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

He didn’t remonstrate or comment. He paid their fare and they sat together, near the back. Now the hat, tilted for utterly hopeless concealment, did manage to conceal his face from her. She wanted quietly to push the hat up. They spoke desultorily now, the words awkward. People might hear.

She wondered where they were going.

They got out in a sun-drenched rope of street, and then there were houses, stacked together like cards, and a door was open on a space and a stair.

“I live here,” he said.

Anna was nonplussed, she couldn’t quite see why. They had gone so far and so fast, and all at this hesitant, leisurely, halting pace.

Of course, she had gone directly with men to their rooms and lain down on their floors and beds with them. But those encounters were not this one.

“I’d love a glass of wine,” Anna said, for there was a café she could see, with tables.

“I have some wine,” he said, “in my room.” He would not look at her, and now the left side of his face was stone white, like marble and the dead in books.

“Yes,” said Anna.

They went up the stairs, and she wondered what she would see, and thought she had been unwise again. But the sun smashed through the narrow windows on to the treads of the stairs, and a clean threadbare carpet, and she could smell geraniums and furniture oil, coffee, and her own powder roused by the heat.

His room was very bare, with a table and some chairs, a cupboard, one cabinet without doors, full of books, a bed behind a curtain – a white curtain, like the white curtains at the windows. There was a wash-stand, and in cool water, the bottle of yellow wine. And on the table, a bowl of dark pink fruit that she did not identify for a long while as peaches, they seemed so curious, and new.

“Do you always have wine? How civilised.”

“No. It was for you. I knew – I’d meet you.”

Her heart slowed until she thought it had stopped. But it had been gathering itself for a leap.

“Oh, how?”

“I don’t know.”

“I saw you yesterday,” she said, “in the café by the gardens.”

“Perhaps it’s that, then. I saw you too, and didn’t know.”

“You mean, you didn’t remember me.”

“No. I mean… It wasn’t you, yesterday.”

Anna laughed. She understood just what he meant, without understanding him at all.

They sat on the hard chairs at the table, and drank the wine. He had taken off his jacket, and the hat. She was fascinated by the pale shirt against his brown throat and hands. The fair hair whitening above the scarlet. Although, he kept his hand mostly over his right cheek.

She too took off her hat, her shoes.

They began to talk seriously, as if beginning on a very complicated meal, which it had taken them all their lives to prepare, and which must be approached with respect.

During this feast, of dialogue, she told of her childhood, her itinerant father hauling her from city to city. That she had never had the presence of a mother, but once, when she was twelve, was shown a most beautiful dead embalmed corpse, that she was informed had been her mother. And that she had not been able to make any connection between herself and it, though old women in black stood sobbing by her, urging her on to lament.

She mentioned borders crossed at night through woods and thorns. Olive groves, and a sea like turquoise. She explained her father had eventually disappeared. That she had made her way by herself.

(The peaches were from a hothouse, expensive. He cut them open, and they ate them, the syrup pouring back into the plates. And they licked the plates like cats, shamelessly.)

He told her, he had been intended to be a priest. “Because,” he said, “of my face.” When she seemed shocked, he laughed abruptly. Only God could put up with him, but then, God had done it to him in the first place. He passed from curtailed childhood to the loaf-thick walls, where he was beaten and starved, along with all the other boys. Here he grew up, seeing the village sometimes, on the side of the hill, where he had been born, far off as something viewed from the sky.

Then the priests had taken him aside. It seemed he wasn’t fit for God either. The other boys were superstitious of him. The laity would be distressed by his appearance, when they should be fixing their minds on the Infinite.

Cast off, he too had made his way. He was clever with figures, that is, most people were so bad with them, his slight aptitude seemed like a talent.

The day had passed over like the amber sail of a windmill, altering the shadows in the room.

Blue scents now came through the half-parted windows.

“It’s so late,” he said. “You must go, Anna.” And when she stared at him, stunned as if he had suddenly slapped her, he said, “It’s been a wonderful day you’ve given me. I don’t deserve it. I won’t forget. But it’s evening.”

She said, her voice very little in the dusk, “But we could go out for a meal. I have lots of money saved. Let me pay for it.”

“No, Anna. Thank you. You said…”

“But I have. Really. My last employer left me something, you see.”

“I’m glad. But I have enough. And anyway, I don’t like brightly lit places, unless I must.”

“Well, I can go to a shop and buy some food, some more wine…”

“Anna, Anna,” he said.

There was a long silence.

Uncannily she heard the clang of a tram, down in the street, which all afternoon she must have done, and had not.

He said, “We have nowhere to go, Anna.”

She knew his name, too, by this time. She used it. “Árpád,” she said, “I’m not – it isn’t – but I should like…”

Árpád rose. Against the window, his face was opalescently dark, like a jewel with one or two darker facets.

He went with