A Passion For Lord Pierrot Part 2

Barefoot and naked they run down to the rock where the dependable little boat has moored itself. They climb aboard, Lord Pierrot sitting astern with Daphne Dolores sprawled between his shrunken thighs. He gives the command to steer for the sh.o.r.e.

As they ride, Lord Pierrot looks behind them. The moon is still hidden, and all the stars.

He strokes the short, soft hair of Daphne Dolores. Perhaps she will be calmer now, more docile since slaking her l.u.s.t. No -- she turns energetically in his arms, nuzzling forcefully at him, almost upsetting the little boat.

'Will you take me to the house?' she asks again.

'To the very heart of the house,' he promises.

They cross the lake. Lord Pierrot pa.s.ses by the boathouse and puts ash.o.r.e at the abandoned grotto. Leading Daphne Dolores by the hand he scales the bank, and slips between the statues of the Astral Graces, each of which wears his mother's face. Along crazed paths, between straggling rhododendrons the couple hasten, circ.u.mventing the garden by an obscure route that brings them out at last on the croquet lawn. The east wing looms ahead, its windows glittering darkly.

Suddenly Daphne Dolores stops. Lord Pierrot knows she remembers his instruction, that she is never to come near the house itself. She stands naked and panting on the croquet lawn, seeking her lover's face in frenzied, mute appeal.

'Come, my darling,' Lord Pierrot bids her in a secretive tone. 'Let us within. We shall baffle Lady Dove with our boldness.'

All at once he hears a dreadful sound.

'Pierre! Pi-erre!'

It is his wife. It is Lady Dove, materialising as if at the merest mention of her name. She has left her bed and come blundering into the garden in her nightgown. Lord Pierrot hears her now smashing towards them through the undergrowth, bellowing for him like a panic-stricken heifer.

Does she suspect? Has she seen them? Or is she sick, and roaming in her sleep? Perhaps, of all things, her premonition has come true: the full moon has unsettled her brain. It is a night for the madness of women.

Lady Dove is coming nearer. Lord Pierrot sees her monstrous shape bobbing in the darkness beneath the shade trees.

Silently giving thanks for the iron self-discipline, the blood and breeding of the Pierrots that enable him to keep his head even through the ordeal of such a night, Lord Pierrot puts his fingers to the moist lips of Daphne Dolores, commanding her to silence. He points across the croquet lawn to the flowerbeds. They will confuse Lady Dove. She will not think to seek them that way.

Daphne Dolores drops Lord Pierrot's hand. She sprints away across the Triacian gra.s.s, Lord Pierrot panting after.

Trampling the blooms so carefully laid out by Lord Pierrot's horticultron, they burst into the arbour leaving Lady Dove behind, still stumbling through the shrubbery. Arriving at the door of the conservatory they hear a faint, disconsolate moo, a distant sound of breaking branches.

Inside, the house begins, without asking, to raise the lights. Lord Pierrot countermands it. Daphne Dolores does not notice. She hardly pauses to admire the glories of the Sirian frescoes. She kisses Lord Pierrot vigorously and pulls him into the gloomy pa.s.sageway and along the hall, where the butler rolls out to greet them.

It scans them with a brief burst of invisible light. 'Good evening, sir and madam,' it says, in its buzzing voice. 'May I take your coats?'

Daphne Dolores laughs uproariously, heedlessly. Her laughter echoes in the rafters.

'Let us go up, my love,' Lord Pierrot bids her. 'To my chamber.'

Again she contradicts him, her blue eyes shining with joyous antic.i.p.ation.

'No, dear heart,' she insists, 'to your laboratory! Did you not tell me that Lady Dove never sets foot there?'

With a private, wistful smile, Lord Pierrot congratulates her on her stratagem. 'An excellent choice, my precious!'

Ignoring the attentive automaton, they jump into the shaft and float up to the level of the laboratories.

Here too Daphne Dolores strides ahead, as if she knows the way. She was here once before; perhaps, unconsciously, in some infant part of her brain, she remembers it. She sweeps through the catalogue room, where all knowledge lies sleeping in banks of deep cold drawers. In the mechanatory, beneath the great bleached skeletons of Lord Pierrot's first automata, she runs her white hand carelessly across the rack of obsolete implements, the tarnished rods and serried claws that recall his years of service in the Innovation Corps. She does not spare a glance for the cabinets of the salon zoologique with their stiff, staring specimens of every kind of fauna, natural and otherwise, as they reckon these things on the planet Triax.

Pierrot is pleased to follow her. Her haste gladdens his old and disappointed heart. He is grateful that, in the dark, she fails to notice the lines of mannequins above her head, encased in gla.s.s along the wall.

Each is clad in some cast-off of the younger, slimmer Lady Dove; yes, even back to the yellow sundress and matching gloves that she wore on their trip to the moon. It would not do to let Daphne Dolores see those clothes; nor the figures that wear them. They might disturb her.

'Ah!' cries Daphne Dolores then. She has reached the last laboratory. She stands amid the vats, gazing about in wonder and delight.

Behind her, Lord Pierrot slips into the curtained alcove for a gown. As he plucks one from the hook and wraps it around his nakedness, the homunculi stir in their nest of rags. Lord Pierrot hastily silences their querulous cheeping, dropping a cloak over them. He steps back into the laboratory.

The stained gla.s.s windows are black and opaque in the occluded night. The only light in the cluttered chamber is a faint glow of phosph.o.r.escence from the things in the vats. It highlights the slick bubbles of alembics and retorts, the dusty bra.s.s barrel of a giant microscope. There is a lingering scent of formaldehyde and rotting orange peel.

Lord Pierrot sees Daphne Dolores padding barefoot from vat to vat, trying to discern what each holds. Some are mere seeds yet, little spatters of darkness in the broth. Others are burgeoning, dendritic: a tubular stem with floppy branches above and below. Daphne Dolores has reached one so far grown as to be spinning a slick integument about itself, like a protective coc.o.o.n. Its members are well defined.

The largest tank stands alone in the corner beneath a sagging bank of shelves. The waters of that one, Lord Pierrot knows, are empty.

As Daphne Dolores goes to peer into its slimy depths, the moon of Triax suddenly heaves itself from behind a bulwark of cloud and sheds light into the laboratory. All the coloured panes flare up at once like a curtain of cold jewels. Daphne Dolores turns about. She catches sight of Lord Pierrot standing there in his white gown, and cries out in pleasure.

'My love!' calls Daphne Dolores. 'You have become a very harlequin!'

Lord Pierrot looks down at himself and chuckles. He is illuminated, as if by the rainbow-coloured primary of an unknown world, daubed from head to toe with carmine and gold and viridian. All down his gown the smears of acids and enzymes show up as harshly as though they were stains of rust or blood.

From beneath the coloured window comes a cry. 'Pierre!'

Lord Pierrot crosses the floor and cautiously peeps out. Lady Dove is there, still tangled in the bushes, swiping blindly at the moonlight with her huge arms.

Daphne Dolores laughs.

'Will you not take care of her?' she asks.

'Take care of her?' repeats Lord Pierrot.

'Release her from her misery.'

She nods at his hand, at the fatal ring.

Lord Pierrot looks at his ring as if he has never seen it before. He marvels at the audacity of Daphne Dolores, at the daring and ambition she has concealed from him all this while. Her spirit is a match for his own.

He sighs.

He opens the ring, inspects the reservoir. 'Let us be sure,' he says. 'I should not wish her to suffer even a moment.' He closes his eyes, suppressing a shudder of emotion, of potent memory; and opens them again.

'I have some fresh distilled. On that shelf up there, in the corner.'

Daphne Dolores turns to look at the shadowy ranks of vials and flasks that have bowed the shelves. Lord Pierrot, feeling behind the couch, fetches out a slender staff of gla.s.s a yard long, with a bra.s.s ferrule. A homunculus scrabbles briefly from under the valance. He shoos it back out of sight.

Daphne Dolores leans across the vat, stretching up to the bottles. She cannot reach. She lifts herself up and puts one knee carefully on the rim.

The coloured light streaks her tiny b.u.t.tocks.

'Oh, I can't get it,' she complains. 'Come and help me.'

Lord Pierrot comes and stands behind her. He puts one long, thin arm around her naked waist, hugging her body to him as if to steady her on her precarious perch. Her flesh is warm in his embrace. With the other arm he reaches over her shoulder for the flask. Their faces are very close together. Daphne Dolores turns her head and kisses Lord Pierrot on the lips.

'Pi-erre!!' moans the stricken woman beneath the window.

Daphne Dolores gives a little laugh and slips her tongue between her lover's teeth.

Lord Pierrot thrusts forward with his shoulder.

Daphne Dolores is small and slight, like all his women. With a cry and a splash, she topples into the tank.

The questionable fluid at once froths pink, surging high and closing avidly about her delectable limbs. It spatters Lord Pierrot's motley gown, and he steps quickly backwards.

In the spume he catches a final glimpse of Daphne Dolores, bobbing up: her startled eyes, her open mouth. He raises his gla.s.s staff, plants its bra.s.s tip between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and thrusts her down.

From her little ears, her nose, her perfect lips, bubbles flurry. Lord Pierrot waits patiently until they cease.

Whispering, the homunculi scuttle from their corners and come to stand around him in a flock, holding hands and craning their necks. They lift one another up to the gla.s.s.

Lord Pierrot does not rebuke them. The moment is too solemn. Wiping the staff on his sleeve, he turns away and opens the window, admitting a wave of hot, dank air.

Lord Pierrot sighs. The melancholy fit is upon him once again, as always when he has made the great renunciation. One by one he raises them; and one by one they become unstable, unreasonable, and have to be stilled.

Must it be ever thus?

He gazes out of the window into the thick and tangled garden. By the light of the yellow moon of Triax he sees his wife, Lady Dove, standing below, her nightdress in tatters, twigs and leaves in her hair. She looks up and recognises him. A scowl crosses her bloated face. 'Pierre!' she shouts.

Fatigued, unhappy, Lord Pierrot orders the intelligence to send his taxidermatron. Then he goes out through the salon, pa.s.sing beneath the line of his daughters, going to seek forgiveness once again of Lady Dove.

Colin Greenland 1990, 1998. Reproduced by permission of the author and the Maggie Noach Literary Agency.

This story first appeared in Zenith 2, edited by David Garnett, and is reprinted along with eighteen other Colin Greenland stories in The Plenty Principle (HarperCollins, ISBN 0 00 649906 6, 5.99).