These Our Monsters Page 12

  The wife lies on the bed and turns away from her husband. ‘I know that I am hideous,’ she says. ‘I am happy to have married you, and you have done everything you should have at dinner. But I cannot ask you to do everything that a husband does with a wife. I am content for us just to live together. We do not have to have sex, if you don’t want to. It’s your choice.’

  ‘I chose to be your husband,’ Gawain replies. ‘I choose to do everything with you that a husband does with a wife. If it is your choice too.’

  Dame Ragnelle turns back towards her husband and she is suddenly beautiful. Her features have retreated, her teeth have shrunk and turned bright white, her hands are no longer claws. She is suddenly as beautiful as she was ugly before. Gawain is amazed. His amazement can be read plainly on his face. He sawe her the fayrest creature that evere he sawe.

  ‘Jesus Christ, what are you?’

  ‘I am your wife.’

  ‘Yes, but you are beautiful. Just a minute ago, you were the ugliest woman I have ever seen. Forgive me if I’m unable to remain entirely calm.’ Gawain sits down on the bed with his wife. He is unable to stand it; he is unable to stand.

  ‘You have another choice to make,’ she tells him. ‘Either I am ugly during the day, when all the world can see me, and beautiful at night, when only you can see me, or I am beautiful in the day when all the world can see me, and ugly at night when only you can see me. You must either go to bed with an ugly woman or have the world believe that you are going to bed with an ugly woman. You must either go to bed with a beautiful woman or have the world believe you are going to bed with a beautiful woman. Which is it, Gawain?’

  Gawain says nothing for a while. Perhaps he is considering his options. If he is, he gives no signs. He is immobile, implacable, resolute. Then he takes her hand, and says: ‘The choice is yours to make.’

  Dame Ragnelle smiles, and rises to kiss him. ‘That is the right answer,’ she says. ‘I was cursed,’ she explains. ‘I was cursed by my step-mother. She was an evil bitch. She transfigured me into the woman you saw before and told me that nothing would lift the spell except the love of a courteous man. And now that you have not only married me but treated me with respect, though you thought I was the most hideous thing you had ever seen, the curse will be lifted, and I will be beautiful all the time.’

  ‘Great,’ he says, and they get into bed.

  Here endythe the weddyng of

  Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnelle

  For helpyng of Kyng Arthoure.

  Capture

  Adam Thorpe

  ‘TELL ME ABOUT THE CASTLE,’ said Louisa, wishing it had more shadow to it.

  Her cousin William turned and cried, ‘You don’t want to know, Lou!’ He was adopting a dramatic pose, arms flung out, the sea just beyond him. Louisa immediately realised that he knew absolutely nothing about the place. Hugh, his friend from Charterhouse, making up the expedition’s foursome along with Dorothy, would even pronounce it wrongly, with a hard ‘g’. Tintaggle!

  ‘Why won’t I want to know?’ She set her brush chiming prettily in the water-bowl, clouds of cerulean blue billowing out like the myth of a Cornish summer. William wasn’t handsome, precisely, but then he wasn’t plain, either. She knew this from the judgements of her friends over the years and especially those of Dorothy. Dorothy had suggested the trip to Cornwall in the first place. It was Dorothy, in fact, who had resolved the absence of chaperones by recruiting her own uncle and aunt – Aunt Becka and Uncle Jack. William had faint hairs, a kind of juvenile suggestion of maleness, delicately sketched on the end of his chin, but his jacket smelt of rich tobacco.

  ‘Because it is ugly,’ he said. ‘Knights hacking away at each other with swords like cleavers.’

  Louisa laughed, deliberately surprising him. ‘What a lark,’ she cried.

  She saw, in one of her customary vivid flashes, huge men covered in dark plates clanking and shouting, the occasional limb sliced through, blood jetting out onto the grass which sprouted on the broken walls as well as underfoot. Then the smaller sounds came into her ears: a grunting, a cursing, the splash of life blood on the stones and the flower-strewn earth. Mostly it terrified and disgusted her, although a morsel of it thrilled. She recognised none of the words that came to her: it wasn’t English, nor was it French. Maybe it was Cornish, which was no longer a living language save in the mouths of very old and mostly unfriendly folk.

  Louisa wanted to leave this spot as you leave a shadowy corner near damp rocks. She had the curious sensation that the corner was pursuing her on thin legs, even though she was going nowhere. She was very much installed on the ruined wall, with her cushion, her portable materials in their little wooden suitcase, small rolls of canvas and her sketchbook. The wind was blustery, as it probably always was here on the westernmost promontory of the British Isles. Yet she felt the dampness. She felt it sliding down her throat like a horrible medicine.

  ‘William,’ she enquired, ‘how long do you wish to stay?’

  ‘Well,’ he glanced at his pocket-watch, ‘a little more than twenty minutes!’

  ‘Twenty minutes?’

  ‘The extent of our sojourn here this morning so far.’

  That was impossible. She had already stayed a lifetime. Two hours at least. The breeze had brushed her bones. She had completed several feeble sketches and William had smoked his pipe down to the ash.

  She was bored by his teasing. Suddenly she asked, as if wanting to show she was unimpressed by it, ‘How old is the castle?’

  William shifted on his little folding chair. He had no idea, evidently. To most people, the ruins were like any other ruins: heaps of stone blocks loosely cemented together by a sort of ancient, crumbling mortar into precarious walls, chunks bitten out of them like traces of hungry rats in cheese, the grass – along with clumps of wild garlic or bluebells or red campion – shivering and shaking beneath ancient mullions and sprouting from loaves of sand-worn sills. Where there was a roof, the slate tiles looked ready to slide off onto innocent heads. Seagulls occupied any available space like flapping sheets of used blotting paper, then wheeled away in the stronger gusts that occasionally had the two of them seizing their work, the wetter patches of watercolour sending dark worms of colour across the paper, to remain for good once dry.

  William, by all but refusing to paint, idling with his pipe, made her feel over-zealous. Yet Louisa knew that he was a jolly good painter, able to describe anything (from rocks to a stormy sea) in a mere handful of strokes, whether the brush was laden or scratchy. It was unfair, as if lassitude and laziness were in league with the appropriate gods.

  ‘William, I am growing cold. This is not a place for sitting still.’

  ‘Not even for a few minutes?’

  She had initially ignored his teasing, but now the irritation began to swirl in too fiercely. He had a persistent, rather dull way of teasing which grew vexatious, like an inflammation. ‘I wish it had been a mere few minutes. Instead, we have fixed ourselves here to no great effect for well over an hour.’

  He laughed again, reaching into his jacket’s top pocket and glancing at the handsome fob on its thin chain. ‘According to my grandfather’s timepiece,’ he persisted, ‘it is twenty minutes since we unfolded our stools and set to.’ The watchchain glinted in the abrupt sunshine. Gleefully, it seemed to Louisa.

  She bent her head a little, tucking stray elements of her pinned-up hair back into place. His persistence was embarrassing. She had her own elegant watch on her wrist, as flat as a tapeworm, but she had forgotten to check it on arrival. The watch was new, a gift from her dear godmother, and she was not yet accustomed to it. She had, however, glanced at her wrist at some point after starting to paint, when (this being the phrase that trotted gaily and repeatedly through her mind, like a refrain in a musical comedy) she was already bored and not a little chilled. Three o’clock, it had said. Now it was announcing past four o’clock and her shawl was no match for the colder gusts, and her legs under the long thick s
kirt had cramp. ‘And is twenty minutes,’ she ventured, ‘your threshold of tolerance?’

  ‘Tolerance of what?’

  ‘Of sitting on a blowy clifftop with your imminent fiancée?’ Her eyes slid towards him and, if she wasn’t mistaken, she saw the beginnings of a blush.

  It was clear that her favourite cousin recognised that she wasn’t being serious, that it was the usual ‘giddy’ Louisa at play to snag his attention, but that to have laughed would have been rude. She was dropped on her head by accident when only a few months old by her ayah in Calcutta and rumours of a bruise on the brain persisted. It was all nonsense, of course – that she was in any way damaged! – but she knew the family maintained their doubts. Her occasional eccentricities passed without remark, which gave her a certain advantage. He was confused because he was so fond of her (and perhaps in love with her) that her quirks evidently seemed to him an integral part of his affection.

  A sudden glow of bright sun passed over his face, of which she felt the warmth soon enough, and was then obliterated by a cloud. She was enjoying her customary spell of power, brief and curious: being able to control her cousin’s feelings, to touch them, prod them out of the shadows would always thrill her with this deep pleasure, rare though it was. She had not felt this as a child, meeting William for the first time, the little blonde boy only a year or two younger than herself, when she was freshly returned from India. They had met several times a year since, which made them an occasional fixture to each other, like a jovial tennis match, between long anecdotal letters. A fixture, nevertheless, to anticipate with a gentle pulse of pleasure.

  Today, when the four of them had formed into pairs well over an hour ago, agreement had been reached. She and William were to capture in their sketchbooks the castle and its grassy grounds (really, just tumbled stones losing the race over centuries to wild Nature and the sea-churning elements), Dorothy and Hugh to compose Tennysonian poems. Their chaperones were reading compact, grave-looking books in which feathers had been inserted to mark pages, occasionally glancing in their direction for duty’s sake, because they were in a world of cliffs and heaving sea. But these two elders in their heavy and voluminous dark togs were not only well out of earshot, as everything was – thanks to the sea crashing below – they were also mostly out of sight around the rocky corner. Almost a symbolic presence, in fact.

  At moments, Louisa imagined the entire promontory as being swept free of people, followed by the rest of the island of Britain, and then terra firma in general.

  That evening, like the one before, they took it in turns to read aloud in front of a roaring wood fire in the stolid, brand new King Arthur Hotel with its soft carpets and brightly coloured murals, while Dorothy’s aunt and uncle were again nodding in a similitude of appreciation. Louisa had no interest whatsoever in William as her future personified, nor in his dull poems, but simply as an endearing and much-loved relation. Yet there was a faint suggestion in the whole thing of audacity, of possibility.

  ‘Look at the coloured light splashing on the wall,’ she abruptly pointed out: the fire was bright enough to dance on the bare stone walls of this large communal room where the modern tapestries had left the viewer an area of imaginative grace. The smell of burning logs and thick wool carpets mingled confusingly with Dorothy’s over-applied jasmine scent. All their cheeks glowed.

  Hugh stirred in his faux-medieval chair with its high back, his neck garlanded with red spots from the skin rubbing on his starched collar, cradling a delicate balloon of ginger ale and brandy. ‘Where do you think this fellow, Earl Richard, slept?’ He had turned towards Dorothy, who frowned back. Louisa wished his pronunciation of his ‘rs’ had more sinew. As it was, each threatened to crumble like a ripple in dry sand.

  ‘Nowhere in this room,’ Louisa quickly replied for Dorothy, whose knowledge of the place and Arthurian history in general was self-confessedly thin, ‘as the place did not exist in the twelfth century.’

  William chuckled. ‘Built last year,’ he nodded. His ambition, Louisa knew, was to be an architect and build homes fit for (very wealthy) lords.

  Hugh looked up sharply. ‘Of course I knew that. It’s the spit of our new block in Charterhouse, as it happens. But if the room had existed back then …’

  Hugh had turned his stupidity into a jesting game. That’s how these boys escaped consequences. The wind off the sea was like a gently scolding mother, slapping the building but never with real violence. It made the pale, freshly carved mullioned windows shudder, and puffed bitter smoke from the fireplace into the room by way of the ornate chimney. Aunt Becka had nodded off and was now lightly snoring. Until someone smiled at this, it would be embarrassing. Nobody volunteered.

  The following day, they departed the hotel on a breakfast of eggs and kippers and returned to Tintagel Castle using the new, cemented footpath, each armed with a sturdy local walking stick. Their guardians were absent, as Aunt Becka had declared herself ill from an oyster and Uncle Jack wished to stay and care for her. A hotel servant, bearded like a pirate with saltworn cheeks and a somewhat gruff temperament, accompanied them instead. The steps, albeit of clean white concrete, still felt perilous to anyone with a poor head for heights: the sea swayed and crashed into foam far below, the silhouetted ruin might have been made of sand on a beach. They passed what appeared to be an original wall of dark stone (a fragment that included an ancient timeworn window), then a complete hut with its slates mostly intact, crouching at the base of the castle’s remains like the home of a primitive Briton in the days of the Round Table.

  ‘The ancient groundsman’s cottage,’ Hugh suggested, without a trace of irony, which made the others laugh.

  ‘What’s so amusing?’ he asked, in a miffed tone.

  ‘I fear that the girls think you are too thoroughly trapped in modern times,’ William suggested, sparking a further round of laughter from everyone but Hugh (and the Cornishman, who was sucking with intensity on his clay pipe). A reminder of the kippers suddenly broke into Louisa’s mouth like an unwelcome guest. She felt faintly out of breath, as if she had a lung condition. Which she most decidedly did not have.

  Their party, as determined as any Alpine expedition, was now tackling the steeper steps, mounting the rock in zig-zag fashion accompanied by squeaks of the metal frame bolted to the cliff. It was a little daring, physically: the servant was clearly stretching them, or else he was ignorant of the true capacities of gentlefolk, or he wished their numbers reduced. The party stopped and stood in a line holding tight to the hand-rail that saved any foolhardy visitors from slipping over, while Louisa – being the appointed literary expert – shouted out the story of Tristan and Iseult above the wind. Their questions were posed as if they were all on a school outing, which caused great mirth. The first was the difference between the names Isolde and Iseult. There was none at all, or not one that meant anything beyond matters of spelling. Hugh’s questioning sounded sluggish.

  ‘Who was this … Iseult?’ The name came out shakily.

  ‘The wife of Morholt of Ireland,’ Louisa said. She wished they could move on from a spot that felt steep and perilous.

  Dorothy asked: ‘How did she become the betrothed of Tristan?’

  ‘After Morholt’s defeat,’ Louisa’s voice was now barely audible even to herself over the smashing of the waves, ‘she was sent for by Tristan’s uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, who intended to marry her. She had, of course, no say in the matter: these were primitive times, many hundreds of years ago.’ She suddenly felt cross, as if she were reliving a story she had personally experienced. Why should men be always so authoritative?

  ‘So King Mark gave Tristan the task of fetching Iseult from Ireland,’ she continued. ‘One has to imagine boats fluttering flags, a proper royal escort, all that sort of jolly caper.’

  ‘Which would be very satisfying,’ William said, shielding his eyes from a dazzle that suddenly crossed his face like a theatre light, ‘if the escorted happened to be oneself.’

&nb
sp; Dorothy looked genuinely chilled, with a blue-tinted nose. She was gripping the rail with gloved fingers. Hugh’s eyes were closed in apparent private meditation.

  ‘King Mark’s young nephew,’ Louisa went on, enjoying herself at last, as if her audience had grown large and captivated, ‘was barely older than Iseult herself.’ She was shouting above the surf, which was trying to scale the cliffs with foamy white fingers. ‘On the way, a mischievous elf called Dill’ – she had invented this agreeable detail, as was her wont – ‘slipped a love potion into the two young people’s drink.’

  Dorothy blushed and William had grown visibly uncomfortable. Hugh did not react at all. Could this be, Louisa mused – not without a pulse of jealousy – the stage curtain twitching open on a secret? (She had fallen for Hugh last year in London, having watched him play a terrific game of Old Carthusians’ rugby at Charterhouse, and then promptly recovered from the madness on sitting opposite him at dinner, where his capacity for making remarks as hearty as they were empty was on display.) She had now adopted the theatrical stance of someone reciting lines of poetry, an art which she had learnt at her own intimate little school in Hampstead, and began a recitation which was repeatedly snatched away by the sea-crash.

  None, unless the saints above,

  Knew the secret of their love …

  William started clapping prematurely, as if Louisa’s delivery had suggested a climax, but she glowered at him with such intensity that he immediately desisted, blinking in embarrassment. The gulls screeching over the swaying brine were showing an equal lack of respect for literary performance.

  ‘When King Mark discovered his wife’s adultery, he was frightfully cross, understandably. He wished to execute the couple by hanging and burning.’ Louisa had forgotten who was to suffer which punishment. She hoped no one would notice. Dorothy spoke up, but only to remark on the cruelty of those times and to say she very much hoped it was time for tea and scones.