She broke a piece of bread from what was left of the loaf and ran it around her plate mopping up the juices from the meat and then held it to my lips.
"Take. Eat."
I opened my lips and she carefully placed it on my tongue.
"Eat."
She said nothing while I chewed; just sipped her wine and watched me. Then, as if she had come to some conclusion, she put down the glass, pushed back her chair and stood.
"Come. Leave the plates. I want to show you my garden."
"It's a bit dark for admiring marigolds."
"There's a moon and we'll light the lanterns."
She picked up a box of matches. I shrugged and followed her through the heavy doorway of what had once been the stables for the building she had simply called "the big house". Her mother's house; it stood several hundred yards up her lane, awash in a dull yellow glow from the security lights.
A path led down the hill in the opposite direction. In this light it was no more than a grey grassy walk bordered in black shrubbery. Every twenty feet or so, there was a stone lantern like one might find in a Japanese garden. She would crouch and light each one as we arrived. As each flame caught, she and the surrounding vegetation sprang into colour. She was still wearing the dress she had worn to the funeral, a relatively tight black sheath of a finely brocaded material that restricted her movements, making her crouch into a decorously folded knot at each lantern. Her only adornment was a Victorian black jet choker that focused attention on her long and pale neck.
Perhaps it was the darkness or the pockets of mist that clung in spots along the path, but folded up in front of the tiny flame, she took on a delicious air of mystery. I felt the blood draining to my loins.
"Where did you find that dress?"
"London," as if London was simply a store not a city. "You like?"
____
We had met in London two weeks earlier at, of all places, a symposium on "Symbolist Poetry" that had been organized by the School of Art as part of an exhibit of Purvis de Chavannes' paintings. The other participants fell into one of two classes: either neo-decadent bohemians, all shiny pierced, or earnest academics in their armor of Harris tweed.
She perhaps recognized a kindred soul, as I had neither beard nor hound's-tooth jacket. After less than an hour of intellectual torpor, she leaned over to me and whispered, "There's a pub on the corner that has to be more interesting than this. Would you care to indulge my fear of drinking alone?" Forced to choose between the dissection of dead poets and the company of a vivacious partner–in-libation, I threw my lot in with the latter.
On returning with our drinks, I remarked that she seemed (to my untrained eye) far too intelligent and well dressed for the Symbolists and Decadents.
She laughed. "As an opening line, it's a bit cheeky, but thank-you. I could say the same of you. You seem happy to have been dragged from the proceedings and you show no signs of either decay or poetic malaise. I suspect … er … I'm sorry, I don't even know your name. "
"James … James Lambert."
"Well, James Lambert… I suspect that you were trolling for hapless young ladies with a taste for obscure if not erotic poetry. My good deed for the day will have been to keep some starving student from your evil designs." She rolled her eyes upwards as if inspecting her halo.
"Am I right?"
It was my turn to laugh. "You are far too young to be playing ‘Miss Marples'. In actual fact, I am a poet, and have been behaving perfectly within my rights as a purveyor of the metaphoric."
"Really!" She grinned an evil grin. "Then I should have no trouble seducing you into several more drinks in a poetic pursuit of this … er … metaphoric of yours."
"Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss … er…"
"Ophelia Demolay. My friends call me Lia"
"Well Miss Lia Demolay. You shall first have to explain your presence amongst the literati and their hangers-on before I spring for another round."
She laughed.
"My father was a poet. He escaped from Prague when the Soviets crushed their ‘revolution'. He arrived in London where my mother promptly seduced him, the story goes, after several bottles of champagne. I was the result of that joyful union. It was a bit of a scandal as she was married but her husband was ‘overseas'. He had the good grace to stay abroad. My father was never happy here and returned to Prague when I was twelve. He died last year and I feel I really never knew him. So I haunt affairs like today in the hope perhaps…"
She paused to savor the memory then adeptly changed the subject.
An afternoon of pleasant banter followed. She must have enjoyed herself because she allowed me the pleasure of her company the next day for lunch. That meal was followed by a repeat performance the following Monday.
Just as the relationship threatened to evolve into something more interesting, her mother chose that moment to die. Lia left me a message and then vanished for a week. I realized that in spite of all the convivial conversation, I knew almost nothing about her other than her name and that she obviously dressed too well to be poor. When I had inquired about her family, she had simply said,
"We are not like most families; not like what you might consider a normal family."
So, while she sorted out her mother's affairs, I had immersed myself in work, but my heart wasn't in it. Then out of the blue, I was asked to come to the funeral. It was a somber grey affair with less than a dozen mourners. Afterwards, seemingly on a whim, she had invited me to accompany her back to her place in the country.
I had expected a dreary evening of aged relatives, but was surprised to find myself her only guest. I stood about a bit awkwardly and kept the conversation afloat with chatter about my book as she threw together an ‘ad hoc' dinner for two. The conversation during dinner was a bit stilted, but she seemed to be taking her loss well. When I said as much, she had frowned and replied,
"Well, in a sense I've been preparing for this for a lifetime." Then she changed the subject.
_____
I looked back up the path. The big house and her converted stables had vanished in the rising mist. The moon (full or not) was lost behind the veil of heavy clouds that make the British Isles so claustrophobic to North Americans. All that remained was the glow from the lanterns, a string of lights like pearls that climbed and vanished into the darkness.
Two lanterns later, we arrived at a wall, twice my height, covered in ivy but featureless except for a heavy door in the centre. She dragged the door open and stepped through into the dark. I was seized by a moment of panic, a sense of evil about the place. It was not so much the fear of some danger that might lurk in dark corners but a sensation of an evil bred of age and darkness. I shook off the feeling and stepped through the door.
She had lit a pair of lanterns and I could see that we were in a walled garden. The wall that we had come through still had pear trees trained against it. What would have been the vegetable garden in Victorian times was now a formal lawn with carefully manicured plantings. At the far end of the space was a small building that in the shadow might have been mistaken for a gardeners shed, but revealed itself, in the dim light of the garden lanterns, to be a perfectly proportioned Palladian style villa, scaled as if for a child.
"My great-grandfather built it as a playhouse for my grandmother, a sort of garden folly long after such things were fashionable."
She vanished into the shadows of the small portico but her voice trailed after her.
"You had best take off your shoes. The carpet is rather precious."
I complied and then stepped through a pair of low French doors into the inky interior. She lit a match and the interior sprang to life.
I gasped. With the exception of a tiny fireplace and several small windows and doors, virtually every surface was covered in mirrors. But this was no circus funhouse.
"The mirrors are Venetian. After the war, when my grandfather went back to Paris to see if the house there had survived, he found it pretty well gutted. The pictures and much of the furniture had been shipped back here before the war, so they were fine. The glass originally covered the drawing room walls. It had been packed away in boxes at the last minute when Paris fell. Miraculously it survived. He sold the house but shipped the glass back here. His intention was to install it in the big house, but my great-grandmother refused. She thought it much too garish for England. She wanted him to sell it, but in a fit of pique, he had it fitted onto the walls down here. In Paris there would have been wainscoting below it, but with the low ceilings, it fits pretty well, don't you think?"
It was stunning. A million facets sparkled from the light of the single candle she had lit. Everywhere I looked, my face stared back at me. A thousand pale women in black brocade and jet chokers moved across the room then crouched in front of a thousand fireplaces and stuck a thousand matches. As the fire caught, the room brightened and crackled in sympathy. The ceiling was low, maybe seven feet. She laughed as I reflexively hunched over. It could have been mildly claustrophobic except for the infinite virtual space offered up by the mirrors.
Then I noticed the carpet. It looked Chinese, thick and soft. The base colour was that deep Chinese blue that drags you into its depths. Cavorting across the surface were a hundred stylized dragons.
She stood up from the fire and admired her handiwork. Then she turned and sidled up to me. I watched as a thousand reflections of her in the mirrors to our left and right leaned forward and gently kissed me.
"In a moment the fire will have this place very warm. This dress is cute but not that comfortable. Will you unzip me?"
A million copies of me looked momentarily stunned, and then I unzipped the dress. She shrugged and it slid gracefully off of her shoulders and down her body, coming to rest in a black puddle around her ankles. Her small breasts had needed no bra. She stood before me in black panties and the black choker. She stepped onto "dry land" and bent down to pick the dress up. She folded it and hung it shimmering over the back of a small chair.
She smiled at me and whispered, "What wine goes well with a naked lady?"
I had lost my voice.
She laughed softly. "Champagne, I should think."
I swallowed dryly.
