Strange Stories by Robert Aickman

left familiar surroundings and completely changed her way of life for him. He must do the same for her without end; and he wished it.
    The moonlight was now insufficient to show the state of the walls or the curiously assorted furnishings or the few personal traps he had omitted to bear to London. Stephen had worn gloves to drive and had not removed them to lug. He wore them still.
    None the less, when he said, ‘Shall we have a light now? ’ he spoke with some reluctance.
    “Now,’ said Nell. ‘We’re at home now.’
    He fired up some of the rough cressets he had managed to lay hands on when he had borrowed the sottish Jarrold’s Land-Rover.
    Nell threw herself against him. She kissed him again and again.
    As she did so, Stephen resolved to look at nothing more. To look was not necessarily to see. He even thought he apprehended a new vein of truth in what Nell had said on that second day, still only a very short time ago, about her father.
    Nell went upstairs and changed into the dress he had bought her. She had done it without a hint, and he took for granted that she had done it entirely to give pleasure. In aspect, she was no longer a part of nature, merging into it, an oread. Not surprisingly, the dress did not fit very well, but on Nell it looked like a peplos. She was a sybil. Stephen was scarcely surprised. There was no need for him to see anything other than Nell’s white and black robe, intuitively selected, prophetically insisted upon; quite divine, as ordinary normal girls used to say.
    When he dashed off his gloves in order to caress her, he regarded only her eyes and her raiment; but later there was eating to be done, and it is difficult, in very primitive lighting, to eat without at moments noticing one’s hands. These particular hands seemed at such moments to be decorated with horrid subfusc smears, quite new. Under the circumstances, they might well have come from inside Stephen’s driving gloves; warm perhaps, but, like most modern products, of no precise or very wholesome origin. If ineradicable, the marks were appalling; not to be examined for a single second.
    When Nell took off her new dress, Stephen saw at once (how else but at once?) that her own small single mark had vanished. She was as totally honied as harvest home, and as luscious, and as rich.
    Stephen resolved that in the morning, if there was one, he would throw away all the souvenirs of Elizabeth he had brought with him. They could be scattered on the moor as ashes in a memorial garden, but better far. The eyes that were watching from behind the marks on the walls and ceilings and utensils glinted back at him, one and all. The formless left hands were his to shake.
    ***
    In the nature of things, love was nonpareil that night; and there was music too. Nell’s inner being, when one knew her, when one really knew her, was as matchless as her unsullied body. Goodness is the most powerful aphrodisiac there is, though few have the opportunity of learning. Stephen had learned long before from the example of Elizabeth, and now he was learning again.
    Time finally lost all power.
    The music became endlessly more intimate.
    ‘God!’ cried Stephen suddenly. ‘That’s Schumann!’ He had all but leapt in the air. Ridiculously.
    ‘Where? ’ asked Nell. Stephen realized that he was virtually sitting on her. He dragged himself up and was standing on the floor.
    ‘That music. It’s Schumann.’
    ‘I hear no music.’
    ‘I don’t suppose you do.’
    Stephen spoke drily and unkindly, as he too often did, but he knew that everything was dissolving.
    For example, he could see on the dark wall the large portrait of Elizabeth by a pupil of Philip de Laszlo which had hung in their conjugal bedroom. The simulacrum was faint and ghostly, like the music, but he could see it clearly enough for present purposes, dimly self-illuminated.
    He had taken that picture down with his own hands, years and years ago; and the reason had been, as he now