The Black House

19

Caroline was crouched on the sofa, her knees tucked beneath her. She hugged a cushion to her stomach and said, “I like her. Perhaps that’s the reason I stayed.”

“Really,” said Munday, but he made it a murmur of disinterest and doubt.

“You know very little about your wife.”

“I know she’s lonely, and her heart bothers her. She’s had a bad time of it.” He lit the candles in the wall holders over the hearth. “We’re partly to blame.”

“Partly?” said Caroline. She smiled and flicked one of the tassles on the cushion with her fingers. “Are you going to leave her?” Munday thought a moment. He said, “Wouldn’t it be perfect if we could live like this, the three of us.”

“You don't mean that,” she said.

Then Emma walked in with the coffee. She served it and took a chair before the fire, between Caroline and Munday. “I’m not having any coffee,” she said. “It would only keep me awake. I’ve put a nightdress and clean towel on your bed. It’s the back bedroom. I hope you’ll be comfortable.”

“You’re very kind,” said Caroline.

There was complete peacefulness on Emma’s face. She said, “It would be lovely if every evening was like this. The candlelight, the fire, good company. I think I could actually bear it here.” She let her head fall back and she seemed to sleep, still smiling quietly. Her repose excited Munday; he felt a stirring of desire for her, thumbs and fingers within him warming his grave pulse to a weightless dance. The desire he felt for Emma became a yearning for Caroline—it was intense, bearing on one, then the other, a sexual blessing Emma inspired that he would bestow on Caroline. He savored the speed and impatience, the flutter in his blood.

He said, “Emma’s had a long day. Cooking’s quite an effort for her.”

“I’m awake,” said Emma. Her eyes were nearly shut. “Just.”

“I’d like to help with the washing-up,” said Caroline.

“It’s too dark for that—this blackout,” said Emma. “I’ve piled the dishes in the sink. Alfred and I can tackle them tomorrow.”

“It’s easier in the morning,” said Munday.

Emma rolled her head to one side and said to Caroline, “I feel as if you’ve rescued me.”

“It’s you who’s rescued me,” said Caroline.

“No,” said Emma. “I didn’t realize until tonight I could be happy here. It’s your doing.”

Munday said, “You look tired, Emma.”

“I am tired.” Her voice was thick with fatigue. ‘That fire always makes me so sleepy.” She sat up straight and said, “I’m nodding off. You must forgive me. I’m going to bed. Alfred, will you lock up and make sure Caroline has everything she needs?”

“Of course,” said Munday.

Emma got to her feet. She was somewhat unsteady. Caroline came over to her and said, “Sleep well,” and raised her hands. Emma reached and took them, and the women drew together, an action of unexpected grace, like that of two trained dancers beginning to music. They faced each other and touched cheeks, and then they kissed with great naturalness. It was a swift sisterly gesture, with a mute sigh in it, and their bodies met, their loose lips grazed. But Munday saw them hold it a fraction too long, and he was a gaping witnfess to a moment of intimacy. He sat back and squinted—he did not want to look away, though he felt he should, it was only proper.

And without saying more to him, Emma went out of the room. He heard her on the stairs, the light stamps rising up the other side of the wall. The sound faded and stopped. Then there was the wind in the chimney, the soft pop of the fire.

“Now,” said Munday, and he got up from his chair and made a move towards Caroline.

“Aren’t you afraid she’ll hear?” Caroline whispered. “She’ll be asleep soon,” said Munday. He went over to her and brushed her ear with his mouth, and kissing her he received a faint sweet fragrance of Emma’s cologne. He inhaled it and said, “I can taste her on you.”

“You’re so slow.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I could always taste her on you,” said Caroline. “She helped us. We need her. It would be awful, you know, just you and I—living here in this place, dishes in the sink.”

“It would be different somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere,” said Munday. “At your house.”

"This is my house!” she said. She saw his bewilderment and added, “You didn’t know that. I think she does, in her way. You know very little. You barely know me.”

“I know I love you,” he said. He took her by the waist and drew her towards him. She struggled, but remained in his loose grip.

“You invented me,” said Caroline.

There was a scrape on the ceiling, Emma’s footsteps. They both looked up. Munday listened for more, and Caroline said, “She did too.”

“No.”

“I needed it. I’m grateful to you for that,” said Caroline. “She’s beautiful.” Caroline faced him and said, “But you’re a desperate man.” He took one of her breasts and worked his thumb over the nipple. “What are you?”

“The same,” she said. “I’m like you. Why else would I be here?”

“So you see, we belong together, you and I.”

“And Emma,” she said.

There were sounds of bedsprings just above their heads, the low ceiling creaked. It was plaster, roughened in patches where the stain had made it peel, and it was slumping and cracked in enough places to give the impression that if it was jolted too hard it would divide at its severest crack and collapse and cover them. The thick beam which ran along the center would splinter as well and add weight to the chunks of stone, the shower of dust. The sight of the ceiling caving in was vivid to Munday because the strain of the creaking and the five-note song of the bedsprings continued like music from the finger-harp which set Africans in motion.

“She’s in bed,” said Munday.

“She can’t sleep.” Caroline reached up and ran her fingers dreamily along a crack. She said, “She’s right there.” As she was looking up Munday stood close to her and pressed his face into her neck. The bedsprings seemed to respond to the pressure of her fingers, touching and following the crack. She moved in Munday’s embrace, stroking the ceiling, until her back was turned to him and he was pressed against her shoulders. She took his hands and lifted them from her waist to her breasts and cupping the backs of his hands in her own she slid them over her breasts—she was languidly fondling her body using his hands. Then she planted her feet apart, opening her legs and lifting her buttocks against him, scalding his groin.

They stayed like this, pressed together, as if she was carrying him, like a swimmer rising with a victim on her back from a deep firelit pool. The room had darkened, the heat was hers, not that of the dying fire that ceased to blow with any force into the chimney. He remained on her back, holding to her breasts, and he was aroused, for although she was facing away, her hands kept his over her breasts and the gentle switching of her soft buttocks he found a wonderful caress. She pulled at the neck of her dress, and he heard the sigh at her teeth as her nipples rode through his fingers.

The bedsprings still sounded, but he didn’t hear them. He embraced a stifling heat and remembered Africa, a memory of bursting blossoms that surged in his body and reddened the backs of his eyes with fire. She was jungle, moving against him, trapping him in the rufous dark of her heat, weakening him but making his penis into a club. She took his right hand and moved it down her stomach, bumping his wrist on her hip, and pressed the pad of hair, gripping herself with his tickling hand and rolling the other over her breast. She pitched and came alive, plant flashing into animal, feathery and damp, but with muscles working under all that warmth.

She was a creature from an amorous bestiary, as if she had clawed her way out of a voluptuous myth, a long-legged heron or swan, with horny yellow feet, a woman’s head and hunger and eager winged hands, and the cries of a child in her throat. Briefly, Munday imagined he was subduing her; but that was illusion— he was no hunter, the subduing was hers, she gripped him and bore him as if driven by the scratching on the ceiling, the sound of the bed. With her stroking buttocks she brought him almost to the point of orgasm. He flew, clinging to her back, seeming to rise on the quivering light and shadow of the room that was like a passage through a forest of dense trees. And her shrugging insistent speed was like a reminder that he must obey her and follow her to the end. She dropped to her knees, and Munday went down, pulling cushions from the chairs, kicking his shoes off.

“Let me do it,” she said. She helped him off with his clothes, but slowly, undoing each button. He reached for her dress, but she was quicker: she squirmed and stepped out of it and then knelt over him in a pair of tight lacy pants.

“Listen,” she said.

The bed spoke through the ceiling, and the ceiling itself seemed to tremble with the sound.

“She can hear us,” he said.

“No,” she said, and worked her pants down with her thumbs. In the whiteness of her body he saw a peculiar savagery: she was a huntress clasping a ferret between her legs. She got on all fours and then face down on the floor, on her knees and lifted her yellow buttocks at him. He hugged her from behind and entered her, but she complained and took his erect penis and fixed it at the tightness of her arse. He prodded it into her feeling her roughness squeeze him, and he opened her until he could lie across her back. He sodomized her in pumping strokes while he ran his fingers over her cunt, and it seemed to him as if, straddling her in this way, his mouth at the back of her ear, he was crawling over a dank forest floor.

“I love you,” he said. “Please, God—”

“Don’t stop,” she said, much calmer than he.

He felt an orgasm approach, pinching his ankles and calves, climbing to his thighs and concentrating on that sawing prod that was pushed so deep into her it felt as if it was wearing away.

She acted quickly. She moved from under him and pushed him over, and holding his penis like a truncheon she licked at his inner thigh, rolling her head between his legs and lapping at him. She jerked on him, blinding him with pleasure, and her mouth slipping over him and her tight grip made him feel he was being carried upside-down. She had captured him and carried him into this heat and now his arms lay on the floor and she, the marauder, was dragging him to a destination not far off. He put his hands over his face and groaned, and he felt her draw him to her to feed on. There was no sound from him; he shivered, his shoulders going cold, and now a chill, like a wind starting in the still ‘room breathed fraility on him. Caroline swallowed and ran her arm across her mouth. Munday was going to speak, but he hesitated, and he realized he was listening for the ceiling and the bedsprings. There was nothing, except that so quiet the ceiling was emptied of cracks and even the beam looked powerful.

“I love you,” he said at last.

Caroline went over to the fire and threw some split pieces of wood on the fire. She hit them with the poker and drew light from beneath them. Flames jumped at splinters. But Munday was cold; he put his shirt on as, naked, Caroline built up the fire.

“That first time,” she said, “here, in front of the fire, after we’d finished I sat beside you. You were sleeping. And I was thinking—” She broke off and smiled and shook her head.

“That you loved me,” he said.

“No/’ she said.

“What, then?”

“That I loved myself,” she said. “It was—I can’t describe it—euphoria—the way I feel now. It’s so marvelous. I wonder if other people feel that way, that overwhelming affection for their body after sex. I was so happy I wanted to cry and touch myself. It was real love.” He said, “Narcissism.”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “But not the ugly kind, posturing, preening yourself before other people, making them acknowledge you.”

“Nothing to do with sex, then,” he said.

“Everything,” she said.

“What a selfish vfew of sex.”

“I admit it,” she said. But I can’t help it. Sex can

make you feel so strong you don’t need anyone. After I make love, I think I could go to a desert island or a forest and live for the rest of my life. And this feeling lasts for ages.”

“Then why don’t you go to your forest?”

“God, to be away from here!” she said. She looked at Munday and said, “As soon as I start to go, I want to make love again. Then I look for you.”

“You don’t have to look far.”

“It’s not that easy,” she said.

“We could make it easy,” he said. He reached for her hand. “I want to live with you.”

“You’d hate me,” she said, pulling her hand away. “Never,” he said, and clutched her. She allowed it, but she was staring at the ceiling. He said, “I know what you’re thinking. I could live without her.”

“But we couldn’t,” she said.

He touched at her face, like a blind man reading braille for an answer. Sex had emptied him and made him speedily innocent; there was nothing of desire in his touching—it was curiosity.

She said, “Don’t give her up. I couldn’t love you that way. And you’d despise me.”

“You’re making it impossible,” he said.

“It’s been possible up to now,” she said. “We can go on like this. She matters more than you know.”

“Poor Emma,” he said.

“Don’t pity her.”

“What is it you want me to do?”

“Keep her,” she said. “If you want me, keep her in this house—stay with her, please.”

Munday said, “That’s crueler than leaving her.”

“It is the only way.”

“Is it the village?” he asked. “Are you afraid of them thinking you drove her away?”

Caroline said, “You don’t understand.”

“But I do ” said Munday. “Africa prepared me for this.” '

“This isn’t Africa.”

“Villages are my subject,” he said. “I know how they operate. You don’t know and so you’re afraid.” She took her dress from the floor and made a shawl of it for her shoulders, and then she stared at the fire and said, “You know nothing.” The accusation maddened him. He said, “You want to make a fool of her so that you’ll seem innocent.”

“No,” she said.

“That’s why you met me secretly—to hide me, from them!" But he didn’t press the point; he remembered, as he said it, how he had hidden Silvano. “You’ll keep on using her, inhabiting her mind.”

“I care for her,” she said. “Nothing must happen to Emma. You don’t know what they’d do if it got around that Emma left. They’ve already stolen my dogs.”

“But that happened before you knew me.”

“Yes, how did you know? It doesn’t matter—don’t tell me. They’ve hated me for a long time. They drove me out of this house. They have no mercy.”

“I can handle them.”

“They wouldn’t leave you alone,” she said. “Look what they did with your dagger. That was deliberate. There’d be more of that.”

“I’m willing to risk it,” he said.

"I'm not,” she said. “But that’s only part of it. If you want me you must keep her.”

“I won’t do that for them—or you,” he said. “Emma is mine. She loves me. And isn’t it strange? It’s because of her love that I could live without her.”

“But don’t you see / couldn’t!” she cried.

He was silent. He closed his eyes.

“And you couldn’t,” she said. “They wouldn’t let you.”

“Where does it end?”

He fell asleep after that, then opened his eyes on a smaller fire and dead candles, and the new order of the room and Caroline’s absence suggested that time had passed. He picked up his clothes and went upstairs in the dark, feeling his way along the hall and listening to the boards creak under his feet as he entered the bedroom. He looked around the room and remembered Caroline’s last muffled reply, “That’s up to Emma.” The curtains were drawn; what he could make out were the shadowy tops of the bed, the wardrobe, the dresser—and the darkness gave them a heavy solidity, as if they were rooted there and yet halfmissing, like tree stumps. From the dresser mirror came a glimmer of silver light, and all around him in the room hung webs and veils of black. He tugged his pajamas from under the pillow and silently put them on, careful not to disturb Emma. But when he slipped into bed he wanted her to wake up and ask him where he had been, what doing—no, he wouldn’t tell; but if she asked a question he had been unable to frame, an answer might occur to him.

On other occasions, that first night he had made love to Caroline, or when he had met her furtively in the barn or in the church, he had come back to Emma and felt a kind of revulsion. Touched by lust, he could not bear to be near her. But tonight he wanted to hold her; he was wide awake and he wanted her to hear him and throw her arms about him and pull him to her. It had happened—on nights when she had, half-awake, seen his sleeplessness and believed he was troubled; in Africa, where the moon was so large and clear it lighted the curtains, and the air in the room was heated like accusation, preventing sleep: she had comforted him then.

Now, he nearly shook her. But he would be gentle. Resting would calm him. Sex had starved him of sleep, and he envisioned a life without sleep, being awake to each moment, snared in nerves—that horror of having to endure without rest what one rested to forget. He lay on his back, next to Emma for comfort, feeling the heat of his bruises, the teethmarks like stitches Caroline had left on his flesh. He tried to Seize sleep with his eyes and draw it into his head.

He craved a simpler world, one he had a hand in inventing and could inhabit easily. For an hour or more in his wakefulness he imagined such a world, of order and sunlight, where neat huts were ringed by fences of flowers and people hoed in hillside terraces of vegetables; where the pattern of life, approved by the anthropologist, was unalterable, and all around were mountains, white cliff-faces, and forest, and secured by jungle too dense to admit any adventurer. But he saw that it was not of his imagination; it was an actual place he had cast himself away froih, and it was not so peaceful: some nights, sleeping in their rickety huts, children had their faces chewed by hyenas, and he had been unhappy at times—but never afraid or desperate. He had traded it for the shadowy menace of the Black House, but in this mockery of home there was no danger except fear: the menace was the shadow, and one was made free by risking fear, choosing a way through it.

He got up on one elbow and shook Emma lightly. She was turned away. He put his face close to her ear. He had lain there so long and wide awake that his voice had an unfamiliar clarity. “You were right,” he said. “We can still go.” His words didn’t wake her. He said, “I want you to forgive me, please. It was her doing. You don’t have to say anything now—just trust me. I love you, Emma, I always have. I want to stay with you.” He leaned over and took her shoulder in his hand and pulled her towards him. She seemed to object; the stiffness in her he took to be deep sleep was like resistance, her flesh had the feel of clay, and she was heavy. When he let her go she rolled back to her original slumbering position. He kissed her hair and said, "Emma—” Her arm was tightly crooked against her stomach. He wanted her to wake so that he could tell her they were saved. But her sleep was perfect; he could not rouse her gently; he would not rouse her at all.

There was the other to tell. He could face her now with his refusal. He got out of bed and went down the hall to the last bedroom.

“Caroline?”

He kicked the door open and saw the empty bed, and at the window the first of dawn, a frosty yellow-blue light on the glass. He sprang to the closet and opened it. An old black coat turned on a hanger and under it were dusty misshapen shoes.

Methodically, in the feeble light, he searched for her, knowing that ,as he did so he was ridding himself of the Black House, room by room. He looked again down the hallway with its long carpet and he saw enormous footprints, a giantress’s tread, where it was worn. He listened to the silence until his ears roared. He opened the door to the box room (a trunk, cartons, a crippled chair) and a tide of cold air paused on his skin and shrank it. He went into the two other bedrooms, the one with the child’s religious picture in a frame on the wall, the larger one, where Silvano had slept—an aroma of the African's perfumed soap still floated in a narrow layer. Each room Munday noticed had its own distinct hum, and the whole house murmured. He crept in his bare feet down the stairs to the kitchen. A light that had come on when the power was restored burned uselessly over the sink of dirty dishes. He looked in the back hall among the rubber boots and walking sticks, and in the bathroom with its wet streaming windows. He was anxious to find her, to put her to flight, but a foretaste of disgust kept him from taking any pleasure in it.

He threw open the door to the living room, but saw only the empty chairs, the vicious cushions, the shelves of decaying books. The fire was out, ashes were heaped on the irons and spilled from these mounds into ths fire screen. The wrinkled plaster, the stained walls and split beam and the stale odors of wax and wood-smoke, gave the room a feel of senility; it was something he had never seen in the house before— fragile and harmless, propped there over his head, the house was revealed in the morning light with all its cracks apparent. He could pull it to pieces.

Someone was watching him. He glimpsed a movement and turned to face a pale intruder with wild hair entering from a side room, startled in the posture of being caught, with terrified eyes and lined cheeks. It was a trespasser, an awful portrait of one; then as he went closer, he saw the flaw in the mirror, the ripple of his pajamas, the flaw scarring his face, the chimney behind his head.

He made his way to the study. But he stopped; she would not be there, and he did not want to see his weapons, his notebook, his unfinished work. She was gone, there was no doubt of that. The Black House was empty, and for seconds he imagined that not even he was there—that it remained for him to admit it with some final act. It was a despair he had heard of in Africa, where a man might rise one morning, send his touseboy to market with a long detailed shopping list, lock the door and shoot himself. But he had never felt that despair, he had never feared any village, and now he knew that no matter how remote he was he would survive, for here in a village where there was no sheltering fabric of jungle, where birdsong took the place of locusts’ whines, and church bells drums, which had at times appeared to him stranger than any African outpost, he had mastered solitude.

He had been haunted, and though Emma had slept through it all, put to sleep by her injured heart— a heart she had once given him to fail and bum at his own lungs—she had always been with him. He had never been alone. He said her name softly, then louder, then broke off and left himself with the echo.

The room grew dark, and he felt a chill, his feet prickled with cold, as the sunrise was eclipsed by cloud. Sleeping in bed, he might have missed those early minutes of sun that had helped him search the house, the warmth of the early-morning dazzle that had appeared only to recede under the eaves of sky. He sat down and warmed his hands under his thighs and saw Africa, green and burning, people scattering as if stampeded by the sun. Then the dark fire spread, the Black House matched Africa, and it was alight, cracking with heat and fire and falling in upon itself, crushed by its own weight and size.

But that was another anxious dream. The Black House was indestructible; only its tenants could be destroyed—if they didn’t know their time was up and stayed too long. Caroline had taught him that, but he would leave with Emma. It puzzled him that she was still in bed. An early riser, she had always been up before him; but it was some satisfaction that on this morning he was first. He sat in the empty room, studying the dead fire, and waited for Emma to wake.