Arms and the Women

Get back to normal, she’d told herself, and then recalled that this was also what she’d told herself after Rosie’s illness and had soon come to an understanding that normal wasn’t just a sequence of repeated activities, but a condition like virginity which could never be regained.

But she’d followed the pattern of her normal day, retreating (a nice religious word for what sometimes felt like a nice religious activity) to the boxroom which she refused to call a study. Real writers had studies and you weren’t a real writer till you got something published. Well, she had hopes. The rejection of her third attempt at a novel might have driven her to despair had it not come at the time of Rosie’s illness when despair wasn’t a place she had any desire to visit, and certainly not for the sake of anything as unimportant as a sodding book!

As Rosie started to recover, Ellie had started to write again, but just as her daughter seemed in her play to have turned away from the games of imagination which had once been her favourite territory, so the mother now found herself toying with characters and situations from long ago rather than the snapshot here-and-now realism she’d hitherto thought of as her forte.

She’d pursued this new line without questioning, even after she realized that it wasn’t likely to lead to anything she could submit for publication. But it was… fun? Yes, it was certainly that. But, like the fun of children, like child’s play, it was learning also. Here was something important to her at that time in those circumstances, but also in other times and future circumstance maybe. During her previous existence as a lecturer, a colleague who ran a Creative Writing course had moaned to her that he spent far too much time dealing with the hang-ups of students who clearly regarded narrative fiction as a branch of therapy rather than a branch of art. Now she knew what he meant. Therapy you kept to yourself. Art took you, trembling, in front of the footlights.

She brought this perspective to bear on her rejected third novel. Suddenly she found herself asking paragraph by paragraph the two essential questions. Is this really so important to me I’ve got tosay it? Is this potentially so interesting to readers, they’ll have to read it?

And for a whole week without saying anything to Peter or anyone else, she had launched a savage attack upon her holy script, like Moses going at the tablets with a sledgehammer. The result had been… she had no idea what the result had been, except that before, the book had read clever and now it felt like it read true. A deep distress has humanized my soul…? Well, maybe. Three days ago she’d sent it off to the publisher who’d rejected its previous manifestation. Her accompanying note said, Last time you said it showed promise but… So tell me what it shows now. Only this time I’d appreciate it if you told me quick!

And then she’d returned to the therapy of her tale of old, parodic, far-off things and battles long ago. Self-indulgence is the novelist’s greatest sin, but here she could indulge herself to her heart’s, and her head’s, content. Here she could mock, mimic, talk dirty, wax sentimental, be anarchic, anachronistic, anything she wanted. Here she had power without responsibility, for she was writing solely for herself. No one else was going to read this. She ruled alone in this world, its normalities were whatever she made them. Or, to put it rather less grandiloquently, this was her comfort blanket she could pick up and chew whenever her fragile sensibilities felt the need. So that’s what she called it in her computer. Comfort Blanket. It was still unfinished but so what? The real pleasure was being able to go back over it again and again, changing things, trying new things out.

Nice if life were like that, she thought as she switched on her laptop. Call it up, click on Edit, and cut, copy, find, replace, delete…

Her words suddenly came from nowhere to fill the screen. She smiled. To her essentially non-technological mind, it was still magic.

Now where had she got up to in her revision? Oh yes. There it was.

Chapter 2

As they came down from the headland, the storm died, not a belly-wound death, but quick as an arrow through the heart. One moment the wind off the sea threatened to whirl them along with the racing tatters of low grey cloud, the next the air was still and balmy and the full moon, riding in a star-studded sky, lit the camp site below like a thousand lanterns.

Hadn’t she used that simile before? So what? Homer used his stock images over and over. Get obsessed with novelty and you ended up with a wardrobe full of lovely clothes you could never wear again.

Here, those so tired that they’d slept despite the howling wind were now aroused by the sudden silence. Men began to busy themselves drying offthe weapons and armour which had got soaked in the storm, while the women started building up the tiny fires which were all they’d dared kindle in face of the gale. But all activity stopped as they became aware of the approaching procession.

The Greek came first, his hands bound behind his back and the guard commander’s sword resting lightly against his neck. For all that, he managed to look like a returning traveller greeting old friends, head held high, teeth showing bright through the tangle of beard as he smiled this way and that, nose wrinkling appreciatively at the smell of cooking already arising from one or two fires.

But his eyes were never still, drinking in every detail of the camp.

Bringing up the rear was the wounded guard. He gripped his bleeding left wrist tightly with his right hand and his face showed white as moonlight beneath the weather-beaten skin.

‘What’s up, mate?’ called someone.

‘Bloody Greek spy. Nearly took my fucking hand off. Bastard!’

‘That right? Don’t worry, we’ll chop more than his hand off before we’re finished.’

The guard commander said mildly, ‘Glad to see you’re so keen for action, soldier. You can take over up the headland. Go on, don’t hang about. Could be there’s a whole army of Greeks landing there already.’

The word Greeks buzzed quickly through the camp, and soon the way ahead was blocked bya crowd of men, many with their weapons out. Unperturbed, the prisoner advanced at the same steady pace, forcing them to retreat before him, till someone at the rear set up a cry of, ‘The Prince! The Prince!’ and the men moved to either side, leaving a path clear.

Two men had emerged from the sole substantial shelter in the camp, a small pavilion erected in the lee of a huge boulder which had shielded it from the worst of the storm. One was grey-bearded and bent with the weight of years, the other young, slim, upright, with still, watchful eyes set in a narrow clean-shaven face.

Suddenly the fat man sank to his knees and prostrated himself with his face pressed against the young man’s sandals.

‘Have mercy, great Prince,’ his muffled voice pleaded. ‘Like the gods you are clearly descended from, take pity on this poor miserable wretch whose only hope for life and succour lies in your infinite generosity.’

The young man didn’t look impressed.

‘What’s this you’ve brought us, Achates?’ he asked.

Succinctly the guard commander told his story.

‘So, a Greek, you say? And probably a spy?’

A cry of protest rose from the recumbent man, cut off sharply as Achates pressed the point of his sword into his neck.

‘Could be. Shall I set him on a griddle over a slow fire for half an hour till he’s ready to tell us?’

A murmur of approval went up from the listening men, but the Prince said gravely, ‘This is not how our religion has taught us to treat the wayworn traveller who comes as a guest in our midst. Let food and dry clothing be brought, and when he is refreshed, I shall talk to him to discover what manner of man he is and his purpose in coming here.’

The fat man began to gabble fulsome thanks, but the Prince silenced him with a sharp movement of his foot and went on, ‘Nevertheless, heat up the griddle in case I am not satisfied.’

The Prince disengaged his foot and Achates prodded the Greek upright with his sword. Two young women came forward, one with some clothing, the other with a bronze platter piled high with steaming food.

‘That smells grand. I’m right grateful, lord. Only I need a hand to eat with.’

‘Only one?’ said Achates, raising his weapon. ‘Which would you like to keep?’

‘Nay, not so hasty,’ said the Greek, starting back. ‘Hang about.’

He flexed his broad shoulders, took a deep breath, bowed forward, his body hunched, and with a single convulsive movement, he snapped the length of cloth which bound his wrists.

At this moment the doorbell rang and Ellie, dragged back from the dangerous world of her imagination to the equally dangerous world of her life, knocked over the cup.

‘Fuck!’ she said, jumping up and shaking the coffee from the keyboard.

Amazingly, when she finished, the screen still displayed her story but for safety’s sake she saved and switched off.

The doorbell was ringing again.

Even the knowledge that Detective Constable Dennis Seymour was sitting in his car right opposite the house didn’t prevent her from checking on the bellringer from behind the curtains like any suburban housewife in a sitcom.

It was her friend, Daphne Aldermann, full of eager curiosity after having been intercepted and checked out by the watching policeman. After a short hiatus to pour herself and her guest a nerve-soothing Scotch – once you got on Dr Dalziel’s books, you followed his prescriptions to the bitter end – she had launched into the narrative with mock-heroic gusto, and thence to the calmer pleasures of self-analysis. As a long-time opponent of all forms of violent action, she felt it necessary to explain in detail to Daphne, who had no objection whatsoever to a bit of violence in a good cause, what had provoked her to physical assault.

‘It was using Rosie that did it,’ she said. ‘It was my own guilt feelings that really exploded, I suppose.’

‘Your guilt feelings?’

Daphne wasn’t Dalziel and she certainly wasn’t that nebby infant, Novello.

She gave her a version of the confession she’d rehearsed when talking to the Fat Man, ending with, ‘So you see what a mixed-up cow I’ve turned into. I feel like that base Indian – in Hamlet, is it? –who threw away the pearl richer than all his tribe. Only I got it back.’

‘Othello, I think. And the point was he had no idea that what he’d got had any value at all. And you didn’t throw Rosie away anyway,’ said Daphne Aldermann sensibly. ‘And you’ve always been a mixed-up cow, so no change there.’

It was, she felt, in her relationship with Ellie Pascoe, her avocation to be sensible. In upbringing, outlook and circumstance, the two women were light years apart. But the mad scientist of chance had chosen to set their opposing particles on a collision course some years earlier, and while a great deal of energy had been released, it had been through fusion rather than fission.