John Banville - Shroud

She really was tiny; had it occurred to me I might have felt some disquiet at the ease with which I had attracted in rapid succession these two distinctly boyish little persons. When she took off her gown, under which she was conveniently naked, and lay down before me on the bed, I was nervous of putting my hands on her for fear of breaking something. Where women are concerned I have always been, as you can attest, the bull in the china shop. So many I have caused to shatter in pieces, like Meissen figurines. Even the great, glazed urn that was Magda in the end was smashed under my stamping hoofs. Lady Laura was excited by the prospect of exquisite damage. She lifted her affectingly frail knees and opened her arms and smiled up into my face with slitted eyes. "Come on," she said, in a cat's thick gurgle, "break me in two, and make a wish."

She kept me, more or less, on and off, for nigh on two years. The arrangement between us she set out clearly from the start; it was to be entirely on her terms. There was no question, for instance, of my having exclusive rights to her bed; in fact, I was to have no rights at all, worth speaking of, to anything that was hers. She already had many admirers, and went on accumulating more of them all the time. She moved in a narrow, rackety milieu where aristocratic black sheep met and mingled with the art world crowd. She had a very great deal of money from her dead father, who had been a duke, but although she was a spendthrift, she was not generous. She bought me good clothes, handmade shoes, wearable trinkets of all kinds, but they were less an adornment for me than for her, by proxy. She continued to insist on my being French – "Really, darling, no one comes from your country" – and introduced me everywhere as my Frog. I liked her, really, I did; perhaps I more than liked her. There was something unwholesome about her, something acrid, discoloured, used, that I found deeply appealing; I am remembering the stale smell of her hair, the raspy touch of her shaven legs, the deep hollows under her eyes, with their bruised, plum-brown shadows.Yet no one I have ever known, not even you, dear Cass, was as tender, as delicate, as voluptuously helpless as she was, when she chose to be. She loved, she said, my size, the improbable, impossible bulk of me, her blond, contraband brute with big square jaw and killer's paws and ridiculous, unplaceable accent.

We knew nothing about each other, I mean nothing of any consequence. She led me briefly, her slim, cool hand lying lightly in mine, into the pages of one of those smart and amusingly cruel novels which were fashionable in that era, whole shelves of which I read, to improve my English, and the echo of which, I suspect, can be detected still in the colder, primmer interiors of my lamentably heterogeneous prose style. All I saw of Laura was the brittle, bright façade she chose to present to the world at large, that undistinguished, commonplace world in which, and she was careful that I should make no mistake about it, I was as far as she was concerned just another commoner. Who knows what she saw in me, beyond the merely physical. She took me everywhere, to parties and clubs, to artists' studios, to hunt balls in huge houses, even to court, once. She knew all sorts of shady people. We went to dog races, gambling dens, to a place in the East End where cock fights were held, and where, at the end of one particularly sanguinary contest, she turned to me with a terrible, glittering smile and I saw a crescent-shaped stipple of cockerel's blood on her cheek and thought inconsequently of the bramble scratches I used to get as a child picking blackberries on my grandfather's farm. She ate too much, smoked too much, slept too late and with too many lovers. Most of all, though, she drank.

It was on a visit to her mother's house in the country that I discovered the secret of her drinking, I mean her serious, full-time dipsomania. We had motored down, as the saying went, for the weekend. It was the first time I had been shown to the Dowager Duchess, and her daughter was nervous, I could tell by the metallic brightness of her voice and the altogether too brilliant smiles she kept flashing at me as she manoeuvred her dashing little car at breakneck speed along the verdant byways of Berkshire. This hitherto unsuspected vulnerability I found affecting, and I felt protective toward her, and determined to defend her against the Dowager, who in my indignant imaginings was growing by the moment to the dimensions and ferocity of a fairy-tale dragon. She lived in grand if somewhat faded style in a stone mansion set on a hill above a tiny hamlet, from the huddled roofs of which the house's many windows averted their haughty gaze. The lady herself, like her abode, was large and stately and fascinatingly ugly. My first sight of her did nothing to contradict my expectations of fierceness and flame, for she was standing in gumboots beside a bonfire into which she was poking a mattocklike implement with scowling vigour. In greeting her daughter she consented to receive a dry kiss on the cheek. Me she took in with instant cognisance and grimly set her jaw. Beside me Laura drooped perceptibly, all her brightness dimming. I realised at once that I had been brought here as a gesture of defiance against her mother – to whom my status as semi-paid lover would have been immediately obvious – but of course the old bag had the hide of a rhino and was not in the least surprised or shocked. For a long moment we regarded each other, she and I, and for all that I was half a foot higher than her I felt that she might be about to place the heel of her rubber boot on my brow and press me without effort into the earth, like a giant tent peg. A gust of wood-smoke from the fire blew in my face and made my eyes water. I said something about the journey, commended the weather, admired the house. "Are you a German?" the Dowager said loudly, with frowning incredulity. Laura muttered something and strode off toward the house, head down and hands jammed in the pockets of her long leather car-coat.

Matters grew steadily worse as the afternoon ground on. At four o'clock tea was served in the conservatory, under the leaning fronds of a giant fern. A grandfather clock directly behind my chair clicked its tongue in large, slow, monotonous disapproval. The Dowager complained of the land girls who had been sent down from London to dig up the lawns and plant potatoes; they knew nothing of country ways, she said, and cared only for cigarettes and going to dances; she suspected them of immoral carryings-on with the village men. I nodded sympathetically and inclined my face over my teacup; the giddy urge to laugh kept bubbling up. Laura sat wordless between her mother and me in what seemed an agony of anger and violent disgust, as if she were a child being forced to endure the torment of adult company. Eventually she flung herself from her chair and slouched off, supposedly to tell the maid to bring fresh tea. She had been gone for a considerable time, and I had begun to wonder uneasily how long such an errand could take in even so large a house as this – had she fled altogether, got in the car and driven away, abandoning me here, with this hideous termagant? – when I heard from far within and high up in the house a thin, ululant cry that made my backbone tingle. I put down my cup; no doubt I had a look of alarm. The Dowager, who also had heard the scream, folded her large, mannish hands on her thigh and considered me keenly, with, I thought, a certain gratified amusement. "For how long, Mr. Vandal," she asked, "have you known my daughter?"

After a search, I found Laura upstairs, locked in a little bathroom attached to what turned out to have been the nursery. She would not open the door at first, and I had to wait, looking somewhat desperately out of a circular window at a far field with grazing cows. At last I heard the lock turning. She had a gin bottle, half empty, the neck of which she had somehow managed to break off, cutting her hand quite badly. She sat on the wooden lid of the lavatory and I knelt before her and tore my handkerchief into strips and bound the wound while she mewled and wept. The fittings in the room, the lavatory, the rust-stained bath, the handbasin, the towel rail, were all made in miniature, to a child's scale, and I had a distracting sense of grotesque disproportion; we were back in a fairy tale again, I the worried giant now, and she the tiny, hysterical princess. She was already drunk, thoroughly, comprehensively, in a way I had not seen nor drunk before. She kept alternating between clawing apologies and accusatory, hair-shaking rages, big, iridescent bubbles of saliva forming and bursting between her slack, gin-raw lips. She said it was all my fault, she should never have brought me here, what had she been thinking of, it was mad, mad, she should have known, oh, how could I ever forgive her, she was sorry, so sorry, so very sorry… I took her in my arms, still kneeling before her, and she twined her legs around my waist and pressed her hot temple so hard against my cheek I thought a molar might crack. She wailed in my ear and dribbled on my shoulder. If I ever loved her, it was in that moment.