Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 27 Read online

  Mason did not like to look at the painting. It made him uneasy. But Dunbar had owned it as long as Mason had known him. In the flat they shared on the east side of the city it had hung in the hall opposite the front door, so in a way it communicated to him homecoming. Once it was up above the mantel the migration was complete: the house was now home.

  On the following Monday, Mason made his first commute into the city. He woke in the morning, sometime after dawn. It was not the alarm that had woken him, but his internal clock: an instrument of great precision. Beside him Dunbar lay unmoving, his body loose and curved slightly in sleep. Mason sat at the edge of the bed and watched him for a moment. He could not imagine the content of Dunbar’s dreams. Sometimes Dunbar dreamed of Mason and would mention it casually later, in the midst of conversation. The Mason who inhabited his dreams was another man: a ghost form, a figment, given to extraordinary actions. Mason envied this other self, who roamed freely the most secret landscape of Dunbar’s world. He wished now that he could lie back down and sleep beside Dunbar. Sleep prowled the limits of intimacy; it was the closest closeness he could attain.

  Regretfully he dressed for work and exited the house. The front garden was wet and there was a kind of cleanness in the air. He could see no one else moving up and down the street. He supposed that the proper businessmen and women had left far earlier for their offices, whilst anyone remaining behind was sunk in sleep still. The absence from the scene of anything human—all he could see were the shadows of birds, the shivering motion of wind in the trees—set his hair on end. He climbed hastily into the car and turned the radio on, tuning in to a morning call-in show. The human voices were shrill and familiar. They seemed to wake the world around him. He drove away, the wildness he had sensed melting off like a dream.

  He was encouraged to find how close the city seemed. Once he was inside his workshop, the noise of downtown traffic and street chatter hit him, rising through the windows, a more beautiful white noise than the sound of the sea. It was as though he only lived in an outer borough—not, after all, so very far away.

  The theatre for which he did his principal work was staging a summer production of The Tempest, and the loft that housed the workshop was littered with a melange of material. Overskirts and whitework ruffs were carelessly displayed. Lengths of lawn and sarsanet were draped across the tables. A stripped farthingale sat in one corner, rather skeletal. Folded on Mason’s desk was a finished item: a water-stained cambric shirt. The limp ruffles at wrist and neck were rich with blackwork. The embroidered pattern was a choice of Mason’s own, a running row of artichokes embellished by knots of leaves. He liked the unexpectedness of the artichokes where there might have been roses, cowslips, sage. The design was dense and well-executed. The spines of the artichokes seemed fragile things. He thought, not for the first time, that he would like to see Dunbar in the shirt. It was intended for the actor played Ariel. It would be large on Dunbar; the cuffs would almost cover his hands. But something in the embroidery seemed to suit him. The lushness of it, the dark foliage that threatened to engulf the sleeves. Dunbar would love it.

  Or, Mason thought, I would love him in it. He weighed the difference. For a moment it seemed difficult to distinguish the two things.

  Come evening he extinguished the lights of the workshop, locked the loft door, headed northwest over the river and away. In his rear mirror he could see the ragged spine of the city laid out behind him. Dusk suffused it with a blue and tranquil glow. At this distance the buildings were black silhouettes, as though their real selves resided elsewhere and only the shadows they cast on the world could be seen. Mason watched until a sharp turn took them out of sight. By this time it was quite dark and he was driving on clean empty suburban streets.

  Dunbar met him at the door. He had cooked dinner. The kitchen smelt of onions and sage. The table was laid with wineglasses, napkins, china. There was even a candle, a cheap pillar guttering on a spare plate.

  Dunbar said, “I thought it would be nicer than takeaway.”

  “It’s lovely,” Mason assured him. He set his satchel beside the table and took a seat.

  They shared a bottle of white wine, which went well with the chicken Dunbar had roasted. There were parsnips also, buttered and salted, and rocket salad, and very crisp garden peas. It was far too much food for two people. Mason toyed with a parsnip. “We’ll have leftovers,” he said.

  Dunbar rested his elbows on the table like a little boy. “An embarrassment of riches,” he said. “I dug the parsnips up out of the garden. There’s loads of stuff alive. I just have to cut the weedy bits away.”

  Mason glanced at the back window. It looked almost like a flat black pane. He could only just make out the outline of the garden, touched by a neighbour’s porch light. The snarled foliage was moving slowly in an unseen breeze. The light was very yellow. It lent a ferociousness to what it touched. Mason found he was no longer hungry. He set his fork against his plate. Dunbar was still talking animatedly about the garden. The candle sent shadows running across his face.

  “—a lot of common plants are really hardy; they’ll survive about anything. Of course we can root up what we don’t like, but there’s something sort of wonderfully anarchic about letting it grow, don’t you think?”

  “I think you should do what you like,” Mason said. “Look, do you want to watch television and leave the dishes for the morning? I can do them on my way into work, if you don’t mind.” He needed the voices of strangers, their exaggerated speech rising and falling in cadences unmistakably human. The noise of a larger and more civilised world pouring out of the TV screen.

  “Are you sure?” Dunbar asked, but he didn’t argue. Mason stored the leftovers and set the dishes to soak. Then they sat together on the couch, watching a marathon of a crime drama that neither of them had ever seen. Halfway through, Dunbar fell asleep on Mason’s shoulder. Mason lowered the volume on the TV. He could feel Dunbar’s breath, warm and damp, stirring against his neck, his dry and slightly spiky hair tickling his cheek. A surge of gentleness struck him. He felt that Dunbar’s life, little and precarious, was in his hands. He knew that he should rouse Dunbar so that they could go to bed, but he did not want to forfeit that moment. It seemed to him that they were the only two living things for miles, and furthermore that all round them darkness was closing. If he moved, if he switched off the TV, they would be marooned.

  In the new house Dunbar slept better. He did not twitch and move so much. In the city Mason had often been startled awake by his frantic motions. Here it was Mason himself who began to have trouble with sleep. He would lie in bed, kept awake by the terrible stillness of his surroundings. There was no noise of cars, no ambulances weeping far away into the night. He could hear Dunbar’s heart beating, the steady inhale and exhale of his breath. It should have been comforting, this sound, but it scared him. He pressed his face against Dunbar’s shoulder; closed his arms around him like a vice. Even when he managed to sleep, fears dogged him. One morning Dunbar woke with bruises where Mason had, dreaming, held his wrist too tightly. The bruises were like fingerprints marked blue upon his skin.

  During the days, Dunbar was at work on his thesis, which concerned wilderness and the Romantic imagination. He had a computer set up in the spare bedroom. The floor was littered with stacks of library books: the poetry of Byron and Coleridge, illustrated volumes on Salvator Rosa and the evolution of the English garden. He would not allow Mason to read what he had written, and kept the typed and finished pages in a cardboard box tied with a string.

  Mason strongly suspected that Dunbar did not leave the house except to work in the garden. It made a kind of sense: Mason took the car each morning into the city, and there was nothing, no cinema nor shop nor restaurant, for miles around. And he could not deny that Dunbar was making great progress in the garden. Each night the kitchen seemed more flush with food. There were ripe aubergines and green peppers, tomatoes on the cusp of redness and carrots that tasted slightly dark from the
earth. Plants of varying seasons seemed all, simultaneously, to bear fruit. Dunbar brought in armfuls of spring and autumn flowers and intermixed them in glass jars. It was strange, but then modern agriculture was marvellous. Mason did not question it. Dunbar was radiant all the time; he seemed so pleased.

  Mason was drinking coffee in the kitchen one morning, preparing to leave for work, when Dunbar came in from the garden. His hands were covered in dirt and cupped in front of him as though he held something precious. The two of them had lived in the house for nigh on a month, by then.

  “Look at what I’ve found,” Dunbar said. He showed Mason. Several off-white teeth lay in the palms of his hands. They were curved and sharp: clearly not the teeth of a man, but some sort of predatory animal. “I dug them up in the garden. They’re sharks’ teeth.”

  Mason picked one up. It was small and very pointed. “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen them before. You find them where there used to be water. Dried-up sea beds from, I don’t know, the Pleistocene.”

  The tooth was the colour of old bone. Loose earth flecked it. A queasy feeling gripped Mason. He set it back in Dunbar’s hand. “It’s strange,” he said. “I mean: somebody must have churned up the soil. Otherwise you wouldn’t just find them lying about so near the surface, would you?”

  Dunbar frowned. “I don’t know. I suppose they could have done. Churning up’s what you do to gardens, when you’re planting.”

  “I just think it’s odd; that’s all.”

  “I think it’s marvellous. I thought you would like it. You like old things.” Dunbar closed one hand around the sharks’ teeth possessively, like a fist.

  Mason said, conscious of his misstep, “It is marvellous. We should show them to an expert. Someone at a museum.”

  “Who knows what else I might find,” Dunbar said. “We should wait.”

  Before he went back out to the garden he laid the sharks’ teeth on the windowsill, all in a row. The morning light made them look white and polished. Mason thought: These are not fossils. They might have been new. Terror seized him, brief and irrational as a wave on the sea. It was the new house, he told himself, the sense of strangeness permeating everything. He downed the last of his coffee and collected the car keys from the table. When he was in the city, amongst familiar surroundings once again, he would look back at the morning and laugh at his nervous disposition. He would be amazed at the idea that there was anything sinister about that tiny, docile handful of teeth.

  In the workshop, Mason was constructing a collar for Ariel out of rocaille beads. It was several rows thick. The beads were old and slightly uneven. He sorted them in blues and golds and greens. He could have delegated the task to someone else, to one of the postgraduate students who came for summer internships and were expert in obscure topics: the history of the carcanet, or spindles, or shuttle-weaving. But he enjoyed the labour: intricate and meditative. It took hours to interlock the beads. He had intended their colours to evoke sun on ocean water, but instead he was reminded of the Altdorfer painting—St. George and the Dragon—with its dense, voluptuous leaves. The dragon was the last of St. George’s problems. His back was still turned to that vast and threatening forest. The light like a web amongst the trees.

  Mason often worked late, but was reluctant to admit that he liked it. After dark the city turned coy and familiar. The streets seemed smaller, low-ceilinged; the commuters went. He could look from the loft into other buildings’ lighted windows and see men and women performing every ordinary action: working, cooking, crying, as though they were onstage. He felt connected to these people. A sympathy existed between them. I too am here, I too am human, he wanted to say. Instead he would have to wind the silk thread and store the beads, switch off the work lamps, and be on his way. Down in the street he walked past cafes, diners, bars from which life spilled onto the pavement. He was a part of this life just by his passing. But when he closed the door to the car the connection was severed. He drifted home in a miasma of sadness, lonelier than he had ever been.

  Mason knew that if he told Dunbar of this feeling, Dunbar would insist that they move back to the city. He would downplay his love of the house and its salutary effects upon him. He would declare that a few window boxes would satisfy him in place of the garden. Mason imagined the conversation and experienced already, preveniently, his shame and dread. He could not allow Dunbar to sacrifice the house and garden. But all the same each night it was harder to steer himself onto the motorway. Home seemed an unreal island, half-submerged in the distance. He envisioned a day when he would be unable to locate it. It would simply have slipped away.

  When he entered the house and glimpsed Dunbar’s quick and crooked smile, he repented of these feelings. He was aware that they constituted a betrayal he could not atone for or even explain. He began to bring gifts back from the city: antique books, bottles of wine, supper from their favourite Indian takeaway. Once he even brought flowers and then felt a fool, for of course the house was full of flowers. Roses dropped fragrant petals from a vase on the kitchen counter; tiger lilies overtook nasturtiums in a bowl in the front hall.

  “I didn’t even know you could grow tiger lilies in this climate,” Mason said, disturbed by the fierce bell-shape of the blossoms.

  Dunbar shrugged. “I know; it’s like magic. I hardly have to do anything at all.”

  But he did do something, for he was always at work in the garden. On weekends, when Mason would have liked for the two of them to escape to the city, Dunbar was reliably found in an old university t-shirt, carrying a trowel and spade. He had by now a sunburn across his nose and the tops of his cheekbones that never quite went away.

  One Sunday morning as Mason lingered over the Times inside, Dunbar came into the kitchen looking puzzled. “I think you’d better come out to the back porch,” he said.

  Mason did so. There, resting on the bleached wooden boards, was a large off-white skull. It was unmistakably animal in origin: long and flattish, with wide eye sockets and prominent canine teeth. Dirt was packed into the curves and hollows of the bone, as though it had been a long time buried. Mason looked at Dunbar.

  “I dug it up in the garden,” Dunbar said.

  “What is it?” Mason knelt for a closer look, but could not bring himself to touch it. There was something subtly horrible about the object, more than its intrinsic aura of death.

  “I think it’s the skull of a wolf,” Dunbar said uncertainly. “Though it could be a very large dog, like a Siberian husky, I suppose.”

  “A pet,” Mason said. He was trying to convince himself of this possibility. “They buried a pet in the backyard—someone who lived here before.”

  “A long time before,” Dunbar said. “It seems old.”

  It did seem old. There was something about the bone—a graininess, a discolouration—which suggested a museum piece, a specimen from ten thousand years ago. Mason was reminded of the skeleton of a mammoth he had seen once, unearthed from a peat bog. It had possessed the same sepia quality. He tried not to think of it; tried not to look at the empty holes where the eyes of the dog or wolf had been.

  He said, “We should ask the neighbours. Perhaps one of them’s lived here for a while; they might have known the people here before us.”

  Dunbar nodded his assent. “It is a bit exciting,” he said. “You have to admit.”

  “Do you think?”

  “Well. You wouldn’t get this in the city. Anything at all could be out there.”

  Mason said, “Yes.”

  That night he could not sleep. He extricated himself from where Dunbar had curled around him. Dunbar mumbled something without waking, a slurred protest intelligible only in his dreams. Mason stroked his bare shoulder: the clean line of collarbone beautiful under the skin. He rose and walked noiselessly into the kitchen. He took a glass from the cabinet and filled it at the tap. The noise of the water rushed through the still room. Something tapped against the window—an insect, a stray beetle or wasp striking
the pane. The noise came again. Unwillingly, Mason looked at the window and out into the garden. He could see at the edge of the porch the white skull dully gleaming. Farther out the stray edges of foliage crept and swayed. There was very little light, only the dim beams of the porch lamp. Most of the garden was a mass of darkness. But from it, a single shadow seemed to detach itself and move. Mason watched it dumbly. He could not say, exactly, what it was: whether animal or other. It was the size of a large cat or average-sized dog, but resembled neither. He had only the briefest glimpse of it, a solid black shape, and then it was gone. He set the glass down on the counter. Both his hands were shaking. Adrenaline left him light-headed, alert with fear. He considered his options. Under no circumstances could he bring himself to walk out to the garden. Instead he checked the locks on the door and walked carefully back to the bedroom. Dunbar was still sleeping. Mason climbed into bed beside him, wrapping his own body around Dunbar’s like a living barrier, a human shield. He was still shivering, every muscle convulsive. He had never before felt so small or helpless. Even this one gesture, the embrace, seemed feeble. He knew that from what he had seen in the garden there was no way to protect Dunbar, no way at all.

  The noise of the alarm clock woke Mason in the morning. He switched it off and lay in the blue dawn. Sometimes in the night Dunbar had moved away from him and lay sleeping with his face pressed into the pillow. Shadows, long and lazy, shaded the ladder of his spine. He looked like an antique photo, taken by an Aesthete before the invention of colour. The men in such photos were always lush and sleepy-eyed, yet something in the contours of their bodies suggested an animal power about to be freed.