‘Didn’t you hear me?’ I shouted. ‘I said no.’
He held on to my wrist with both hands. Then, at last, he let it go. My arm returned to me, like a boat cast loose on dark water.
‘Three days ago,’ I said. ‘That was the last time.’
His face brightened suddenly. ‘You’re jealous.’
In one flowing, almost circular movement I picked up a fallen branch and swung it at his head. He caught the blow on his forearm. It still hurt, though.
‘You’re dead,’ I said.
‘What?’ Holding his forearm, he stared at me. ‘What did you say?’
‘You heard me.’
I threw the branch down in the grass and walked away from him. After a while I looked round. I was surprised how small he was. There was half a field between us and a wind getting up, clouds blowing southwards. If I spoke now, he would hear me.
‘It was your choice,’ I said.
One night I hacked the marriage bed to pieces with my father’s axe. I woke up and lay quite still — shocked, fearful, regretting what I’d done. I put a coat over my nightshirt and crept out to the barn. How was I going to explain it? My father would be furious. All that work.
But when I saw the bed standing on its four legs in the moonlight, not finished yet, but whole, somehow, and beautiful, I changed my mind. I wished I’d done it after all. I stood there, undecided. The axe I’d used in the dream was hanging on the wall; its newly polished steel seemed to beckon me. The axe began to speak. Edith. Take me down. Do it. I turned and ran out of the barn. Ran straight into my father who had heard a noise and come out with his gun.
‘What are you doing up?’
‘The bed — I wanted to make sure it was all right.’
He gave me a look of bewilderment as I moved past him, back into the house.
For most of that week I didn’t talk and no one talked to me. I was out in the vegetable garden every day, planting for the spring. Carrots, I put in. Potatoes, too, and radishes. The wind brought squalls with it. I laboured on as the rain came down, soaked to the skin and shivering. In the barn behind me, the bed took shape, its headboard carved with the names of the bride and groom, and round the names there was fruit — apples and wild figs and grapes — and over them, a canopy of leaves. Axel was hardly there, except to sleep. Either he was working with my father, repairing storm damage, or he was over at the Poppels’ place, a muddle of shacks on a side road, half an hour’s walk from where we lived. I still couldn’t understand it. The Poppel men were a bunch of good-for-nothings, drunks. They passed you in their cart sometimes, horse teeth in their heads and startled, bloodshot eyes, and nothing on the back except some bedsprings, maybe, and a punctured tyre. But that was where he went, to drink with them and play cards and lie down on something with that pale girl.
The wedding was still weeks away and suddenly I could stand it no longer. I asked Karl and Eva if I could move into the hotel. In return, I’d be a chambermaid, a gardener — anything. Karl listened to me as if I was talking to him from somewhere very far away and when I’d finished he just nodded. He didn’t query my decision or my motives. All he said was, ‘We could use another pair of hands round here.’
They gave me a small, north-facing room on the first floor. It had a single bed; the headboard was plain, varnished wood — no fruit on it, no names. I had a wash-basin, too, and a tall wardrobe that leaned forwards, away from the wall, like a waiter taking orders. Standing at the window I could see the pool below me. There were fir trees at one end, to shelter bathers from the wind. A flight of steps led down to the water. The steps had been cut out of the rock and then reinforced with cement. Beyond the pool was a wooden terrace; this was where the famous people must have strolled in the past, with their silk dressing-gowns and their cigars.
I had more contact with Eva than with Karl and, though she could be remote at times, she couldn’t match his almost total lack of interest. Five years older than I was, she would sit me down at the kitchen table and question me. For instance, she wanted to know whether I’d fallen out with my family. I said I hadn’t. I told her that my brother Axel and his wife would be living in our house and I thought that, as newly-weds, they ought to have some privacy.
‘Then what’s that on your arm?’ Eva was pointing at the dark-red, wedge-shaped scar that ran in a straight line from the edge of my right hand towards the inside of my elbow.
‘I did it on the stove,’ I said. ‘I tripped and fell against it.’
‘It must’ve hurt.’ Drawing greedily on a cigarette with her pale, plump lips, she seemed to want it to have hurt.
I nodded.
It had happened the day I told my father I was leaving. Breakfast was finished and I was clearing the plates away. Axel had already left the room.
‘You’re walking out on us?’ My father’s eyes were pewter-coloured in the gloom of the kitchen and his hands lay on the table, red and swollen at the knuckle.
‘I’m going to live at Karl’s. He needs help with the hotel.’
‘There’s plenty of work around here.’
I shrugged. ‘That Poppel girl can do it.’
‘You’re walking out,’ he said, ‘just like your mother.’
‘I thought she died.’
His head turned slightly to one side, as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard me right. He was looking at me all the time, though, his anger rising, slowly rising. It was like watching milk come to the boil.
But I couldn’t stop myself. ‘She wasn’t my mother, anyway,’ I said. ‘I never even knew the woman.’
Through the window I watched Axel cross the clearing, carrying a struggling guinea fowl by its feet.
I said it again. ‘She wasn’t my mother. Your wife, maybe. But not my —’
I didn’t see the hand coming. I thought for a moment that I must have rushed forwards suddenly and hit my face on something. The room spun round and I fell against the stove. My right arm touched it first. I felt the flesh melt. I couldn’t tell if I’d screamed or not. There was a kind of echo of a scream, in the walls of the kitchen, somehow, up near the rafters. And the sweet, rotten smell of my own skin burning. Axel came running in. My father was standing over me. I could see the air between his trouser pocket and his hand.
He pushed Axel across the room. ‘Get some butter.’
‘We haven’t got any.’
‘Fat then.’
Axel came towards me with a scoop of white lard in a spoon. He sat on his haunches in front of me and let a whistle through his lips. ‘Nasty wound.’
Which wound? I almost said. The one you did, or the one done by the stove? But I kept silent. I took the spoon from him and melted the fat on to the burn myself.
‘What happened to your mouth?’ he asked.
‘Must’ve hit it when I slipped.’
My father hadn’t spoken at all. From where I was sitting, on the floor, I saw his right boot shift sideways, scrape at a mark made by the lightning years before.
‘Leaving,’ he muttered. ‘Usually it hurts the ones that stay behind.’
If there was any feeling of triumph in moving out, I don’t remember it. My life at the inn — the Hotel Spa, as it was now called — was lonely. Karl was eight years older than I was. He worked all through the day; in the evening he sat in the parlour with a beer. He rarely spoke to me and when he did, his voice had a kind of distance in it, as if I wasn’t family, but a stranger he felt he had to be civil to. Nights were the hardest, thinking Axel’s hand might reach across, wanting it so much, on my shoulder, in my hair, anywhere — and then remembering. I was eighteen and no one touched me any more. I’d get up before dawn and stand by the window, facing north; I’d watch the steam lift from the pool. Most mornings I was sick in the basin. It occurred to me that I might also be carrying Axel’s child. Then he’d have to marry me as well. I imagined two brides walking up the aisle in the village church. Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband? I do. I do. I saw my smile in the wardrobe mirror, and it was not a pleasant one. But my blood came halfway through the month, as usual. And anyway, I was losing weight, not gaining it. It got to the point where it didn’t matter whether Karl spoke to me or not. But I only had to think of Axel’s face in the field that morning, his face just before I hit him with the branch, and the anger rose in me until my hands shook so hard that I couldn’t dress. My anger wasn’t unlike my father’s — slow-burning, rarely visible, but almost impossible to put out.