The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror Read Online Free PDF Page A

flat. It’s the girl’s life. There’s the chair where she must have sat when she composed the note. Or is that what’s bothering you?’
    ‘It doesn’t bother me at all, you know that. I’m not the one who lies awake.’ She spread a cloth on the table and filled two glasses. ‘Just a few things of my own, that’s all I ask. I don’t like charity.’
    And the men at the ballroom? What did she call the drinks they bought her at their clubs? ‘You’re not in all that much,’ he said.
    ‘It’s not my fault if you won’t come with me.’
    ‘Can’t afford to come with you, you mean.’ His words thrust like a tongue toward an aching tooth. His fingers traced his inside pocket, the photograph symmetrical with his heart.
    ‘Don’t, don’t. You’re hurting yourself.’ She carried a glass to him. As he took it, she laid her hand on his within the concealed rectangle. ‘You can’t be both a civil servant and a painter. Don’t try for so much or you’ll lose everything,’ she said. ‘Let’s leave the flat to look after itself for tonight. Our room is ours.’
     
    ‘Do hurry,’ she said, ‘I’m so tired.’ Deflated, he lay back. In a minute the moonlit sheet over her breasts was rising and falling like surf. He inched to sit up. His side of the bed was a scribble of shadow like paint scrawled in fury. Perhaps this might be meaningful on canvas. Bedroom Scene, The Marriage Bed— but he couldn’t express their marriage. She had been a civil service typist; as she’d passed him, glanced and smiled, his pen had come erect between his fingers; the next time she passed he had sketched the memory. When she came to look he’d said ‘I’d like to paint you.’ ‘That would be nice,’ she’d replied, ‘but not nude.’ Baulked, for she had destroyed his dream , he’d postponed the offer through months of clumsy dancing in ballrooms where smoke billowed to meet clouds of false stars, of hands across club tables at one in the morning; seeking to possess her, he’d foregone the rushing skies, the stretched clouds, the combed and recombed grass, which met at his easel and poured into his brush, and he’d suffocated. When they emerged from the cramped registrar’s he’d found he couldn’t paint. On the wedding night she’d cried out; briefly he’d possessed her. Yet before the honeymoon was over he’d yearned for something more; he’d gazed from the hotel at rumpled trees, humped hillside walls where the girl from the photograph might have stood and smiled. ‘Don’t forget to give in your notice,’ he’d reminded his wife. ‘I’ll keep you.’ Perhaps thus he could possess her. But his walks possessed the breasts of the hills, the splayed thighs of the valleys. Then one night he’d been whipped home by a storm and had found her gone. An hour later she’d slammed the front door, gasping happily, thrilled by the leaping rain, and had halted at the sight of him sunk deep in a dark chair. She’d stroked his hair; rain coursed down their merged faces like tears. They’d gone upstairs to find the house was cracked; rain dripped somewhere. They couldn’t afford the repairs, and at last they’d agreed before a landlord’s card bulged and distorted by the trembling globes of a new rain: this flat, close to the country as she’d said, closer to the raw red sign of the ballroom round the corner as he’d thought. He slid down the bed to mould himself to her, but she was still asleep. He turned over. The moonlight fell short of the wardrobe, where his suit hid the photograph. The cupboard of books was held within skins of sleep which weighed on his eyes; next to it, his easel was a dusty blackboard. As he drowsed into sleep, he thought the cupboard opened.
    ‘Wear your nice suit today,’ she said. ‘I like to see you in it.’
    ‘All right, for you.’ The sunlight slid from cars and coated leaves with light; it might become a painting. He collected pens and wallet from the table by the bed