Mr. Fox

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

There was a death on the plane back to London. It was the woman beside me. I didn’t know it could happen like that. I mean, I knew, but I didn’t believe it.

We pushed our seats back at the same time, our eyes met, and we laughed. We’d both ordered vegetarian meals. “I hate this food,” she said. “But I like getting it before everyone else.” Her name was Yelena. She was from the Ukraine, she told me, and I reminded her of her younger daughter. She was fifty-something, I think. Late fifties. Her fuzzy brown hair, her round, shiny eyes. She reminded me of a duckling, a greying duckling. I’d only just met her, but I liked her. I don’t know. We talked about New York. She’d been visiting her eldest daughter, a journalist for a fashion magazine. “You don’t know how far she’s come,” she said. What else. . She showed me a group photo of her eldest daughter, her son-in-law, and her grandson. They looked happy and wealthy, suntanned in winter. I told her that I’d just been visiting my mother. “Good daughter,” she praised. I shook my head. “Only child.” She asked me what my mother does, and I said she’s a yoga teacher. I almost always lie about my mother. This woman, Yelena, started watching a sitcom and giggling, so I put on my noise-cancelling headphones and drank three-quarters of a bottle of cough syrup. I like it because it wears off faster than sleeping pills. I licked my lips. My stomach felt full; it seemed to sigh. When I looked out of the window sleep came down over it, steadily building black, softening my neck so that my head lolled, gathering me up in its vapour so that I drifted above the cramped angle of my seat. At some point my neighbour began to drum a fist upon my arm, then she began to groan and gripped my wrist; I shrank away and turned my face deeper into the flight cushion. I was dreaming.

I dimly recall hearing a beeping sound, and another noise, like a toy rattle being shaken. But they might have been in the dream. I love sleeping. Waking is more and more hateful the older I get. I say this as if I’ve lived too long. I’m twenty-two.

I woke as they were taking her away. Everyone was talking — everyone, in every seat. I felt their voices through my back and in my hair. There was still daylight in the cabin, but the overhead lights were on. Two male flight attendants carried Yelena away down the aisle, wrapped in blankets. And a balding man with a stethoscope walked behind them. I kept my head very still and just took my time to look and listen, without saying anything. Yelena’s arm kept trailing; her palm touched the floor, and the attendant who had the upper half of her kept catching her arm but couldn’t keep it aloft. Not to worry, said the flight attendants, and the man with the stethoscope said something similar with every step. They were taking her through to first class, which was almost empty, something Yelena and I had complained to each other about at the beginning of the flight. Someone asked if Yelena was dead. The flight attendant said something about her having been “taken ill.” But you’ve covered her face, someone else said. A beige silk scarf had been laid in a floppy triangle over Yelena’s eyes, mouth, and nose. Someone behind me started praying, in Latin, and rattling beads. People kept looking at me, and at the empty seat beside me. There was Yelena’s handbag, beneath the seat in front of us. Her tray, with the remains of her meal on it, had been hastily pushed on top of my own tray. Her seat was still warm. The sitcom was still running on the little screen. I kept listening to what was being said: I heard the words “cardiac arrest.” I should look after Yelena’s handbag. When would they come back for it? Should I take it up to the front. .

The stares from the other passengers grew fixed, and I realised that my lips were moving, so I stopped moving them. Someone asked me if I was all right. Yes, I think so, thank you. Someone else asked me if I was all right. Yes, I think so, thank you. She seemed fine. Maybe she wasn’t well but didn’t want to say so. .

I shouldn’t have drunk so much of that cough syrup. A quarter of a bottle would have been sufficient. Half at the most.

The people around me kept asking if I was all right. Their voices were very kind, filled with concern, as if it was I who needed their concern. I couldn’t see exactly who was talking to me — it all seemed to be coming from every direction at once. My nose ran. Tears fell; they stung, like hail. Sorry, I said. Sorry. Eventually someone came and took me away, and I scooped up all my things and Yelena’s and followed behind the air hostess, dropping books and bottles and passports. Leave them, leave them, Miss Foxe, the air hostess said. I’ll bring your things along for you in a minute. I had a moment of bewilderment—Who is Miss Foxe? — then I just let everything go and went to first class, which is where they wanted me to sit so that I could tremble out of sight of my former cabin mates, so that I wouldn’t distress them, so that I wouldn’t complain later about how I’d been treated after the incident. Yelena was six seats away from me. There was an empty row in front of her and an empty row behind her. They’d arranged her in the seat as if she was sleeping — her face was still covered, but it looked better now that she was upright; it looked as if covering her face was something she did just to help her sleep. Her hands were folded on her lap. I know it sounds strange, but I calmed down a bit once I could see her. She looked lonely, but I didn’t want to join her. The air hostess put Yelena’s handbag beside her and brought me some gin. I huddled up under a blanket, dipped my thumb into the glass and sucked it. Yes, it was like that. .

I closed my eyes and tried to do some stupid breathing exercises.

“Only two hours until landing,” a man’s voice said. It seemed he had addressed the words to me, so I opened my eyes. He was sitting to my right, his whole body turned toward me, his chin on his fist as he studied me. I hadn’t heard or felt him draw near. He was older than me, but I couldn’t guess how much older. He was good-looking. Enough to make me feel uncomfortable. Tall and dark, etc. There was room between his eyes for a third eye of the same size — I’ve read that that’s one of the standards of classic beauty. He was wearing a black suit, but it looked as if he’d slept in it for a week straight — wrinkles within wrinkles. “I’m glad to hear it,” I replied.

“That woman over there is dead,” he remarked.

“I know. I–I was sat next to her.”

“What happened?”

“I think she had some sort of massive heart attack.”

He said, “I see,” and spent a second or two thinking about it. “Did you know her?”

“No.”

“Your eyes are just like a cat’s,” he told me. His voice was husky. There was gravel in it, and waves. I blushed. It was the way he looked into my eyes, unfalteringly into my eyes, as he spoke to me and heard my replies. As close and as direct as the look exchanged when standing face-to-face after a kiss, or at the peak of a bad fight. Worse than that, actually. Closer than that.

He lifted a lock of hair away from my face. “Why is this part white?”

“I was struck by lightning when I was little.” A lie I tell everyone. It made him smile. I liked that he didn’t believe me. I liked that he didn’t question the story but let it stand. We talked a bit more. His name was St. John Fox. (St. John. . I thought that had died out as a first name centuries ago. Posh. He was definitely posh.) We made a halfhearted fuss about having almost identical surnames, wondered about being distant cousins. He’d just presented a paper at a psychiatry conference in Manhattan. I made a joke about him being Dr. Fox and he said, seriously, that he preferred “Mr.” I asked him what the subject of his paper was, but he said it wasn’t particularly interesting. Which meant he thought I was stupid. I wished I hadn’t told him that I model. To make up for it I told him about my psychology degree, and he said, “I’ve got one of those, too.” We talked until the plane landed, and then I broke off and stood up when the economy-class passengers started filing through the cabin, whispering and staring. I didn’t want them to see me lounging around in first, chatting with a handsome doctor. I waited around to see what would be done about Yelena — the airplane staff told me they had to get everyone off the plane first. St. John waited with me, though I hadn’t asked him to. I spoke to the doctor and a representative from the airline; I answered their questions and told them all I could think of. We waited until they asked us to leave. That made me think they were going to do something bad. Stick Yelena on a trolley with some luggage, something like that. There was no wheelchair waiting. This worried me.

St. John stepped off the plane. I didn’t follow. He stopped and looked behind him with an expression of mild surprise. “It’ll be all right, Mary. Let them sort this out. She’s gone. We should go, too.”

We talked all the way through passport control and baggage reclaim. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but that didn’t mean anything either way. I have married friends who don’t wear rings. My parents were married and didn’t wear rings. I finally got him to tell me about his paper. He was interested in fugue states. A fugue state is the result of an afflicted consciousness, he said. A person in a fugue state is somewhere between waking and dreaming, with the mere appearance of functioning normally. An already fragile man might suffer strain from some extraordinary life event at nine o’clock one night, then wake up at seven o’clock the next morning and just walk away from his home, his family, his life. He might take a bus or a long train ride, or a flight, and once he is elsewhere he becomes someone else. He’ll take a new name and forget his old one. His handwriting might change; the way he speaks and behaves changes subtly but significantly. He has no memory of his old life — until, abruptly, the fugue wears off, and what’s left is a frightened, exhausted human being, miles and miles from home and unable to recall what he’s seen and said and done since the evening of his dreadful shock.

“You said it wasn’t an interesting subject.”

“Most of these cases are historical. It’s been argued that fugue states are a nineteenth-century malaise, convenient for central European men looking for work in other countries, a disguise for individual attempts at economic migration, that sort of thing.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“No.” His eyes were very bright; they’d been like that since he’d begun talking about his subject. He looked like someone in love. Well, in love the way people were in old movies.

“Are you working with fugue-state patients right now?”

“If I was, I wouldn’t be allowed to discuss it.” He wheeled my suitcase up to the taxi rank. He only had a light-looking hold-all himself. “My car’s parked down there. I’d offer you a lift, but. .”

“But?”

“But you shouldn’t drive off with strange men you only just met on the plane.”

“Of course.”

(I would have gone with him.)

“It was nice to meet you, St. John. Thanks—” I had no idea what I was thanking him for. He was gazing at me again, with that overwhelming concentration. I seemed to interest him very much — as an artefact, almost.

He drew a business card from his wallet, a pen from the top pocket of his jacket, and rested the card on top of my hard case. “Look — you’ve had a bit of a shock today. And I have some concerns,” he said, writing a phone number on the back. “It’s because your eyes are like a cat’s, you know, and you were struck by lightning. If you don’t phone I’ll assume the worst.”

“Bold,” I said, accepting the card.

He touched my wrist. Lightly, and with just one finger, but I shivered. It wasn’t that his hand was especially cold. I think it was the subtlety. If I hadn’t been looking, I wouldn’t have even noticed what he’d done. He took my pulse, I thought. Stole it.

“Too bold?”

He walked away from me, backwards.

I didn’t know how to answer. I think I just shrugged awkwardly and turned away.

I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. Not even for curiosity’s sake.

For example: There’s the time I went to Berlin to see a man I liked, a stage magician I’d done a shoot with to promote something or other. The visit went badly. I’d turned up at his door as a surprise, and he didn’t like surprises. If I’d thought about it I would have realised that — a magician must control his props and the space in which he orchestrates his tricks — it looks like play, but the magician’s mind must be as strict as an iron brace. We went for a walk and he told me that I didn’t make much sense to him outside of the photographs. He seemed to be trying to tell me that I was a creature of chaos. I said, “Okay, I’ll go home today.”

The magician said, “Thank you for understanding.” He turned homewards and I stood still.

“Aren’t you coming?”

“No, I’m going home.”

“But your things—”

“Throw them away. I’ll get new things. There are so many, all around.”

“You’re angry.”

“I’m not. I swear I’m not.” I really wasn’t angry. I did want him to go away, though, and quickly, so that I could begin to forget about him. So I smiled, and hugged him, to show that I wasn’t angry. He left, calling after me that I should phone him if I changed my mind about picking up my things. I kept walking. Under a bridge in Prenzlauer Berg I came across a man playing a violin; he was wearing a top hat and dinner jacket, and his notes were apple crisp. Because he was playing so well I looked at him. At first I thought my sight was sun-spattered, but once my eyes adjusted to the tunnel I saw that the scars were really there — harshly moulded welts that gripped half of his face. They crowded his left eye, forced its corner to travel down with them. I stopped walking.

“Wunderbar,” I said. “Wo hast du gelernt?”

He didn’t change the pace of his playing. Nor did he look up.

“Schläfst du hier?”

No answer. Sunset lanced through the tunnel, cutting our shadows off at the knees. I found my purse, took out a note, and let it flutter into his violin case. I liked his indifference. I respected it. He finished his piece and packed up his violin, shaking the money out of the case first. It blew away, but I stomped and trapped it under my foot, still watching him, wondering, I suppose, if he would acknowledge me before leaving. “If you want to talk to me you can talk to me,” he said, as he snapped his case shut. “But not here.”

And he leapt to his feet and sprinted away, through the tunnel and across the smooth lawn of the park, through the rose-covered trellises that flanked its gates. He crossed over concrete and, at a mad, desperate dash, through the traffic that whirled along a broad avenue. And I followed, chased briefly by my flying ten-euro note, colliding with pedestrians, knocking handbags off shoulders and newspapers from people’s hands. The violinist’s hat fell off his head, and I picked it up and ran harder, shouting “Entschuldigung!” and shaking it joyfully. Near the end of a dimly lit alleyway my quarry knocked on a door in a complicated manner — a series of knuckle raps and openhanded slaps — was abruptly admitted, and tumbled inside. I drew the line at that. I approached the door, which looked like any other door, and placed the top hat to the left of it. Then I went off in search of something to eat. The running had made me hungry. I hope he recovered the top hat — it wasn’t a cheap one.

I’ve wondered, I have wondered, what that chase was all about, but I’ve never regretted leaving the matter at that. I didn’t want to follow the violinist into the company of persons unknown to me. So I didn’t do it.

I decided that I would not be calling S. J. Fox — there was something married about him. So I left his business card in the back of the taxi. I’ve left purses and cameras and mobile phones in the backs of taxicabs and have never once been called back to collect them before the cab drove off. This time the driver called out, “You’ve forgotten something, miss,” and I had to go and pick the business card up.

I liked to go home. I’d worked hard on the place, repainting a room a month, stencilling bright butterflies in corners, building little galaxies of light with crystal lampshades, pouring gauze over the windowpanes. There was no darkness where I lived.

I let myself in, picked my letters up off the doormat, and walked through two weeks’ quiet, the floorboards soft under my feet, a gentle path to my unmade bed. It looked storm-tossed, just the way I’d left it, just the way I liked it. I lay down, opened letters, and listened to my answer machine. There were hardly any messages. A couple from my agent, about jobs.

As I listened to the messages I looked at an invitation to a fancy dress party, really looked at it, held it close to my face. The words were printed alongside a picture of me, looking too silly for words. They’d done my hair up in Victorian ringlets and dressed me up in a grey wolf suit and a red cape. The snarling wolf’s head was hung around my neck, sharp teeth and bright gums. In the background there were soft multicoloured lights that were supposed to suggest fantasy and imagination. It was for charity. The party was due to start in an hour, and the venue wasn’t far from my flat — not by taxi. I could still go. It seemed wrong not to take a chance to meet people.

There was a shepherd’s crook leant up against my bathroom door — I’d got it on the Portobello Road a few months ago. I considered going to the fancy dress ball as a saucy shepherdess. Or Christ. Or I could go as a saucy shepherdess, and when people asked me if I was a shepherdess I could say “Christ, actually.”

I moved on to the last letter in the heap, the only one addressed to Miel Shaw. It was a dove-grey envelope addressed in thin, dark purple print. Which meant that it was from my father. I had one hundred and twenty-seven other envelopes like it, many of them unopened because they’d arrived on days when I knew I couldn’t cope. The letters were all in a shoebox under my bed. My hoard. I opened the new envelope little by little, sliding a nail along under its sealed flap, from one corner to the other. It took a long time.

The letter was upsetting, so I’ll try to paraphrase it. It had been written by someone else on his behalf — dictated, it seemed, and sent without editing. My father apologised for writing to me — he said he knew that I didn’t like him to. But he had been taken aside and told terrible things about what was happening inside his body. He was dying of colon cancer. He had gone through chemotherapy, and he was still dying. There was a smell in the air — a sweet smell that terrified him and was with him always. He thought it was coming from his stomach. He asked me to visit him at the prison hospice. You’ve never seen such a place, he said. You couldn’t know that a place like this exists. Come and see me. Just quickly, just once. Or if I telephoned, if I wrote back — just to show that I was there, that there was someone. He said that he’d seen me in a magazine but that I’d just been paint and porcelain. Are you really there? he asked. Are you?

I folded the letter, put it back in its envelope, and added it to the others in the box. I don’t care. I don’t care. He hadn’t put my name in the letter, and that made it easier for me to refuse the letter — it had not been written to me.

I thought I heard something in the next room, a footfall.

I paced through the flat with the reassuring weight of the shepherd’s crook in my hand, checking that all the windows were locked. They were. I was alone. Safe, alone.

All the times I’ve been frightened because of my father. My need for night-lights, my inability to sleep in a room unless I’m able to clearly see all four corners from the bed — and dreams, bad dreams like messengers he sent. All the times he’s frightened me. Die, then, I thought. Die. And I wondered when he would be gone.

I phoned my lawyer, and I phoned his lawyer, and left messages. Long messages. Part of the reason I changed my name was so that my father wouldn’t be able to contact me. Yet somehow he has always been able to find me. His secretary used to send me cheques twice a year, cuts from my father’s investment yield that he instructed her to pass on to me. But I’ve never cashed them, not under any circumstances. When I moved house I left a post office box as my forwarding address, and I haven’t checked it since. You have to be like that when there’s a person like my father in your life; when you leave places you mustn’t look back or you’ll find him there.

“S. J. Fox, psychiatrist,” I murmured. “S. J. Fox, psychiatrist.” Whilst thinking, I was looking at his card. I’d placed it on my bedside table. The card was so plain, so black-and-white and uncreased, that it made everything around it, the frosted-glass lamp that shone light on it, the framed photograph of my cousin Jonas and me, look insubstantial. I was interested in his work, this St. John Fox. Did he know, could he tell, when a fugue state was coming on? The clinic he worked at was in Cornwall, and that was far away. I covered the card with my letters. There was no point invoking psychiatry in this matter. I am sane and it’s well documented that my father is sane. He seemed fully aware of what he’d done, and he was sorry, so sorry. My father is eloquent and sensitive, fair-haired and fair-skinned. His facial expressions flow into one another with mesmerizing transparency, grief, anguish, scorn. “He gets so worked up,” my mother used to say. She said it lovingly. Then she took to saying it in a puzzled way, then with contempt.

There was always something strange about the three of us together. Little things that might have been fun but somehow weren’t fun. One sunny morning my father made my mother lie down — she was laughing, and she said she wanted to do it, but she was an actress; can you trust an actress and a sunny day? — he made her lie down in the garden in her bikini and he wrote all over her. I can’t remember what he wrote; it was a long poem, in blue ink, an original poem, maybe. I was ten going on eleven. I didn’t like what was happening and I didn’t know why. He wrote on her back first, kneeling beside her; then he made her turn over and wrote all across her front, pressing hard, and the letters were big and ugly, but she pranced around afterwards, holding out her arms and saying things like: “Am I in the poem? Or is the poem in me?” And he just sat in a deck chair as if exhausted by his work and watched her. I thought, Something very mad is going on, she doesn’t like this, but she’ll never say so.

I was taken to a theatre matinee for my twelfth birthday treat; that should have been fun, too. We had the best seats possible, because that’s what things were like with my father. My mother was playing Juliet, and the first two scenes dragged—blah, blah, said one actor — Romeo, I presumed. Blah, blah, blah, said a second actor; some relative of Romeo’s. Asking him something; merry but concerned. Blah, blah, blah, blah, Romeo said, looking downcast for a few seconds before proceeding to jump around and climb things. My father stared into space and I felt my eyes begin to close of their own accord. Until Juliet made her airy appearance, soft and slender—“How now! Who calls?” and suddenly we were listening, Father and I, watching, our heads tilting to take her in, as if we’d never seen her before. The stage makeup exaggerated her eyes, but her mouth was still larger, very much larger. Something from the distant past — a great-grandfather who was an African. She was self-conscious about her mouth and called it her clumsy flytrap, but my Aunt Molly told me that that’s how it should be — when a woman’s lips are larger than her eyes it’s a sign that she’s warm-hearted. Her hair was a bright mass of crinkles, a lion’s mane. Romeo embraced her and she gave herself over to him with eager, trembling bliss. There were quite a few embraces, and my father became conspicuously still and watched with startled pain. I was uncomfortable because I’d never seen her like this before, but he’d seen her perform plenty of times. It’s only acting, I thought. Is he always like that when she acts?

After the matinee my parents took me to lunch, and the strangeness was there with us. It was there in the powdery smell of the velvet on the restaurant chairs, and it was there in the palm fronds that tickled my head. My mother and father talked politely about things they had read in the newspaper, and changed the subject whenever it seemed they were about to disagree. As usual, my father ordered something that wasn’t on the menu, just because. He told me to order whatever I liked, and I did. My mother drank martinis and said sharply, “Three whole courses! What a pig you are, Miel.” And I was so surprised I almost cried. It was my birthday. And she’d never said such a thing before. My father and I were silently against her for the rest of the meal, sticking to our plan to order ice cream even though she wasn’t having anything and was ready to leave.

I wish I hadn’t ever been bad to my mother. I see that afternoon again and again. She had acted wonderfully, she had been Juliet, and then we’d met her at the stage door and treated her as if she had done something wrong. We hadn’t said “Well done” to her, or much of anything. My father had just pushed a bunch of flowers into her arms.

Just over two years later, my father killed my mother. She was running away from him down some stairs and he seized her by the hair at the nape of the neck — he must have lifted her onto her tiptoes — and he forced a knife through her chest. From behind. Then he called the police, and waited for them. I was at boarding school, and everyone there knew, because it was in the newspapers, and some of my friends went and lit candles in the school chapel. I found that deeply bogus. All the newspapers were kept away from me so I wouldn’t see what was being said. I didn’t need to read about my mother — I knew her well — we spoke every day until he killed her. She’d moved out of his house, and she was living with her new boyfriend, Sam. She went back to the house to get some things. She had his permission, as long as he didn’t have to see her. So they’d settled on a weekday afternoon — he was supposed to be at the office. But he wasn’t.

He said that she had been turning me against him. (This isn’t true: My father always frightened me. If I had been allowed to testify I’d have said so.) He had a lot of explanations that I wasn’t really able to take in at the time. He said he couldn’t take it anymore.

“It.”

What is “it”? Sometimes I think he killed her to show us something, to show us what “it” is. She was my best friend, and she knew almost everything — if she didn’t know she made outrageous guesses. She made me laugh and I made her laugh. When I spoke to my mother I was the funniest, cleverest, most interesting girl alive. Other people’s mothers told them to “be good” or to “take care.” Mine told me to be bad and wicked and not to worry. While waiting for her to phone me at school I’d feel seconds bursting inside me and leaving clouds. That won’t come again — it can’t. I’ll never have that with anyone else. I’ll never even come close.

So. When I say I’ve been visiting my mother, that means I’ve been visiting her grave. I bring her foxgloves; her maiden name was Foxe. At her funeral she was hidden away in a closed casket because she was no longer beautiful. He’d done other things before he stabbed her — no one would tell me what. I suppose I could have insisted on seeing her, if I’d really wanted to.

I had counselling, which helped. I discovered cough syrup as an aid to sleep, and that was even better.

I didn’t go to the charity ball that night. I couldn’t face it. I called Jonas instead — he’s the closest thing I’ve got to a brother. His parents took custody of me and paid for the rest of my schooling and my food and clothes. And because I was academically advanced and they thought it would be wrong for me to be kept back, they put me through university at the same time as Jonas — I was a drain on their resources. I kept a tally of the running costs as best I could and paid them back when I got a big enough contract. They were very angry, because they love me, and Uncle Tom tore the cheque up, and we never spoke of it again. They are such good people and I owe them so much that I can hardly look either of them in the eye. Jonas’s mother, Molly, is my mother’s younger sister — they used to tease each other about their Anglophilia, two American girls who married British men and developed a keen interest in the goings-on at Ascot, Wimbledon, and the Henley Regatta. Their older sister, Jane, is the one who still lives in America, and the one who had my mother flown out there to be buried. She’s an odd one, Aunt Jane. I don’t think I like her. Jonas isn’t keen on her, either. It exasperates him that she uses his name so often whilst speaking to him; it gives the impression that she’s trying her hardest not to forget who on earth he is. She does that to everyone. She’s always careful to call me Mary, so I find her constant repetition of my name sinister, as if she’s reminding me that I’m not who I say I am.

Jonas is a seminarian — in four or five years’ time he’s going to be a priest. I’ve never been inside his seminary, only glimpsed the grounds. A silence in the centre of London. The main entrance is a glass door set between grey pillars, and when I wait for Jonas on a Friday afternoon, sexy, soberly dressed men of every nationality pour out onto the street. Sexy because they belong to God and will never more be caressed by human hand. A strange thing, because I remember when we used to French-kiss, Jonas and I. We’d French-kissed all over the house while his parents went to concerts and galas and dinner parties. It was my idea. He said he’d never kissed a girl, and I felt sorry for him. So I showed him and showed him and showed him. “This isn’t right,” he stammered. “We’re related by blood.” But he liked it, and he was good at it. Very good at it, actually. Gentle but subtly demanding, too, the way he’d pass his hand through my hair, his lips moving over my mine, slow, savouring. He was talented, at an age when other boys were horrible kissers, just horrible and sloppy. I was fourteen then, and he was sixteen. When Jonas came to the phone I asked him if he remembered that we used to kiss. “I remember,” he said tersely. “Is that why you called?”

I meant to tell him about the letter from my father, and to ask what to do. But I could already hear him telling me that I’d have to go to the prison hospice, that place of marvel my father promised me. So I ended up telling Jonas that someone had died on the plane, and that her name was Yelena. He didn’t ask me if I was all right. He listened. He let me tell him what happened again and again, in more detail as the details came to mind.

“Why are you laughing?” he asked abruptly. It was true, I was — and not quietly, either. I managed to say that I had to go, and hung up. So he was dying! My laughter rose in pitch to equal a scream.

Maybe the letter was a trick, like my father hiding in the house, waiting for my mother to come home without fear. I’d know tomorrow, when the lawyers phoned me back.

Dinner was vodka, such a lot of vodka. And Swing Time was on TV, so I watched that.

“Listen,” Ginger Rogers said to Fred Astaire, “no one could teach you to dance in a million years!”

That dried my laughter up immediately. I turned the TV off and went to bed, to the sleep that I loved.

In the morning I Googled S. J. Fox and found a sad story — a eulogy he’d written for his wife four years ago. It was tender. Very tender, and I stopped halfway through — I had no right to be reading it. There was no mention of the word “suicide,” but it was clear to me that that was what he was getting at. Someone from his wife’s family had posted the full order of the funeral service, including the hymns sung and the psalms and Bible passages read, and they, too, pointed to suicide. Oh, you broken, broken soul, they seemed to say. There is a balm in Gilead, etc. I studied the photograph of her. Daphne Fox. She was sitting on a mossy boulder with sunshine all around her, wearing a picture hat and holding on to it at the crown so it didn’t blow away. She’d been a PE teacher at the local comprehensive school, and had given it up when she’d married him. Like someone from another age. She was a bit plump, and she smiled shyly. Not at all the type I would have expected to see with someone like S.J. She seemed to like butterflies. She was wearing a pair of butterfly earrings and a butterfly pendant. I also made out a butterfly bracelet; the wings closed around her wrist. The life of a butterfly is very short. The German word for butterfly is Schmetterling. These were thoughts I had while avoiding the fact that Daphne Fox looked familiar to me. She was a redhead, like me, but that wasn’t it. I must have just looked at her for too long.

Having ascertained the facts, the lawyers returned my calls. Their voices were serious and low. The letter wasn’t a trick. My father was very ill.

Jonas said, Go to him.

Aunt Molly said, Go to him. So did Uncle Tom.

Aunt Jane said, Go to him, Mary.

There was something morbid about their insistence. He was going to die soon, so now his words were important and had special meaning. That’s what they wanted me to believe. It was disgusting. .

I pretended my mother spoke to me. I pretended she said, Don’t go to him, he’s evil. Don’t forget, she said, that he had that folder full of newspaper clippings. Don’t forget how he made you look through them. Don’t forget that some nights he kept you up until you had read through all the clippings again. He’d test you. He’d watch you wilt.

Why was Fatema Yilmaz buried alive under a chicken pen?

As punishment for talking to boys. She wasn’t allowed to.

Who punished her?

Her father and her grandfather.

How deep was the hole they dug?

Three metres.

Three metres? Are you sure?

No — no. Two metres.

Correct. Why was Medine Ganis drowned in a bathtub?

Because she wouldn’t do as she was told.

Elaborate, Miel. Elaborate.

Her father chose a man for her to marry and she said she wouldn’t do it.

Who was there when she drowned?

Her father was there, and her two brothers were there, holding her down. Her mother was there, but she took no part in it.

Where in the article does it say her mother took no part in it? Don’t embroider. Silence is consent.

But it doesn’t say her mother was silent—

Enough. Why was Charlotte Romm shot to death in her bed?

Because her husband didn’t want her to know that he’d spent her parents’ life savings. But Dad—

Yes, Miel?

He shot their children, too. And her parents.

I know. But I didn’t ask you about them. Don’t answer questions you haven’t been asked.

My mother would tell him to stop it — I passed these stories on, with gruesome embellishments, to other kids at school, and their parents complained — but he said that the world was sick and that I should know I wasn’t safe in it. My mother told me not to listen to him, but it was impossible not to. I kicked open cubicle doors in public toilets, so expectant of discovering an abandoned corpse that for an instant I’d see one, slumped over the toilet bowl, her long hair falling into the water. I saw them in the dark, the girls, the women yet to be found. I counted their faces, gave them names and said the names, as if calling a class register. Here’s what I learnt from the clippings: that there is a pattern. These women had requested assistance. They’d told people: Someone is watching me, has been following me, has beaten me up before, has promised me he will kill me. They’d pointed their murderers out, and they had been told “It won’t happen,” or that nothing could be done, because of this and that, etc. I was jumpy in those days, expecting something terrible to happen to me at any moment, without knowing where it would happen to me, or why, or who would do it.

My father sent press clippings to me at school, from prison. As if to say, Your mother wasn’t the first and won’t be the last. Maybe I could have shown all the clippings to someone and somebody would have looked at his sanity again, tried to get him treatment. But that might have reduced his sentence, or they might have hospitalised him. My father, out in the world again — a thought I couldn’t think. Not ever.

A box arrived in the post, forwarded from the agency. I signed for it, and sat down on the sofa with it, afraid that it was something my father had sent to me. Then I reminded myself that his letter had come directly to me — he knew my address. Still, my hands shook as I unwrapped a brasshandled magnifying glass and a tiny book about half the size of my thumb. I turned the pages — there were only three, and each had a word written on it in a fine, light hand. Trying to breathe, I held the glass over each page and read:

You

didn’t

call. .

He’d included another card inside the box, allowing me the excuse of having lost the first one. He answered on the third ring, as if he’d been waiting.

“It’s me,” I said stupidly.

I thought he couldn’t hear me clearly, and was about to add, “It’s Mary Foxe,” but he spoke just a heartbeat before I did. “Are you seeing anyone?”

“No.”

“Will you see me?”

His voice in my ear. It did interesting things to me. It curved my back and parted my lips. I felt lazy and feline, and he wasn’t even in the room. “Yes. When?”

“I’m in town next week — I do a couple of days a week at a private practise.”

“Call me next week, then.”

“I will.” He paused. I paused.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” he said, at the same time as I said, “I’m sorry about your wife.”

I recovered first. “Thank you for saying that,” I said, without emphasis. He must have found one of those stupid and unnecessary “she isn’t doing too bad for a girl whose mother was murdered” articles. He’d have had to dig deep, though. It was such a long time ago.

“Likewise,” he said.

“I’m sorry I snooped.”

He made no reply. He’d already ended the call.

“Soon, then,” I told the dial tone.

I stopped talking to Jonas and Aunt Molly and Uncle Tom and Aunt Jane. It wasn’t easy. I missed them. Especially Jonas. I attended foam parties and tube parties and hedge and highway parties. I took every job my agent could get for me. People looked at my contact sheets and told me I was doing my best work yet. I couldn’t see what they meant — the pictures looked the same as always.

It was at another charity fund-raiser that I remembered where I had seen Daphne Fox. Light hummed in crystal chandeliers. Jonas, decadent Catholic that he was, would have loved the party. Men in dinner jackets and starched white collars, throats pulsing with laughter. Yards of oystercoloured silk, and diamonds, diamonds, garnets, rubies. One old man had a walking stick topped with an emerald the size of an egg. I holed myself up in a corner with a couple of girls I knew from jobs I’d done, and we listened to the speeches and stood there drinking and looking at everything through our sunglasses, waiting for something to happen. The room was in half-darkness, raked by a roving spotlight. Every now and again someone who had been only a silhouette suddenly transformed into a pillar of flashing jewels. I hadn’t thought to wear any jewellery, and when the spotlight finally fell on our group, I stepped out of it. It didn’t take much to make my head spin just then — the sudden change from blinding light to dusk made my hands clammy. That and the cough syrup and the cocktails and the wine. I excused myself and weaved out of the ballroom, towards the toilets; a crowd of women emerged and momentarily surrounded me. “Come back,” I wanted to tell them. “Don’t leave me alone in here.”

But they had, and I walked up the row of cubicles, kicking doors and watching the mirror while a tap dripped bleakly and Muzak floated in through the speakers. I kicked the last door open and clenched my jaw against a scream — the image of a dead woman flashed fiercely, just as it used to when I was eleven; exactly like that.

It was the same woman I conjured up each time, sprawled in the cubicle with wet, dangling hair, and that bashful, almost apologetic expression—Sorry about this. The face was Daphne Fox’s. That was my last clear impression for a while.

Some time went by. A night, a very late night, I think; streetlamps spiked the dark, and no one was out. Whatever I was doing, wherever I was, I was most aware of the grinding of my teeth — the sound and the feeling. The supple clicking was a comfort.

At first I was alone, then I was with S. J. Fox, at a restaurant — potted plants as tall as trees, fancy bread rolls, tapenade, and out of a window I saw Cleopatra’s Needle dividing the sky. I was very nervous. Close up his skin was weathered and held frown fractures so fine and deep that he seemed made of them. I still couldn’t guess how old he was. I didn’t listen too closely to what he was saying. His expressions changed suddenly and completely — a frown would chase a boyish grin midway through a sentence; not even my father had switched masks so quickly. And that was what all the expressions felt like — masks. I didn’t believe them. They were too thorough, too nuanced; they were never at odds with his subject matter. He probably had to be like this because of work — he had to show people what normal, balanced emotions looked like. But that’s just not how it happens. People move from comic to tragic with the remnants of a smile left on their lips. Natural expressions linger. There was someone behind all S.J.’s masks, someone who stared mockingly and dared me to say that I knew he was there. And that was the one I wanted to meet. The unprofessional.

It took a lot of concentration not to mention his wife. I’ve never met Daphne, but I’ve seen her in my head. .

We walked out of the restaurant and down the street, to the hotel he was staying in. His arm was around my waist. I moved deeper into the curve of his arm as he collected his messages at reception. In the lift he gently pushed me away and made me stand on my own, facing him. “You have a gap in your teeth,” he whispered, and he filled it with the tip of his tongue. He looked at me as he did it, and I looked at him. This was no silver-screen kiss, we were in each other’s wide-open eyes, and I dared not flinch. It was a long way up — the lift kept stopping, and other people entered it and left — I couldn’t see them, only felt them, like clouds drifting around us.

His hotel room was cream and burgundy. He drew the blinds and sat down on the chair by the dressing table. I sat on the bed.

“I loved Daphne,” he said. He studied my reaction — I had opened my mouth, but I said nothing. He went on: “I did. But in the last few months she was worse than a child. She lit fires on the carpets and she threw coffee tables through locked windows. She always had to be watched.”

I couldn’t look at his face anymore, so I looked at his long-fingered hands, the way his knuckles jerked as he opened and closed his hand around the room key.

“I see. She was too much trouble—”

“That’s not what I was saying—”

“So you killed her?”

There, it was out.

“Do you always talk like this?” he asked calmly.

“Did you kill her?”

He answered with a smile. The darkest and most malignant I had ever seen, too strong to be voluntary. The door, I thought. The door. But I didn’t dare turn to it, in case it wasn’t there. His smile stayed. It stayed and stayed, until it became meaningless. It calmed me. So light-headed I stopped trying to sit straight. I dropped onto the floor, and he watched me approach, on my knees. I didn’t stop until I was looking directly into his eyes, deep in their hollows. His face tightened — he was barely breathing.

“Oh, you,” I said. “You are a man I’ve been waiting to meet.”

I took his hands. I arranged them around my throat, closed my own hands over them, tight, like a choker. “Did you kill her and get away with it? How did you get away with it?”

“She killed herself.”

I moved so that they pressed together, the two pairs of hands. I let go, then pressed them together again, made my breathing fold like bellows. It felt good. It felt like forgetting.

“Stop it,” he said. But he didn’t move his hands.

“Did you kill her? Did you kill her?”

“I said ‘Stop it.’”

“And me? Do you want to kill me? Is that why you look at me the way you do?”

“What do you want, Mary?”

I offered my lips to be kissed. He didn’t move his head, though he stayed close.

“Kiss me,” I said.

He took a deep, rattling breath. “You’re. . a strange girl.”

“Kiss me.”

He did. My hands worked at the buttons of his shirt, carefully, slowly. He peeled my dress away from my shoulders. Then we were on the floor together. I was pinned beneath him at first. Our open mouths. Our heat. I hooked my legs around his, drank his skin, strange salt that ran like water; my hair swept across his bare chest; I was astride him by then, and I took him an inch at a time (“Wait,” I said, “wait,” pulling away every time he tried to take too much), an aching delay between each movement that brought him deeper. Such pleasure when he finally steadied me above him, his hands where my waist softens into my hips, such pleasure when he filled me.

“I’m sorry I said those things,” I said when we lay together afterwards. His lips brushed my forehead.

“It’s understandable,” he said. “I understand. The lightning. .”

I hated the kindness in his voice — where did it come from? It wasn’t why I wanted him. I wanted the look in his eyes when I’d asked, “Did you kill her?” The moment in which he had hated me.

“You shouldn’t work after-hours,” I said.

He laughed softly. “Then don’t make me.”

He left me sleeping — when I woke I held out my arms to him and there was nothing, not even a note.

Another day passed, and another night, I think. Without him. Then there were a lot of people, and I didn’t know who any of them were. There were so many of them. Why so many? I realised that I was in public. I had to stay there, in public, because I didn’t know how to get home. Every direction looked exactly the same to me.

Someone took my mobile phone. Someone else took my purse. It wasn’t robbery, exactly — I must have just been sitting there, on a park bench after dark, holding out my purse and my phone, my hands like weighing scales, and then they were empty. I didn’t worry about it. I thought it was summer. “It’s summer,” I said to myself. And I saw ants troop past my feet in single file. I wondered about ants. I wondered whether within each ant there is another and another and another until finally you reached a cold small chip of the universe, immovable and displeased.

Then Jonas was there. I don’t know how he found me. We went into McDonald’s, because it was nearest and I was almost frozen. Ha! Not summer after all. I said I wanted onion rings, and he bought me onion rings, which I didn’t eat. No, I tried ring after ring on my heart finger. Wedding rings. None of them fitted, but they didn’t fall apart, either. Jonas watched me, and he rubbed his head all over, as if searching for a thought, then raked hair out of his eyes. His dear face — his thrice-broken nose, his summer eyes. He had bought me onion rings; he wasn’t going to take anything from me. I didn’t really have anything left, anyway, apart from mascara and my door keys. I was happy when he put his arms around me. I hid my face in the lapels of his jacket and my frame loosened, lavalike, beneath my skin. I don’t know how I didn’t scald him. Jonas’s heart beat steadily, not fast, not slow; its order restored me. He drew back.

“Where have you been?” he said. He was Old Testament angry, calm and wild at once, like a prophet come down from the mountains with a storm under his tongue, holding it until it was time.

“When?”

He stared at me, and I said quickly, “I went to a party.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. A big one. There were probably photos in the paper. It was at. . oh. . at—”

“The Athenaeum?”

“That’s it.”

“Three nights ago.”

“Three. . really. .?”

“Yes, really.”

“Oh. .”

He counted days off on his fingers, his face stony. “So there was yesterday night. And the night before that. And the night before that. We’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Have you. .”

“Roger died on Friday. They were going to cremate him the day before yesterday, but we’ve asked them to hold on until we could reach you.”

“Reach me? Why?”

“So you can see him,” Jonas said simply. “If you want to stop being afraid, Miel, you’ll do this.” He pulled me up out of my seat. I fought him, but he merely locked his arms around me and contained me. I stomped on his foot and his grip didn’t loosen, but his touch became gentler; he brushed his nose against my cheek: “Sh, sh. .”

“No,” I said. “I can’t.”

“I’ll be there.”

I hoped someone would intervene, but everyone else in the vicinity just stared down into their cartons of fries. They must have thought we were having a lovers’ tiff.

Jonas took my keys and opened the front door, talking on the phone as he did — he was cancelling my credit cards for me, asking me for information. Jonas is a good boy. I don’t deserve him. He unzipped my dress, which had wine all down its front, and dragged the satin down over my waist, my hips — it might have been erotic if he hadn’t been so businesslike. He chose a new dress and pulled it over my head, leaving me to wriggle into it. Jonas isn’t afraid of me. God knows I’ve tried to frighten him in my time, jumping out from behind doors and screaming shrilly, prank-calling him when I knew he was at home alone, bookmarking his favourite psalm with a Tarot card — the hanged man. He’s never been scared of me, so he’ll never run. I’m glad, so glad, of that. I’ve tried to show gratitude. But what can I do for Jonas? Last summer I spent almost an hour blowing dandelions off their stems towards him, so that he had a chance to wish for everything he wanted. He was very polite about it, but it can’t have meant much to him. Jonas thinks about eternity and other things that make wishes seem tiny and silly.

The morticians had done well with my father. He didn’t even look that stiff. There was a waxiness to him, but it was more like that of a new doll’s. It was almost eight years since I’d last been in the same room as him, and he looked even younger than I remembered. The sickness had made him small in his suit. I hadn’t expected to be able to see that he had suffered. Now he looked cordial; it felt impossible that he could have done anything terrible, could ever have felt or thought or planned. . If you didn’t know, you could believe that this man had never done anything at all but lie there, patiently waiting for whatever happened next. His cheeks so rosy I almost laid a hand on one, for warmth. I have my father’s nose. I have his ears. I touched my nose and ears. Soon they would be ashes.

Beside me, Jonas began to pray. I don’t know how I knew he was praying, since he didn’t speak and his lips didn’t even move. But he was praying. For a moment I tried to see this situation from Jonas’s perspective. But I couldn’t do it at all. I will never think the way you do, Jonas. You see, my father is a murderer, and yours is not.

Father, in my life I see

(Father in my life I see)

You are God who walks with me

(You are God who walks with me)

I looked back at my father, to see what he thought about Jonas praying. My father was amused, and I followed his lead.

I think I’m going to have to go—

I think I’m going to have to go.

“Go where?” S.J. asked. He was at the other end of the line. I phoned him, at home, at four a.m., and he answered.

“Where do you think you have to go?” S.J. asked again. Where indeed. .

My family was a mistake, I think. The three of us.

I’m the only one left.

I think I’m going to have to go.

“Will you come and get me?” I asked him. “Please.”

“Now?” We were talking about a seven-hour drive through the dawn, and through rush hour. If he started now, he’d be here at about noon. Anything could have happened by noon. They were going to cremate my father at nine a.m. It sounds amazingly stupid, but I was convinced I’d burst into flames with him. I’m bound to my father. How did this happen? I’ve been running from him.

“I’ll come,” S.J. said.

“No.” It scared me that he was so willing. I know I’d asked him to, but his “yes” was impossible to decipher — what was it supposed to mean?

“I want you here. For observation.”

“Haha. I’ll take the train,” I said.

“All right. I’ll take a couple of days off.”

“You can’t. People need you.”

“So do you,” he said. “Call me when you’re on the train.”

I nodded, and I very carefully wrote down the address he gave me.

When I sat down at my computer, checking e-mail before bed, I saw that I had opened twelve identical windows, and Daphne Fox smiled coyly at me out of each one.

I’m no good at train journeys. Half an hour of scenery (which I try to admire), half an hour of the sound of the train on its track, and I have seen and heard enough — my legs begin to jiggle frenetically entirely of their own accord. I began to fall asleep, but the empty seat beside me made me watchful. I didn’t want to fall asleep and wake up and find someone sitting there looking at me. Yelena, Daphne, anybody. The dead are capable of creeping up on you when you aren’t looking, just as capable as the living are.

I kept myself awake with phone calls — to my agent, to explain that I’d be away for a while.

“What? How long for, exactly?”

“I don’t know. My father died.”

“Oh. .” He didn’t say that he was sorry — honest man, my agent: “Take all the time you need, darling. Call me if you need anything.”

He got off the phone quickly. I called Jonas next, and told him where I was going, in case he was interested. Jonas was suspiciously enthusiastic.

“Sounds promising, Miel,” he said.

“Does it?”

He sighed.

“And it’s Mary, by the way,” I said. People shouldn’t think that they can call me Miel just because my father has gone, as if I’m a little girl who was hiding from an ogre. Now they’re all walking around calling out that I can come out now. Well, it’s too late.

It took almost as long to get to Brier Moss by train as it would have by car. Six and a half hours later I climbed out of a taxicab and walked up to a house that stood alone behind a large flat whorl of a garden, almost out of sight of the road. Grasshoppers ticked away in the bushes as I knocked on the front door. S.J. answered, in pyjamas, barefoot, and carrying a towel. Drops of water clung to his lips and ran down his chin, and as I followed him into the house he ducked his head beneath the towel and emerged with his hair standing on end. The hallway smelt strongly of polish and paint; its walls were a very strong and spotless white. No stand for coats and hats, no mat for wiping muddy feet, no carpet, even. The other downstairs rooms were unfurnished and painted the same white as the hallway, until we came to his study, which was walled with shelves that stopped only at the ceiling. There was a ladder attached to the shelves by a wooden claw, the sort of ladder I’d only seen in bookshops — on it you could move around all the books and climb, touch all of them, pluck the exact book you wanted out from amongst the rest yourself. They all looked medical — gynaecology, psychiatry, neurology.

He was watching me. “What do you think?”

I set my bag down by the door and walked around, looking.

“Cosy.”

There was only one chair, and that was behind the desk, which faced the French doors and the late afternoon. I could see how someone would want to live only in this room and abandon the others. But nobody actually does that. You have to at least have something to look at or sit on in the other rooms, even if only for form’s sake. I told myself I would wait a little while and then point that out to him. There was a plate on his desk with three squares of iced cake on it. Each cube had been firmly and largely bitten into just once, and then left. It seemed a strangely dainty thing to do.

“Wait here,” he said, and disappeared.

I looked out through the French doors and said to myself, ‘What. .’ It was such a bare garden. Nothing flowered. There was just green grass levelled low in every direction. It was the sheer effort of maintaining these conditions that amazed me. Because things grow. Wherever there is air and light and open space, things grow. So much cutting and uprooting must be done to keep a place like this bare.

My phone rang in my pocket. It was S.J.

“Have you left the house?” My voice pitched higher than I’d have liked it to. But I hadn’t heard him leave. And I didn’t want to be alone in this house. He tutted.

“I’m on the roof,” he said. “Meet me up there.”

“How—”

“Go round to the side of the house — not the side where the cedar tree is, the other side. There’s a ladder. Climb up.”

I hung up and did as I was told, leaving my bronze pumps on the grass and stepping quickly into the sky — not quite running; there was dew on the soles of my feet, and the iron frame beneath me creaked a little too much for my liking. But I went up with ease, the walk was easy, and I didn’t look down once.

He was waiting for me at the top, as he had said. He took my hand and pulled me off the top step and onto the flat tiles. There were two chairs ready, with a single lantern set between them. The chairs faced north, looking out over rooftops and hills, and the roads dipped deep in them. The view made me dizzy; the same scene endlessly multiplied. It could have been a trick done with mirrors, vast ones. Dusk was only just falling, and I heard moths stun themselves against the lantern, the hard flicker of their wings as they sprang away again. S.J. poured whisky from a jug into shot glasses and toasted me. “Here’s to visions,” he said.

I drank, and realised it wasn’t whisky. It started off like liquid gingerbread, then lingered on the tongue, deep and woody, the way I imagined tree sap tasted.

“What’s this?”

“Nonalcoholic. Nutmeg, mostly.”

“Nutmeg? That’s meant to be an aphrodisiac, isn’t it? It tastes nice.”

“Yes. And in large doses, it’s a psychotropic agent.”

I spat my drink back into the glass. I never want visions. They’re not fun.

“Mary,” he said suddenly.

“Yes?”

“I didn’t do anything to Daphne.”

“Okay.”

“I tried to take care of her — to help her. And I couldn’t.”

His voice was completely steady, but he was crying. “She slipped through my fingers every time.”

I wiped his tears away with my hands.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

“I didn’t speak to anyone for three days after I found her. I mean, I didn’t speak to anyone who didn’t have to speak to me. Nobody called. They knew what had happened, but they didn’t call. I stared at the phone. I understood what was going on — I’ve done it myself. When someone’s bereaved you think they want to be alone, or that they don’t want to talk, or that they only want to talk to someone close to them. Someone closer than you are. So you don’t phone. You assume that the poor bastard is being inundated with calls from other people, and you don’t phone.” His voice grew halting. “They were — long days. I wanted to talk. To anyone. I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to be with people. But mostly I stayed here. I tried not to go too far from the house, because I thought that if I got too far away I might decide not to come back. And it would be a shame not to come back. The house is all right. It didn’t do anything wrong—”

“People should have called,” I said. I was angry. Why wasn’t he angry? “Even if they tried and it was engaged they should have kept trying. They didn’t even try. I would have called.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And I’d have said anything that came into my head. I’d have read you the weather forecast. We should have known each other back then.”

There was something childish, something timidly happy, about the way he smiled as he listened to me. As if he had been promised something so good that he was trying to manage his hope, trying not to believe it until he saw it with his own eyes.

Later he showed me where I would sleep. The room was crammed with a four-poster bed hung with grape-coloured velvet, which I gaped at as I walked around it. I heard the creaking of a rocking chair but couldn’t find the chair itself at first — the space was complicated by folding screens and empty vases and trinket boxes. I began counting the different vases, lost count, began again. At some point this room must have been bursting with flowers. Five foxgloves stood up like spread fingers in one of the vases. There was a dressing table and chair in there, too, and a kind of mirror closet — it was a box of mirrors that had a latch and pulled open so that you could stand surrounded by every possible view of yourself whilst dressing.

Daphne’s room. Daphne had been gone for four years. This was the state of things, him living in two rooms — just his study and a bedroom, the one next door to this. I tried not to show that it made me sad.

We undressed. He turned the light out and lay down beside me. He kissed me, and parted my legs with the stroke of his hand. He was gentle at first, and rocked slowly, then he pressed all the breath out of me, little by little. At first it was good, and then it wasn’t good. Our bodies were cold and it hurt when he moved inside me. I didn’t wince or cry out. I kept my eyes firmly closed.

(He’ll stop once he feels that it’s hurting me.)

But he didn’t; he stopped when he was finished.

“I can’t stay here,” he said, and he left, stumbling over things — shadows, slippers, whatever was on the floor.

Minutes pricked shallowly, like thorns. I shivered in my chemise. I’d never slept in a four-poster before — my dreams came framed by the purple velvet of the canopy. I kept waking up, or thinking that I did — I couldn’t tell. This was Daphne’s bed. Daphne Fox had lain here, looking up into this canopy. How had she lain? What had she looked at? Was it here that he had found her? The pounding on the door, the footsteps rushing towards the bed, the sound he made when he found her dead. He’d have shaken her, I imagine, slapped her, tried to revive her, dragged her about, knelt over her with his mouth pressed desperately to hers. Now, in her bed, I tried to find her. I lay on my front, but it was too suffocating, so I changed and lay listlessly on my side, my head on my arm, pretending to be a woman who didn’t want to live. Then I turned onto my back, and cold surged all along my body. My hands followed it. How full my breasts were, how soft my stomach; in death everything froze. But my thighs were warm, and the bedclothes were soft against my back, and there was the smell of the foxgloves. . My bones moved with suppleness under my skin as I pushed my hips upwards, rocking against my fingers. . It became almost too much. Who is touching me? Me, it’s only me, only me. The heavy wetness on my fingers, as if I’d smeared them with honey. When it was over, goose bumps forced themselves up from every patch of bare skin.

And the handle of the bedroom door clicked as it turned from the outside, and the door swung open.

I shot upright and jerked the bedclothes up around me. But no one appeared in the doorway, and when I marched up to it, there still wasn’t anyone there. I looked up and down the empty passageway. In a very small voice I said, “S.J.?”

His bedroom door was closed.

I closed mine, too, and returned to bed, only to be jolted from sleep by the sound of the door opening again. It was not a dream or any sort of reverie. There was something terrible about watching the door come open the second time. It opened all the way, and with such force that I don’t know what stopped it from slamming against the wall.

I didn’t call out. I closed the door again. There must be something wrong with the door frame, or the way the door had been set in it when the place was built. It happened, doors popping open of their own accord, bad builders taken to task. The third time the door opened it felt as if I was being told very sternly to go. But go where? Get out, clear out.

I stood, half asleep, and held the door closed for two hours or so. It began to feel as if I was shaking a small, cold, smooth stump that had been proffered in place of a hand. When I’d had enough of that I sat, then lay on the blue carpet, hardly aware of what I was doing, or where I was. The door opened again as soon as I let go of the handle. Let it stay open, then; let it stay open. I heaved myself back into bed as a collection of parts, concentrating on getting my arms up over the edge, torso, legs.

The next time I opened my eyes it was very early morning. I put on a pair of slippers that were beside the bed. They were just my size. Which gave me something of a jolt. But they were warm, so I left them on. I went down to S.J.’s study. The plate with the squares of cake on it was still there on his desk, and I wanted to get rid of it. It jarred me. I found it feminine. So I opened the French doors and stepped outside, showering moist crumbs amongst some finches and sparrows that were already pecking at the grass outside. There were seeds in the cake, and it smelt of rum. I hoped the birds wouldn’t get too drunk. I wiped my hand on my skirt. Then I stood near the twisted cedar tree, staring. There was just enough light for the leaves to glow. I imagined touching a branch and watching it rise, followed by another branch and another, the trailing leaves parting so that I could step into the space the tree guarded, the secret place it hunched over for safekeeping from the sun.

S.J. came out of the house and stood beside me.

“Morning.”

Tentatively, without looking at me, he held out his hand. I took it and held it clasped to my chest. I didn’t look at him, either. We were eyeing the cedar.

“Morning.”

“What shall we do today?” he asked.

We went out walking, wrapped round in scarves and jackets. We tramped down lanes and places in the earth that seemed to have been dug and rubbed until granite came through, then abruptly left. We passed signs with names like Merrymeet and Tremar and Saint Cleer written on them, and by the time we crossed a low stone bridge with its feet in a shallow, pebbled brook our landscape was three-quarters blue. I began to step gingerly, even though I could see that the ground was firm all around me. There was so much sky that it felt as if we were on a precipice — there was not enough grass to stand on, it was so thin and flat by comparison. We walked around a barrow that rose from the long earth in the shape of a taut shoulder. Every now and again a bird coasted overhead, spreading shadows with the flap of its wings, and I would move uneasily, thinking that it must be coming for us, since there was nothing else for miles but flat tors and, in the distance, a hill so vast that it looked both broken and smooth as the eye tried to absorb its image all at once. I ruined my boots in what felt like an unending series of turf pits that had stored the previous week’s rainfall. I struggled in the last pit, thinking I was sinking, and S.J. crooked his arm and stood still on a safe spot, so I could take his elbow and step out. We came to a halt by a lake that seemed to have clouds in it even though it was a clear day. The moor swept on after the water interrupted it, and looking at the other side I felt doubled; without turning I could see what was behind me. S.J. told me stories about the lake. He was a good storyteller: matterof-fact, convincing. Excalibur had come out of this lake, he said, and I saw no reason to disbelieve him. I saw kites go up. Small figures rushed along up the hill, their wrists and fists leashed to the bright creatures in the sky. I want to stay here, I thought. I want to stay.

In the evening S.J. worked, even though he’d said he wouldn’t, sat in the study with huge books opened up all around him, underlining bits of the case studies he was taking notes from. I looked at some cookbooks for a while, then left him and went upstairs, to the blue room. With dramatic bravado, I switched all the lights on and went through Daphne’s things, moved them around recklessly, daring her. If I was afraid that something bad would happen, why wait? Why not make it happen now?

Some papers had been folded into a square and pushed into a corner at the back of one of the dressing-table drawers. The words were written in faded, grainy pencil strokes — I had to hold them under the lamp to make them out properly. There was a lot of crossing out. They were the same few sentences, over and over. Different drafts. The last one read:

I’ve drunk quite a lot of bleach. Enough to kill me,

I shouldn’t wonder. I did it on purpose.

Daphne

I put my head down on the desk because I felt braver with my head supported. In the corner of the last note, written in small letters and lightly, was L 11: 24–26. Without lifting my head, I dragged a King James pocket Bible, covered in white leather, out of another drawer in the dressing table. I set it in front of my nose and looked through it.

Leviticus. . Lamentations. . Luke. . well, it couldn’t be Lamentations, because that only had five chapters.

The Leviticus passage was incomplete; the first sentence of it referred to the sentence before it, and the last sentence was an admonition against eating pork and mutton.

Luke said:

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out.

And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished.

Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

My gaze snagged on two parts of the passage again and again:

I will return unto my house whence I came out. .

Seven spirits more wicked than himself.

I read the passage aloud. I couldn’t help it. Better that than keep it as a thought.

As I said the last word, the rocking chair groaned behind me.

Exactly as if someone had sat down in it.

And the chair began to rock.

I changed my mind — I didn’t want her there. I didn’t.

I ran, leaping three steps at a time, coming down so hard I almost turned my ankle.

S.J. looked up when I reentered the study, breathless.

“What is it?” he asked. There was a note in his voice — as if he knew.

“Nothing.”

I lay down at his feet, my breasts against the rug. I turned the pages of a cookbook and pretended to read, but really I was imagining him walking across my back, his heel grinding into the base of my spine, the next step pushing the vertebrae away from each other; by the time he reached my neck I’d be in pieces. He wouldn’t do it, but he could — he had the ability. With his lips and hands he refigured me, coaxed me into moving so closely with him that we disappeared and left a trail of sighs behind us. Not just in the bed. Against walls, across tables, on floors with my heels dancing the same pleading two steps over his shoulder blades. But we didn’t go into the blue room again.

“Where’s all the downstairs furniture?” I asked him, in the morning.

He looked wary. “In the cellar,” he said.

There was a little platform immediately inside the cellar door, and a staircase leading straight down. It was gloomy once the door had closed behind us.

“You first,” S.J. said in my ear.

So I went first, sending a torch beam ahead of me with one hand and feeling my way with the other. S.J.’s hands collided with mine, and I heard him breathing behind me. There were a lot of chairs and tables packed into a very small amount of space; it was like climbing out into a sea of brocade and velvet padding. Insects wriggled around between the armchairs, and chair legs fell apart as I moved them out of my way; I picked bits up and saw they were worn through with holes. Woodworm. We stayed down there until we’d identified some pieces that were salvageable, taking turns sitting on each chair and leaning against each table to be sure. It was a slow, airless hour, full of rustling, like someone whispering through cloth. From time to time I trained the torch on S.J. He kept looking at me, looking away, then back at me, quietly surprised that I was still there.

We dragged the whole pieces out and arranged them in the rooms they belonged to. The place began to look less like an austere puzzle. I tampered with his placement of the sofas and armchairs and side tables and vases, and he tampered ceaselessly with mine. When we caught each other in the act we pretended we hadn’t seen. Those were the rules of playing house.

The next afternoon we went down to a cove in the opposite direction from the one we’d taken to get to the moor. It was only a little cove; it sloped down to the water smoothly. Gravely, as if guiding me into the deep of his secrets, S.J. showed me the markings on the stones he collected. Darkness fell, and we stripped down to wetsuits and walked into the sea. When we tired of swimming I just floated and spun in the gloss of the water and he bobbed beside me. We were top and tails; he held my ankle so I didn’t float away too far.

I texted Jonas: Happy.

And he sent the word back to me: Happy.

I ignored my agent’s phone calls and deleted the threats he left me via voice mail — I was smiling in a way that felt new, so fresh it was like another face, and I didn’t want to stop. Not even for the moment needed to take one of those pictures people said were so good, the ones in which a girl with blank and shiny eyes stood on one leg, looked over her shoulder, was an acrobat, was no one.

The day S.J. went back to work I dashed around Brier Moss, buying things to cook for a dinner party in the evening. He wanted me to meet some of his friends. Two female friends and two male friends. They were all single, so he was also hoping to set them up. I bought candles and flowers and artichokes and steak and braced myself for a frosty reception from the single female friends. It wasn’t unlikely that they had stayed single in the hopes that he might suddenly fall for them. When I came back from town I went into S.J.’s study to fetch a cookbook. He’d left the French doors open, and in going to close them, I almost trod on a finch. The bird lay on its back in between the doors and didn’t take fright at my drawing so near. Its beak and feet pointed at the sky, blackened, as if blasted by flame. It had died with its eyes open and some liquid in them congealing. And there were more just outside. I stopped counting after ten. They were all in the same condition. There were more birds chirping from somewhere, there were still birds, still singing, but I couldn’t see them. They must be very high up. For a moment I thought I’d be sick, but I wasn’t sick. The majority of the bodies were congregated in an uneven half-ring around the cedar tree. Oh. . My eyes flickered closed — for a moment I saw myself standing on the grass, cake flowing from my hand like sand — my eyes opened again. I used a rolled-up magazine to push the bodies towards each other, into a heap. I wanted to dig, so that I could bury them, but I had nothing to dig with. I tried a little with my hands, and it took a long time to make even the slightest pocket in the ground. I had to cook the food; I had to get ready for guests. I didn’t want people to arrive and find me here, scrabbling in the earth with my fingernails. I just had to leave the birds where they were.

I went into the kitchen and stood beside the Aga staring at the wall. It was on; it had been on all morning. I’d laughed at it when I first saw it, but it gave off serious warmth. Dinner would be ready, possibly even burnt, in no time. And then I would have nothing to do.

I think I’m going to have to go.

I grasped gratefully at that thought. I became busy. I chopped the steak and made a marinade for the artichokes. I closed the kitchen door and lined the bottom of it with tea towels. I opened the oven door and knelt down and breathed blue, dancing gas. I coughed but without urgency. I was dizzy, and the heat around me was not unpleasant; it was like being lost in a fog when you had nowhere in particular to go. It didn’t matter. I collapsed onto my stomach and looked to the side, not that there was anything to see, apart from grey-coated metal.

I began to choke. I couldn’t move. I wanted to, but my head wouldn’t do it — the fog was in it.

I heard a distant sound — a dial turning.

The Aga shut down. No more blue, just gaping blackness.

Someone was crouching near me. She put her hand on my leg. My skin shrieked. I can’t explain how it felt. There was movement beneath her fingernails.

“You’re an idiot,” she said. Her voice wasn’t at all the way I’d imagined it. It was clear and firm.

“Nothing’s wrong here. Can’t you see that? Nothing’s wrong. Next time just don’t feed the birds with cake that’s been experimentally laced with pharmaceuticals. You listen to me, Mary Foxe, or whatever your name is. Stay here. There’s a decent man here who will probably fall for you if you don’t make a mess of things. He’ll take care of you. And you take care of him. No point having any more death.”

My mother. My father. I couldn’t speak.

“Yes,” she said. “I know. But you’re what happens next. That’s all I wanted to tell you upstairs, but you ran like — like the hound of the Baskervilles or something.”

“Thank you, Daphne,” I whispered.

“Oh, yes, you owe me one. So you’ll tell him?”

“Tell him what?”

“That it’s not his fault about me. Because it’s not.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Don’t just say it. Make him believe it.”

“How—”

“Make him believe it.” She squeezed my ankle.

“I will!”

“I’m tired,” she said. “I’m going now. Be bad. Be wicked. And you should worry. But don’t.”

Mary stayed out of my way for a couple of weeks. I was busy with Daphne, trying to get her to like me again and call off the death threats from her friends. I began teaching Daphne to drive. She was fearless — a little too fearless for my taste — and she learnt fast. She’d bought a pair of driving gloves specially, and her hands rested serenely on the wheel when it was her turn to try taking a corner. We drove down to the pheasant farm I used to shoot at when I was coming up — fifteen minutes away, but it took us thirty-five with Daphne driving. She brought a pheasant back with us and cooked it up for dinner — it was the worst meal I’d ever encountered, but I choked it down and appreciated it. She was trying, and I was trying. It’d be wrong to say my wife hasn’t got any go in her. On our honeymoon she spent the best part of a morning leaping around a rock garden, bouncing from ledge to ledge like a lunatic and singing some almost offensively sugary song. She slipped and twisted her ankle, but she didn’t howl about it. She bit her lip and she cried a little, because, she said, she didn’t want to pretend it didn’t hurt. And she hobbled around good-humouredly, taking snapshots and studying the gaudy little paintings for sale on the streets just as solemnly as if they were up in a gallery. Remembering that she’d cried, I got a doctor to look at her ankle for her when we got back to the hotel. It was a sprain. I’d have understood if she’d howled.

Another day we drove down to the state park. It’s called Devil’s Hopyard. That was a pretty good afternoon. Close to the waterfall each tree quivers as if trying to shake itself awake from a bad dream without waking the others up. And the stones all around the waterfall itself are half hollowed out — we looked at stone after stone for almost an hour. The hollows were definite, as if someone had come along with a scoop and removed the heart of each stone.

“These are the reason this place is called Devil’s Hopyard,” I told Daphne. “People round here used to say the devil himself made the marks in the stones with his hooves as he walked over them. . ”

“It’s the only explanation,” Daphne said solemnly. I found myself playing with her hair — just sort of mussing it and walking my fingers down the strands until they fell back into place again.

“How’s Mary?” she asked me, almost straight-faced. Almost.

“Mary who?” I asked.

That night, after love, she rolled away from me and sat up in her own bed. I was falling asleep, but she sat in a way that demanded I look at her. She had her hand on the top of her head, as if trying to keep something in.

“What is it?” I asked. I stretched out an arm. “Come back!” She stayed where she was.

“I’ve just got to go and — you know.” She was whispering, as if she didn’t want to be overheard. Even though we were the only ones in the house.

“Oh — okay, honey. Good thing you remembered.” Daphne sponged with Lysol disinfectant to keep from getting pregnant. It worked, too. She hadn’t wanted a kid when we got married, and I hadn’t argued.

I closed my eyes. Daphne didn’t move. I felt her weight a few inches away, warm and still. I opened my eyes again. She was looking at me and her smile had crumpled.

“What? Have we run out?”

“No.”

“What is it, D.?”

“You want me to? You want me to go and — you know?”

“You don’t want to.” I was alarmed, and I sounded alarmed. It wasn’t the thought of a baby, per se. It was just the sudden change; she might as well have pulled the mattress right out from under me.

She smiled. Falsely, brightly. She scrambled out of bed. “Okay. Thanks for letting me know how you feel.”

“D. Hold on. Hold on just a second—”

She vanished into the bathroom. I went up to the closed door and heard nothing. The taps didn’t turn on. She might have opened the cupboard and reached for the yellow bottle that sat between my razor and her set of heated curlers, but if she had, then she’d done it with infamous and unnecessary stealth. After a few more minutes I became convinced she’d climbed out of the window and run off into the night. I knocked on the door. “D.”

“Yes, darling.”

“Are you going to come out?”

“Yes, in a minute.”

There are things I should have said to her then, but I didn’t say any of them. I thought I’d tell her when she came out. She didn’t come out. She was still in there when I fell asleep. I woke up at some point before dawn and she was there in bed beside me, nestled up against me. She’d taken my arm and put it around her. And I was grateful. Pathetically grateful. Next time the matter came up, I would say the things I knew I should say.

Very early the next morning we walked down to Cloud Cove and walked out across the sand to the island; it was accessible on foot when the tide was out, and I wanted to show Daphne the lighthouse. I own it — I mean, I inherited it, and just like my father, who inherited it from his father, I don’t know what the hell to do with it so I just make sure it gets a good spring cleaning from top to bottom three times a year and keep some books there. My great-grandfather won the place in a game of cards. I always think I might go over there to work, but I never do.

Daphne and I didn’t talk much on the way over. We picked up bits of driftwood, shells, and pebbles, and arranged them on the ground when we felt we’d carried them too far away from where we’d picked them up. The wind nipped us through our clothes.

“Oh, God,” Daphne said, as the lighthouse came into view. She said “Oh, God” again and again with every step we took towards it. “It looks evil.”

It wasn’t evil. It was just a white tower with long slits for windows. Not even a particularly tall tower. She liked it better when we were inside and she saw that it was spickand-span and modern. I took her up to the lantern room, and she stared at the lantern through the glass panels. It was the size of a man, and covered in dust. I pointed out the lenses that surrounded it, and explained how they refracted the light from the lantern and made it fly out in all directions the way she’d seen it in movies. When I took her to the watch room she insisted on turning the handles that rotated the lamp lenses. We heard the lenses whirring — not a comfortable sound to have above you — like huge wings flapping in place, but there was no kerosene in the lamp, and even if there had been, it was morning, so the whole thing was a pretty pointless exercise.

“You must have loved this place as a boy,” she said, as we came down the spiral staircase. “It must have been like a four-storey playground.” She’d brought some logbooks down with her, clutched against her chest, even though I’d warned her that all she’d find written there were times and dates and comings and goings and observations on what direction the wind was coming from.

“Not really,” I told her. “I didn’t see the point of it.”

“All right, well — normal kids would love it. . ”

She’d brought a flask full of coffee and some rolls, and we had those at the kitchen table. She looked over the logbooks, lost interest after about four pages, as I had predicted, but soldiered on. I left her at the table and went to go and pack up a few books I wanted. I dragged a couple of crates over to the back door, so I could look out at the sea while I searched — the tide was high and choppy, but not so that I couldn’t see across the cove. I looked from my books to the water, from my books to the water — sunlight flashed once, twice, three times on the waves. The fourth time I saw that it wasn’t light. It was a hand, raised up at the end of an arm, and it was waving at me. Gradually, Mary Foxe walked out of the sea and paced across the sand towards me. She wasn’t smiling. Her hands were behind her back. She looked as if she had a lot on her mind. Once she was standing directly before me, she dropped a curtsey.

“Mary.”

“Yes, Mr. Fox?”

“I think I know what we’re trying to do with this game of ours.”

“Tell me.”

“We’ve been trying to fall in love—”

She raised her eyebrows. “With each other?” she asked, coolly.

“Would you let me finish?”

“With pleasure.”

“We’ve been trying to fall in love — yes, with each other — but we’ve been trying to take some of the danger out of it. So no one ends up maimed, or dead. We’re trying for something normal and nice.”

Mary folded her arms. “That is not what we’re trying to do.”

“Oh. What, then?”

“Your wife loves you. Turn to her. Properly. Stop fobbing her off and being a counterfeit companion. It would be good if, after all this, just once you wrote something where people come together instead of falling apart. Just show me you can do it and I’ll leave you alone.”

“But I don’t want you to leave me alone.”

She turned to face the sea. The wind whipped her hair around. Her hair is a miraculous color, like autumn leaves shaken down around her shoulders. She looked wild and lovely.

“Mary. If you were real I’d run away with you forever.”

I went to her; we faced each other. She said, “You’re cruel, Mr. Fox.” Her voice, her eyes. She was weary.

My heart was doing that jerking thing it did when I’d thought Daphne might leave me, but worse. Much, much worse. Almost unbearable. I was about to go off like a bomb or something. It actually hurt.

(Please don’t let me keel over on the sand at this woman’s feet.)

“I would like to have breakfast with you,” Mary Foxe said. “And I would like to have you defer a little to my tastes and habits — at present I have none, because you haven’t given me any. I’d like to go to dinner parties with you and play charades. I’d like to have friends to lend me books and tell me secrets. I would like to have nothing to do with you for hours on end and then come back and find you, come back with things I’ve thought and found out all on my own — on my own, not through you. I’d like not to disappear when you’re not thinking about me.”

She enunciated her words very slowly and carefully. As she spoke I saw that I’d proposed the impossible.

“So if you did find some way for me to be real and for me to be together with you, then I wouldn’t mind that. I wouldn’t mind at all.”

“Honey,” Daphne called out. “Shouldn’t we go before it gets dark?”

Mary wasn’t there anymore. She’d never passed out of my sight so abruptly before.

I was shaken, and Daphne mustn’t know that I was shaken. I’d told her she had nothing to worry about where Mary was concerned. I’d said it wasn’t “like that.” Had I lied? To Daphne? Or just now, to Mary? I’ll say anything to get out of a spot. I counted to ten, holding my chest like a fool, like Young Werther guarding his sorrows; then I went to Daphne. She was sitting on the front steps with a paperback. It had to be War and Peace—it was thick enough. The title was in Cyrillic, and so were all the contents.

“Is that. . Russian?” I asked her.

She answered in words that left me stone cold. Russian, I presumed.

“Daphne!” It made her laugh, the way I was looking at her.

She winked. “Don’t worry, I’m not possessed. I said I’m just brushing up. I’ve been taking a correspondence course. You’ve got a lot to find out about me, my friend.”

She looked a little cold, so I put my jacket around her shoulders and we strolled down to wait at the post where the ferry came in. And she leaned against me, and it was all right.