He gazed from the kitchen window. The lidded bin looked reassuring, actually calming. Palin felt enormously relieved, free at last. He'd never fall for anything like that again. By God, he was going to enjoy his holiday. That was what he needed. Cats were staring down at the bin. Let them fish in it if they wanted to, they'd be disappointed.
The gathering darkness was warm. Soon he went to bed. He missed his soldiers; the room looked bare. Could he beg them back from John Hulbert? He didn't see how. Even that didn't seem to matter. He sank easily into untroubled sleep.
He was making love to a girl. Her eyes sparkled; she panted; she smiled widely, laughing—he made her feel alive as she never had before. As soon as he was free he'd gone to her. He'd dressed and run to find her. He was laughing too, as they worked together toward orgasm. He'd found her and carried her easily to bed. Her left arm lay carelessly above her head, carelessly twisted, impossibly twisted. He'd found her and dragged her out the rest of the way, as cats struggled from between her limbs.
When he awoke screaming he was lying face down on the bed, in her.
The bag had gone. Dawn twilight crawled on her face. For a moment it gave her a face, a charred fixed grin, eyes like holes in coal. Then he was screaming again, struggling with her slippery limbs; his erection nailed him in her. He began to wrench at her head. The neck gave way almost at once. The head rolled from the pillow; he heard it thud on the floor.
The thighs clamped about him in a last convulsion, stiff as rigor mortis.
The Pattern (1976)
Di seemed glad when he went outside. She was sitting on the settee, legs shoved beneath her, eyes squeezed tight, looking for the end of her novel. She acknowledged the sound of the door with a short nod, pinching her mouth as if he’d been distracting her. He controlled his resentment; he’d often felt the same way about her, while painting.
He stood outside the cottage, gazing at the spread of green. Scattered buttercups crystallised the yellow tinge of the grass. At the centre of the field a darker green rushed up a thick tree, branching, multiplying; towards the edges of the field, bushes were foaming explosions, blue-green, red-edged green. Distant trees displayed an almost transparent papery spray of green. Beyond them lay curves of hills, toothed with tiny pines and a couple of random towers, all silver as mist. As Tony gazed, sunlight spilled from behind clouds to the sound of a huge soft wind in the trees. The light filled the greens, intensifying them; they blazed.
Yes, he’d be able to paint here. For a while he had feared he wouldn’t. He’d imagined Di struggling to find her final chapter, himself straining to paint, the two of them chafing against each other in the little cottage. But good Lord, this was only their second day here. They weren’t giving themselves time. He began to pace, looking for the vantage-point of his painting.
There were patterns and harmonies everywhere. You only had to find them, find the angle from which they were clear to you. He had seen that one day, while painting the microcosm of patterns in a patch of verdure. Now he painted nothing but glimpses of harmony, those moments when distant echoes of colour or movement made sense of a whole landscape; he painted only the harmonies, abstracted. Often he felt they were glimpses of a total pattern that included him, Di, his painting, her writing, life, the world: his being there and seeing was part of the pattern. Though it was impossible to perceive the total pattern, the sense was there. Perhaps that sense was the purpose of all real art.
Suddenly he halted. A May wind was passing through the landscape. It unfurled through the tree in the field; in a few moments the trees beyond the field responded. It rippled through the grass, and the lazy grounded swaying echoed the leisurely unfolding of the clouds. All at once he saw how the clouds elaborated the shapes of the trees and bushes, subtracting colour, lazily changing their shapes as they drifted across the sky.
He had it now. The wind passed, but it didn’t matter. He could paint what he’d seen; he would see it again when the breeze returned. He was already mixing colours in his mind, feeling enjoyment begin: nobody could ever mass-produce the colours he saw. He turned towards the cottage, to tip-toe upstairs for his canvas and the rest without disturbing Di.
Behind him someone screamed.
In the distance, across the field. One scream: the hills echoed curtly. Tony had to grab an upright of the cottage porch to steady himself. Everything snapped sharp, the cottage garden, the uneven stone wall, the overgrown path beyond the wall, the fence and the wide empty flower-sprinkled field. There was nobody in sight. The echoes of the cry had stopped at once, except in Tony’s head. The violence of the cry reverberated there. Of what emotion’ Terror, outrage, disbelief, agony’ All of them’
The door slammed open behind him. Di emerged, blinking red-eyed, like an angrily aroused sleeper. ‘What’s wrong?’ she demanded nervously. ‘Was that you?’
‘I don’t know what it was. Over there somewhere.’
He was determined to be calm. The cry had unnerved him; he didn’t want her nervousness to reach him too ‘ he ignored it. ‘It might have been someone with their foot in a trap,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if I can see.’
He backed the car off the end of the path, onto the road. Di watched him over the stone wall, rather anxiously. He didn’t really expect to find the source of the cry; probably its cause was past now. He was driving away from Di’s edginess, to give her a chance to calm down. He couldn’t paint while he was aware of her nervousness.
He drove. Beside the road the field stretched placidly, easing the scream from his mind. Perhaps someone had just stumbled, had cried out with the shock. The landscape looked too peaceful for anything worse. But for a while he tried to remember the sound, some odd quality about it that nagged at him. It hadn’t sounded quite like a cry; it had sounded as if ‘ It was gone.
He drove past the far side of the field beyond the cottage. A path ran through the trees along the border; Ploughman’s Path, a sign said. He parked and ventured up the path a few hundred yards. Patches of light flowed over the undergrowth, blurring and floating together, parting and dimming. The trees were full of the intricate trills and chirrups of birds. Tony called out a few times: ‘Anyone there’ Anybody hurt?’ But the leaves hushed him.
He drove further uphill, towards the main road. He would return widely around the cottage, so that Di would could be alone for a while. Sunlight and shadow glided softly over the Cotswold hills. Trees spread above the road, their trunks lagged with ivy. Distant foliage was a bank of green folds, elaborate as coral.
On the main road he found a pub, the Farmer’s Rest. That would be good in the evenings. The London agent hadn’t mentioned that; he’d said only that the cottage was isolated, peaceful. He’d shown them photographs, and though Tony had thought the man had never been near the cottage, Di had loved it at once. Perhaps it was what her book needed.
He glimpsed the cottage through a gap in the hills. Its mellow Cotswold stone seemed concentrated, a small warm amber block beyond the tiny tree-pinned field, a mile below. The green of the field looked simple now, among the fields where sheep and cattle strolled sporadically. He was sorry he’d come so far from it. He drove towards the turn-off that would take him behind the cottage and eventually back to its road.
Di ran to the garden wall as he drove onto the path. ‘Where were you?’ she said. ‘I was worried.’
Oh Christ, he thought, defeated. ‘Just looking. I didn’t find anything. Well, I found a pub on the main road.’
She tutted at him, smiling wryly: just like him, she meant. ‘Are you going to paint?’