I recognized the Roman nose, the dark curls, the long lashes – it was the head of Malcolm Lovat. It was more like the toppled head of a statue than a real severed head – the break was clean and even, no blood vessels or frayed sinews floating like tentacles in the bucket.
The head emitted the most tremendous sigh and fixing me with its dead gaze beseeched, ‘Help me.’
‘Help you?’ I said. ‘How?’ but the rope slipped out of my hand and the bucket clattered back down the well. I peered down. I could still see the pale face glimmering through the water, eyes closed once more and the words ‘help me’ echoing like ripples on the water before fading away.
What does the dream about Malcolm Lovat mean? And why his head only? Because he used to be head boy at Glebelands Grammar? (Are dreams that simple?) Because I was reading Isabella, or the Pot of Basil last night? It’s hard enough trying to keep a geranium alive in Arden, I can’t imagine trying to cultivate a head. Imagine the care and attention a head would need – warmth, light, conversation, combing and brushing – it would be an ideal hobby for Debbie. And basil would be even more difficult, given the malign environment of Arden.
I am, I know, a seething cauldron of adolescent hormones and Malcolm Lovat is the cipher of my lust, but decapitation? ‘Freud would have a field-day with that stuff,’ analytic Eunice says, ‘heads, wells – all that suppressed lust and penis envy …’ It’s hard to believe that anyone could envy a penis . Not that I have seen many, in fact, apart from statues and an unfortunate glimpse of Mr Rice’s addenda, I have only the evidence of Charles’ anatomy to go on and it’s a long time since I’ve seen any of that in the flesh, as it were. ‘I’m speaking metaphorically,’ Eunice points out. Aren’t we all?
Carmen, the only one of us to have studied the subject in any depth, reports that a plucked turkey and its giblets are the nearest she can get to describing it, but then Carmen’s attitude to sex is surrounded with such an air of ennui that trainspotting seems positively dangerous in comparison. ‘Well, it’s one way of spending time,’ she says indifferently. (If you spend time what do you buy? ‘Less time,’ Mrs Baxter says sadly.)
‘Orite?’ Debbie asks (her usual greeting) when I finally stumble down to the kitchen for a bowl of Frosties. She’s meditating on a kitchen table of meat like a preoccupied butcheress – serried ranks of pork chops, anaemic sausages, big steaks sliced from the limbs of large warm-blooded mammals – a table full of dead flesh the colour of sweet peas. ‘We’re having a barbecue tonight,’ she says by way of explanation.
‘A barbecue?’ It sounds like an invitation to disaster. Debbie’s home entertaining is regularly doomed to end in disappointment and, not infrequently, ritual humiliation and social embarrassment. We have witnessed any number of ‘little cocktail parties’, ‘wine and cheeses’ and ‘potluck suppers’ turn into disasters. But Debbie is heedless, thrilled at the idea that she is about to reintroduce cooking alfresco to the streets of trees where no-one has charred a steak over a flame for at least a thousand years.
‘For the neighbours,’ she says optimistically as she scrutinizes a tray of pale bloodless sausages. ‘I’m going to put them in buns with ketchup,’ she adds. ‘What do you think?’ She could turn them back into a pig for all I care but I mutter something encouraging because she has a wild kind of look in her eye as if someone’s overwound the key in her back and she’s going too fast. She starts wiping steaks tenderly with a cloth as if they were the butchered bloody cheeks of small children and says, ‘I think it’ll be nice. It’ll certainly be something.’ (Although you could say that about a lot of things.)
She turns her attention back to the sausages and stares at them fixedly then looks at me and
The head emitted the most tremendous sigh and fixing me with its dead gaze beseeched, ‘Help me.’
‘Help you?’ I said. ‘How?’ but the rope slipped out of my hand and the bucket clattered back down the well. I peered down. I could still see the pale face glimmering through the water, eyes closed once more and the words ‘help me’ echoing like ripples on the water before fading away.
What does the dream about Malcolm Lovat mean? And why his head only? Because he used to be head boy at Glebelands Grammar? (Are dreams that simple?) Because I was reading Isabella, or the Pot of Basil last night? It’s hard enough trying to keep a geranium alive in Arden, I can’t imagine trying to cultivate a head. Imagine the care and attention a head would need – warmth, light, conversation, combing and brushing – it would be an ideal hobby for Debbie. And basil would be even more difficult, given the malign environment of Arden.
I am, I know, a seething cauldron of adolescent hormones and Malcolm Lovat is the cipher of my lust, but decapitation? ‘Freud would have a field-day with that stuff,’ analytic Eunice says, ‘heads, wells – all that suppressed lust and penis envy …’ It’s hard to believe that anyone could envy a penis . Not that I have seen many, in fact, apart from statues and an unfortunate glimpse of Mr Rice’s addenda, I have only the evidence of Charles’ anatomy to go on and it’s a long time since I’ve seen any of that in the flesh, as it were. ‘I’m speaking metaphorically,’ Eunice points out. Aren’t we all?
Carmen, the only one of us to have studied the subject in any depth, reports that a plucked turkey and its giblets are the nearest she can get to describing it, but then Carmen’s attitude to sex is surrounded with such an air of ennui that trainspotting seems positively dangerous in comparison. ‘Well, it’s one way of spending time,’ she says indifferently. (If you spend time what do you buy? ‘Less time,’ Mrs Baxter says sadly.)
‘Orite?’ Debbie asks (her usual greeting) when I finally stumble down to the kitchen for a bowl of Frosties. She’s meditating on a kitchen table of meat like a preoccupied butcheress – serried ranks of pork chops, anaemic sausages, big steaks sliced from the limbs of large warm-blooded mammals – a table full of dead flesh the colour of sweet peas. ‘We’re having a barbecue tonight,’ she says by way of explanation.
‘A barbecue?’ It sounds like an invitation to disaster. Debbie’s home entertaining is regularly doomed to end in disappointment and, not infrequently, ritual humiliation and social embarrassment. We have witnessed any number of ‘little cocktail parties’, ‘wine and cheeses’ and ‘potluck suppers’ turn into disasters. But Debbie is heedless, thrilled at the idea that she is about to reintroduce cooking alfresco to the streets of trees where no-one has charred a steak over a flame for at least a thousand years.
‘For the neighbours,’ she says optimistically as she scrutinizes a tray of pale bloodless sausages. ‘I’m going to put them in buns with ketchup,’ she adds. ‘What do you think?’ She could turn them back into a pig for all I care but I mutter something encouraging because she has a wild kind of look in her eye as if someone’s overwound the key in her back and she’s going too fast. She starts wiping steaks tenderly with a cloth as if they were the butchered bloody cheeks of small children and says, ‘I think it’ll be nice. It’ll certainly be something.’ (Although you could say that about a lot of things.)
She turns her attention back to the sausages and stares at them fixedly then looks at me and
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