Suddenly I recall the so, so many times our love - deemed wrong, congenitally, and further enhanced by every irregularity we could devise - was made manifest within this high, wide canopied bed, this stage for our copious acts, this platform for so many provocative views: once with perfumed oils that took an age their sweet odours to remove; once with a nightdress pulled up to your neck, stretched tightly over your face, removing you in that blankness, picking out each feature of your face as you bucked and writhed (which taught me that sometimes it is the smallest twist, the tiniest, most contingent variation that can provide the greatest pleasure); indeed how many times in some way masked while at the same time naked, or with the body as disguised, by the language of dress lying about its sex; or confined, tied, with soft scarves or leather thongs, one of us made an X of between the burly posts of this great bed; or in some incontinent abasement engaged, bestial and cruel; or you, or I, leashed, our very quickness held in the power of the other - noosed, hide-strapped or with your hair when it was long, my favourite - gasping to an air-starved climax our poor looters were denied; or with others, in a tangle of candlelit and lambent bodies, smothered and abandoned within a shared blizzard of caresses, sweet and tart and gentle and fierce and lenient and strict and lubricious and raw, all slipping, struggling, pushing and forcing our way to a staggered multiplicity of release.
And, especially, that first time I shared you, towards the dawning end of a party many years ago now, before our get-togethers became quite as notorious as they later did, when, having so encouraged you, by hints, cajolings and implied example, I was allowed to find you here, unbridled upon this bed in a full plumped landscape of pure white, pinned and pinning and on a spur of pleasure jouncing, rising and falling like some abandoned vessel on a rolling, stormy swell of sea.
He was a cousin, one of my better friends and one with whom I’d rode, shot and fenced and spent many another drugged and drunken night. Now I discovered him below, harnessed and secured by tasselled satin ropes, enjoying you as you rode him, erect and arched, hands round his ankles clenched, then - once the lad had recovered from his initial surprise at my appearance and come round to the idea, and indeed, patently been further energised by the notion - for me you bowed forward, leaning to him and kissing while I joined you too, ascending and mounting close by him, parallel with his generous strokes but - tenderly, patiently, taking pains not to cause such - applying myself to a more fundamental approach. With you by a word of mine stilled, like any obedient mare, and feeling, I believe, him move beneath and within, by his efforts he realised and released in me what he sought inside both you and himself.
It was, perhaps, my finest moment. Judged by the crude technicalism and regrettably naked score-keeping that can attend such matters, we duly outdid ourselves on many a subsequent occasion, but there was a freshness, an irreplaceable, unrepeatable novelty about that first time which made it as precious - no, more precious - than the loss of virginity itself. That first act for any one of us is commonly a cause for nervousness, fumbling clumsiness and those exquisite zeniths of embarrassment only youth in full provides; it can never be attended by the physical accomplishment and the intellectual refinement of taste - the ability fully to appreciate the act that one is engaged upon - which experience only brings and which, over time, one is able to apply in subsequent variations of the deed, no matter in what specifics it may be unprecedented.
I appear to have persuaded myself. All is silent for a moment. I reach for your ankle, grabbing it beneath the covers while you look up, startled, and a door is brusquely knocked. The sound comes from my own room. We both look.
‘Yes?’ I say, loud enough.
‘We’re going now,’ shouts a soldierly voice. ‘The lieutenant says you’ve to come.’
‘One minute!’ I yell. I whip the bedsheets from you.
You look sullen, raising your hips to tug your nightdress up. ‘Are we attempting a record?’
‘Some things will not wait,’ I say, minimally unbuttoning as I hoist myself towards you.
‘Well, don’t hurt . . .’ you say petulantly.
More than pain, such unexpected forcing still takes time, however determinedly done. I bury my face between your legs, submerging in your scent, at once earthy and sea-salt tanged. I loose a lubricating mouthful of spit, then rear and take my plunge.
Another shout.
CHAPTER TEN
A lower vestibule; in the castle’s front hall, the lieutenant’s opera cloak lies discarded like a velvet skin, thrown over the shoulders of a hollow armour suit standing beneath a rosette of swords upon the wall. The jeeps’ engines sound cold and clattering in the courtyard. The lieutenant is talking to the soldier with the grey hair and scarred face, the one with wounds to the legs; he leans upon his makeshift crutch, dutifully taking orders. A couple of our servants stand near, watching the lieutenant, then turning their attention to me.
The lieutenant looks me down and up. ‘Changed again, Abel?’
‘For the better, I trust,’ I say, touching my fly to ensure that all is secure again. I do not think the lieutenant registers the gesture.
The lieutenant too is dressed differently, still sporting her long boots but now, above them, tweed trousers and a waistcoat over her thick green shirt. Her camouflaged jacket and a steel helmet have to fight to re-establish the martial effect over that of the country set. The lieutenant’s helmet has a green cloth cover stretched over it, and on top of that there is dark webbing, a black net stretched taut and tense and at this moment - detumescing, heart thumping - evocative.
The soldier with the scarred face mutters something to the lieutenant. She frowns, glances at the servants and bends to me, putting a hand to my arm and quietly saying, ‘They’ll bury old Arthur in the woods at the back; the best place might be in a shell crater - it would be deep, at least.’
I nod, surprised. ‘And appropriate,’ I agree. So Arthur will join Father. His ashes were scattered there by Mother, thrown to the soil of our home after he eventually returned to us, in a box, following his assassination in a foreign city.
‘They’ll probably cut something on a piece of wood,’ she says. ‘What was his last name?’
I look at her, nonplussed. ‘His last name?’ I say, procrastinating.
She looks at me with narrowed eyes, and I fully expect that she anticipates my ignorance. She is quite right, of course, but this is one advantage over her I cannot pass up.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Arthur’s last name; what was it?’
‘Ignatius,’ I tell her, taking the first name that comes to mind (and now I think of it, that was the name of the cousin I found you with on that night of shared occupation).
The lieutenant frowns, but then quietly transmits this false information to the scar-faced soldier, who nods and hobbles off. She smiles thinly at me and lifts her gun from its place by the wall. I had not noticed. The receptacle in which the lieutenant had placed her long gun is an old artillery shellcase our family has long used to store umbrellas, shooting sticks, canes and the like. She catches my glance as she checks her gun and shoulders it. She taps the brass cylinder with one boot. ‘Smaller calibre,’ she tells me, then gestures towards the door and the courtyard beyond.
‘No no; after you,’ I say, clicking my heels together.
Her mouth makes that little twist again, and with a nod to the two wounded soldiers in the hall, she steps outside into the light, clapping her hands, herding her charges and with a sudden urgency shouting, ‘Okay! Come on! Let’s go!’
I take my place in the second jeep, with her. She sits behind the driver, I in the other rear seat, with the metal machine-gun post in between us, manned by the red-haired soldier she called Karma, who for the moment is sitting down, one buttock cornered on the back of each rear seat, his feet squeezed in between our thighs.
The first jeep barks and jerks away, narrowly avoiding the stonework of the well and swinging down and out through the inner gate and across the bridge outsi
de, over the moat. We follow it, past the well, across the damp cobbles, skidding fractionally and then dipping steeply down to the narrow gate. The engine sounds loud as we pass through the short tunnel beneath the old guardroom and between the towers. The day beyond blinds, flooding my eyes with a rich golden light. Above, the sky is cobalt.
Our lieutenant reaches into one pocket and smoothly puts on sunglasses. The driver is similarly equipped. He is helmetless but with an olive bandana tied round his blond locks; despite the temperature and the skimpy protection from the elements provided by the open vehicle’s windscreen, he is bare-armed, wearing a ragged T-shirt, a body warmer, what looks like some form of bullet-proof vest and, over all, a gilet, pockets heavily bulging and lapels crisscrossed with linked machine-gun rounds.
The jeep tips us back again as the arched stone bridge takes us over the moat, while the first jeep accelerates down the drive. We pass the trucks, waiting on the gravel round. Each coughs and guns its engine and comes rumbling obediently after us, exhausts clouding the sky with dark gouts of smoke. I wonder if they have already filled the vehicles’ tanks with the fuel I told them of.
The lieutenant stuffs a plastic-sheeted wad of papers into my hands. Within the transparent cover I can see part of the map we looked at earlier, in the library. The lieutenant takes out a cigarette and lights it, staring ahead. The gravel of the drive sounds loud beneath our wheels. I look round as we pass by the encampment of the displaced, watched, dark-eyed, by a few drawn and anxious faces.
Behind us the two trucks trundle delicately between the close-crowded guy-ropes of the camp, their camouflage-mottled canvas-covers like a pair of swaying tents somehow made mobile amongst the rest. Beyond; the castle. Its stone blocks stand, its windows glint, the towers and battlements the clear blue sky divide, and brassy, gold, the colour of lions against the backdrop woods and sapphire sky, it endures, proud and still prevailing, despite all.
I’m leaving only to return, I tell myself. I abandon only to secure. Castles need their share of luck as well as good design; we had our allowance and more of welcome fortune this morning, when our windfall shell failed to germinate and blossom its explosive result, and I hope my stratagems - absorbing, co-operating, watching and biding - may provide a better-thought protection than a grimly prophylactic defiance that invites only rape and rasure.
Absorb like the land, co-operate like the farmer, watch and wait like the hunter. My strategies must remain hidden beneath the appearance of things, like the geology that’s only hinted at by the surface of the world. There, in the hard palatal shift of underlying stone, the real course of histories and continents is decided. Buried within the indefinite edge stressed in continual shock below and obeying their own trajectories and rules, the pent powers that shape the future world lie; an ever-blind rough gripping of darkly fluid heat and pressure, holding and withholding its own stone store of force.
And the castle, dredged from rock, fashioned from that hardness by flesh and brain and bone and by the tides of all competing interests of men, is a poem carved from that strength; a brave and comely song of stone.
I think I see you, my dear, at a high window, robed from my sight, and waving. I wonder whether to return the salute, then become aware of the lieutenant at my side, also turned round, looking back to you. She adjusts the webbing on her helmet, blows out a cloud of smoke that’s whipped away on the slipstream of our progress and turns round again.
When I look back, you are gone, replaced by a glittering reflection of fiery light, set amongst those bright, honey-coloured stones like a shimmering liquid jewel. Above, the three suspended looters sway in the breeze, forsaken; and over all, with a heavy, artless grace and with no choice but to be driven by the firm, coercing wind, our old memento, our new-found emblem, the flag, waves all of us goodbye.
A moment later we round a bend within the trees, and the castle by its own grounds is denied.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The land is warm beneath the sun’s high hand, the light falls prone and further shades the seasons’ pastel scatter; this road, here made golden by a recent shower, steams like a burnished causeway to the sky. We move quickly and alone, coursing through the surfaced, climbing writhes of stagy, sun-struck mist, trailing our exhausts like broken puppet strings amongst the avenues of trees. The softly steaming roads are quiet and still, if not empty; we pass ditched carts and trailers, trucks fallen on their sides or angled into culverts, wheels cocked to the air, noses stuck down into the watery troughs. More trucks, buses, vans, pick-ups and cars make chicanes of the road’s long straights, their bodies burned out, or overturned or simply left. All speak of the crowds who’ve passed this way, discarding these metal carapaces like tender-bodied crabs on the floors of seas, moulting off their past anatomies. We weave through their lifeless desolation like a needle through a frayed tapestry of ruin.
Piles and trails of abandoned possessions further block the road, and here you see the wretchedness of the refugees’ imagination, if not their lives themselves, by what they thought at first to bring, and then discard; electrical goods, cheap ornaments, potted plants, whole libraries of records, gaudy piles of magazines made sodden by the rain . . . as though in their sudden panic they seized upon what was nearest them at the time when the realisation dawned that staying put was no longer such a good idea.
There are no dead bodies I can see, but here and there are piles and trails of clothes, strewn by wind or animal across the fields and the surface of the road, sometimes by chance arranged in a rough semblance of a human shape and so attracting the startled eye. We drive straight over much of the wreckage, scattering pots and pans, lampshades, boxes and plastics casings. We bounce over the heaped, bedraggled clothes, scattering them behind.
Our driver sweeps and swerves, seemingly aiming for certain items of wreckage missed or left in the wake of the jeep in front; he whoops and laughs as he disposes of another derelict household effect or catches a pan left spinning in the front jeep’s wake. His naked flesh has stippled with cold, but he does not seem to notice. His olive bandana ripples in the wind, his sunglasses glint. The lieutenant sits with one leg drawn up on the sill of the door, her long gun’s stock resting on her lap beside her radio, barrel raised to the wind like a whip. The soldier in front of me sits similarly, and checks and re-checks his gun, snapping magazines out then in, out then in.
Occasionally he leans forward and, with a small rag produced from a pouch at his waist, oils a few more square millimetres of the weapon’s gleaming surface. Dressed in long, laced boots, bulkily rustling fatigues and a quilted jacket that I think was once white but which has been smeared with paints impersonating every colour of mud from brown to black to red, yellow and green, he wears a metal helmet similar to the lieutenant’s but with the words DEAD INSIDE scrawled on the green cloth cover, in what looks like scarlet lipstick.
Behind and above me, Karma wears a pair of plus-fours liberated from a farm topped by a fur coat from one of our wardrobes, worn over his combat jacket; the hands clutching the stirrup-handled rear of the machine-gun are cocooned in ski-gloves, one of which has had the top half of the index finger removed to allow better access to the gun’s trigger. On to his metal helmet’s fabric cover are sewn medal ribbons awarded to one of my ancestors.
The soldier in front of me rattles out the magazine once more. He inspects the gleaming rounds nestling inside, turns the tape-twinned clip over and repeats the process, then snicks it back into place again. I can smell the gun’s oil. He starts to sing; something vaguely recognisable as popular, from several years ago. The lieutenant reaches into a satchel by her feet - something on her hand catches my eye and I think of the bag of jewels you held at your feet in the carriage - then sits back and clips a couple of hand grenades on to the front of her jacket. The grenades’ square-cut faceted surfaces make them look like plump bars of dark chocolate. She lights another cigarette.
I have seen hunts not so different from this. Four-wheel drives with
air-conditioning instead of jeeps with machine-gun mounts, horse-boxes rather than trucks, shotguns, not automatics. Still we float along just so; for either set the cast is much the same. The lieutenant possesses her own style, sweeping along, sunglassed, lips clenched around a cigarette, staring forward. Her men too have their own combat chic. They inhabit odd items of sometimes inappropriate military gear - a brigadier’s cap, some gold but grubby epaulets stitched on to a combat jacket, an ostentatious show of rotund black hand grenades plastered everywhere across a gilet like badges on a vest. Others sport pieces of civilian property - a gaudy waistcoat worn beneath the camouflage, another martially dubious hat that may have been a yachtsman’s, a ring-pull from a drinks can worn as an earring - many worn, I suspect, as much for their assumed good-luck value as for any supposed expression of individuality.
And in some ways we are outdone. Our hunts were frivolous; mere games for those with the time, land and resource to spare for such pursuits. The lieutenant’s purpose is more serious, her mission bearing an import greater than any we displayed; more than the life or death of a few feeling animals hangs in the balance now. All our fates, and the castle’s, are piled together upon the scale’s swung platform, awaiting a judgment delivered not by any judiciary, however partial in its view, but by naked force of arms.
These levelling times remain unfair, and commonise, demote, in such a civilised, cultivated countryside, what should be free from vulgar threat. Such sick suspense and mayhem all around, seem to me to belong in cruder climes, where less has been built up to be brought down. But therein lies our original mistake, perhaps; each inaugurating side in this could not believe we would reduce ourselves to the savagery we have embraced.