Killing Violets, Tanith Lee [the two towers ebook .TXT] 📗

“Oh, yes,” she said, not looking.

The chair scraped, and he was facing her, over the table.

“I wish to apologise to you,” said the young man. “You were very nice to me, and I was very rude.”

“Yes,” said Anna. She did not look.

“You see,” he said, “it’s hard for me. No one,” he said, “can look me in the face. But then you did. And I’d had a drink or two. What can I say?”

“It’s all right,” Anna said.

“Excuse me, then,” he said.

He was getting up again, and she raised her eyes. There he was, his hat inadequately tilted to conceal the silky-mulberry stain. His hair was very fair, almost white on that side. His face was narrow, fine as a poet’s. He had dark blue eyes, the right one, cradled in the mark, tinged faintly with rose, like an alabaster lamp.

“You see,” he said, halting midway, “you’re doing it now. You’re looking at me.”

“I’m sorry,” said Anna.

But he was sitting down again. He said tensely across the table, “What do you see?”

Anna reached out and put her finger lightly on his lips.

“You. What else?” Then his face sank, dropped. His eyes were old. She said quickly, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I must get up and go away,” he said.

Just then the girl arrived, and Anna said, “We’ll have two brandies, thank you.”

The girl went. A tear ran out of the alabaster eye. The young man caught it deftly on his hand. “Sometimes that happens. It’s a weakness. This – thing – on my cheek. It looks as if a woman had slapped me in the face.”

Anna laughed. She shook her head. “How vain you are.”

He stared at her. Then the brandies came, and they drank them. Ten minutes later they parted, but he stumbled near the doorway, and Anna had the urge to run and help him. However, she stayed where she was.

Chapter Three: Waiting and Its Consequences

Several days passed in the English House. They were the same in almost every respect, peaceful and boring and uncomfortable, fraught with something like a high-pitched singing note, scarcely to be heard, never quite dying away.

It was continually raining. If the rain stopped, that was only for an hour or so. Anna had heard, or read, of these pluvious English summers. It was as if it had to be since someone had decided. The law.

In the morning, about nine, the maids brought the breakfast tray. She had asked to be given only bread, and added she would prefer coffee. But the breakfast did not change very much. There was no more meat, but instead little boiled eggs under silver, bullet-like caps, or a coppery fish – was it a kipper? And there was never coffee, always tea. She became used to it.

She no longer dropped the food down the lavatory but left it untouched on the tray. Perhaps the servants ate these remains, relied on leftovers.

There were russet kitchens in her past, netted in their strings of onions, tomatoes, garlic, and the cook, the single maid, eating huge feasts at the scrubbed table, their shoes kicked off, belching and cackling.

Then Lilith Izzard-Lizard came and ran the bath, and threw in, unasked, handfuls of bath salts, so it smelled like the squashed rose garden after the downpours.

Impervious, Lilith helped Anna out of her robe, like an invalid. Nudity meant nothing apparently. Where had that myth come from, that the English were prudish? But then, the servants were only dogs, beetles, did not matter.

Lilith dressed Anna. She brushed Anna’s short pale electric hair. She would repeat this procedure at night, in reverse.

Lilith said nothing unless spoken to.

Anna saw her narrow fox face over her, Anna’s, left shoulder, the folded lids, and yellow eyes, the hint of the sandy hair sneaking in under the bonnet of the slave.

“Thank you so much. Thank you. Oh, how kind.”

Ghastly. Unbearable, really.

Not that the girl was unwholesome, unpleasant to come into physical contact with. Just this subservience, so sly and slippery. A slavishness relished?

It’s just me. I was never waited on. I can’t judge.

Lily brushed Anna’s suede gloves. Lily had put lavender sachets into the underclothes. Nothing could be kept from your maid. If ever one had to have a hidden thing, one would need a special hiding place. No wonder all the antique bureaux you read of had concealed drawers. No wonder there were secret passages.

One morning the housekeeper – Mrs Pin – entered and asked, directly over Lily’s bowed, blouse-sorting head, if Lily were Adequate.

“Perfectly,” said Anna.

“If there is anything you’re not happy with, Miss Moll.”

“She’s wonderful,” said Anna extravagantly. Wretched fulsomeness.

Actually Anna had begun to loathe Lilith Izzard. Doubtless it was mutual.

But: the servants seemed to have no resentments. They came and went like shadows, and if you passed one, it bobbed or nodded or bowed, depending on its lowly position. And if there were several of them, this action was like rabbits bouncing or corn turning before the wind, this idiotic gesture, of self-abasement.

Anna wanted to cry, “Stand up, for God’s sake!”

She could imagine their contemptuous surprise. Or would they even have been contemptuous, or surprised?

They waited on the drinks cabinets, the luncheon table, the dinner table. (Not tea, generally; then the Basultes saw to themselves.) The servants carried things about, circumspectly.

They were like automata, which ran all day, and almost all night too, for she had asked Raoul uneasily about their schedules, and learned of the seventeen or eighteen hour stints, beginning before the light and extending beyond the light. Generally unseen, this scurrying and scraping and pattering and creeping. Those tireless exhausted arms and knees, thrust against and into tubs of washing and potato peelings, bowed to rub the floors and bent to clean the grates. (She was only able to question Raoul now and then, following lunch. Despite the previous day, the men were not often present during tea.)

As Anna lay in bed, waking about one or two a.m., she imagined servants crawling through the arteries