Isabel's Skin

  ISABEL’S SKIN

  ALMA BOOKS LTD

  London House

  243–253 Lower Mortlake Road

  Richmond

  Surrey TW9 2LL

  United Kingdom

  www.almabooks.com

  First published by Alma Books Limited in 2012

  Copyright © Peter Benson, 2012

  Peter Benson asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Printed in England by CPI Mackays

  Typeset by Tetragon

  ISBN: 978-1-84688-206-7

  eISBN: 978-1-84688-281-4

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  Other books by PETER BENSON

  published by Alma Books

  The Levels

  A Lesser Dependency

  The Other Occupant

  Odo’s Hanging

  Riptide

  A Private Moon

  The Shape of Clouds

  Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke

  ISABEL’S SKIN

  We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.

  1 Corinthians 15:51

  Contents

  Prologue

  Somerset

  London

  Norfolk

  Dorset

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  I wrote this story in a wooden house at the bottom of a thin garden. Turn your back on the sea, cross the lawn, walk past the bushes, the flower beds and the pond with the statue of a dog. Stop, take a deep breath and look.

  The house was built to face south-east. Climb five steps, watch out for the loose board, cross a veranda, open the front door and there you are, standing with the light coming in and the sound of birds in the marshes.

  The house has a bedroom at the back, a sitting room and kitchen in the front, and a small bathroom at the side. It is built of cedar planks with a felted pitched roof, two windows at the front, the door in the middle, two windows in the sides and one in the back.

  The air smells of apples, wax paper, a collection of pinned beetles and dust. These smells collect and concentrate and turn in the air, like leaves drifting through an autumn wood. There are memories in the air too, of spilt drinks and candles burning through the night, and lost days. I say the place has memories, and these are some of the memories I imagine it has, but I do not know. I cannot tell what is hidden in the walls and floors, or what the windows have seen. I know what I have seen and will tell you about the places I have been, and how they have brought me to this place and state, but that is all I will tell you. There are some things I like to be private about, and I will be.

  I have good, solid furniture, carpets and rugs, pictures of ships in rough seas and a stove in the corner of the drawing room. There is a table in the kitchen and in a cupboard a telescope that does not work. Three chairs that do not match, a salt cellar and a note on the wall that reads “Please close down the stove before leaving”. A pair of cracked plates, some white pebbles we found on the beach and puddles of hard wax on the sill. All the curtains have shrunk, so there is a gap around the bottom of the windows.

  At the back of the house is a low barn with stables for two horses, and a shed filled with old tools, lengths of wood and boxes. A water butt stands by the shed, and a lean-to with room for cut logs.

  When the wind blows the house moans, and when the sun shines it creaks, and when it rains it sighs like it wants the rain so much, and now here it is and here I am, listening all the time. I listen for a whimper and a cry, but I know it will not come. I know I wait in vain. I wait in vain, but will not be defeated.

  In the old days, my father used to allow members of the clergy to use this place for their holidays, but I do not. Since he left it to me, I keep strangers away. The clergymen go somewhere else, but I do not know where. They have their own lives and travels, and I have nothing to do with them.

  Now I have finished writing this story I must get away and do something I have never done before. With this in mind, I started to read a book about a man who travelled through the greater part of Asia to Siam, where he met the King and learnt to fight monkeys. He was an old man and he always wore a hat. He had survived snake bites as a child and grew up to become an important cartographer. I read the first page and most of the second. The man was standing outside a hotel in Glasgow, he had lost his pen and it was pouring with freezing rain. He was soaked to the skin and wrote a page about the terrible weather and how philosophers would never understand the true meaning of misery. I did not read any more of that book.

  I did not read any more because here you can sit at the kitchen table, dab your fingers in a pool of spilt milk and look out at the marshes. You can hear the bitterns boom, the knifed birds of the reeds, perfect for the place, mad and vengeful, never forgetting a slight. Or you can lie in bed and not read a book and listen to the curlews, or you can walk up the garden path, through the gate, across the road and into the marshes.

  The marshes whisper and the marshes cry and the marshes threaten. They are like someone you like but cannot trust. They never look you in the eye and they never buy a drink. They whisper behind their hands and walk with a sly smile. If you leave the paths, the ground will look safe but will lead into a swamp, and you will slip and fall and either spend your last night on earth face down in water or face up, and birds will eat your eyes. Some people say, “The marshes are so beautiful and lonely” – and they are right, but they do not know the whole story. It is too easy to say those sort of things about a place, as though beauty can hide a grave.

  So this is my house at the edge of the marshes with its roof, floors and chairs, and there go a flock of geese, and this is my house too. It is like everyone’s other house, a place where secrets, promises, dreams and terrors are kept. Mine is like this.

  It is not a lasting state, this house, but it changes every day. It holds things that never leave – the memory of the first time I saw her, the sound of her cries echoing in the night, the smell of her sweat, the feel of her – and it grows, twists and adds things to itself.

  It could be mad or it could be angry, or it could double back on itself and become taller than the tallest building in a city you visited once and wish you could see again. It could be yellow and black and talk in a language only it understands. It could whisper about careless times, or flare like a candle and become the person you loved, someone who took your life and wrenched it away. Her name could chime, and when you are so lonely and you pull her image from an envelope and stare at it in the middle of the night you know she was the love of your life and you will never forget her. You can smell her skin, the skin that hurt so much, but then the smell passes. It has gone, and before you have a chance, you find yourself screaming in the night and wailing into the day.

  It is as bad as that, as bad as the grave-digger who thinks, for a second, about what would happen if the man at the top walked away and left him there with his spade and his bucket and the block of light shining down. Or it could be a pale sky with me walking along, and skylarks are watering the air with their songs. The sky is the roof and the larks are bees in the rafters, and I wake in the middle of the night from a dream about being a more dangerous man than I am.

  I sit up, and as the wind plays with the marshes, I remember how her skin used to ripple like water under ice. I used to lea
n towards her, put my ear next to her nose and listen to her breathing. I used to do these things, but now I sit and wait and watch the wind in the marshes, and dust balls roll around my feet.

  I wait and wait, and as the night dies I lie down and fall asleep again and drift through dreams about rare books burning and syringes. But I am not disturbed. I take these things and sweep them into the corner of my head I keep away from. It is exactly like this, and I do not wonder why.

  And I remember she was wailing about ants under her skin, and when I tried to hold her she screamed, beat me off and then held on to me. Her shoulder blades were like wings folded beneath her poor skin, and I thought all I had to do was take a knife and release those wings and she would have freedom. I could have folded the flaps of skin, and feathers could have grown from her blood, like her blood was magic and I had a greater power. Her bones might have clicked and spread and sung along their edges, and my knife could have sung in return, but it did not.

  I ran my fingers over those hidden wings and kissed the back of her neck. She twitched and buried her head in the pillow. She blinked and her eyes filled with tears, but she did not have to say anything. She did not have to say anything at all. She was quiet and then she was still and there was nothing I could do. I was not lost when I found her, but I had no idea where I was.

  Somerset

  I used to be a book valuer. I was employed by an auction house. I was trusted, respected and pleased. I lived in London in comfortable rooms, and I had money in the bank. I lived alone, and although I had friends and acquaintances, I was not close to any of them. I had brown hair and blue eyes.

  Most mornings I stirred at seven and lay awake for five minutes, then got up from my bed, washed and drank a cup of tea in my kitchen. I stared at the tree in the garden next door. It was a horse chestnut, a tall, old and beautiful tree. I used to stare at it while I ate two slices of toasted bread and marmalade. I ate two slices and always spread the same sort of marmalade. It was very bitter and made the tea taste delicious. My rooms were on the top floor of a house close by Highbury Fields. Beyond, to the north and west, spread the swelling slums of the city and their cloaks and dresses of smoke and filth. I did not know these places, and I tried to keep them at a distance. I confess my ignorance, though my ignorance was not bred of disinterest. I believed the ragged should live in the minds of the fortunate, but I was still – and thought I would always be – a top-floor man.

  I dressed smartly in a black suit, white shirt and a plain tie, a fine bowler, polished brogues, and I carried a black-leather briefcase. I left my rooms at eight, bought The Times from a kiosk on the corner of my street, and caught an omnibus to work. I read the letters page and the theatre reviews, and watched my fellow passengers, the buildings we passed and the traffic.

  Most days I spent at a desk in a fine building on the Strand. I had a wide, polished desk and a view of the Thames. I loved the stinking river, the swell, the current, the barges and lighters, the wash of the tide against the walls, the colour and the promise of leaving. I loved the way the water gave the daylight life, and the way the night lights spun and reflected. Nothing remained the same. The river never slept.

  My office was large and comfortable, the walls were lined with books and catalogues, and there were a few pictures in the gaps between the shelves. A pleasant watercolour of the Norfolk coast, a brush-and-ink painting of a sleeping cat, an engraving of a vicious bittern stalking its rival through the reeds, a reproduction of a sailing yacht cutting through a rough sea. My chair was leather and I always used black ink. Always black ink and a thin nib. I suppose I lived the life of an average bachelor, settled into what I thought was comfort, inured to the city, dreaming of something else but not sure what, lost in work and habits and the conventions that cloaked my work.

  As I said, in those days I spent most of my time in London, but sometimes I was asked to break my routine and leave the city, travel to the shires and provinces, risk my tracts and stomach, drink different beer, sleep in yellow bedrooms owned by women called Mrs Lloyd or Mrs MacTavish, and eat breakfasts of huge eggs, fried bread, pork sausages and red bacon. I would be obliged to talk to insane men, or wonder about women with black eyes. There would be roads to travel, and boats to dream of. There were libraries to look at, collections to value and individual volumes to examine. One week I could be in Northumberland, the next in Inverness, maybe a month later in Sussex. Then an old house in Wales or Cheshire, or a place in Cornwall. I could never tell. I am not psychic. I am a small man. No. In my shoes, I am big enough.

  So, last year I was asked to travel to Somerset to value the collection of the late Lord Malcolm Buff-Orpington, who had spent half a lifetime collecting original editions by authors of the French Enlightenment. Why the authors of the French Enlightenment? I did not know, was not told and never found out, but collectors are like this; they have an obscure idea that grows, for no obvious reason, into something that takes on a life of its own, spreading, binding, obsessing and then trapping. And so it was with Buff-Orpington, whose original plan had been to assemble all the English editions of Voltaire published in the eighteenth century. But over the years this plan grew, and by the time of his death the Buff-Orpington collection was one of the finest of its kind and included first and second editions and pamphlets by Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and the others.

  I had a vague idea why the family were selling the collection – something to do with an irrational dislike the new Lord Buff-Orpington had for all things French – but this had nothing to do with me. The auction house had important clients waiting for my valuation, and as I left London I could smell the pages, feel the marbled covers and chipped corners and see the light foxing. I could hear the sound of old words rustling in their paragraphs and the blink of carefully placed punctuation. A complete nine-volume set of Œuvres, published in Dresden in 1748 under Voltaire’s personal supervision, had recently realized a surprising amount. If the rumours were true, the Buff-Orpington Œuvres were as close to mint as they could be.

  I suppose – in those days I supposed and wondered and considered a great deal – I should have been excited, but I left London with a sense of trepidation. I always left London with a sense of trepidation, a worry that now my routine was disturbed I would not be able to sleep properly, or I would have trouble washing. Or I would not be able to find decent bread, or get lost, or I would be unable to get my clothes laundered. So I packed more than I needed – enough for three weeks, although I was only expecting to be away for ten days – and I took my own jar of marmalade.

  I rode the railway from Paddington Station to Taunton. When I first told my father I was a regular passenger on the railways, he shook his head and said he would never be persuaded to travel faster than a horse could pull a dogcart. My father is retired now, but he used to be a parson in Dover. He used to believe mashed potato was dangerous, and when I was a child he used to frighten me with his talks, his livered hands and his huge eyebrows, and the sound of his footsteps in the corridor, but those days have passed now. Days come and days pass, and it is too easy to think you know what happened. People change and you think you knew who they were, who you were and how you reached the place you find yourself in, but you know nothing. You know nothing at all, and anyone who tells you they have found the truth has only found their truth, nothing more. As people who think they have found the truth always end up raving, foaming and talking to plain walls, so people who allow their lives to die in routine only see the edge of the world. But I do not know; sometimes I wish I could go back and meet Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, and we could sit together on a broad terrace with a view of his estate and I could ask him if he thought anything I said or thought or wrote had any merit. But maybe not. As the great man said, “I may have read widely, but I cannot remember a thing.”

  I almost enjoyed the journey, rattling out of the city, through the smoke and dirt, past the filthy houses and cottages that seemed to wish themselves closer to the tracks, leavi
ng the dust heaps and chocked streets behind. I allowed myself to enjoy a disturbed nap until we reached the first fields and the engine began to trundle at a regular speed, and then we were quickly at the business of alarming horses and frightening birds from the trees. A recent report had blamed a spark from a railway train for a fire that destroyed five acres of fine barley outside Woking, and as we passed through one particularly beautiful field, I saw a farmer standing by a gate, his stick raised in fury, his face red, his pinched daughters standing beside him like a posy.

  More than anything, I think I enjoyed the cool air. Since May, London’s smog had been particularly thick, and the summer’s damp heat had not helped matters. There had been days when I had been forced to hold a handkerchief to my face as I walked the last few yards to my office. Now, as we rode through Wiltshire, I lowered the carriage window a few inches and allowed the smutted air to wash through the compartment in the hope that I would be able to breathe some fresh. I did not, so I closed the window, sat back and dozed again.

  We reached Taunton in the middle of the afternoon. I left the train and bought a meat pie, and after a pointlessly discursive argument with a number of drivers, managed to secure the services of a man who was prepared to carry me the twenty or so miles to Buff-Orpington’s home, Belmont Hall, outside the village of Ashbrittle.

  “It’s a fair way,” he said, patting his horse, “and there’s hills he’ll have to climb.”

  “Get me there before nightfall and I’ll make it worth your while.” I gave him a wide, gay smile, and patted my jacket pocket.

  The man shrugged, took my case, threw it up, and with a crack of his whip we were off, down the hill from the station, through the streets of the old town, a bustling market and onto the main road.