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

lie behind it for, she said: ‘Not many women would want Mary Anne for a step-daughter. Oh, no! Oh, no!’ She rolled her eyes significantly and chatted on about the difficulty of obtaining women’s magazines and knitting wool. Presently the music ceased and Mary Anne herself came into the kitchen, on some errand she forgot as soon as she saw me for the housekeeper had not bothered to tell her an unexpected guest would arrive at her home. She stood in the doorway, transfixed with surprise and apprehension; in her face, only eyes the colour of a rainy day moved this way and that, as if looking for a way out.
    She had the waxen delicacy of a plant bred in a cupboard. She did not look as if blood flowed through her veins but instead some other, less emphatic fluid infinitely less red. Her mouth was barely touched with palest pink though it had exactly the proportions of the three cherries the artmaster piles in an inverted triangle to illustrate the classic mouth and there was no tinge of any pink at all on her cheeks. Now she was standing up, she was almost hidden in her dress and her tiny face, shaped like a locket, looked even smaller than it was because of a disordered profusion of hair streaming down as straight as if she had just been plucked from the river. I could see her hair and dress were stuck all over with twigs and petals from the garden. She looked like drowning Ophelia; I thought so immediately, though I could not know how soon she would really drown, for she was so forlorn and desperate. And a chilling and restrained passivity made her desperation all the more pathetic. The housekeeper clucked to see the wraith-like girl’s bare feet.
    ‘Put your slippers on at once, Miss! Bare feet on those stone flags! I never did! You’ll catch your death!’
    Mary Anne moved awkwardly from one foot to the other as if her chances of catching death from the stone floor of the kitchen were halved if only one foot came in contact with it at a time. She was about seventeen. Her distant gaze wandered vaguely over the table and she whispered in a pleading undertone:
    ‘Perhaps a little tea…’
    ‘Not unless you step on to the rag rug,’ said the housekeeper, too authoritatively for the circumstances perhaps.
    The girl edged into the room until she stood on the bright strip of carpet, allowing her eyes to rest on me again while the housekeeper got her a cup and even a biscuit, although she muttered to herself as she did so.
    ‘I am Mary Anne, the Mayor’s daughter. Who are you?’
    ‘I am a civil servant and my name is Desiderio.’
    She repeated the name quietly to herself but with a curious quiver in her voice which might have been pleasure and eventually she confided:
    ‘Desiderio, the desired one, did you know you have eyes just like an Indian?’
    The housekeeper went ‘tsk! tsk!’ with annoyance for we whites were not supposed to acknowledge the Indians.
    ‘My mother always found it embarrassing,’ I replied and at that the girl seemed obscurely pleased and thrust out her hand in such a sudden, unexpected gesture of goodwill it was more like a thwarted blow than an offer to shake. But I took her hand and found it was icy. She would not let go of me for a long time.
    ‘Mr Desiderio is going to stay in the spare room for a while,’ said the housekeeper grudgingly, as if reluctant to share the information with her mistress. ‘He’s come from the government.’
    Mary Anne found this very mysterious; her eyes grew wide.
    ‘You won’t find my father, you know,’ she informed me.
    ‘Why not?’ I asked. My fingers were still in the snow trap of her clutch.
    ‘If he didn’t come back in time to prune the roses, he won’t come back at all,’ she said, and shook with such silent but vigorous laughter her tea slopped from her cup on to her dress, which was already stained with all manner of other spilled food and drink.
    ‘What do you think happened to him, Mary Anne?’ I asked gently for, though I knew