ said Amaury.
Afterwards, Oriole could not think that he had said anything, uttered a single word, while Amaury chattered on. He thought it the greatest of jokes to go on and on thanking and thanking and thanking Oriole in tones of heartfelt bonhommie, making him ridiculous, turning him back into a tool.
‘We thought you were dead,’ said Kadija in stark surprise.
‘Quite right that you should. I went to great pains and a deal of outlay to have people think so. I even had to take a wetting and leave some of my armour on the river bed. And thanks to your husband’s excellent endeavours, I succeeded very nicely, thank you, ma’am … Who won the contest, by the way, Oriole? Or did the proceedings break up early? I hate that. I hate to see an entertainment spoiled, business half-finished. That’s why I went back to the castle from Arles. After I climbed out of the river.’
‘Is everyone ready to proceed?’ the priest interrupted, tense, impatient and uneasy. ‘Is this the lady?’
‘No!’ Kadija had no notion what the priest wanted, but his manner was all aggression, accusation – as if they might have come to flourish at her bell, book and candle. She kept asking Oriole what was happening – the day was quite dreadful enough already. But he had been struck dumb by the sudden resurrection of his master. He just stood bare legged on the ladder rung, gaping.
‘Is she up there?’ Amaury asked. ‘Have you kept her safe and sound for me? There’s a good fellow.’ He invented Oriole’s replies. ‘Still recovering from Barral’s temper, eh! That man really should curb his temper. Too ill to appreciate visitors, would you say? Well, no matter.
The Moor here will serve as proxy. You’ll do that, won’t you, woman? Not a very onerous task, I promise. Oh, and I can vouch this woman’s a Christian, Father, I was at the baptism myself’
The priest was plainly a conspirator, an accomplice whipped in at high speed by a combination of bullying and bribery. But he bridled at a proxy, said, ‘No! I must see the true woman. She might be dead for all I know! Or gone away.’
Amaury gave no more than a swerve of his eyes and the two men in the doorway blundered into the overcrowded room and plucked Oriole down off his perch. One went up the ladder, pushed his head through the door hanging and grunted with satisfaction. The priest’s robe was an impediment to him climbing the ladder, so the second of the professionals lifted him and posted him up the stairwell, to see for himself that the woman in the upstairs bed was alive.
‘I’m content,’ said the religious, and waving away the knights, he gathered up his gown effeminately and climbed down again, showing a pair of white, wire-haired legs, a fine linen undergown and a pair of expensive shoes. He began the wedding service even before he had reached the ground.
‘You mean to marry her?’ said Oriole, his voice huge and full of horror. The prelate paused, then droned on, speaking the required words while his eyes shifted anxiously about. It was nothing new for him to have his words ignored, talked down. After all, they generally concerned sin and prohibition. ‘You’re going to marry her?’ said Oriole.
‘Well, of course, little friend. I wonder you didn’t do it yourself while you had the chance. She’s worth twenty thousand ecus and fifteen hundred acres again, now her husband’s put her away. She’s fair game to be seized on now …’
‘But he hasn’t put me off! He won’t!’ Alazais stood at the top of the stairs in her shift, her blonde hair dark with sweat, the circles round her eyes exaggerating the depth of the sockets. Hers was a face that had fasted a month. But she had managed to convince herself ‘He won’t. Not without proof. What’s one poem?’ Her shift filled with air in the updraught from the open door.
Amaury opened his hands helplessly. ‘Ah, but the stains on the bedsheets, lady! All those little tokens so badly hidden in your chamber. I’m afraid we made a poor fist of concealing our love.’
‘He went back,’ Oriole told her in a fiat, desolate bellow. ‘He went back. While I sang. While Barral was beating you half to death. He went back. To the castle. He went back. He fouled your bed. He left tokens.’
‘Won’t you join us, lady? Beloved?’ asked Amaury. ‘My dear, you must have known the extent of my determination. Just as you must know how pointless it is to protest.’ And he waved his hand about the assembled company to demonstrate the impossibility of escape. Alazais retreated two steps and pulled the door-hanging in front of her. Oriole could hear her breathing, crying just a little on every outward breath. Like a dog whimpering in its sleep.
‘Do you, Sir Amaury of Herm, take this woman, Alazais of Florriac, for wife?’ the priest was saying, doggedly.
‘Oh, no question there,’ said Amaury. ‘I do, I do, I do.’
‘And does this proxy Alazais of Florriac take this Amaury for husband,’ the priest asked Kadija.
She was crouched down by the open door, her daughter clinging to her in fright at such a bombardment of faces and noise. Kadija’s face was a scowl of confusion, of resentment at the intrusion; of bewilderment and resentment at the grief Alazais had already brought into her house, her marriage. When she hesitated, one of the professionals pulled her to her feet so that she dropped the child. He twisted her arm behind her back.
‘Yes! Yes! All right!’ she cried, the words startled out of her. And then, seeing that her words would marry her husband’s obsession to another man, ‘Yes, I do. I do take him.’
There was a single cry from the upper room. It halted the proceedings only as long as the cry of a barn owl might halt the burning down of a barn.
‘Now, it must be consummated,’ said the priest, anxious to be gone.
Amaury went up the ladder without use of his hands. He drew back the hanging and left it drawn back. But no eyes tried to follow him beyond the flapping blanket and its clattering rings. The priest regretted the need to stay. Kadija regretted her collaboration now that she saw what it meant for Alazais. After all, she had nursed the woman, fed the woman, found her pleasant, likeable, almost pitiable despite her wealth; felt now a comradeship with her. The professionals, restraining Oriole now, lobbed obscene, monosyllabic jokes across the top of his head, snorting uproariously.
As for Oriole, he stood between them, bound like Samson to the pillars of the Philistines. And if he had been Samson and not a slight man, built like a ginger tomcat, whom people mistook for a boy, he would have pushed down the pillars, demolished the house, brought down the wattle and joists and planks and roofbeams. He would have brought down the clouds and the sky beyond it, the spheres and all the windows of Heaven with all the reservoirs of water above them. He would have shaken the earth till the planets fell like fruit. But since ‘he was a slight man, built like a tomcat, he merely stood between his guards, and wept.
He could have seized on her. He or any man in France could have seized on her – upon her twenty thousand ecus and her fifteen hundred acres, upon her perfect body and her maleable name. She was a ball Barral Nerra had thrown in the air with all the force and inaccuracy of blind wrath: she might have fallen to any man who cared to open his hands and catch her. And instead, Oriole had helped her, cherished her, admired her, assisted in her ravishment by the man both she and he chiefly loathed.
She made no sound. No noise at all came from the upper room but the thud, thud of the bed; the wood frame encircling the straw sacks had never stood level on the floor. Thud, thud, thud. Between the planks of the ceiling, strands of straw and little gouts of dust fell on to the occupants of the room below. Oriole watched those winnowings of straw, watched the spiders dislodged by the thud of the bed’s fourth corner.
Ever since Poitiers, Amaury had been closing on this moment. Like a hyena which wears down its prey by sheer endurance, sheer persistence of cruelty, he had waited his time, closing closer in with every nightfall. Every step had been one patient step nearer to Alazais’ repudiation and the chance to rush in under Barra’ s arm and seize from him the prey.
When Amaury reappeared at the head of the stairs, he was gasping like a man who has been too long underwater. The grin was clewed to his face with rusty staples of drying blood, but the scratches clearly caused him no pain. He beckoned the priest to witness that all the requirements of marriage had taken place, but the priest only mumbled that he was satisfied and waited out of doors in the sunshine for the furtive exchange of money. The professionals too were paid to spread the news: that Amaury of Herm was married into the estates of Florriac.
At the door of Oriole’s house, Amaury stood and laughed with sheer delight in himself It set Jerusalem laughing, too. He swung the little girl round by her hands. Two earthenware pots were knocked from the table by her feet and smashed. But she went on laughing, in imitation and delight. Oriole tried to snatch Jerusalem away, but Amaury simply tucked her under his arm, where she dangled like a piglet won at a fair. So Oriole said, with all the malice in the world, ‘That’s not your one. Your bastard died, you know. Fell down some steps and died.’
Amaury looked down with some distaste at the child under his arm and dropped her unceremoniously on the floor. When he was gone, Oriole picked up his daughter and held her to him, barely knowing who or what he was hugging so close, only aware of the need to empty out affection, shed it, be rid of it for good.
