V

FLAPPING EAGLE NEVER liked Nicholas Deggle. He couldn’t understand, for one thing, what he was to Livia Cramm. He appeared to do little more than the occasional conjuring trick and receive large sums of money—and the odd jewel—for doing it.

—Gifts, darling, was Mrs Cramm’s explanation. He’s a friend of mine and a genius what’s more. A real malin talent. Can’t I give my friends presents?

Nicholas Deggle never looked like a genius in Flapping Eagle’s eyes: except perhaps in that he had a genuine gift for accepting his benefactor’s munificence graciously. Nor, in his dark svelte finery, ring-laden and perfumed, with a rose in his buttonhole, did he look as if he needed the gifts.

Being absolved from the depredations of age, Flapping Eagle missed the key to Livia’s dependence on Deggle. As she aged, she became increasingly absorbed in the supernatural. She devoured the tarot, the scriptures, the cabbala, palmistry, anything and everything which held that the world was more than it seemed; that the physical end was not, in fact, the end. Since Deggle shared her interests and was a good deal more expert than she, Livia Cramm found him indispensable.

Deggle was in the habit of carrying around what he called his wand. This was an extraordinary object: cylindrical, some six inches long, slightly curving. The extraordinary thing was that it was made of solid stone. Flapping Eagle had never seen the like.

—Where did you find that? he once asked. Deggle looked at him quizzically and replied:

—It is the stem of a stone rose; I broke it off. Flapping Eagle felt foolish; by asking the question he had laid himself open to the ridicule of the answer.

The wand would be used in Deggle’s occasional displays of conjuring skill. He would stand, long-nosed and dark, in a black cloak, and conjure marvels from the air. Even Flapping Eagle was impressed at these displays, and disliked Deggle even more for impressing him. The conjurer never revealed his secrets, but they made Livia dote upon him.

Once, after such a display, Livia was eager to show off her own supernatural skills. She beckoned Flapping Eagle imperiously. —Come over here, she said, and let Livia read your darling hand.

Flapping Eagle approached suspiciously. Livia looked and squeezed and felt and prodded; and assumed an air of great gravity.

—Well, my Eagle, she said, What a terrible hand it is,

Flapping Eagle’s heart missed an involuntary beat.

—Are you sure you want to know? asked Mrs Cramm seriously.

Flapping Eagle thought: she makes it sound as though I have a choice. He looked into her eager eyes, glistening with their dread knowledge, and nodded.

Livia Cramm closed her eyes and intoned:

—You will live long and except for one serious illness be very healthy. The illness is an illness of the mind, but you will recover from it, though it may have a profound effect upon your career. You will neither marry nor father children. You will have no profession; nor do you have great talent. Your luck is bad. It is your lot to be led by others; in the end you will accept this. But most of all you are dangerous. You will bring grief and suffering and pain to those you know. Not intentionally; you are not malicious. But you are a bringer of ill winds. Where you walk, walks Death.

Flapping Eagle had to tense his muscles to prevent his hand from quivering. Without knowing about it, Livia Cramm had reiterated the curse of his birth and his given name.

She looked up and smiled as if to comfort him.

—But you are very attractive, she said in her usual voice.

Deggle smiled too.

Mrs Cramm’s dependence on Deggle grew unceasingly. Whenever Flapping Eagle made a suggestion, that they should sail here, or winter there, or even eat at such and such a place, it irked him to observe the slight questioning inclination of her head in Deggle’s direction before she delightedly agreed or gently demurred. There was no appeal from her decisions.

Two phrases usually formed the focal point of Flapping Eagle’s irritation. One was Livia Cramm’s. Whenever Deggle let drop some dark conversational flower from those saturnine lips, she would clap her hands excitedly, like a pubertal girl shown a naughty thing behind a rosebush, and exclaim (meticulously cultivated accent slipping in her transport) —Ain’t that the Deggle himself talkin’ to you. And she would look gleamingly pleased with the wickedness of the pun. At which Flapping Eagle clamped his mouth shut and stifled his thoughts.

The second phrase was Deggle’s own. He came and went his unknowable way, sauntering in and out of Mrs Cramm’s villa on the southern coast of Morispain, and every time he left, he would wave unsmilingly and say: —Ethiopia!

It was a complex and awful joke, arising from the archaic name of that closed, hidden, historical country (Abyssinia … I’ll be seeing you) and it drove Flapping Eagle out of his mind every time it was said. Ethiopia. Ethiopia. Ethiopia.

Deggle made Flapping Eagle wonder if he could bear his chosen fate.

He had been with Livia Cramm now, her personal gigolo, for twenty-five years. His reasoning was very simple: He had time, more than any in the universe but he had no money. She had a great deal of money and very little time. Thus, by sacrificing a small amount of his time he could very likely acquire a large amount of her cash. It was his most cynical decision, born of desperation, born from the future of dead possibilities that stared him in the face when Mrs Cramm had noticed him in Phoenix. He would have felt a great deal of guilt about it except for one thing: he did not like Livia Cramm.

Livia had been forty-five when she first met Flapping Eagle, and was then a ruined beauty of still-considerable sexual attraction and magnetism. Now, at seventy, the sexual attraction had gone. The magnetism had become an obnoxious, claustrophobic clinging. She clutched Flapping Eagle fiercely, as though she would never let go until he died on her as the unlamented Oscar Cramm had done so many years ago. In public her bony claws of hands never released him; in private she lay, her head eternally on his lap, gripping her own legs till her knuckles stood out whitely; in bed, she squeezed him with a strength so remarkable, it often left him winded. If she saw him speak to another woman she would descend upon them and in her cracked old tones deliver herself of a ringingly vulgar insult which sent the unfortunate female scurrying for shelter. Then she would apologize to Flapping Eagle, trying to look little-girl-coy (which was a sickening sight) and say: —I’m sorry, loveliest, did I spoil your fun then, did I?

There was no escape from Mrs Cramm.

Deggle had arrived on the scene comparatively recently: only eighteen months or so. This had made life even less supportable because Flapping Eagle was now no longer even the one who helped Livia decide the next step in her trivial, perpetually-dying life. He was just a symbol of her pulling power, male physical beauty incarnate, and thinking was no part of his duties. He was her refuge from the lonely blasts of antiquity.

—My Eagle never grows old, she would say proudly. Look at him: fifty-one (Flapping Eagle had lied to her about his age when they first met) and doesn’t look a day over thirty. Wonderful what good screwing can do.

Her politer acquaintances replied: —He’s not the only one, Livia. You’re incredible yourself, you know. Which had been the point of her comment. There were less and less of these acquaintances left.

Flapping Eagle’s only permitted source of regular human contact was, of course, Nicholas Deggle. And so cramped, so enclosed by the engulfing Mrs Cramm did he feel, that every so often he would make use of this source. He tried to tell himself that he treated Deggle as a social whore, in the same way as he was Livia’s sexual whore; but Deggle got the better of their exchanges too regularly to be so described.

Deggle reclined on a brocaded sofa.

—The issue is beyond doubt, he drawled. Livia Cramm is a monster.

Flapping Eagle said nothing.

—La Femme-Crammpon, said Deggle, and laughed, a shrill, falsetto noise.

—What?

—My dear Eagle, I’ve just realized. Do you know into whose clutches you have fallen? He was beside himself with laughter at his incomprehensible joke.

Flapping Eagle gave him his feed-line. —Go on. Tell me who it is.

—But my dear, c’est la Femme-Crampon! The clutching woman. Or, as you’d say, the Old Woman of the Sea! The Vieillarde herself!

He clutched his sides in agonies of mirth. (I sat ashen-faced and silent. There were times when Deggle frightened me.)

—It’s all true, he burst out between uncontrollable spasms. She’s old enough. She’s ugly enough. She lives for sea-travel. She picks up wandering youths like yourself, though you’re not as young as you look. And now she’s got you in her clutches, to squeeze and tighten and constrict until there’s no breath left in your body. Livia Cramm, the terror of voyagers! Why, she’s even taught you to love the sea to make it easier to rule you! Poor sailor, poor pretty-faced matelot that you are. You’re no more than a walking corpse with the Old Woman on your back, her legs gripping tightly, tightly, like the knot that tightens as you wrestle with it, tightly round your, ha ha, windpipe.

I wouldn’t even bother to struggle, he finished, wiping away the tears.

And this was another conversation with Nicholas Deggle:

—Have you ever wondered about old Oscar Cramm?

—Not really, said Flapping Eagle. He had had too many other things to wonder about.

—He never had a chance with that old man-eater, said Deggle. They say he passed on while making love to her, you know. I wonder if there were any bite-marks in his neck.

—Are you saying … began Flapping Eagle.

—Possibly I am, smiled Deggle. He wasn’t all that old, you know. Now if Livia were to think that you were getting on a bit yourself, she might begin to fancy a change.

—You have absolutely no reason … began Flapping Eagle, but Deggle interrupted again. It was quite remarkable how few of his sentences Flapping Eagle ever finished when in conversation with this dark smiler.

—I merely mean, said Deggle, that for some unknown reason I feel quite attached to you, I shouldn’t like to see you come to any harm, pretty-face.

After this conversation Flapping Eagle found himself watching Mrs Cramm; and when her legs constricted or her arms squeezed him, he remembered the passing of Oscar Cramm and became nervous. Which hampered his sexual duties on more than one occasion, and on these occasions he saw Livia Cramm frown thoughtfully and purse her lips before assuring him that it didn’t matter. She would sip from the jug of water that always sat by her bedside, surrounded by her army of pills, and turn away from him to sleep.

One night, Flapping Eagle had a curious dream. Livia Cramm had both her attenuated hands fixed vice-like around his throat and was pushing, pushing with her thumbs. He was sleeping in his dream and awoke in it to find his life being squeezed away. He wrestled then, wrestled for his life, and as he did so she changed continually into all manner of wet, stinking, shapeless, slippery things. He could not grip her and all the time her hold was tightening. Just before he fainted he forced out these words:

—You are old, Livia. Old hag. You’ll never find another.

All of a sudden (he could see nothing now: it was black inside his eyes) the hold relaxed. He heard Livia’s voice say: —Yes, my eagle, my soaring bird. Yes.

When he awoke, he found Livia Cramm dead as a stone, both hands fixed clawingly about her own neck. The jug of water was upset; her army of pills was substantially diminished.

It was only later that morning that Flapping Eagle discovered that his own precious bottle, the phial with the blue, release-giving liquid, had disappeared. He went to confront Deggle, who reclined as usual on the brocaded sofa in the drawing-room, his habitual dark clothing for once appropriate.

—Livia didn’t seem the sort to commit suicide, he said.

—What sort is that, foolish boy? asked Deggle. She was old.

—You don’t know about a certain bottle disappearing, do you? asked Flapping Eagle.

—You’re overwrought, said Deggle. I like you, you know. What you need, my boy, is to get away from all this. Take the yacht. Sail into the, ha ha, blue.

What can you say to a man who may or may not be a murderer, who may or may not have saved your life?

—You really are remarkably well-preserved, smiled Deggle. You must have a guardian angel.

Flapping Eagle thought: Or devil

The will left me the money but it left Deggle the yacht. The verdict was suicide.

Since Deggle didn’t want the yacht, and since I wanted desperately to get away, I accepted his offer and set sail, alone for the first time in a quarter of a century, for ports unknown.