“Wake up, wake up,” she whispered, and still Thick snored and she could not hold the girl.
But Monica’s hands were clinging. She smelled the odors of soap and Paradise Shore and there was a hand upon her own shoulder making the flesh feel large, and the other small wedge-shaped hand was thrust between the mattress and her breast. Her lips were against the child’s eyes and she could taste them. Somewhere she was losing blood, but there was no longer any sobbing or screaming. Only the melting dream, the feel of a dangling hairpin and at the foot of the empty bed next her own the dark-blue shade of one of Monica’s sandals.
“Ducky,” whispering against the eyes, “feeling a little better? There’s a girl.”
In the silence, glancing away from the face, she felt the child’s fingers and touch of the cameo ring starting again at the round of her own shoulder; then traveling lightly away to the elbow and reaching the wrists, stopping. And followed by the other hand until both the child’s arms were outstretched and come to a point atop her own, so that despite the cold and numbness she felt the grip, while somewhere below her waist she seemed to be sinking, caving in wall by tissue wall.
“Poor Margaret,” said the little girl, “I could cry, I could. …”
“See can you do anything with the knots,” she whispered then.
Monica knelt on the ticking near Margaret’s head — a thin bent back, silver between the ribs, bowed as if for an old woman’s drunken hand — and tried to work the rope ends.
“I can’t,” leaving off, soothing her fingers against the coolness of the brass. “What are we going to do?”
“Perhaps you could put a coat round me,” she whispered at last. “If only Michael knew. …”
So the child fetched Little Dora’s coat and spread it over Margaret and brought a glass of water and Banks’ wife drank — some of it spilled and wet the mattress— and Monica dressed herself in the discarded green dress and sandals and socks. And on her own bare bed again: “Larry’ll make him turn you loose. I promise.”
“Yes. Go to sleep now, Monica.” She watched the child lying firmly in the moonlight, watched two small hands carry the cake up and into the shadow of the mouth, listened to the rigid and fragile sounds of chewing. Later she heard Monica brush away the crumbs, lie still again.
Outside on a branch above the garbage receptacle, an oven tit was stirring: not singing but moving testily amidst the disorder of leaf, straw sprig, remnant of gorse, fluttering now and then or scratching, making no attempt to disguise the mood, the pallidness, which later it would affect to conceal in liveliness and muted song. A warbler. But a sleepless bird and irritable. Through drowsiness and barge-heavy pain she noticed the sounds of it and did not smile; saw rather a panorama of chimneys, fine rain, officers of the law and low yards empty of children; farther off there was a heap of tile and a young woman in rubber shoes, an apron and wide white cap, and there were bloodstains on the ticking.
She heard the door, and when it closed again it shook the picture of the woman bending at the pond. He was swaying in the room and stately drunk. Without feigning sleep and in innocence Margaret watched him, wondering what had changed him now, and smelled the dark rum which had stained the teeth, the lips, the tongue. The light was more than a wash — it seemed to come off the wardrobe’s empty saucer, shine from the print of the pond, rise up from the worn flooring beneath his feet. Or the light was coming off the man himself.
Finally she understood this much: he was not fully dressed. The coat, the tie, the chemise-soft shirt, the undervest, were gone. And she was staring at naked arms, at white face and soot-black hair, at something silver that stretched and reflected the moon’s pale tone from below his bare neck to the belted line of his trousers. And she thought that softly, ever so softly, he was humming as he swayed there, some sort of regimental march perhaps.
He moved then. Bringing the light, the glow, still closer — without any motion — he started down between the two brass beds, stopped — breathing near her shoulder — and fumbled in his pocket until he found and opened a little penknife that was only a sparkle before the curved sheet of steel. Despite the cold light of his chest she knew beforehand that his fingers would be hot, and his fingers were hot when, back turned to Monica, he stooped and reached — her own eyes were to the side and up and she saw the shining links like fish scales, and pressed to them the triangular black shape of the pistol — and began to cut. Once she saw his face, and it was the angel’s whiteness except for a broken place at the comer of his mouth which set her trembling.
She waited and felt triumph while he cut. Then burning. For all his gestures were considerate, performed calmly and with care. There was sureness and the heated fingers. Yet there came his sound of breathing, and with exactitude he was yet slashing and the blade that went through Thick’s ropes went into her wrists, her own wrists as well. They too began to bleed.
Even now, after how many hours, being able to move her arms, drag them back to her sides then cross them upon her stomach, chafe them, touch the welted wrists, even now there was little pleasure in it, feeling the scratches, cuts, stinging of the blood. “You’ve wounded me,” she whispered, eyes to the ceiling and in darkness. “You cut me.”
He said only: “I meant to cut you, Miss. …”
So sometime after 4 A.M. she tried to use her numb and sleeping arms, twice struck out at him, then found her hands, the bleeding wrists, the elbows, and at last her cheek going down beneath and against the solid sheen of his bullet-proof vest. At that moment sunlight roused the day’s first warbling of the heavy oven tit, and Monica slipped away through the unguarded door.
Sparrow, having changed from wine to whisky and being drunk but not stately drunk, knelt in the middle of Larry’s room and, surrounded by weapons of countless shape and caliber — black and oily, loaded, strewn across the floor and piled on the bed and on the horsehair rocker and the footstool, a collection of Webleys, Bren guns, automatics and revolvers to make the Violet Lane men whistle — and fumbling with string and paper, beret pushed all the way back and cupping the bald spot that protruded from the rear of his skull, fumbling and paying no attention to the woman crouched in the comer and sneering, tried to wrap something into a passable packet and failed until he cried, “Come over here, Little Dora, and give us a hand with this present for my boy Arthur.”
7
SIDNEY SLYTER SAYS
Racing World Awaits Running of the Golden Bowl …
Classic Event Equivalent of Olympic Games …
Rock Castle’s Owner: Pawn of Brutal Gang?
Somebody — angel of Heaven or Hell, surely— knew it all before. Somebody, possessed of prescience and having time stuck safely like a revolver in his pocket, knew all this already and went about the business as sure of satisfaction as a fellow robbing graves in a plague. Knowing Rock Castle’s past, which was recorded; having only to know of that Danish blood which circulated beneath the skin, only to know that the fact of this Rock Castle — tom from his mare — predetermined the stallion’s cyclic emergence again and again, snorting, victorious, onto the salt-white racing course of the Aegean shore; needing only this intelligence, that the horse existed and that the horse would win. Then to make off with him, one night to take him from the purple fields of the woman and groom too old, too feeble, and too wise to care; then to choose and pose one ignorant and hungry man as owner and with threats and violence and the pleasures of life to hold him until the race was won. Simple. Easy. Like taking sweets. … It might have been Sidney Slyter, mightn’t it? Or Harry Bailey of East End? It might have been any one of us. … But it was Mr. Michael Banks. Because Mrs. Laval’s been holding out her hand and drawing near, enfolding him. Because she told me so and has warned me off again, warned me off. But what do women know of such mysteries? They know too bloody much, I’d say. And Mrs. Laval, like all the rest of them — the gang of them — Mrs. Laval knew it all already. Every bit of it planned and determined in advance — the kiss, the dance, the jealous deaths — all of them beforehand set in motion like figures walking in the folds of the dirty shroud. … What now of Sidney Slyter’s view of the world? What now of my prognostications? What of Marlowe’s Pippet? And the sport? But what power, force, justice, slender hand or sacrifice can stop Rock Castle, halt Rock Castle’s progress now? Sidney Slyter doesn’t know. … Nonetheless, Sidney Slyter will report the running of the Golden Bowl for you. …