The Robber Bride Read Free Page A

hundred thousand Teutones – or two hundred thousand, depending on who was doing the chronicling – a century before the birth of Christ. By dangling a small advance contingent of his forces in front of the enemy like bait, he’d decoyed them to his chosen slaughtering-ground. After the battle, three hundred thousand Teutones were sold into slavery, and ninety thousand others may or may not have been thrown into a pit on Mont Sainte Victoire at the urging of a possibly Syrian prophetess, whose name may or may not have been Martha. She was said to have worn purple robes.
    This clothing detail has been passed down through the centuries with firm authority, despite the vagueness of other parts of the story. The battle itself, however, definitely took place. Tony has inspected the terrain: a flat plain, hemmed in on three sides by mountains. A bad place to fight if you were on the defensive. Pourrières is the name of the nearby town; it’s still called that, after the smell of the rotting corpses.
    Tony does not mention (and has never mentioned) this eggcup connection to West. He would be dismayed, not so much by the rotting Teutones as by her. She once remarked to him that she could understand those kings of old who used to have their enemies’ skulls made into wine cups. This was a mistake: West likes to think of her as kind and beneficent. And forgiving, of course.
    Tony has made coffee, grinding the beans herself; she serves it with cream, in defiance of cholesterol. Sooner or later, as their arteries fill with sludge, they will have to give up cream, but not just yet. West sits eating his egg; he’s absorbed in it, like a happy child. The bright primary colours – the red cups, the yellow tablecloth, the orange plates – give the kitchen a playground air. His grey hair seems a fluke, some unaccountable transformation that’s been worked upon him overnight. When she first knew him he was blond.
    “Good egg,” he says. Small things like good eggs delight him, small things like bad eggs depress him. He’s easy to please, but difficult to protect.
    West , Tony repeats to herself. She says his name from time to time, silently, like a charm. He didn’t use to be West. Once – thirty? thirty-two years ago? – he was Stewart, until he told her how much he hated being called Stew; so she reversed him, and he’s been West ever since. She cheated a little, though: strictly speaking, he should have been Wets . But that’s what happens when you love someone, thinks Tony. You cheat a little.
    “What’s on your agenda for today?” says West.
    “Want some more toast?” says Tony. He nods and she gets up to tend the toaster, pausing to kiss the top of his head, inhaling his familiar scent of scalp and shampoo. His hair up there is thinning: soon he’ll have a tonsure, like a monk’s. For the moment she’s taller than he is: it isn’t often she gets such a bird’s-eye view.
    There’s no need for West to be told who she’s having lunch with. He doesn’t like Roz and Charis. They make him nervous. He feels – rightly – that they know too much about him.
    “Nothing very exciting,” she says.

4
    A fter breakfast West goes up to his third-floor study to work, and Tony changes out of her dressing gown, into jeans and a cotton pullover, and marks more papers. From upstairs she can hear a rhythmical thumping, punctuated by what sounds like a mixed chorus of mating hyenas, cows being hit with sledgehammers, and tropical birds in pain.
    West is a musicologist. Some of what he does is traditional – influences, variants, derivations – but he’s also involved in one of those cross-disciplinary projects that have become so popular lately. He’s mixed up with a bunch of neurophysiologists from the medical school; together they’re studying the effects of music on the human brain – different kinds of music, and different kinds of noises, because some of the things West comes up with can hardly be thought of as