‘You’re like — you’re like some kind of black hole,’ he said curiously. He sat down in an armchair and for the first time looked at her as if she frightened him. ‘You consume me.’
Chapter Sixteen
LOVE was uncourtly at Hampton Court: it divorced, beheaded and died; divorced again, was beheaded an improbable twice, but still, ultimately, survived. Love conquered all but the loveless, and even then sometimes other things got you first.
Like disease, Agnes thought, or maybe childbirth. The dimly ornate bedchamber, which they were surveying from behind its restraining rope like visitors to an asylum, seemed suddenly racked with screams as an heir clawed his way out from a cloying, unanaesthetised womb; his mother two-headed then, like a mythic beast. The rules were different in those days, she thought, but the game was the same.
The house and gardens lay posing like two beauty queens, competing for the beholder in whose eye they might see their rival beauties briefly borrowed. He was beguiled by the gardens, she transfixed by the house; each sensing something of their own shadow in the other’s choice which made them defend their favourite hotly. A strange discomfort arose between them, a kind of twinnish mistrust, as they remembered that while each possessed the properties of beauty, together they formed something that made people stare.
It had occurred to her to wonder if he might simply be tired of her; had crossed her mind like a delayed commuter over a busy station, too frenzied and obvious to be interesting. As an insomniac of the heart, Agnes found such admissions unwise; they could keep her awake at night, tucking the darkness round her like an eiderdown of oblivion. The worst of it was that she sympathised with him.
As they crossed the moat into the cool belly of the palace she felt them both to be absurd. Like fish, their confluence depended on a common environment without which they flopped and gasped separately. It was easy to love in dim bars and dark bedrooms, but their bond could not withstand historic transposition. The fact that he was tired of her actually came as no surprise; that she was tired of herself even less so. What disturbed her was the alertness of her need for him amidst all this somnambulance. It beat in her like a heart, unfathomable. Something had been exchanged in those early hours when he had still been free to choose her, and he had been paying for it ever since. She would appear on his doorstep in years to come while he hid behind curtains with a frightened wife and bewildered children, reminding him that once he had singled her out. It was not about affection or delight. It was a game she had to win.
As they walked into the courtyard, straining and chaffing like strangers, it all became sadly plain: this addiction, this great mistake, this misdiagnosis that was love.
Henry VIII, many-headed and self-perpetuating, regenerated lives and wives like an earthworm. Agnes felt they would have understood each other well, she and this builder of mazes; his house a virtual reality of simulated tricks, with its secret gardens and hidden doors, corridors of lust and back passages of intent. It spoke of a mistrust she shared. They would indeed have got on well; both lovers, neither beloved.
She perused their portraits: six wives, love’s carrion. She and Henry could have compared notes. Henry VIII, in love with love, fat with the flesh of women. There was, she knew, no satisfaction for that kind of hunger. Like her, what he sought was but his own reflection. What he fought for was but the survival of his own fittest self. He looked for love and he found a beast; and the beast was no one but himself. The nature of the beast, then and now, was that it destroyed what it craved the most.
The courtyards boring through the centre of the house gave the surrounding buildings a prisonish look, their windows bound with steel bodices through which wan, womanly faces might be supposed to peer. These orifices, together with the several low doors which studded the walls at regular intervals, seemed almost elided by the lacy skirts of mosaic and brick, through which the leering tongues of gargoyles erupted beside stony cameo faces trapped like sailors behind portholes. Above, pairs of narrow chimney stacks soared to the sky like outflung legs, cross-bound and gartered. Straggling groups of late tourists hovered uncertainly in the October sunlight.
Agnes saw her lover disappearing beneath a cool arch at one end of the courtyard and followed behind at a safe distance. Once inside, she discovered a great stone staircase which appeared to lead to the body of the house, and the sound of receding footsteps furthermore informed her that he was but a short distance ahead. She climbed the stairs quietly. He had seemed distant and inclined to solitude, and she did not want to jettison what she knew was her last chance by yapping at his heels like a vexing dog. Reaching the landing, she caught him drifting into one of the vast drawing-rooms, and she watched him from the doorway as he paused in front of a large canvas. On it, a naked woman reclined against a grassy bank, the geography of her copious flesh bruised and mountainous compared to the manicured green of her setting. Agnes felt rather offended that he should so mysteriously choose to contemplate such an object — and she in all her lissome superiority so close at hand!
She crossed the room quietly and stood by him, the breath of acknowledgement between them as faint as that of two strangers at an art gallery, each cowed into dalliance by the erudition of the other.
‘She’s beautiful,’ Agnes ventured, hoping with the lie to provoke a denial which would affirm both her charity and her own charms. Moments later, casting a glance beside her to check upon the progress of her missile, she saw it had been vainly fired. He had sauntered off, leaving but a mirage of scent and an airy bodily impression behind him.
When she was younger, she had used to indulge in romantic daydreams concerning the as yet unspecified character of her future partner. She had wondered where he was and what he was doing, and had vaguely hoped by such contemplation to establish psychic links between them which might one day render him more securely hers. She wondered now if she had ever been visualised thus in a stranger’s mind. Beams of sunlight slanted across the empty room, whirled with motes of dust. It seemed important, just then, that she should be tethered here by something stronger; that being here was part of something larger, someone else’s plan.
She no longer observed the future as if from the passenger seat of an aeroplane: a pleasant trip, with but the slightest frisson of fear, to a certain and even more pleasant destination; the high peaks of mountains in view, with fluffy clouds obfuscating the terrible plunge to their craggy feet. Now she was earth-bound and afraid, grinning stupidly at the sky and wondering how things stayed up there. She fingered her future like a set of flimsy negatives: a world of dark skies, glaring shadows, black smiles and certain death.
Agnes Day was lost, but only in so much as her lover was not to be found. She wandered down a long corridor and read from a sign that Anne Boleyn had fled over those very boards after receiving news of her imminent execution. For reasons which did not require elucidation, the passage had been named the Screaming Gallery.
Anne Boleyn had six fingers, Agnes recalled. Despite her deformity, Henry had loved her passionately. She wondered how he felt as her head thudded to the ground. It was an act of power, but also perhaps one of love. She thought of the desecrated Anne. To be so loved — what must it feel like?
She perused the tapestried dining-hall and imagined it full of bearded men spearing unspecified cuts of meat with knives. She examined faded tapestries depicting one-dimensional horses and women with shrunken bodies and enormous heads like embryos. She had hoped he would see her thus absorbed and be impressed by her self-sufficiency. After a while, however, she grew tired of her attentive posture and set out towards the kitchens, as if there might be some titbit there to comfort her.