The Book Collector Page 12

  ‘Hello.’

  She tentatively sat up in bed. Her head ached fiercely. What was she doing in hospital? She couldn’t remember coming here. There was also some indefinable difference about her. What was it? A lightness of heart, a feeling of peace. It felt blissful, as if a critical witch in her head had flown away up into the sky.

  ‘Where’s Felix?’

  ‘He’s at home. With Clara.’

  She felt surprised. She had never heard of Clara before but he said the name as if she should know who Clara was. He saw the puzzlement on her face.

  ‘Clara is someone I’ve brought in, to help you look after Felix.’

  ‘But I keep telling you, I can manage on my own. I like to manage on my own. Care for him myself.’

  ‘Clara is very well trained. She’s an experienced nanny. She came with excellent credentials.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘Oh, it was the Richmonds, I think. Or was it the Bennets? I can’t quite remember. But they were excellent.’

  She felt too relaxed to argue. In fact it would be nice to have someone to help her look after Felix. Clara could be a companion for her, too. Archie was away so much.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I must admit, it will be a help.’

  ‘Not at all. You and Clara will get on like a house on fire. Come on, let’s take you away from this place! I’ve brought you your clothes.’

  Archie left her alone in the room and a few minutes later she heard, through the door, Archie talking to the doctor. There were intense murmurings. She got out of bed and dressed. Archie and the doctor came back into the room. They both quickly smiled encouragingly at her. She was surprised to see that they seemed quite close friends. The doctor examined her head with his cold hands.

  ‘There are just a couple of burn marks here, on the frontal lobes. They will fade soon. I expect a full recovery in a few weeks. Until then, I advise bed rest at home.’ He addressed these comments to Archie, not to her.

  ‘Don’t worry, Doctor, I’ll take good care of her,’ Archie replied, shaking the doctor’s hand, as if they had just made a successful business deal.

  ‘Thank you so much, Doctor.’

  ‘Feeling better, eh, Lady Murray? You look so much happier.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ she said.

  ‘Is there any medication she needs to take with her?’ Archie asked.

  ‘Just the laudanum,’ he said. ‘And some ointment for the burns. And she will need help at home with the baby, I should imagine.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, I have already arranged that. A most suitable woman.’

  ‘Excellent.’ She could see the doctor thinking what a wonderful husband she had, how fortunate she was. Seeing him show his ostentatious love for her in front of the doctor, she thought, yes, indeed, how fortunate I am.

  At first it was strange to be back home. Everything now looked brighter, more colourful, as if the world, instead of her, had been electrified. A gap seemed to have opened up between her and her perceptions, as if her feelings had in some way been displaced. She felt in a protective cocoon that shielded her from the coarseness of reality. When she held Felix, she was surprised by how much older he had grown. She felt a warm affection towards him, but the anxiety intertwined with the love had disappeared. As if she had been given back herself and the inner turmoil had gone. She knew she used to be more intelligent than she was now but some of the most intelligent people she had known were also the most miserable.

  She applied her makeup carefully that evening, in the bedroom, before dining with Archie. Men had always found her attractive and they had never understood why. She didn’t really understand why. She was growing older, but she still had the shape of desire, just in a more shadowy and obscure form. She opened up her jewellery box to look for some earrings. She found a silver pendant that she didn’t recognise as hers. It was a B for Betsy, she remembered, and the image of a swan’s wing came into her head.

  She began to imagine what it would be like with Archie in bed that night, his body, his touch, what he would do to her, what she could do to him. How they could give each other pleasure. She loved to give and take pleasure. And she had not done that with Archie in so very long.

  Archie collected the book of fairy tales back from Lavinia for the fourth time.

  ‘It looks wonderful,’ he said.

  ‘I’m proud of it, too,’ Lavinia said. ‘I’ve spent care stretching and sewing. Look how smooth it is.’

  She drew a finger over the cover and caressed the insert of the almost-but-not-quite-full moon.

  ‘Fairy tales,’ she said. ‘Rose would have loved it. Rose loved fairy tales.’

  A week after coming back from the asylum, Violet was in the drawing room, embroidering. She turned round to see Archie in the doorway. Her heart leapt: he was the husband she loved, the man she had chosen to spend her life with.

  ‘I have a present for you,’ he said.

  He came over to her and gave her a book.

  ‘You need to be careful. You don’t want to be holding it like that. It’s only recently been bound. It’s a book of fairy tales.’

  He traced over the cover with his hand and then bent down and kissed it. How strange he was with these books. The cover was of green vellum. A circle had been cut out of the calfskin on the front cover, the hole partially filled in with crescent-shaped segments in different shades of white and off-white, inserted one after another like a waxing moon. One of these slivers bore the remnant of a snakeskin scar.

  ‘The moon isn’t quite full,’ she said.

  ‘It will be soon,’ he said and gave her a light smile.

  She opened the fairy tale book up at the flyleaf and read the dedication.

  ‘Who is Rose?’ she asked.

  ‘My first wife. She died in childbirth. She said she liked fairy tales because they reminded her of real life.’ He laughed. ‘So typical of Rose.’

  ‘But I, too, think they are life-like,’ Violet said. There is a psychic truth about them.’ A shadow crossed her light-filled mind, a sudden memory of how she had been, which dissipated as quickly as it had come.

  Archie laughed. ‘You mustn’t think like that. It doesn’t suit you.’

  She thought he might have liked her being similar to Rose, but clearly not. She looked into his dark blue eyes. He was everything to her. Her past, present and future. Why would she want anything but this fairy tale she was in? Rose had been unlucky, tragically unlucky. There was no reason why she, Violet, would be so. No reason why luck, this time, wouldn’t be on her side. She had never done anyone any harm, had never betrayed anyone. Did she not deserve happiness, a gift for being a good person? Perhaps in some way Rose had not been good, had received the fate she had deserved. Violet’s fate would be different.

  She put the book down. That night, Archie held her tightly in his arms and she could sense his animal smell and dived into it, like a fish leaping in a pond, flicking its tail and then sinking deep until all she saw was resolute and comforting blackness, lips pressed against lips and hands delving, his body sinuous and shining.

  Her son became like a shadow beneath the grandiose statue of their love and passion. She struggled to love and care for her son, to come out of the shadows of her marriage, but the love for her son couldn’t compete with the blinding light of the new intimacy she now shared with her husband.

  Chapter 35

  GOING TO BED that evening, she walked past one of the bathrooms. The door had been left ajar and Violet could see Clara’s reflection clearly in the bathroom mirror. Her blonde hair was tied up loosely in a bun to keep it out of the water. Tendrils hung down over her shoulders. In the mirror Violet could see how large her breasts were, naked and uncontained. Clara looked undone: voluptuous, overflowing with an abundance of flesh and sensuality, this plethora of sensuality.

  Violet turned away. She continued down the passageway to the marital bedroom. She quietly slipped into bed and lay there alone, between the dry cotton sheet
s, waiting for Archie to come up, but thinking of the density of Clara’s figure, its material presence, its physicality. She looked down between the sheets at her own thin, unforgiving, narrow form and wondered how she and Clara could be the same species. She caressed her hip bones, her elbows, her soft belly left rounded after Felix.

  She was now a woman of two halves, half woman, half mother. Two bodies from different times conjoined. But Clara was still whole, of a single time, her body still existing for a single purpose, to give and take pleasure. Her body had not been divided in half by motherhood. It was Clara who had singularity of purpose.

  She and Clara met in the hallway in the morning.

  ‘You look ill,’ Clara said suddenly.

  ‘No – I’m fine.’

  Why did Clara’s concern seem slightly over-bearing? Where was that shrill anarchic voice inside her head coming from, she wondered? And then a quick feeling of calm swept over her.

  ‘Do you want to take a rest?’

  ‘No, honestly, I’m fine.’ She was shouting now.

  Clara looked taken aback. She had to control herself. Her hands were sweating. She could feel the skin congealing in her clutched palms, as if it were melting. As if she were melting. She suddenly hated Clara. Her self-contained manner. She wanted to wipe that placid smirk from her face. Make her feel for one second how Violet felt all the time. She felt sick and suddenly the room tunnelled into blackness. The floor came up to meet her. Everything became black.

  ‘Are you all right?’ It was the soft voice of Clara.

  Violet came round, sitting in a chair, in the kitchen. Clara was bending over her. Clara’s pretty tendrils seemed intertwined with flowers, her young fresh face, seemingly unaffected by the heat, pale and luminous at the same time.

  Clara took a glass from the table and quickly washed it under the tap. It was only a glass, Violet thought. Why did she imagine it shattering in Clara’s small capable hands, and cutting her? The blood draining down, mingling into the water. Why was she associating English rose Clara with blood? Her thoughts weren’t making any sense.

  ‘Where is Felix?’ The words sounded so anxious, borderline hypnotised.

  ‘He’s with his little friend James, remember, in the village? He’s staying a few days there.’

  ‘Of course. I’d forgotten.’

  She still felt angry with Clara, at her unflappable pragmatism. It felt callous.

  Violet could see the young woman’s full breasts beneath her dress. She wondered what would happen if she deliberately undid the small pearly buttons down the front of Clara’s dress. Would she be able to see the shape of her pale nipples beneath? Would she be able to slip the breasts out, smooth and round?

  She caught Clara looking at her. She had an odd complicit smile on her face.

  Oh, my Lord, had she read her mind?

  She watched as Clara handed her a glass of water. Her head was beginning to throb.

  She wondered when reality would come and seize her or was it already doing so? Insidious whispering in her ear, shadowing her while all the time she was deliberately ignoring what reality was saying to her, having nothing to do with it. She, like Rose, wanted a fairy tale. The fairy tale that was her family, her love for her husband, his love for her and their beloved precious son that made their family whole. She had forgotten all about the hallucinations, the over-riding desire to harm her son, the flashes of light. Yes, she had forgotten all about it. It was Clara who was the wicked stepmother.

  Chapter 36

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Violet came into the kitchen and saw Clara, her back to her, standing at the pantry bringing out some milk. Archie was lounging on a kitchen chair, his legs wide apart, staring at the curve of Clara’s waist. It was as if a snake had wrapped itself around the man she had once known, or swallowed him whole so she could just see the outline now, clothed in snakeskin.

  Violet wondered about love, how people who weren’t loving were incapable of understanding the wonder of others. About selfishness that didn’t understand unselfishness, in fact despised it as weakness. And ‘the corrupt’. Did they despise innocence? Or long for it. Want to corrupt it. Make the blameless the same as they were. Did innocence disturb them, make them feel wrong, hold up a mirror to their own distorted faces? And how guiltless was she? How much of her innocence was a shield from her fear of the truth?

  Clara turned round to smile at Violet. She had taken Clara’s integrity for granted, had stared at her milkmaid face and assumed everything. She looked through the kitchen window at the estate. Assumption. She had assumed her whole life, the geography of the place, the permanence of her family. She had never envisaged a different future, rather presumed it, the presumption of innocence.

  Fairy tales, it was all to do with fairy tales. She went back to the fairy tale book he had given her and opened it and read. Her eyes alighted on the story called ‘The Constant Tin Soldier’. She thought of Archie and his mechanical, almost military ways. He was the soldier and Clara the ballerina doll. She started to read some of the other stories, ‘The Wild Swans’, ‘The Little Mermaid’ and ‘The Red Shoes’.

  Her heart pounding, she went into the drawing room where Archie was in his armchair, reading. She could now picture the chair having fallen over.

  ‘I’ve remembered everything.’

  He met her gaze. ‘We are a happy family now.’

  ‘It is all illusion. The house. The money. The security. It is based on quicksand. On your lies and smoke and mirrors. Thinking I was loved and protected. I am part of your illusion,’ she said, as if someone else, someone who was truly protecting her, was speaking through her lips.

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’ He gave her a clumsy smile and for a moment she believed him. How she wanted to believe him. She thought, yes, I am mad. How can this engaging man, such a loving father to Felix, be so monstrous? Archie, the father to her child. Where were these malicious thoughts coming from? How could she be so disloyal? He was her life, their lives interwoven like a pattern in a tapestry. If one thread were pulled out, their whole life would unravel. He was so precious to her. She could not imagine her life without him. This was what marriage meant, the indissolubility of their lives. She was lost without him and she had long thought that he would be nothing without her.

  It is not he who is mad. It is me. She felt faint with uncertainty. Archie was quick to notice her self-doubt.

  ‘Violet, you are tired. You’ve only just come back from your treatment in the asylum.’

  ‘Clearly it hasn’t worked,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Give me the book back,’ he said.

  She stood staring at him. ‘It is only a book of fairy tales. I’ll put it back in the library.’

  Why, she wondered, had he married her? Was it to do with giving him a son and heir? He would never get over the love he felt for his first wife. She would always be in Rose’s shadow.

  ‘Rose is like the Ice Queen. She has left a shard of ice in your heart. Clara is just your plaything and accomplice.’

  ‘I will never forget Rose lying there, our dead baby cradled in her arms. I knew soon they would both be buried deep under the earth, that I would never hold or caress her again. Her skin looked translucent, like marble. I bent down to feel it. It was as white as marble, too. I stroked it. I thought, I will never stroke this skin again. It looked so beautiful.

  ‘After a photograph was taken of them, I was left alone with them both to grieve. I pulled up her gown. I took the knife they had used to sever the dead baby’s umbilical cord and cut a piece of skin around her swollen uterus, and pulled it back. It came away easily. There was only a little blood. I knew then what I wanted to do. I wanted to create a token of my love for her.’

  ‘What about the other women? The women from the asylum?’

  ‘Don’t you see? She loved fairy tales so much. The moon was decoration. Besides, they were all mad, those women. They had nothing to live for. You will join them. To make the moon
full.’

  ‘And what fairy tale would I be in?’

  ‘Haven’t you realised? Isn’t it obvious?’ He traced her face with his finger. ‘Your face has such beautiful skin.’

  ‘I’m not the sick one,’ Violet said. ‘You should be the one in the asylum. I will not be put in a fairy tale.’

  ‘It is not up to you.’

  She thought quickly: she had no choice but to seem to acquiesce.

  ‘If I agree to this, will you and Clara look after Felix for me?’

  He smiled. ‘Of course. We should all have dinner together tonight,’ he continued. ‘You, me and Clara. To celebrate everything.’

  He came over and held her tight. ‘I knew in the end you would understand,’ he whispered, ‘how important this book is to me. How vital it is to complete its decoration.’

  Chapter 37

  A SENSE OF an ending came upon her. It had to be as well thought out as the moon on the cover of the fairy tale book. She felt impelled to bring the ending about. What had happened was unbearable, the realisation of her husband’s monstrosity, his and Clara’s illicit relationship.

  She still felt in a state of shock and the world seemed distant. Her feelings of jealousy for Clara had long ago receded. Clara hardly impinged on her and was not even worthy of her contempt. Clara had taken part in her husband’s evil deeds, slept with him and, with a clarity of cold insight, Violet realised that Clara and Archie deserved each other. Those who betray others, lie and deceive, deserve each other. Like an algebraic equation they are equal to each other and cancel each other out. It was only she and Felix who were left, who remained in the story.

  And this realisation made her ending clearer, what it was exactly she was compelled to do. So Archie wanted to put her in a fairy tale. Well, she would put him in one instead. She remembered the ending of ‘The Tin Constant Soldier’, the story where Archie and Clara belonged. But how to rewrite this fairy tale? Her husband’s and his lover’s physical strength were so much greater than her own. She needed a secret potion, a sleeping draught.