Killing Violets

KILLING VIOLETS
Tanith Lee
www.sfgateway.com


Enter the SF Gateway …
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
Welcome to the SF Gateway.


Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
To Begin
Chapter One: Having Arrived
Chapter Two: The English Country Walk; with Coda
Chapter Three: Waiting and its Consequences
Chapter Four: Then
Chapter Five: A Reasonable Attempt
Chapter Six: Entering Through Doors
Chapter Seven: Among the Pack of Dogs or Cards
Chapter Eight: A Nocturne; with Extended Coda
Chapter Nine: The Tea Ceremony
Meaning to Continue
Website
Also by Tanith Lee
Dedication
About the Author
Copyright


To Begin
In the European city where he found her, Anna had already made up her mind to sell herself. She was very hungry. She had begun to hallucinate about food. But something had decided Anna’s body was worth more than a dinner. What it was worth is the substance of this story.
Raoul met her by the banks of the pea-green river, to which she had wandered down. Around them the grey city rose through a grey rain, with one or two buildings like Parma ham, while some copper domes shone like spectral turnips. Old woodsmoke burning somewhere had the smell of chocolate.
When Anna turned, her large rain-coloured eyes fixed at once on Raoul. She saw he was well-dressed, and he was smoking too, an expensive cigarette. That he was handsome made her think she should be careful. Surely he had no reason to be looking, with his black eyes, for a street girl.
“Good day. Do you like the rain?” said Raoul.
“What rain?” said Anna. It had tasted of thin French wine.
“This one, which falls on the just and the unjust together.”
“Which are you?” asked Anna.
He laughed. What lovely teeth. “I see you’re a foreigner, like myself. Rain falls on foreigners, too. I’d like to take you somewhere.”
Anna felt a surge of hope so painful she nearly screamed. “Oh, where?” she said, negligently, watching some ducks go by. But they did not look like food in their feathers, and now she could smell brown soup from the river mud.
“To my hotel, perhaps?” said Raoul.
So he was looking for a street girl. And she must be his type, slim and ash-coloured, and belted into a poor coat, whose pockets held all she owned, water dripping from the sides of her bell-shaped hat, and from the wisps of her short hair.
“Why would I go with you?” said Anna, seeing the clouds above the rain, marshmallow, or scoops of soiled creamed potato.
“We could have some dinner, some drinks. We’d have a nice time,” he said. Then he added, strangely she thought, possibly sinisterly, “I don’t have odd tastes. I’d like to fuck you, but there won’t be anything – unnatural.”
Anna said, “Let’s, then.”
She walked arm in arm with him – he had gallantly offered his arm.
The puddles sang at her high heels and splashed her legs, her last pair of stockings.
She had absolutely no thoughts at all about the lovemaking. She would do whatever he wanted, even squat on the rug giving grunts like a pig. She began to float, weightlessly, nearly floating right away from him, so it was a good thing she had his arm to cling to.
No one looked askance in the lobby of the hotel, which was one of the grand stone piles of the city, lined with awful maroon carpets several inches thick, marble stairs and pillars, pale green walls that reminded her of celery.
Even so, they dined in his room. Of course, she wasn’t fit for the gilded dining apartment.
His suite was lavish and grotesque, with a chandelier. He asked if she would like a cocktail. She said she would. The drink came in grey-rain glasses, with olives and caviar and toast, and Anna ate. She ate, she ate.
As she ate the meal – she was never able afterwards to remember what it was, only the caviar and the cocktail at the beginning – pickles and patés and the entrée and a dessert and fruit – she kept thinking fondly, nearly enthusiastically, that she would do anything, anything for him. All he wished. Tie him to the bed-posts and bite his toes, beat him with the fire-tongs, pretend to be dead…
But she had eaten nothing, before this dinner, for five days, and drunk only two cups of coffee. Ten minutes after she had set down the last spoon or knife, she wobbled into his bathroom of mahogany and brass, and vomited copiously and ceaselessly for nearly two hours.
Finally she found herself lying, damp and shivering, and only