The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter Page A

ivied walls and lodged in knots on the roofs where flowering weeds were rooted in the gaps between the mossy tiles while a great, unlopped elm with lice of rooks in its hair towered over the house as if about to drop its great limbs upon it, to smash it, while at the same time its roots clutched the foundations under the earth in a ferocious embrace. The garden had laid claim to the house and was destroying it at its arborescent leisure. Those within the house were already at the capricious mercy of nature.
    Enormous clumps of mugwort had torn apart the gate and blocked the path entirely so I had to clamber over the tumbledown wall, dislodging a few more stones as I did so. Looking towards the shaggy outlines of the house, I saw a greenish glimmer of light on the ground floor filtering through the leaves which obscured the windows and took this for my clue out of the hostile, vegetable maze which, as I moved forward, lashed me, scored me, stung me and left me sick, bleeding and dizzy with its odorous excess. As I drew nearer to the house I heard, over the pounding of the blood in my ears, notes of music falling ‘plop’, like goldfish in a quiet pool. Breathless, I halted for a moment to find out if the sound was true. It went wistfully on. Somebody in that ruinous place was playing Debussy on the piano.
    At last I reached the lighted window and parting the foliage which covered it, I peered through. I saw a drawing room with worn Persian rugs on the floor and walls hung with a once crimson brocaded paper that was now faded and figured with damp and mould, rucking and buckling over the dank walls beneath. There was an alabaster fireplace with a bouquet of shell flowers in a misted glass dome upon it and a fan of silver paper in the grate. Oil paintings so heavily varnished one could not make out their subjects hung here and there askew in pompous frames of tarnished gilt and an unlit cut-glass chandelier in the centre of the ceiling scintillated with reflections from the two candles in a branched stick which stood on the grand piano and threw a soft light over the girl who played it.
    Her back was turned towards me but when I craned my neck I could see her white, thin, nervous fingers on the keyboard and caught a glimpse of the pale curve of her cheek. Her hair, the lifeless brown of a winter forest, hung down the back of her black dress. She played with extraordinary sensitivity. The room was full of a poignant, nostalgic anguish which seemed to emanate from that slender figure whose face I could not see.
    I thought it best not to disturb her and made my way round to the back of the house where I found a black cat washing itself on an up-turned bucket, and inside an open door, a fat old woman who sat in a darkened kitchen to save, she said, the electricity; and that was also the reason why she made the mistress of the house play the piano by candlelight. The housekeeper guessed who I must be from my lumpish shape in the shadows. She greeted me warmly and turned on the lights in my honour to reveal a blessedly commonplace kitchen with a gas stove, a refrigerator and a saucer of milk put down for pussy. She settled me down at the scrubbed table with a cup of tea and a saucerful of shortbread biscuits, asked about my journey and hoped, too solicitously, that I would find the accommodation adequate.
    ‘Though how could we put you up luxuriously, sir, I mean – in the circumstances…’
    She had a slippery, ingratiating quality which was meant to disarm but somehow offended me and she loquaciously set sail on a rattling stream of nothings while the girl in the drawing room continued to play the piano exquisitely and the music echoed down a corridor into the room. The old woman spoke of the vanished Mayor with neither embarrassment nor surmise. She had apparently absorbed the fact that he was gone so well into her world that if, one day, he returned, she would feel subtly affronted. She hinted that she suspected a woman might