Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter
At that, Marianne sprang up, her cold eyes sparking.
‘All this is a bad dream,’ she said. ‘It can’t happen, it didn’t happen and it won’t happen.’
‘Young men will always take advantage, dear,’ said Mrs Green. ‘And we all have to take what we can get.’
She sighed. But all the same, she was as smug and comfortable as if wolves and tigers did not roam forests where no trees had grown previously and Marianne must learn to reconcile herself to everything from rape to mortality, just as her father had also told her she would have to do. Mrs Green’s photograph flashed in the lamplight, picture of a woman who could have been Marianne’s mother; Mrs Green might also feel a certain pleasure that her wild foster-son should marry so far above his class, pleasure and revenge, perhaps. Clearly she thought Marianne had learned a lesson and would not try to run away again for, after she had fed the girl the next morning, she left her to her own devices while she went off on her tour of inspection of the camp
Certainly Marianne did not intend to run away again yet, even though today was her wedding day, for she knew she would be tracked by cunning huntsmen, subjected, perhaps, to fresh humiliations and returned to the stinking castle once more at gun point. Instead, she went straight to the Doctor’s study.
As she went down the staircase, she heard again the sound of the curious music which had haunted her during the days of her imprisonment; chords and crescendos of a small organ emanated from the chapel where Donally lived and he played with such violence the rotten stone appeared to shiver. She had never heard organ music before but she could tell the instrument was out of tune. The fugue approached its peak. Last night’s sign was wiped off the wall; in its place was painted, MISTRUST APPEARANCES, THEY NEVER CONCEAL ANYTHING. She flung open the door and cried ‘Charlatan!’ at the top of her voice.
Her voice rang in accord with the music round the vaulted ceiling and both died away together. The room was almost in darkness, the windows quite covered with hides although outside the sun streamed down for it was another beautiful day. But here the baleful obscurity of the glow from the little stove concealed the whereabouts of the unseen organist until she saw the last patches of gilding left on a set of organ pipes gave off a faint gleam; a lighted candle was stuck by its own grease to the manual of a small, baroque organ perhaps late seventeenth or early eighteenth century in origin. She could make out the battered faces of one or two cherubim still smiling down on the worm-eaten oak. Donally prised away the candle and, holding it aloft, stepped down from the bench. His wiry hair stuck out all round his head like an immense halo of spikes. He had left off his dark glasses and seemed friendly and cheerful, which immediately made her suspicious. His son appeared, cowering, out of the shadows; he was panting and must have been working the organ pump.
‘Run along and play,’ said the Doctor benignly to the boy, who shot him a scared glance and bolted from the room, slamming the door behind him. He wore no collar today, though the ring of raw flesh round his neck was still fresh and he looked extremely cowed. He had one black eye.
‘Maybe you were a Professor of Music, once,’ said Marianne, glancing at the organ and, in spite of herself, impressed, for she had before heard only the martial sounds of her uncle’s military band.
He made no reply but placed his candle on a book-littered, quaking table some distance from the altar and gestured Marianne to sit down upon his chair. She refused. In his own room, he chose to wear a neat, dark suit, a white shirt and a black tie, no talismans or jewellery at all, no fur or feathers. He lit a few more candles, enough for her to see a little by, to see the mossy pillars which held up the vaulted roof all clogged with cobwebs, the filthy rag of a flag upon a gilded pole propped against the altar, the brass eagles of a lectern turned bright green with verdigris, some shapes of figures of wax and stone in embrasures. But the small, pale candle flame served mainly to delineate the areas of artificial shadow, though Marianne could clearly inspect Donally’s eyes. These were grey veined with green, like certain kinds of stones, and his eyeballs were lightly veined with red lines. She noticed he had plucked his eyebrows into neat, thin arcs, a queer vanity for a man who lived nowhere.
‘Tell me why it’s necessary for you to marry me to that Yahoo who raped me yesterday afternoon about what used to be teatime.’
‘Consider and make the best of things,’ said Donally, stroking the purple half of his beard. ‘He is probably the most beautiful man left in the world.’
‘You told me yourself to mistrust appearances; and his beauty didn’t make it hurt less nor make it any less humiliating. The reverse, in fact.’
‘Domiciled as you are among the Yahoos, you might as well be Queen of the midden. Don’t you know the meaning of the word “ambition”?’
She shook her head impatiently.
‘Come, come, now,’ said Donally encouragingly. ‘There must be something you want. Power? I can offer you a little power.’
He suggested the idea as if it were a delicious goody.
‘All I want is for my father to be alive,’ she said, overcome with misery; she sank down upon Donally’s chair.
‘Gather yourself together, young lady. Marry the Prince of Darkness. You’ll find him very sophisticated. Though his sophistication has always been superior to his opportunities, he does the very best he can.’
She looked over his books and saw names she remembered from the spines in her father’s study, Teilhard de Chardin, Lévi-Strauss, Weber, Durkheim and so on, all marked by fire and flood. He had been reading some books about society.
‘Where do you come from, why are you here? Why didn’t you stay where you belonged, editing texts or doing research? I suppose you might have been a Professor of Sociology, once, though only a crazy literato would call that animal you keep the Prince of Darkness, for he was a gentleman, as I remember.’
‘I was bored,’ said Donally. ‘I was ambitious. I wanted to see the world.’
A draught made the flames of the candles dance and the air grew thick with the smell of hot wax. Marianne’s eyes had grown more and more accustomed to the candlelight and she made out knobs and swags of carving in the ceiling, flowers, cherubs, jacks-in-the-green, death’s heads, hourglasses and memento mori, all covered with dust. Trunks, chests and cases were littered everywhere, covered with dusty utensils and more books even than in her father’s study. He must have a special cart to himself to transport them all. Yellow weeds blossomed in the walls and somewhere moisture dripped.
‘Well, here you are at the end of the road, holed up in a ruin with your rotten library, aren’t you?’ she said nastily. ‘Why did you never teach Jewel to read?’
‘Self-defence, in the first instance,’ he explained briskly. ‘On the second count, I wanted to maintain him in a crude state of unrefined energy.’
‘What, keep him beautifully savage?’
‘Why, yes. Exactly,’ said Donally. His eyelids fluttered; he continued to stroke his purple hairs with a fine, white hand, now contemplating Marianne as if she were a good deal more clever than he had ever suspected.
‘Our Jewel is more savage than he is barbarous; literacy would blur his outlines, you wouldn’t see which way he was going any more.’
The smells of hot wax and the vile brew he stewed on his stove combined to make Marianne dizzy, though Donally’s voice and intonation were so familiar there was almost some comfort to be derived from them, though everything he said seemed wilfully perverse. When he moved, a faint perfume of lemon verbena drifted from his shirt, a clean, refreshing smell which cleared her head.
‘Why have you only communicated with me so far by means of your nasty graffiti?’
‘So nobody could hear what I was saying,’ he replied. ‘Besides, there’s nothing much to do in the evenings except coin an aphorism or two.’
‘I should have thought you were a man of many interests.’
‘I run through the occasional fugue. And, then, I’ve my fits to practise, of course;
‘Also you cultivate your serpentarium,’ she said. ‘Jewel told me about your snake, unless I was imagining it.’
‘It seemed to me that the collapse of civilization in the form that intellectuals such as ourselves understood it might be as good a time as any for crafting a new religion,’ he said modestly. ‘If they won’t take to the snake for a symbol, we’ll think of something else suitable, in time. I still use most of the forms of the Church of England. I find they’re infinitely adaptable. Religion is a device for instituting the sense of a privileged group, you understand; many are called but few are chosen and, coaxed from incoherence, we shall leave the indecent condition of barbarism and aspire towards that of the honest savage, maintaining some kind of commonwealth. Let me give you a quotation.’
He riffled through a book sprouting with markers and found his place; he coughed and read aloud:
‘The passion to be reckoned upon is fear; whereof there be two very general objects: one, the power of spirits invisible, the other, the power of those men they shall therein offend.’
‘My father had that book,’ said Marianne. ‘Only he didn’t like it much.’
‘Doubtless he hoped for the best,’ said Donally. ‘He didn’t have to create a power structure and fortify it by any means at his disposal. He was sustained by ritual and tradition; both of which I must invent. I think the wedding ceremony will be more impressive if it takes place at night. I have a very frightening dress for you to wear, all ready prepared. You have no choice at all, you know. It’s marry or burn.’
He smiled at her again; then he took up his candle and walked briskly to the wall. Raising the candle, he illuminated a stone fissure so she could see within a grinning medieval skeleton who carried a stone banner engraved with the motto: AS I AM, SO YE SHALL BE. Marianne gave the Doctor a thin, pale smile and rushed headlong from the room, accompanied by the well-bred cadences of his laughter.
Outside in the brilliant sunshine, naked children played a game of tig along the terrace and through the rose garden. Marianne came out of the front door and a communal sigh went up. The children scattered at once but Mrs Green’s granddaughter went down the stairs so fast she tripped and rolled head over heels to the bottom, where she lay yowling in a clump of long grass. Marianne went down the staircase, set the child upright and dusted earth from the wrinkles in her bare stomach. Jen scowled.
‘I hope Jewel shows you what’s what,’ she said. ‘I hope he beats you with his fists, once he’s married to you.’
‘News certainly travels fast,’ said Marianne. ‘Who told you he was marrying me?’
‘I hope he keeps you in a cage, like that snake,’ said the child. ‘And I’ll come and poke a stick through the bars.’
She squinted at Marianne malevolently and all at once lost interest. She stuck her dirty thumb in her mouth and wandered off, through the rose trees where her friends were playing a new game. The overblown, dishevelled roses cast down petals on all sides; in this romantic setting, the children pelted the half-witted boy with stones. He crouched under a white rose tree which, shaken by the frequent impact of the stones, snowed him with petals. He was protecting his eyes with his hands.
‘I can see you!’ snarled Marianne with considerable ferocity, parting the spiky branches and glaring at the children. Once again, they scattered and the boy collapsed, weeping, on his face.
She walked towards the river, across the meadow where ponies and horses were grazing. They raised their heads and fluttered their velvet nostrils at her; the gentleness of their eyes comforted her but the unnatural beauty of the valley made her sad, for the banners of purple loosestrife streaming from the roof in the sunshine were like the triumphant flags of nature herself, staking her claim to the building. She walked a little way up the river, towards the point where it disappeared into the woods, and saw Precious there. He had ridden a horse into the river, to water it. He wore hardly more clothes than the children did.
He did not see Marianne. His black hair hung down over his cheek, hiding the marks of the tattooing needle, and he twisted his fingers in the black mane of a bay horse and sang a very simple tune to himself; he repeated the tritonic phrase over and over again almost as though he had forgotten he were singing. The bones had not yet formed an implacable casque beneath the soft flesh of his face and his thin, brown, adolescent legs dangled against the pony’s flank negligently. Precious had not finished growing. He waded downstream, the horse parted the reeds in the dark water and Marianne gasped, for the rider looked just as if he had come from the hands of original nature, an animal weaker than some and less agile than others, but, taking him all round, the most advantageously organized of any, pure essence of man in his most innocent state, more nearly related to the river than to herself. His eyes were closed, perhaps he was dreaming; but she could not conceive what dreams the Barbarians dreamed, unless she herself was playing a part in one of their dreams.
‘I thought things would be more simple, among the Barbarians,’ said Marianne to herself and all at once felt lonely.
‘Why did you stay? Tell me the real reason,’ she said to Mrs Green later, when they were in the kitchen by themselves and Mrs Green was heating water in a black iron pot, to wash Marianne with. Mrs Green tested the water with her elbow and smiled gently into its wrinkling surface where little bubbles were rising.
‘They left the prints of the heels of their boots on my heart,’ she said.
‘I saw them first when I was a little girl. I saw them riding into the village and everyone was so frightened and one of them killed my brother but I could tell, even then, that a horseman had very little chance against a disciplined soldier.’
‘Oh, they never win outright but, then, they don’t need to, do they? Just a bit of pillaging to bring back what we need. The flour and so on.’
‘Fear is their major weapon, so they need to get themselves up to look like nothing on earth, not men at all.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Green. ‘It’s a right old raree show. Colourful. You’d better wash down here and I’ll stay by the door so that nobody comes in. You wouldn’t want, say, Johnny to find you in your altogether.’
Marianne put the cauldron of water on the table and washed herself limb by limb. Mrs Green gave her a piece of soap she had secreted in the bottom of her trunk for years, in case of an occasion like this. The Barbarians made no soap themselves and rarely felt the need for it. As she washed her arms, the light in the kitchen darkened; looking up, she saw the half-witted boy, freed from his chain, sitting on the window ledge making signs and faces at her. She gave a little cry of surprise. Mrs Green was affronted and ran into the backyard to shoo him away. Marianne wrapped the skirt round herself and followed her; the boy was rolling on the ground and Mrs Green was trying to prise apart his fingers, which were tightly clasped around something he clearly did not wish to show her.
‘It’s for the Professor girl,’ he said. ‘It’s a wedding present.’
‘Here I am,’ said Marianne, kneeling beside him.
He grew quiet at once and sat up on his haunches. His chain and collar hung threateningly from the kennel but someone had rubbed fat on the sore place in his neck. The boy giggled and shuddered, hiding his face with his paw, and pressed the contents of the other fist into Marianne’s palm. The promised present comprised a few stalks of grass and some crumpled rose petals.
‘Thank you,’ said Marianne gravely, looking into his swimming eyes.
‘It was the best I could manage, in the circumstances,’ he said. His voice was as thin as his father’s and his articulation surprisingly precise.
‘Your father’ll beat the daylights out of you if he finds you roaming loose.’
‘He said I could go out, he was angry with Jewel for cutting the collar but he said I could go about loose because today was special and Jewel put grease on my sore because he said it was his wedding day.’
‘Well …’ said Mrs Green doubtfu
He crawled into the kennel and sat down with a sigh on a heap of filthy straw.
‘Can I have a bit of wedding cake, later?’
‘There isn’t any wedding cake, nowadays, there hasn’t been any wedding cake for years and years and years. How the hell did you get to hear about wedding cake?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the boy. ‘Somewhere.’
He sighed gustily again and began to masturbate. This shocked Mrs Green, who went: ‘Tsk, tsk,’ and hastily shepherded Marianne back into the kitchen, where she finished washing in the cooling water.
‘He’s no idiot,’ said Marianne. ‘Certainly no more of an idiot than anyone would be who had always been kept tied up on the end of a chain.’
‘He was ever so funny when he was a kid, drooling and that. And those fits, just like his dad, dreadful fits. Frothing at the mouth and gnashing his teeth. I hate to think what’ll happen to him in a year or two, with the girls and that. They go out and play with him and tease him now, as it is; it’s disgusting, and Donally beats him something dreadful, then, like it was his fault.’
She helped Marianne to dry herself and they went up to her room, where she lit the fire. A large metal box had been deposited on the floor in their absence.
‘Is that my wedding dress in there?’
‘I suppose so, dear.’
‘And when does the ceremony begin?’
‘About nightfall.’
Mrs Green produced her comb and began, unhappily, to comb Marianne’s hair, which surreptitiously she had kept cropped for fear of vermin by nibbling away at it with a little knife.
‘It’s all wrong for a girl to have hair as short as you,’ she said. ‘Why ever did they do it to you?’
‘I do it to myself.’
Mrs Green stared.
‘You’re an odd one, aren’t you. You can’t have fitted in.’