Legenda Maris by Tanith Lee Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t want to, at least, I didn’t
think she did. Maybe she was lonely. There appeared to be no Mr. Besmouth.
Those unmistakable spoors of the suburban male were everywhere absent.
    To sit on the settee by the fire, I had
to go round the chair. As I did so, he came into view. He was just as I
recalled, even his position was unaltered. His hands rested loosely and
beautifully on his knees. He watched the fire, or something beyond the fire. He
was dressed neatly,           as he had been in the shop. I wondered if she dressed
him in these universal faded jeans, the dark pullover. Nondescript. The fire
streamed down his hair and beaded the ends of his lashes.
    “Hallo,” I said. I wanted to touch his shoulder
quietly, but did not dare.
    Immediately I spoke, she called from her
kitchen: “It’s no good talking to him. Just leave him be, he’ll be all right.”
    Admonished and intimidated, I sat down.
The heavy anger was slow in coming. Whatever was wrong with him, this couldn’t
be the answer. My back to the kitchen, my feet still in their plastic boots
which let water, I sat and looked at him.
    I hadn’t made a mistake. He really was
amazing. How could she have mothered anything like this? The looks must have
been on the father’s side. And where had the illness come from? And what was
it? Could I ask her, in front of him?
    He was so far away, not here in this
room at all. But where was he? He didn’t look—oh God what word would do? — deficient .
Leonardo da Vinci, staring through the face of one of his own half-finished,
exquisite, lunar madonnas, staring through at some truth he was still seeking....
that was the look. Not vacant. Not.... missing—
    She came through with her pot of tea, the
cups and sugar and milk.
    “This is very kind of you,” I said.
    She grunted. She poured the tea in a cup
and gave it to me. She had put sugar in, without asking me, and I don’t take sugar.
The tea became a strange, alien, sickly brew, drunk for ritual. She poured tea
into a mug, sugared it, and took it to the chair. I watched, breathing through
my mouth. What would happen?
    She took up his hand briskly, and
introduced the mug into it. I saw his long fingers grip the handle. His face did
not change. With a remote gliding gesture, he brought the mug to his lips. He
drank. We both, she and I, looked on, as if at the first man, drinking.
    “That’s right,” she said.
    She fetched her own cup and sat on the
settee beside me. I didn’t like to be so close to her, and yet, we were now
placed together, like an audience, before the profile of the red chair, and the
young man.
    I wanted to question her, ask a hundred
things. His name, his age. If we could get him to speak. If he was receiving
any treatment, and for what , exactly. How I wanted to know that.
It burned in me, my heart hammered, I was braised in racing waves of adrenalin.
    But I asked her nothing like that.
    You could not ask her these things, or I
couldn’t. And he was there, perhaps understanding, the ultimate constraint.
    “It’s very cosy here,” I said. She
grunted. “But I keep wondering why you can’t hear the sea. Surely—”
    “Yes,” she said, “I don’t get much time
to go into the town centre. What with one thing and another.”
    That came over as weird. She belonged to
the category of person who would do just that—skip an idea that had no interest
for her and pass straight on to something that did. And yet, what was it? She’d
been a fraction too fast. But I was well out of my depth, and had been from the
start.
    “Surely,” I said, “couldn’t the council
provide some sort of assistance—a home-help—”
    “Don’t want anything like that.”
    “But you’d be entitled—”
    “I’m entitled to my peace and quiet.”
    “Well, yes—”
    “Daniel” she said sharply, “drink your
tea. Drink it. It’ll get cold.”
    I jumped internally again, and again
violently. She’d said his name. Not alliterative after