Dialogues of the Dead

And so the game began. Dee clearly enjoyed the role of patient teacher, though it did seem to Rye that every time she thought she was getting the hang of it, he introduced a new and still more complex element. Not that she felt this as competitive. Indeed she soon began to get a sense that the mature experience of the game would have more of the partnership of dancing in it than the clash of competition. The rich designs glowed on the board and the letter tiles, made of smooth ivory, slipped through the fingers like silken fish when you dipped your hand into their container to replenish your store. This container itself was a thing of beauty, no plain tin or battered cardboard box, but a heavy gold-hinged casket carved from rubeous crystal.

“My mother’s sole heirloom,” he said when she asked about it. “How her mother got hold of it I don’t know, nor indeed, considering the circumstances of the family, how she held on to it when everything else of value must have gone to the saleroom or the pawnshop. It held what little jewellery she possessed, gimcrack stuff, mainly. Now it holds something far more precious. The seed of words waiting for their creator. All language is here, which means life itself, for nothing exists till these seeds are sown.”

And he had shaken the crystal casket so that the pieces of ivory slid and rustled and seemed to syllable her name.

Gradually, irresistibly, an erotic subtext had entered their game, a sort of sexy flirtation with sly innuendoes, hot-eyed side-glances, verbal caresses, entirely free from menace. She always felt that any time she wanted to step back, she need send only the slightest signal and, without fuss or recrimination, the normal friendly decorum of their working relationship would be restored. But she sent no such signal. Bathed in the shifting chiaroscuro of the fire, her body felt warm and relaxed. Where this game was leading, she did not know, nor yet how far she wanted it to go. At some point Dee had produced a bottle of dark red wine and a pair of tumblers, and the peppery liquid slipping down her throat was like the early throes of love-making, at the same time satisfying and increasing the drinker’s appetite. The world of rock and water and vegetation outside the small weather-darkened windows seemed a long way away, and more distant still seemed that other world of people and buildings and engines and technology. If their memory seemed dark and comfortless it was because all their warmth and light and comfort and pleasure seemed concentrated in this narrow room. As for the airy infinities of the great mysterious universe in which all worlds exist, what need to go out and stare at the skies when all its beauty and wisdom was contained here on this magic game board which lay at her feet like the cosmos under the gaze of God?

And far away, still in that furthermost world, Hat Bowler was driving his car through the afternoon traffic like a mad thing while some way behind and falling further back, Peter Pascoe was heading in the same direction with rather more concern for his own life and limb as well as those of other road users.

The logs on the fire burnt swiftly, domed, then collapsed into a tumbled bed of glowing ashes whose red heart pulsated with consuming heat.

“A great fire for toast,” murmured Rye. “When I was a kid, I remember sitting before a fire like this, and we toasted thick slices of white bread till they were almost black and spread butter over them till it melted through the airholes in the dough. I thought of it last time I was here …”

“Toast,” echoed Dick. “Yes, toast would be nice. Later, perhaps. When the game is done.”

And he threw more logs on the fire and soon the seeds of heat in the ashes blossomed once more into flames which embraced these new limbs of wood so that they shifted and sighed and moaned as the fire within them grew hotter and hotter till the room turned unbearably warm.

Dee reached down and pulled off the old tracksuit top he was wearing, revealing a short-sleeved vest which strained against an unexpectedly muscular and athletic body. Rye followed suit, pulling the chunky woollen sweater she was wearing against the anticipated rural chill over her head. It was only as the heavy fibres rubbed across her face that she recalled she didn’t have a top on underneath, only the flimsy silk bra she’d worn with her funeral outfit. Or was she perhaps pretending that it was only now that she remembered this? Certainly there was no perceptible pause as she drew the sweater off completely and let it fall alongside the chair, then leaned forward to make the word joy.

Dee neither averted his eyes nor ogled her bosom, but nodded as if in approval and said, “And now, if we were playing the poets’ convention whereby crossing a word with another which either follows or precedes it in a poem which must of course be accurately quoted, I could score well here by crossing joy with crimson.”