A Pa.s.sion for Lord Pierrot.

by Colin Greenland.

Introduction.

I wrote this story for David Garnett's Zenith 2 anthology, as another in the series of portraits of nasty men that includes Tarven Guille the taxidermist in Other Voices and Isa's father the mad inventor in 'The Wish'. What they share is a mastery of dubious science, an appalling att.i.tude towards women and an infinite capacity for arrogant, romantic self-delusion. Mortimer Lychworthy, twenty-eighth Earl of Io and Master of the Guild of Aether Pilots, is obviously another of the same fellowship.

Why I've been compelled to pillory these grotesque examples of extreme tendencies in my own s.e.x is a mystery to me. Presumably it's in some sense the other side of the more prominent mystery, which people always seize upon and question me about when I'm on stage: why are all my novels about women?

Actually, I don't think it is a mystery, unless there's an equivalent mystery in Mary Sh.e.l.ley writing about Victor Frankenstein or Ruth Rendell writing about Inspector Wexford. The mystery is perhaps why more men haven't done it. That doesn't mean I know why I do it, though. I can tell you that it's not a matter of decision. The character always comes first, as a whole person, whose story I am to tell. What that story actually is, is a matter of many, many decisions, as is how I am to tell it. For this piece I adopted the Commedia dell'Arte imagery and elegiac, bitter-sweet tone I first encountered in works by Michael Moorc.o.c.k, the chronicles of Jerry Cornelius and of the Dancers at the End of Time. The narrative voice, detached, anonymous, but still quite personal, I also borrowed from Mike, before learning that he had also borrowed it, from George Meredith.

It was one sentence in this story, the one about 'the gala concert on Artemisia to celebrate the opening of the new Trans-Galactic Pa.s.sage', that gave me my first glimpse into the universe of Harm's Way.

-- CG.

A Pa.s.sion for Lord Pierrot

In the land of Anise, on the planet of Triax, it is the hour after dinner.

Lord Pierrot sits alone in his apartment, playing the accordion. He reclines on a couch and plays a slow, sad tango. A melancholy fit is upon him, for he remembers the past, the years before he came into his inheritance.

He is thinking of other nights, nights of gaiety when he sauntered with his comrades through yellow gardens on the moon, the same moon that now shines on the lake, turning it the colour of fine honey. On those nights he had not a care to his name, and the songs he sang were merry. He was young then, Lord Pierrot, and now he is old, as they reckon such things on the planet of Triax.

Lord Pierrot's whole apartment is most sumptuously appointed. The furnishings are made of velvet, the floor of glossy yellow hardwood imported all the way from Peru, on Earth. Splendid specimens of the local wildlife decorate the walls, represented by their severed heads. But tonight Lord Pierrot is not comforted by luxuries, nor by the trophies of his skill in the slaughter. Tonight there will be no comfort for him but in the arms of his paramour, Daphne Dolores.

He will go to her now, this minute. He rises and tucks the accordion under his arm, to entertain her, later, with some music. With this thought he steps from his chamber into the shaft and goes down, out of the front door into the stifling night.

Lord Pierrot crosses the lake by means of his little rowing boat. The moon is bright. Tomorrow night, he thinks, it will be full. Across the water he sees a light in the window of the lodge that stands upon the other sh.o.r.e.

Moon or no moon, that is his beacon, his guiding star.

He moors below the lodge, in the lee of a black rock that shelves out like a parapet over the water. The rock was brought back from the Horsehead Nebula by Lord Pierrot's father, at a time when society admired such actions. Lord Pierrot climbs upon it now and stands gazing at the moonlit lodge. A languid breeze toys with his pale hair.

In the silence he hears the door of the lodge open, and then he sees her, sees Daphne Dolores, running to greet him.

'Daphne Dolores!' cries Lord Pierrot, and he springs from the rock. At once she is in his arms. He holds her very tightly, though not inconsiderately. He feels the beating of her heart, that splendid organ.

Its rhythm betrays only a slight sign of exertion -- or is that pa.s.sion, pa.s.sion for Lord Pierrot?

'Daphne Dolores,' murmurs Lord Pierrot ardently. 'My love.'

'My darling,' Daphne Dolores replies, in rapture.

Daphne Dolores is slight and becomingly small of stature. She looks up at Lord Pierrot and presses the palm of her hand to his breast in a way that he finds irresistible. Her blue eyes sparkle in the moonlight. At this moment he would do anything for her, anything she asked. At this moment he would give up his wife, his house, his lands, his laboratories, and take her away on a journey to another star, a journey to last a lifetime.

Fortunately, Daphne Dolores does not ask him to do so. She does not ask him for anything. It is not in her nature to ask for things.

The most she will ever ask him is: 'Are you pleased to see me?'

Lord Pierrot is inflamed with love for her. He kisses her fiercely, bearing down on her in his hunger for her lips.

She returns his kiss as avidly as he gives it her, Daphne Dolores.

Thus they remain, a minute or more, as they reckon these things on Triax.

Then they enter the lodge, and close the door upon the night.

Lord Pierrot bids his darling extinguish the lamp that guided him across the lake. He prefers darkness for these meetings. He does not like to let Daphne Dolores see his face too clearly, for it will remind her that he is old, and remind him too of what she is. She is a young woman, Daphne Dolores.

She obeys him in this request, as in all things, and returns to him at once.

Lord Pierrot is solicitous. He pays full attention to the woman in his arms. He must not waste an instant of her company. He kisses her again, hungrily, as if he could somehow suck new youth from her mouth.

Daphne Dolores makes a small noise in her throat. Her hand presses the back of his neck as they kiss.

Her love for him is complete and true. Lord Pierrot knows that of her. He knows it so well that he no longer reflects on it. It is not in her nature to love a man and afterwards, cease from loving him.

Lord Pierrot rolls up his ruffled sleeves, pushing them back from his long, slender wrists. His hands are narrow, his fingers taper. He wears a ring with a large, square, black stone. He wears it at all times, and never takes it off, not even with a woman. He has excused it to them, to Daphne Dolores and to all those who came before her, as a sentimental attachment, a betrothal gift from his wife.

Lord Pierrot begins to undress Daphne Dolores.

She stands quietly on the rug as he reveals her body to the night.

Daphne Dolores is white and slim as a boy. Her hair is cut short, and layered as closely to her head as the fur of an otter. Lord Pierrot runs his hand over her hair and kisses her throat. She shuts her eyes and lifts her chin with pleasure.

Her shoulders and hips are narrow, Daphne Dolores, her stomach flat. She has no b.r.e.a.s.t.s to speak of. Her nipples look like wounds in the dim light.

It is scarcely conceivable now, but thus his wife, Lady Dove, used to be, ah, long ago, in the first days of their marriage. Lord Pierrot goes down on one knee to remove her stockings. With his lips he brushes her pubic hair. He is consumed with desire for her. Rising, Lord Pierrot pulls at the b.u.t.tons of his gown. Beneath it he wears neither shirt nor undergarment. His chest is narrow and hairless. He kisses Daphne Dolores as he tugs his arms from the sleeves and forces down his baggy trousers.

His p.e.n.i.s is slender, and elegantly curved. It lifts in the dark like some strange nocturnal plant of Triax, seeking for the moon.

Lord Pierrot directs Daphne Dolores to take hold of it, and she does. He gasps in pleasure.

Later, when pleasure has had its fill, Lord Pierrot lies back against the pillows with Daphne Dolores nestling in the crook of his arm. She lies lightly upon him, for which he is grateful, for the night is very hot, and they are both somewhat sticky.

Up in the rafters, something catches Lord Pierrot's eye: a small ma.s.s darker than the darkness. It is sure to be a nest of the skylings, which persist in infesting his eaves. Every year at this time it is necessary to send an automaton to pluck out the nests of the skylings and cast them into the lake. These nights Lord Pierrot shares with Daphne Dolores are numbered; they are precious and few. The squawking of baby birds must not be permitted to disturb the making of love.

'You're very quiet, my love,' says Daphne Dolores.

Lord Pierrot kisses the top of her head.

'What are you thinking of?' she asks him.

'I'm thinking of you, my delight,' he tells her. His voice is high, and quavers. It seems to lose all its virile resonance after lovemaking. Lord Pierrot has remarked it before, and wondered whether anything can be done about it. 'I'm thinking of you,' he says. 'And how perfect you are.'

It is a lame, trite answer, he knows. Nor is it altogether true. Lord Pierrot is in fact thinking of his wife, Lady Dove, and wishing she were away from home. But what a gross error of tact it would be even to mention this to his mistress, as they lie together in the afterglow of pa.s.sion.

Lord Pierrot is nothing if not fastidious. It embarra.s.ses him to utter falsehoods and plat.i.tudes, though Daphne Dolores has an inexhaustible capacity to receive them. She rejects nothing, not if Lord Pierrot gives it.

He gets out of bed, leaving her lying there. He finds his accordion on the floor and, dusting it reverently with the palm of his hand, remembers his plan to delight Daphne Dolores with a serenade or two. He opens the door and sits there, on the step, looking out at the night.

Now that he has drained the cup of pa.s.sion dry, the melancholy fit is upon him again. Lord Pierrot plays once more the slow, sad tango.

'What a mournful tune, my love!' exclaims Daphne Dolores.

Lord Pierrot looks round at her, seeing only a dark shape in the dark house, out of reach of the moonlight. The lodge is full of the musky scent of her. Lord Pierrot lays his accordion aside.

'Would you have me always happy?' he asks her.

'For my sake,' she tells him.

'Ah, that I might do everything for your sake,' he muses, sorrowfully.

'Then would you be mistress indeed.'

Lord Pierrot wishes his wife might be sent away, just for a while, before the end of summer. He has an aunt, in the north-west. She and Lady Dove have always got on wonderfully well together. They play bezique, and compare their illnesses.

While the accordion finishes its tango Lord Pierrot cups his chin in his hands and watches the golden moon of Triax climb above the trees along the lake sh.o.r.e. The heat blurs the sky about it to the violet of a fresh bruise.

The moonlight creeps through the open door, finding Daphne Dolores where she reclines, naked and pale on the tousled sheets. When the instrument falls silent, Lord Pierrot speaks in Latin, telling her that his melancholy is but natural, under the circ.u.mstances. 'Post coitum,' says Lord Pierrot, 'omne animal triste est.'

'You have said that to me before,' says Daphne Dolores. 'I remember it. I wish I could be learned, and know such things.'

'So you could, my dear,' replies Lord Pierrot, 'so you could, if you would first grow to my age.'

'Oh, now you will complain of your years, and talk of decline and the inadequacy of flesh,' says Daphne Dolores at once, protesting, though in gentle merriment. 'I shall not allow you to remain in this mood,' she declares, and she rises from the bed and comes to him where he sits in the doorway. Stooping, she embraces him from behind, stroking his cooling flesh and kissing his ear and his neck until he begins to rouse again.

'No, Daphne Dolores,' says Lord Pierrot then, and with a touch he deters her, disengaging her arms from about his neck. He nods his long head in the direction of the lake. 'It is time I returned to my lady.'

At that Daphne Dolores casts herself upon him and clasps him to her once again. 'Stay with me tonight,' she pleads. She twists her fine fingers into his soft white hair.

Lord Pierrot is surprised at her forwardness, though flattered as any man would be. Usually she is more modest. He felicitates himself for having roused a new pa.s.sion in her tonight. Her love for him, which he would have sworn was complete, is growing yet.

He detaches her hand from his hair and brings it to his lips. 'Alas,' he says. 'I may not. Women,' he tells her, 'are creatures of the heart; but men must bend the knee to duty.'

The truth is, that Lord Pierrot is grown old, as they reckon these things on Triax, and amorous exertion, especially in the season of heat, leaves him not only melancholy but also exhausted. But this is neither the place nor the time for truth; only for the voice of regret, in words of parting.

Bidding Daphne Dolores a gallant farewell, Lord Pierrot closes the door of the lodge, straightens his cuffs, and steps carefully in the dark down past the black rock to the sandy margin of the lake. He goes to board the little boat that will take him back to the sh.o.r.e.

It is a boon, Lord Pierrot's little boat, a device of his own invention quite indispensable for these nocturnal trysts. As it rows itself noiselessly across the honey-coloured water, Lord Pierrot is able to take his ease and recoup some of his dissipated energies. He looks around at the torpid, sultry night. In the reeds not a lizardfish, not a dabchick is stirring. The whole world, it seems, is still; still as if all Triax were barren, and the secret ways of life not yet pieced together there.

Lord Pierrot congratulates himself on the satisfactory conclusion of another night's dalliance.

Back indoors, Lord Pierrot sheds his clothes and hands them to a waiting automaton, which trundles away to launder them. They will be fresh and dry by morning. Belting a poplin robe about him, Lord Pierrot steps into the shaft and allows it to carry him up past the dining hall, past the libraries and laboratories, to the upper floor where both he and his wife have their apartments.

He looks in on his wife, the Lady Dove. She is still awake. She lies propped on a great many pillows, reading a volume of the collected correspondence of a grande dame of another age. Here, on this benighted outpost of the empire where the Pierrots keep their family seat, few letters reach them, and Lady Dove must make do with these printed relics.

She looks at him over her gla.s.ses. 'What time is it, Pierre?'

She has her bedside console, and need only ask the house intelligence; but she prefers to ask him. Lord Pierrot stifles his irritation, making an effort to construe this habit of his wife's as deference due to his authority in the household. He tells her it is half-past eleven, or a quarter to one, however they reckon these things on Triax. 'Time you were asleep, my dear,' he tells her, and pats her on the shoulder. Lady Dove needs a great deal of sleep. She has grown colossally fat since he found it expedient to remove her ovaries. The slightest exercise fatigues her.

'And you, Pierre, are you not going to bed?' she asks.

'Directly, my angel,' says Lord Pierrot; but first he will stay and converse with her awhile, as is only mannerly. He looks around for a chair, but they are all laden with clothing, books and female impedimenta that Lady Dove has been too weary to put away. Lord Pierrot averts his eyes from a pile of her enormous underwear. He sits gingerly on the narrow margin of the bed that is not occupied by the flesh of Lady Dove.

'I have been taking a stroll in the grounds,' he tells her, 'by the light of the moon.'

'Moonlight is not good for the brain,' declares his wife at once. 'The radiance of the moon is unsettling. It tends to unbalance one.'

Lord Pierrot strokes her great hand consolingly. 'I find it more calming these days than the heat of the sun,' he tells her mildly.

Lady Dove is full of opinions on what is and is not healthy. Her capacity for them has grown as her bulk has swelled, and as her own vitality has declined. This stricture against moonlight is typical, mere feminine superst.i.tion. As a scientist, Lord Pierrot would like to dispute it, but as long as he allows her to remain in error, he can be sure Lady Dove will leave him to pursue his nocturnal excursions uninterrupted, for fear of moonlight.

And Daphne Dolores knows never to come near the house. So all is well.

He embarks on a trivial anecdote, the story of an amusing but entirely logical error made by his automatic lepidopteron, which has been unable to grasp the subtleties of Triacian taxonomy. 'There it sat, solemnly mounting and labelling an entire drawer of bluebottles!'

Lady Dove lies like a torpid hippopotamus, breathing hoa.r.s.ely through her open mouth. Her heavy eyes never leave Lord Pierrot's countenance, though he does not a.s.sume she is attending to his anecdote. She is simply watching his mouth move. Meanwhile, covertly, he is studying her.

Unintentionally, automatically, he compares her c.u.mbersome flesh, her stale and suffocating bosom and lank hair with the fragrant delights he has tasted so recently in the arms of Daphne Dolores.

He remembers when he first set eyes on Lady Dove, at a gala concert on Artemisia to celebrate the opening of the new Trans-Galactic Pa.s.sage. She was a delicate flower then, a rose in bud adorning the arm of her papa, Lord Panteleone, while he was but a subaltern in the ranks of science, a rising young buck of some promise in the Innovation Corps. Now he is Lord Pierrot, master of the tango and the heavy night, yearning madly for the moon.

'You seem tired tonight, Pierre,' says his wife. 'You drive yourself too strenuously.'

Lord Pierrot looks sharply at her. It would be unlike her, unworthy of her, to resort to innuendo.

'Science is a hard taskmaster,' he replies, blandly.

'I hope you are not overdoing it,' she says. 'You will make yourself ill.'

He thinks she sounds a trifle disgruntled, but Lady Dove has returned her attention to her book. Lord Pierrot bids her politely good night. He kisses her pendulous cheek, quickly, and goes to his own room.

As he bids the intelligence turn out the light, a second poignant memory occurs to him, unsought, of that time when Dove and he made a foursome with Gerard Pomeroy and Mona Twisk to sample the innocent pleasures of the gardens of the moon. Those golden days. Behind the marshmallow kiosk his Dove had unb.u.t.toned her glove and, almost unprompted, relieved him of an importunate erection. His astonishment and pleasure were alloyed, a little, with alarm at her expertise. How could his dainty treasure be so knowledgeable about the male organ? How did she know what to do? Not, thinks Lord Pierrot to himself, that she had to do very much. In acts of venery, he commends himself as he falls asleep, he has always been prompt, very prompt.

Next morning, when Lord Pierrot awakes, he directs an automaton to throw open the window. The green land of Anise lies veiled in haze. This day promises to be just as hot as all its immediate predecessors. The heat can affect a man, playing upon his blood. Lord Pierrot thinks again of his memory of Dove, of her unexpected dexterity. It is bitter to him now. When did he and his wife last enjoy the pleasures of concupiscence? How many years is it since he has seen beneath that billowing nightgown?

Lord Pierrot winces inwardly and turns away from these unhappy reflections. Already he is suffused with longing for his paramour, for Daphne Dolores. He must meet her again tonight. He orders breakfast in the Magenta Room, with the french windows open onto the terrace.