He looked away, touched his brow, turned aside. “You … you wanted to see the barn?” His voice was soft again.
“Can we?” She was down the ladder in a flash. “I love old barns! But your mother said it wasn’t safe.”
“I think it’s safe enough,” he answered. “Georgina worries about everything.” He had called his mother Georgina since he was a little boy. She didn’t seem to mind.
They went through the rambling house to the front, Yulian excusing himself for a moment to go to his room. He came back wearing dark spectacles and a floppy, wide-brimmed hat. “Now you look like some pallid Mexican brigand,” Helen told him, leading the way. And with the black Alsatian pup tumbling at their heels, they made their way to the barn.
In fact it was a very simple outbuilding of stone, with a platform of planks across the high beams to form a hayloft. Next door were the stables, completely rundown, just a derelict old huddle of buildings. Until five or six years ago the Bodescus had let a local farmer winter his ponies on the grounds, and he’d stored hay for them in the barn.
“Why on earth do you need such a big place to live?” Helen asked as they entered the barn through a squealing door into shade and dusty sunbeams and the scurry of mice.
“I’m sorry?” he said after a moment, his thoughts elsewhere.
“This place. The whole place. And that high stone wall all the way round it. How much land does it enclose, that wall? Three acres?”
“Just over three and a half,” he answered.
“A great rambling house, old stables, barns, an overgrown paddock—even a shady copse to walk through in the autumn, when the colours are growing old! I mean, why do two ordinary people need so much space just to live in?”
“Ordinary?” he looked at her curiously, his eyes moistly gleaming behind dark lenses. “And do you consider yourself ordinary?”
“Of course.”
“Well I don’t. I think you’re quite extraordinary. So am I, and so is Georgina—all of us for different reasons.” He sounded very sincere, almost aggressive, as if defying her to contradict him. But then he shrugged. “Anyway, it’s not a question of why we need it. It’s ours, that’s all.”
“But how did you get it? I mean, you couldn’t have bought it! There must be so many other, well, easier places to live.”
Yulian crossed the paved floor between piles of old slates and rusty, broken-down implements to the foot of the open wooden stairs. “Hayloft,” he said, turning his dark eyes on her. She couldn’t see those eyes, but she could feel them.
Sometimes his movements were so fluid it almost seemed as if he were sleep-walking. They were like that now as he climbed the stairs, slowly, step by deliberate step. “There is still straw,” he said, voice languid as a deep pool.
She watched him until he passed out of sight. There was a leanness about him, a hunger. Her father thought he was soft, girlish, but Helen guessed otherwise. She saw him as an intelligent animal, as a wolf. Sort of furtive, but unobtrusive, and always there on the edge of things, just waiting for his chance …
She suddenly felt stifled and took three deep, deliberate gulps of air before following him. Going carefully up the wooden steps, she said, “Now I remember it! It was your great-grandfather’s, wasn’t it? The house, I mean.”
She emerged into the hayloft. Three great bales of hay, blanched with age, stood dusty and withered in a pyramid. One end of the loft stood open, where projecting gables spared it from the elements. Thin, hot beams of sunlight came slanting in from chinks in the tiles, trapping dustmotes like flies in amber, forming yellow spotlights on the floorboards.
Yulian took out a pocket knife, sliced deftly at the binding of the uppermost bale. It fell to pieces like an ancient book, and he dragged great deep armfuls down onto the boards.
A bed for a gypsy, thought Helen. Or a wanton.
She threw herself down, was conscious that her dress rode up above her knickers where she lay down. She did nothing to adjust it. Instead she spread her legs a little, wriggled her backside and contrived to make the movement seem perfectly unconscious—which it was not.
Yulian stood still for long moments and she could feel his eyes on her, but she simply cupped her chin in her hands and stared out of the open end of the loft. From here you could see the perimeter wall, the curving drive, the copse. Yulian’s shadow eclipsed several discs of sunlight and she held her breath. The straw stirred and she knew he was right behind her, like a wolf in the forest.
His floppy hat fell in the straw on her left, his sunglasses plopped down into the hat; he got down beside her on her right, his arm falling casually across her waist. Casually, yes, and light as a feather, but she could feel it like a bar of iron. He lay not quite so far forward, propping his jaw in his right hand, looking at her. His arm, lying across her like that, must feel very awkward. He was taking most of its weight and she could feel it beginning to tremble, but he didn’t seem to mind. But of course he wouldn’t, would he?
“Great-grandfather’s, yes,” he finally answered her question. “He lived and died here. The place came down to Georgina’s mother. Her husband, my grandfather, didn’t like it and so they rented it out and lived in London. When they died it fell to Georgina, but by then it was on a life-lease to the old colonel who lived here. Eventually it was his turn to go, and then Georgina came down to sell it. She brought me with her. I wasn’t quite five, I think, but I liked the place and said so. I said we should live here, and Georgina thought it a good idea.”
“You really are remarkable!” she said. “I can’t remember anything about when I was five.” His arm had slid diagonally across her now, so that his fingers barely touched her thigh just below the curve of her bottom. Helen could feel an almost electric tingle in those fingers. They held no such charge, she knew, but that’s how it felt.
“I remember everything almost from the moment I was born,” he told her, his voice so even it was very nearly hypnotic. Maybe it was hypnotic. “Sometimes I even think I remember things from before my birth.”
“Well, that might explain why you’re so ‘extraordinary’” she told him, “but what is it makes me different?”
“Your innocence,” he at once replied, his voice a purr. “And your desire not to be.” His hand caressed her rump now, the merest touch of electric fingers tracing the curve of her buttocks, to and fro, to and fro.
Helen sighed, put a piece of straw between her teeth, slowly turned over on to her back. Her dress rode up even more. She didn’t look at Yulian but gazed wide-eyed at the sloping rows of tiles overhead. As she turned so he lifted his hand a fraction, but didn’t take it away.
“My desire not to be? Not to be innocent? What makes you think that?” And she thought: because it’s so obvious?
When he answered, Yulian’s voice was a man’s again. She hadn’t noticed the slow transition, but now she did. Thick and dark, that voice, as he said, “I’ve read it. All girls of your age desire not to be innocent.”
His hand fell on her belly, lingered over her navel, slipped down and crept under the band of her knickers. She stopped him there, trapping his hand with her own. “No, Yulian. You can’t.”
“Can’t?” the word came in a gulp, choking. “Why?”
“Because you’re right. I am innocent. But also because it’s the wrong time.”
“Time?” he was trembling again.
She pushed him away, sighed abruptly and said, “Oh, Yulian—I’m bleeding!”
“Bleed—?” He rolled away from her, snatched himself to his feet. Startled, she stared at him standing there. He shivered as if in a fever.
“Bleeding, yes,” she said. “It’s perfectly natural, you know.”
There was no pallor in his face now: it was red with blood, burning like a drunkard’s face, with his eyes narrow slits dark as knife slashes. “Bleeding!” this time he managed to choke the word out whole. He reached out his arms towards her, hands hooked like claws, and for a moment she thought he w
ould attack her. She could see his nostrils flaring, a nervous tic tugging the corner of his mouth.
For the first time she felt afraid, felt something of his strangeness: “Yes,” she whispered. “It happens every month …”
His eyes opened up a little. Their pupils seemed flecked with scarlet. A trick of the light. “Ah! Ah—bleeding!” he said, as though only just understanding her meaning. “Oh, yes …” Then he reeled, turned away, went a little unsteadily down the steps and was gone.
Then Helen had heard the puppy’s wild yelp of joy (it had been stopped by the steps, which it couldn’t climb) and its whining and barking fading as it followed Yulian back to the house. And finally she started to breathe again.
“Yulian!” she’d called after him then. “Your sunglasses, your hat!” But if he heard, he didn’t bother to answer.
She wasn’t able to find him for the rest of the day, but then she hadn’t really looked for him. And because she had her pride—and also because he had failed to seek her out—she hadn’t much bothered with him for the rest of their holiday. Perhaps it had been for the best; for she had been innocent, after all. She wouldn’t have known what to do, not two years ago.
But when she thought of him, she still remembered his hand burning on her flesh. And now, going back to Devon with the countryside speeding by outside the car, she found herself wondering if there was still straw in the hayloft …
George, too, had his secret thoughts about Yulian. Anne could say what she liked but she couldn’t change that. He was weird, that lad, and weird in several directions. It wasn’t only the creeping-Jesus aspect that irritated George, though certainly the youth’s furtive ways were annoying enough,. But he was sick, too. Not mental, maybe not even sick in his body, just generally sick. To look at him sometimes, to catch him unawares with a side-glance, was to look at a cockroach surprised by a switched-on light, or a jellyfish steaming away, stranded on the beach when the tide goes out. You could almost sense something seething in him. But if it wasn’t mental or physical, and yet encompassed both, then what the hell was it?
Hard to explain. Maybe it was both mind and body—and soul too? Except George wasn’t must of a one for believing in souls. He didn’t disbelieve, but he would like evidence. He’d probably be praying when he died, just in case, but until then …
As for what Anne had said about Yulian at school: well, it was true, as far as it went. He had taken all of his exams early, and passed every one of them, but that wasn’t why he’d left early. George had a draughtsman, Ian Jones, working for him in his London office, and Jones had a young son in the same school. Anne would hear none of it, of course not, but the stories had been wild. Yulian had “seduced” a male teacher, a half-way-gone gay he’d somehow switched on. Once over the top, the fellow had apparently turned into a raver, trying to roger every male thing that moved. He’d blamed Yulian. That was one thing. And then:
In his art classes, Yulian had painted pictures which caused a very gentle lady teacher to attack him physically; she’d also stormed his bed-space and burned his art folios. Out nature rambling (George hadn’t known they still did that) Yulian had been found wandering on his own, his face and hands smeared with filth and entrails. Dangling from one hand he’d carried the remains of a stray kitten. Its carcass was still warm. He’d said a man had done it, but this was out on the moors, miles from anywhere.
That wasn’t all. It seemed he walked in his sleep and had apparently scared the living shit out of the younger boys, until the school had had to put a night-guard on their dorms. But by then the head had spoken at length with Georgina and she’d agreed he could leave. It was that or expulsion—for the sake of the good name of the school.
And there’d been other things, lesser things, but that had been the gist of it.
These were some of the reasons why George didn’t like Yulian. But of course there was one other thing. It was something very nearly as old as Yulian himself, but it had fixed itself in George’s mind indelibly.
The sight of an old man clutching his sheets to his chest as he died, and his last whispered words: “Christen it? No, no—you mustn’t! First have it exorcized!”
Anne could be strident if she had to be, but she was good through and through. She would never say a thing to hurt anyone, even though she might think certain things. To herself—if only to herself—she had to admit that she’d thought things about Yulian.
Now, lying back a little in her seat and stretching, feeling the cooling draught from the half-open window, she thought them again. Funny things: something about a big green frog, and something about the pain she’d get now and then in her left nipple.
The frog thing was hard to focus on; rather, she didn’t like to focus on it. Personally she couldn’t hurt a fly. Of course a child, a mere five-year old, wouldn’t realize what he was doing. Would he? The trouble was that as long as she’d known Yulian he’d always seemed to know exactly what he was doing. Even as a baby.
She had called him a “funny little thing,” but in fact George was right. Yulian had been more than just funny. For one thing, he never cried. No, not quite true, he had cried when hungry, at least when he was very small. And he had cried in direct sunlight. Photophobia, apparently, right from infancy. Oh, yes, and he’d cried at least one other time, at his christening. Though that had seemed more rage—or outrage—than crying proper. As far as Anne knew, he never had been properly christened.
She let her thoughts take hold, carrying her back. Yulian had just started to walk—to toddle, anyway—when Helen came along. That was a month or so before poor Georgina had been well enough to go home and take him back. Anne remembered that time well. She’d been heavy with milk, fat as butter and happier than at any other time in her life. And rosy? What a picture of health she’d been!
One day when Helen was just six weeks old, while she was feeding her, Yulian had come toddling like a little robot, looking for that extra ounce of affection of which Helen had robbed him. Jealousy even then, yes, for he was no longer all important. On impulse—feeling a pang of pity for the poor mite—she’d picked him up, bared her other breast to him, her left breast, and fed him.
Even remembering it, the twinge of pain in her nipple came back like a wasp sting to bother her. “Oh!” she said, stirring where she had fallen half-asleep.
“You all right?” George was quick to inquire. “Wind your window down a little more. Get some fresh air.”
The steady purr of the car’s engine brought her back to the present. “Cramp,” she lied. “Pins and needles. Can we stop somewhere—the next café?”
“Of course,” he answered. “There should be one any time now.”
Anne slumped, returned half-reluctantly to her memories. Feeding Yulian, yes … She’d sat down with both babies, nodded off while they fed, Helen on the right, Yulian on the left. It had been strange; a sort of languor had come over her, a lethargy she hadn’t the will to resist. But then, when the pain came, she’d come quickly awake. Helen had been crying, and Yulian had been—bloody!
She’d stared at the toddler in something close to shock. Those peculiar black eyes of his fixed unwaveringly on her face. And his red mouth, fixed like a lamprey on her breast! Her milk and blood had run down the curve of her breast, and his face had been smeared and glistened red with it; so that he’d looked like a dark-eyed gorging leech.
When she’d cleaned herself up, and clearted up Yulian too, she’d seen how he’d bitten through the skin around her nipple; his teeth had left tiny punctures. The bites had taken a long time to heal, but their sting had never quite gone away …
Then there had been the frog episode. Anne didn’t really want to dwell on that, but it formed a persistent picture in her mind, one she couldn’t wipe clear. It had happened after Georgina had sold up in London, on the last day before she and Yulian had left the city and gone down to Devon to live in the old manor house.
George had built a pond in the garden of their Greenford home wh
en Helen was one; since when, with a minimum of help, the pond had stocked itself. Now there were lilies, a clump of rushes, an ornamental shrub bending over the water like a Japanese picture, and a large species of green frog. There were water snails, too, and at the edges a little green scum. Anne called it scum, anyway. Mid-summer and there would normally be dragonflies, but that year they’d only seen one or two, and they’d been small ones of their sort.
She had been in the garden with the children, watching Yulian where he played with a soft rubber ball. Or perhaps “played” is the wrong word, for Yulian had difficulty playing like other children. He seemed to have a philosophy: a ball is a ball, a rubber sphere. Drop it and it bounces, toss it against a wall and it returns. Other than that it has no practical use, it cannot be considered a source of lasting interest. Others might argue the point, but that summed up Yulian’s feelings on the subject. Anne really didn’t know why she’d bought the ball for him; he never really played with anything. He had bounced it, however, twice. And he’d tossed it against the garden wall, once. But on the rebound it had rolled to the edge of the pond.
Yulian had followed it with eyes half scornful, until suddenly his interest had quickened. At the edge of the pond something leaped: a large frog, shiny green, poising itself where it landed, with two legs in the water and two on dry land. And the five-year old child froze, becoming still as a cat in the first seconds that it senses prey. It was Helen who ran to retrieve the ball, then skipped away with it up the garden, but Yulian had eyes only for the frog.
At that point George had called out from inside the house: something about the kebabs burning. They were to be the main course in a farewell meal for Georgina. George was supposed to be doing chef.
Anne had rushed to save the day, along the crazy-paving, under the arch of roses on their trellis to the paved patio area at the rear of the house. It had taken a minute, two at the outside, to lift the steaming meat from the grill onto a plate on the outside table. Then Georgina had come drifting downstairs in that slow get-there-eventually fashion of hers, and George had appeared from the kitchen with his herbs.