The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [69]
He stopped again. Frank waited, his own hands folded.
“There was a stench. I noticed it, I think, before I opened the door. She was on her bed. She was quite dead. She was a mass of raw, open wounds and blood, and blood. The edges of the pools of it were congealing, like glaze, on the surface of her thighs, and on the linoleum.”
“Yes,” said Frank, to interrupt the flow.
“She had run about, all over the room, pouring blood, grasping at things with bloody fingers, the marks were everywhere. I couldn’t look at her face—it was simply a mass of bloody knobs—”
“Yes,” said Frank, more firmly. He said “What did you do?”
“I stepped back, and closed the door, and went home to my lodgings. What else could I do?”
“Called the police?”
“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. It was too late for help. And I became—ill, sick, debilitated.” He came to a stop. “This is all?” said Frank. “All? It is a horror.”
“But not a horror of which you are—by your own account—guilty.”
How to find the voice of a confessor, or a judge. It slipped across Frank’s mind to wonder whether Fludd had really killed the woman, in a brainstorm, and was either lying or had forgotten. And it slipped into his mind to wonder whether the story was made up, either to hurt him, Frank, with, or to feed Fludd’s appetite for horror. Fludd said
“I am not lying, you know.” Then he said
“I am faithful to her, involuntarily. I do not love my wife, as I promised to do. There are thick walls between us. She is a beautiful woman, who expects to be desired, and I do not—often—desire her. I should not have married her.”
“It is very late to say that,” said the priest.
“She is a stupid woman. A plucked chicken in a serge carapace. Sometimes I think she has no soul.”
“You promised to love and cherish her.”
“I have tried. I may sneer to you, now, but I have tried. There is no love in our house. I am not the only one guilty of that.”
“I cannot judge, there.”
“I am not asking you to judge. Or to interfere. If I thought you had the nous or nerve to interfere I wouldn’t talk to you. Look at you shaking. You will pretend this—confession—has never happened.”
“I expect it was partly your intention to make me shake. What do you expect me to do?”
“Nothing, nothing, nobody can do anything. I shall go home and slide for a time into my private compartment of Hell. I am horribly afraid—always—of never finding the way out or of—”
“Or—?” Frank prompted. But Fludd had come to the end of his confession, just as abruptly as he had begun it. He stood up, and stumbled out of the church without a backward glance.
Frank Mallett had thought to himself that what had been “confessed” was not what Fludd had come to confess. He lived for a few weeks in fear of Fludd doing something to harm himself, or his family, or some outsider—he had been afraid of something in the future, and had confessed something far in the past. Fludd did indeed enter a black period, alternately swearing and breaking pots, or taking long solitary marches along the shingle beach at Dungeness, waving his arms, and shouting at the sky. Frank Mallett made timid attempts to visit Sera-phita and “bring her out” and Seraphita, remorselessly, made minimal tea-party comments on the weather, or the jam, or the servants, and waited for him to go away. Geraint’s schoolwork suffered when Fludd was in a black mood. His arithmetic deteriorated. So did his Latin translation. And then one day—or so Frank imagined it, for he was not, naturally, present at the time—Benedict Fludd shook himself, and went back into his studio and began beating out wedges of clay.
The two friends cycled into Winchelsea on a very hot summer day, to discuss the preparation of a series of lectures, in Lydd, for the darker months in the autumn. They took paths across the Walland Marsh and along the Camber Sands, which covered the drowned town of Old Winchelsea, as though it had never been. They