Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(11)

“Thank you,” says Constance.

She warms up, eats chicken and soup, hears ice-storm stories from the others. Narrow escapes, frights, quick thinking. They tell one another how lucky they are, ask one another if there’s any way they can help. It’s companionable here, it’s friendly, but Constance can’t stay long. She needs to go back to the house, because Ewan must be waiting.

Once there she creeps from one cold room to another, calling softly as if to a frightened cat: “Ewan, come back! I love you!” Her own voice echoes in her head. Finally she climbs the stairs to the attic and opens the trunk with the mothballs. It’s only clothes. They lie there, flattened, inert. Wherever else Ewan is, he’s not here.

She was always afraid to push that question before, the question of the affair. She wasn’t an idiot, she knew what he was doing, though not who with: she could smell it on him. But she was terrified that Ewan might leave her the way Gavin had. She couldn’t have survived that.

And now he has left her. He’s gone silent. He’s gone.

But though he’s gone from the house, he can’t be gone from the universe, not altogether. She won’t accept that. He must be somewhere.

She needs to concentrate.

She goes into the study, sits in Ewan’s chair, stares at the blank screen of her computer. Ewan must have wanted to save Alphinland; he didn’t want it to be fried by an electrical spasm. This was why he ordered her to shut down the computer. But what was his reason for doing that? Alphinland isn’t his territory: secretly he hated its fame, he thought it was silly, he was humiliated by its intellectual shallowness. He resented her deep immersion in it, even while indulging her about it. And he’s excluded from it, from her private world: invisible bars keep him out. They’ve always kept him out, ever since they met. He can’t go in there.

Or can he? Maybe he can. Maybe the rules of Alphinland no longer hold, because the hexed ashes have done their work and the ancient charms are broken. That’s why Gavin was able to pop open the lid of his cask last night and turn up in Constance’s house. And if Gavin can get out of Alphinland, it stands to reason that Ewan can get in. Or could get drawn in, if only by the lure of the forbidden.

That must be where he’s gone. He’s passed through the gateway in the turreted stone wall, he’s in there now. He’s following the dim, winding road, he’s crossing the moonlit bridge, he’s entering the hushed, precarious wood. Soon he’ll reach the shadowy crossroads, and then which way will he turn? He’ll have no idea. He’ll get lost.

He’s already lost. He’s a stranger to Alphinland, he doesn’t know its dangers. He’s runeless, he’s weaponless. He has no allies.

Or he has no allies but her. “Wait for me, Ewan,” she says. “Wait right there!” She’ll have to go in and find him.





REVENANT




Reynolds bustles into the living room, carrying two pillows. An indeterminate number of years ago, those two pillows billowing upward from Rey’s encircling arms like two plump, inflatable breasts, soft but firm, would have suggested to Gavin the real breasts, equally soft but firm, that were hidden underneath. He might have hammered together a clever metaphor incorporating, for example, two sacks of feathers, and, by way of them, two sexually receptive chickens. Or possibly – because of the bounciness, the resilience, the rubberiness – two trampolines.

Now, however, these pillows recall – in addition to the breasts – an overdone avant-garde production of Richard the Third they’d seen in a park the previous summer. Reynolds made them go; she said it was good for Gavin to get out of his rut and be in the outdoors and expose himself to new concepts, and Gavin said he would rather just be in the outdoors and expose himself, and Rey nudged him playfully with her elbow and said, “Bad Gavvy!” It was one of her kittenish tropes to pretend that Gavin was a dysfunctional pet. Not so far from the truth, he thinks bitterly: he hasn’t yet taken to crapping on the carpet and destroying the furniture and whining for meals, but close.

On their expedition to the park, Reynolds took a packsack with a plastic sheet to sit on and a couple of car rugs in case Gavin got chilled, and two thermoses, one of hot cocoa and one containing vodka martinis. Her plan was transparent: if Gavin complained too much she would dose him with alcohol and cover him up with the car rugs and hope he’d go to sleep so she could immerse herself in the deathless bard.

The plastic sheet was a good idea, as it had rained in the afternoon and the grass was damp. Secretly hoping for more rain so he could go home, Gavin settled himself onto the car rug and complained that his knees hurt, and also he was hungry. Reynolds had foreseen both of these areas of disgruntlement: out came the RUB A535, with Antiphlogistene – one of Gavin’s favourite examples of meaningless words – and a salmon salad sandwich. “I can’t read the f*cking program,” said Gavin, not that he wanted to. Rey handed him the flashlight, and also a magnifier. She’s up to most of his dodges.

“This is exciting!” she said in her best Miss Sunshine voice. “You’re going to enjoy it!” Gavin had a twinge of remorse: she has such a touching belief in his innate capacity to enjoy himself. He could do it if he tried, she claims: his problem is that he’s too negative. They’ve had this conversation more than once. He’ll reply that his problem is that the world reeks, so why doesn’t she stop trying to fix him and concentrate on that? And she will reply that reekiness is in the nose of the sniffer, or some other exercise in Kantean subjectivism – not that she’d know Kantean subjectivism if she fell over it – and why doesn’t he take up Buddhist meditation?