Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [9]
In the smaller space of this room it was impossible not to feel a kind of force emanating from Paris. This lay not so much in any distinction of bearing as in the potential for damage that seemed to invest him, conveyed by something awkward in his movements, something constrained or perhaps not fully coordinated. Sitting there in his thick black suit, impassive now that grimace of a smile had faded, with his pale eyes and long, furrowed face turned attentively to his hostess, the stranger looked somehow as if the space wasn’t enough, as if he might break into disastrous action.
It was the chief fear of Mrs Kemp, as she afterwards confessed, that her nephew might break something. ‘I was on the edge of my seat the whole time Matthew was in the room,’ she said. ‘So unsettling.’ Her voice, as always, threatening to expire before the final syllables were reached.
She had joined them for tea, in this room she loved best in the house, with its pale green brocaded chairs and little oval tables, its lawn curtains admitting a discreet view of the street and the opposite house fronts, its cabinets of things she had had from her mother, things precious to her, tea-sets, Dresden figurines, the prized collection of china pomanders and pill-boxes – all well within reach of her nephew’s arm.
She was fond of Matthew, who was her sister’s son, and had always followed his career with interest, in spite of seeing him only rarely. She often spoke of him, a fact galling to Erasmus, though his pride would not allow him to show it. Her pity and distress at her nephew’s misfortune she disguised in accustomed weariness and these exaggerated fears that he might break something. With a husband and a son always ready to correct her errors of feeling, she had learned disguise long ago.
‘Yes,’ she said in her expiring tones, ‘I was prepared for the very worst.’
And yet the movements of his hands were precise enough, his management of shallow saucer and small-handled cup and diminutive spoon beyond reproach. It was an uneasy constraint of body, not any evident clumsiness, that gave others a sense of possible disaster. And it was obvious that he was strong.
‘He quite wearied me out,’ Mrs Kemp said. ‘And then, of course, knowing that he had not been long out of prison …’
‘You think his capacity for wreckage was thereby increased?’ Kemp asked. Though not given to regarding himself with any degree of irony – and perhaps because of this – he had stores of it for his wife.
‘Well, it restricts them, doesn’t it?’ she said in a reasonable tone. ‘My nephew has been kept within close bounds. Now that he is restored to society, it would not be surprising if he felt a need to move himself about.’
It astonished Erasmus – who had never understood his mother – that she seemed so little sensible of the disgrace her sister’s son had brought on the family. From her manner of speaking about it Paris might as well have just emerged from some illness.
‘You can say what you like,’ she said. ‘I thought him charming. And his manners, for the occasion, a good deal better than those of some’ – this last a rebuke, more direct than she usually had energy for, to her son for his brusqueness, which she had not failed to see.
The manners were a source of amazement to Paris himself. A man whose heart feels dead within him, whose desire it is to disappear from the face of the earth, who is about to take employment on a slaveship as a first step to this, still balancing his cup, passing the sugar, writhing politely on a hard chair.
However, such is our nature, what begins as social pretence quite often becomes a reality of feeling. He saw his aunt’s face near his own, marks of sympathy in it as well as petulance and hypochondria, and he found himself drawn to her. The lines of strain on his face softened as he observed her fussing to settle her skirts, watched the play of her scented