Free Polystom by Adam Roberts Page A

up some small reservoir of strength, so that you can act as a woman and not as a ghost! But he didn’t say any of this out loud, nor did his inward fury inform his speaking voice.
    She was looking past him now, out of the breakfast room window. A brisk spring wind was blowing straight up the Middenstead. The glass was rattling gently in its frames.
    ‘Nestor tells me,’ Polystom said, after a while, ‘that you have taken to sleeping in the Velvet Bedroom.’
    She caught his eye briefly, with the most ghostly of smiles on her face. Was she mocking him?
    ‘He
also
tells me,’ Stom continued, gripping the handle of his butter spoon with unnecessary force, ‘that you don’t settle in any one bedroom for very long.’ If only you took
one
bedroom, he wanted to say. If only you
settled yourself somewhere
. Then I would know where to find you. He spooned a lump of butter onto his plate.
    ‘I found some sketches under the chaise-baissé in the Yellow Room,’ she said, unexpectedly. This wrong-footed Polystom, who had become used to her unbroken silence at breakfast. She couldn’t even be consistent in that!
    ‘Sketches?’ he snapped.
    ‘Of dogs, I think.’
    It took a moment for Stom to locate himself. ‘My great grandfather used to sketch. He assembled a bestiary of animal sketches. Perhaps those were discards. Or copies. The original are now in private collection – my mother’s mother keeps them all.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Did you say dogs?’
    She nodded.
    ‘There aren’t any dogs on Enting, you know,’ he said. ‘The climate doesn’t agree with them. Lots of insects in the air here, aboriginal insects, and their bite kills off almost all breeds.’
    There was a silence after this little lecture, broken only by the fluttery rattle of the window panes in their frames.
    Shortly, Beeswing slipped out of her chair and through the door, vanished, as insubstantial an exit as befitted her.
    All that day Stom cursed himself inwardly, marching vigorously through the forest to try and burn off his sense of indignation. His mood wavered between fury and self-pity. For a while he would be spitting with frustration that there had been the chance of connection, that her observation on the sketches had suggested itself as a bridge, that if he hadn’t been so inwardly clotted with anger he might have responded kindly to her words, might have established a dialogue, and the two of them could have started the slow process of growing together. But this mood would flip about in moments and would be replaced by an anger as hard as knucklebones. What was the matter with her! Why couldn’t she be a more conventional wife! It
wasn’t
his fault, it really wasn’t, he had tried over and over. It was
her!
She had abdicated the proper responsibilities of a wife and partner. Even if she
fought
him it would be preferable; even if she spat at him and flashed her nails at his face. Anything would be better than this grey passivity, as if she weren’t entirely real, as if
he
weren’t substantial and important – the Steward of Enting, after all! By this stage Polystom was kicking great patches of last year’s pineneedles into the air, like winnowing wheat, with swooping great swings of his legs.
    By his return to the house in the evening this rage had shrunk, distilled itself into a pearl of rancour seemingly located in his gut. His wife did not appear for supper. Stom sent the underbutler to seek her out, but after twenty minutes the young man returned, red with embarrassment, to say that mistress wasn’t hungry, chose not to dine with him. The rage flared in Polystom’s breast again – to humiliate him
via a servant!
It was too much. He ate his food with a savage deliberation, and then asked the underbutler where his wife might be found. In the Print Room.
    He thumped his way along the corridors and to the Print Room furious, determined to vent his anger at Beeswing. He decided he was going to tell her that it wouldn’t