Sleep, Pale Sister

46

Imagine a snowflake floating down a deep well. Imagine a flake of soot falling from the dim London sky. Imagine that for a moment.

Through layers of darkness I floated; I danced through dangerous landscapes. I saw a knight with a bunch of fluttering pennants salute a lady in a tower of brass; I saw a herd of white horses; I saw the lyre-bird, his tail like a comet…My dark sister took me by the hand and we followed dreaming tides on the shores of strange seas; and she told me the story of a girl who slept for a hundred years, while around her everything and everybody grew old and died. But the girl had a lover who refused to forget her; he kept guard over her frozen sleep and waited and waited, he loved her so. Every day he would sit beside her and talk to her and tell her about his love. Every day he brushed her hair and kept the dust and the cobwebs from her face and waited. And, as time passed, he grew old and infirm; his servants, thinking he was mad, deserted him and went away. But still he waited. Until one day as he was sitting in the last rays of the autumn sun, almost blind and crippled with age and hardship, he thought he saw her move and open her eyes and wake. And he died of joy with his beautiful love in his arms and her name on his dying breath.

Yes, she whispered stories to me as I slept; I felt her hand on my hair and her voice singing softly:

‘Aux marches du palais…

Aux marches du palais…

’Y a une si belle fille, lonlà,

’Y a une si belle fille…’

I looked down on the body stretched out on the bed; poor little white girl…would anyone wait for her?

Mose would wait for me. I knew he would; he had promised to wake me. I knew he’d wake me. When Fanny first told me of the plan I refused. I was frightened; I didn’t want to wait in the dark as they sealed the vault over my head; even with the laudanum I was sure I’d go mad…but she assured me, no more than ten minutes, then he’d come and I could wake up. Then we’d be together, Mose and I, and nothing could ever part us. I knew. He had promised.

Henry had sent Tabby away to see her family and my heart ached for her. I longed to have my dear Tabby with me during those cold, dark hours, to hear her kind scolding voice, to smell her good scents of dough and starch and polish, to have her tuck the blankets around me as I lay in bed…

Tomorrow, I told myself, Tabby would believe I was dead. Aunt May would believe it too, growing suddenly old behind the counter of the little shop in Cranbourn Alley. Mother would have to forgo her frivolous bonnets and her rides in Mr Zellini’s gig-she would wear black, which did not become her, in mourning for the daughter she had never really understood. Would I dare to call on them, when I was safely out of Henry’s reach? I didn’t think I would ever be brave enough. I would be dead to them, dead for ever. I could not risk Henry ever finding out.

The night grew cold; snow latticed my window and blew shrieking down the chimney, hissing on the hot stones of the hearth. Wind mourned through the chimneys and the hours ticked away. Tizzy sat on my knee for a time, purring, her eyes narrowed into crescents of gold in the firelight…I wondered whether Henry would look after my cat when I was gone.

Suddenly I was jolted by a scraping of feet against the floorboards outside the door. My heart began to beat wildly. It was Henry, not with poison but with something more effective to still my troublesome heart: a knife, a cleaver, a rope cunningly knotted. The door swung open. His face was greenish in the gaslight, like a child’s painting of a witch, his eyelids drawn down into long flaps of shadow. Thankful for the discipline I had learned in years of sitting as a model for Henry I forced my face into an expression of sleepy quietude, and yawned.

‘Is that you, Tabby?’ I murmured.

His voice was gentle, almost tender. ‘It’s me. Henry. I’ve brought you something.’ His hand brushed the nape of my neck, scorching me with his fever. ‘Chocolate. For my little girl. I didn’t want you to be neglected just because Tabby is away.’

‘Chocolate. Thank you.’ I smiled vaguely. ‘That will help me to sleep, won’t it?’

‘Yes, it will. Sleep well, Effie…’ He kissed the top of my head and there was his breath, hot and moist against my hair. I felt his smile.

‘Goodnight, Mr Chester.’

‘Goodnight, Effie.’

When he had gone, I threw Henry’s chocolate away and, as I lay on my bed, I willed my subtle body to rise. I could do this effortlessly now and, moving from room to room, I flew all over the house then out into the snow. I felt the snowflakes rush through my body but I felt no cold, only the burning exhilaration of my soul’s flight. I waited: in my present state I had little notion of time and I might have been drifting for hours, rocked in the arms of the storm, before I saw them coming out of the house. My heart gave a leap as it recognized Mose, with his old hat jammed down over his eyes and the collar of his greatcoat turned up against the cold. Henry was beside him and from my whistling eyrie I could see him clearly.

He was grotesque, a dwarf, comically foreshortened by the odd perspective, an eye glancing up from beneath his hat, a pair of mittened hands upheld to ward off my wind, my storm…I began to laugh. To think that that was all it took: a change of angle, to convert my terror and awe into contempt. I had been so used to looking up at the thin line of his mouth, the cold tunnels of his eyes, that I had forgotten the weakness, the cruelty and deceit which flawed him…From above I narrowed the gaze of my new perception to focus on things unseen and I saw the shifting cloud around his head, the murky halo of tortured colours which was his soul. From the mouth of the night I laughed-and maybe this time he heard me, because he glanced upwards and, for a moment, his wild gaze met mine in an instant of pure and hellish understanding…

But the dark delight which flooded me then lasted only for a second, for Mose was standing behind Henry, carrying the body of poor little Effie on his arm as if it weighed no more than the cloak which covered her from head to foot, and the face of my lover was half obscured by brightness, flawed by the spectral band which masked his face in a splash of brilliant scarlet, like the executioner’s crimson hood.

47

She was lying on the bed with her hair loose, her breathing so light that for an instant I thought she was really dead. The vial of laudanum was beside her on the bedstand, with the empty chocolate-cup next to it, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Henry touch the discarded cup with a hand which seemed as brittle and translucent as the china. Effie was wearing her grey dress and against the colourless fabric her skin seemed luminous, her hair touched with pale phosphorescence as it coiled across the bedspread and to the floor. For an instant my eye was caught by the brooch at her throat, a present from Fanny, a silver thing shaped like an arched cat, which mirrored the greenish light. Behind me I heard Henry make some inarticulate sound, like choking.

‘She’s asleep.’ I spoke briskly, not wanting Henry’s resolve to weaken. ‘Where’s her cloak?’

Henry pointed to where the cloak hung behind the door.

‘Help me wrap her in it. Does it have a hood? Better find a bonnet.’ Henry did not move. ‘Hurry, man!’ I said impatiently. ‘I can’t manage her on my own.’

Mutely he shook his head in disgust.

‘I…I can’t touch her. Take these,’ he added, thrusting the cloak and bonnet at me. ‘Put them on her.’

I shrugged irritably and set to work with the bonnet-strings and the cloak-buttons. She was light, and I found that I could carry her on my arm like a child, her head hanging against my shoulder and her feet barely touching the ground. Henry was reluctant to touch her even then; he opened doors for me, shutting them behind us with his usual prissy attention to detail, rearranged ornaments, turned down the gaslight in the hall and pulled on his boots and his coat without once looking at either her or me. Some ten minutes later we stepped out into the snow and Henry locked the door behind us. Now there would be no turning back.

Suddenly I saw Henry stop, his body stiffening. A cat had sprung out across our path, one paw held high: I recognized Effie’s cat Tizzy, yellow eyes gleaming wildly with excitement at the big snowflakes whirling about her. A strangled sound came from Henry’s mouth as he saw the cat. Looking at his face I was convinced that he was about to suffer some kind of an attack: his features were unravelling like a piece of knitting.

‘Aahaah…’

‘Don’t be a fool, man!’ I snapped more sharply than I intended. ‘It’s only a cat. Pull yourself together, for God’s sake.’ The whole situation was beginning to work upon my own nerves. ‘Get your arm around her,’ I ordered, deliberately brutal. ‘When you’ve got rid of her, then you can indulge in remorse if you like, but now…’

He nodded and began to move again; I saw hate in his eyes, but I didn’t care. It would help to take his mind from other things.

The walk to Highgate would only have taken me ten minutes or so in normal circumstances; that night it seemed endless. The snow was heaped in irregular drifts across the road; powdery, treacherous stuff which had turned to ice beneath the surface and sent our feet out from beneath us. Effie’s toes dragged against the snow’s thin crust, slowing our progress still further. In spite of her lightness we found we had to stop to rest every few hundred yards, our breath ribboning out around us, our hands icy and our backs drenched with sweat. We saw hardly anyone; a couple of men outside a public-house watched us with incurious eyes, a child stared out from behind a plush curtain at the window of a dark house. At one point Henry thought he saw a policeman and froze in panic until I pointed out to him that policemen were not usually issued with boot-button eyes and a carrot in place of their nose.

Half an hour later we came to the cemetery which was unnaturally bright, almost luminous against the dull orange sky. As we approached it, I felt Henry begin to hang back, dragging against my shoulder so that I was almost supporting him along with Effie. Casting a last glance around us I saw that no-one was nearby. In fact, the visibility was so poor that I could hardly see the light of the nearest gaslamp, and the flurrying snow had already begun to fill our footprints with new snow. I shifted Effie’s weight from my shoulder and took the unlit lantern from my belt.

‘Here,’ I said shortly to Henry, ‘hold her for a minute.’ I saw him almost collapse as Effie’s head rolled on to his shoulder: the bonnet-strings had become loosened and her hair streamed out into his face, ghostly as the snow. Henry almost dropped her in his sudden panic. With a strangled cry of loathing he thrust the body from him so that it toppled backwards into the snow and he sprang back, his hands raised in an almost childish warding-off gesture.

‘She’s alive!’ he whispered. ‘She’s alive and she moved.’

‘Perhaps,’ I agreed, ‘but she isn’t conscious. Help me to get her up.’ In spite of my growing irritation I kept my voice gentle. ‘Not far now.’

Henry shook his head. ‘I felt her move. She’s waking up. I know she is. You take her. Give me the lantern,’ he articulated painfully, and I realized that he was close to collapse.

I thrust the lantern at him and picked Effie up out of the snow, pulling the bonnet once more over her loosened hair. Behind me Henry fumbled in his pocket and pulled out his bottle of chloral, upending it into his mouth. Then, with trembling fingers, he managed to light the lantern, and with a final glance behind him he followed me through the gates and into the cemetery.

48

Behind the wall of the cemetery and the endless, exquisite tension of the wind, the silence was immense, deafening. The sky above me was filled with flying things like jigsaw pieces; no moon, no stars, only the dark flakes flying like moths into the lantern. And the ground beneath was livid as the moon, as if somehow the earth and sky had changed places for this one monstrous night.

I watched Harper’s back as I followed him. In spite of the deep snow his stride was long and even; he was carrying Effie in his arms, her hair falling like a shroud over his hands and wrists. For the first time in my life I was possessed of a sudden envy of this man who seemed to have no fear, no remorse, no guilt. For he was guilty, just as much as I was, but somehow he had accepted his guilt, made his peace with it…How I longed to be Moses Harper! But as the chloral began to take effect I found that I was once more able to accept the enormity of what we were doing. Absorbed into the silence of myself, I realized that I was facing a Mystery, a return through tides and currents I had travelled once before, through the waters of my childhood and my sin, back to the room with the blue-and-white doorknob and the source of all my hate and misery…my mother.

I had long since ceased to feel the cold. There was a tingling in the tips of my fingers and in my feet, but apart from that I had no body-I drifted a few inches above the snow, dragging my feet a little against the thin crust. I realized that St Paul was right: original sin was passed on through to the soul from the body. There I was, out of my body, and I felt quite pure; the word murder danced before me in a volley of bright lights: stare at the word for long enough and you’ll find that it becomes quite meaningless.

I remember passing through the Circle of Lebanon; sepulchres on either side of the path, thatched with snow, were outlined in the fire of the lantern. Then Harper stopped, dropped the bag of tools from his shoulder into the snow and turned towards me.

‘Cover the lantern,’ he said tersely, ‘and keep watch here, by the path.’ Nodding towards the door of the sepulchre in front of him, he gently lowered Effie on to the ground and began to search in his bag. ‘No-one comes to this grave,’ he explained. ‘All the relatives are dead. It’s the ideal place.’

I did not answer. All my attention was focused on the little sepulchre. It was a chapel of sorts, the name isherwood emblazoned across the rotting stone in Gothic script. Briefly I saw a stained-glass window in the back wall, illuminated into sudden brilliance by the lantern in my hand. By the window stood the remains of a footstool, its once-fine brocade rotted into finest filigree by age and damp. Mose had opened the door without difficulty and, with mittened hands, was sweeping the floor clear of the accumulated snow and leaves which littered the marble.

‘See?’ he said, without looking round. ‘This is the opening.’ Over his shoulder I could just see a slab of marble, slightly paler than the rest, in which was set an iron ring. ‘There must be dozens of people down here,’ continued Mose, beginning to pry at the sides of the slab with the help of a small chisel. ‘Damn!’ he exclaimed irritably as the chisel slipped in his hand. ‘It’s an old seal and it’s tight. I’ll have to chip the stone.’

Suddenly the night was at my throat like a hungry wolf. Sensation flooded my frozen limbs once more and I began to sweat. I knew what we should find in the vault when Mose finally opened it. As the bitter air seared my lungs I thought I caught the elusive scent of jasmine and honeysuckle…

Then Effie moved.

I know she did: I saw her. She shifted her posture slightly and she fixed me with her terrible, verdigris eyes. I tell you, I saw her.

Harper had his back to her. He had managed to dislodge the marble slab and was working it away from the hole, his breath a dragon’s-plume of pale steam around his face. He heard my cry and turned, scanning the path for any sign of a witness.

‘She’s awake! She moved!’

I saw Harper make a gesture of impatience. But she was moving; almost imperceptibly at first, though I could guess at the coiled hatred unwinding through her thin white body; and her face was my mother’s, was Prissy Mahoney’s, was the Columbine doll and the dead whorechild, their mouths moving almost in unison to form words of black invocation, as if, at their command, the earth might open and loose a fountain of blood on to the immaculate snow…But Harper had noticed her at last; the somnolent turn of her cheek against the dark cape, the fitful clenching of her fists. In a moment he was beside her with the laudanum bottle, his arm around her shoulders. I heard her murmur something, her voice blurred like a sleeping child’s.

‘Mo…ose, I…’

‘Shh, be quiet. Go back to sleep.’ His voice was a caress.

‘No…I don’t…I don’t want…’ She was closer to wakefulness now, struggling through shades of consciousness. Harper’s voice in the shadows was gentle, seductive.

‘No, Effie…go back to sleep…shh, go back to…’

Her eyes snapped open and, in that moment, I saw the Eye of God behind her dilated pupils. I felt His Eye focusing upon me like a magnifying glass in the sun. I faced His immense, monstrous indifference.

I screamed.

49

Cursing inwardly, I tried to keep my voice soft and soothing. Damn her! A few minutes more and the whole affair would have been concluded. I pulled the cloak over her face to try and limit the reviving effect of the cold, put my arm around her and whispered gently. But Effie was coming round quickly, her eyes moving fretfully beneath her closed lids, her breathing rapid and irregular. One-handed I opened the laudanum bottle, trying to coax her to take a few drops.

‘Come on, Effie…shh…just drink this…come on, that’s a good girl.’ But I could not persuade her to take the drug. Instead, disastrously, she began to talk.

Henry wasn’t far away; he had panicked when Effie opened her eyes and run a few steps down the path, but he was still within earshot. If Effie let slip a single word about our plan I knew that even now Henry was shrewd enough to guess at the rest. I put my arms tighter around her and tried to muffle her words.

‘Come on…’ I said, more urgently. ‘Drink this, and be quiet.’

Her eyes focused into mine. ‘Mose,’ she said quite clearly, ‘I had such a strange dream.’

‘Never mind that,’ I hissed desperately.

‘I…’ (Thank God, I thought, she was drifting again.)

‘Look, just drink your medicine, like a good girl, and sleep.’

‘You will…you’ll come back for me, won’t…won’t you?’

Damn her! Henry was coming back along the path. I tried to pinch her nostrils and force the laudanum down her throat, but she was still talking.

‘Just like…Juliet in the tomb…like Henry’s painting. You’ll come, won’t you?’

Her voice was suddenly very clear in the night.

You have to understand: I never intended her any harm. If only she had kept quiet for a few minutes more…it really wasn’t my fault. I didn’t have the choice! Henry was almost at my elbow: another word and the whole thing would have been ruined. All our effort for nothing. I couldn’t keep her quiet.

Understand that I acted purely on instinct: I never meant to hurt her, simply to keep her quiet for the few minutes I needed to get Henry out of the way. It was dark; my hands were numb from working with the stone, and yes, I was nervous, anyone would have been nervous.

All right, all right. I’m not proud of what I did, but you’d have done the same, believe me. I hit her head, not very hard, but harder than I intended, against the edge of the sepulchre. Just to keep her quiet. She wouldn’t have thanked me if because of me Henry had tumbled to our plan; she would have wanted me to do what I could, for her sake as well as for mine.

The bitch could have ruined everything.

She crumpled into the snow and, as I picked her up I saw a bead of blood darkening the hollow where her head had rested; just a single round patch the size of a penny. I fought back panic. What if I had killed her? She was frail, already close to collapse…it would not have taken much to finish Henry’s work. I brought my face close to hers and listened for her breathing…there was none. What did you expect me to do then? I couldn’t react: Henry would immediately have suspected. There was nothing I could do but wait. Ten minutes, and Henry would be gone. Then I could see to Effie. I couldn’t believe that little tap on the head had killed her: more likely I hadn’t heard her breathing because of the noise of the wind. I couldn’t afford to panic on account of something so trivial.

Gently I brushed the snow from her and carried her to the vault. Looking into the opening I could see that it was dark in there, and I hung Henry’s lantern above the entrance so that I wouldn’t fall. There were a dozen narrow stairs leading down, some broken and rotted with age. Carefully I carried Effie’s limp body down and looked around in the gloom for a place to put her. It was slightly warmer in the vault than outside, and it stank in there, of age and mould, but at least the coffins were out of the way, hidden behind stone slabs on their shelves and sealed with cement. I carried her to the back of the vault where there was still an empty shelf wide enough to lie on. I made a pillow for her head with my knapsack, wrapped the cloak tightly around her and left her there as I made my way back up the steps towards Henry.

I sealed the vault again, scattering earth and dead leaves over the slab so that my interference would not be noticed. Then I shut the door and wedged it with a stone. Turning to Henry, I handed him the lantern and smiled.

For a moment he stared at me, his eyes blank, then he nodded and took the lantern.

‘So…it’s done,’ he said softly. ‘It’s really done.’

Oddly enough, he sounded more lucid than he had been all night: his voice was clear and almost indifferent.

‘You will remember what to do next, won’t you?’ I urged, wary of Henry’s new serenity. ‘The presents. The tree. The housekeeper. Everything has to be perfectly normal.’ I was uncomfortably aware that if I had really killed Effie, we were risking my neck as well as his.

‘Of course.’ His tone was almost arrogant. He half turned away, and I was struck by the peculiar thought that I was being dismissed. At that thought I grinned, and suddenly I found myself laughing, choking with sour hilarity among the graves, the sound absurdly appropriate to that Gothic night as the heavy snowflakes filled my mouth, my eyes, my hair. And Henry Chester began to move slowly down the path, the lantern held high, like some stern Apostle leading the dead along the road to hell.

50

For a time beyond time there was nothing. I was beyond motion; beyond thought, beyond dreams. Then the world began to return; single thoughts drifted through my mind like isolated notes of an unfinished symphony. I moved through clouds of memory in search of myself until suddenly a face floated in front of me like a balloon and I remembered a name…then another…and another, fluttering around me in the haze like a hand of spilled cards. Fanny…Henry…Mose…

But where was she, my dark sister? My fellow-dreamer, my twin, my closest friend? In rising panic I looked around for her and realized that, for the first time since we met and travelled together, I was alone; alone and in darkness. A wave of memory broke upon my head and I cried out in dismay: my voice echoed oddly against frozen stone and, in the aftermath of the black wave, I realized where I was. I tried to move, but my body was stone, my hands frozen clay. As I forced my rigid limbs into movement, I found that I could raise myself on to my elbows. Painfully I began to search the area immediately around me, my eyes dilated against the endless dark. I was lying on some kind of ledge-my numb hands could not tell me whether it was of wood or stone, but I could tell that it ended a few inches to the left of me. What was beyond it I could not guess, preferring to stay quite still where I was rather than risk touching the rotting boards of some ancient coffin…Above me I could faintly hear the sounds of the night and the high whine of the wind.

Thinking of the outside I was for a moment disorientated, imagining myself deep under the ground with the roots of the cedars all around me. Tomorrow there would be people walking down the snowy path to church; children in bright coats and hats dreaming of sledging down Highgate Hill; lovers arm-in-arm, blinded by the sun on the snow; carol-singers with lanterns and hymn-books…and all the time I would be there beneath them, frozen into the dark stone with the dead around me…

At the thought I started and cried out involuntarily: No! Mose would come. I was supposed to wait, and he would come to find me. The realization flooded me with a great relief. For a moment I had been so confused that I had believed I was already dead, imprisoned for ever beneath the snow and the marble.

And in the warmth of that relief I slipped quietly out of my body again and out into the light where my sister was already waiting for me.

51

As I watched Henry disappear along the High Street I paused to look at my watch. It was two in the morning, technically Christmas Eve. I was drenched and, now that I was no longer carrying Effie, I had begun to feel the cold. I decided to give Henry half an hour or so to arrive home-it wouldn’t do to have him walk in on me as I opened up the grave-and began the walk half a mile or so down the road to an old haunt of mine, whose owner had a healthy disrespect for closing-times and where I might be able to catch a quick drink or two to warm that grim night. If I was going to open up that vault again alone I was going to do it with a few drinks inside me.

I know what you’re thinking and in a way you’re right. You see, a thought had come to me as I laid Effie’s lifeless body on the shelf in the vault, a thought I felt I should examine in a less morbid setting. So far I had been thinking only in terms of deceiving Henry into believing Effie was dead; neither Fanny nor I had really thought beyond that. No-one had ever wondered what would become of Effie, invalid that she was, when the charade was over. Now I realized that she would very likely need medical treatment-perhaps hospitalization. She would need a place to stay where she would not be recognized, for if word came to Henry that she was still alive it would not only mean the end of our lucrative plan but very likely arrest. In truth, everything pointed to the fact that Effie…

It was only a thought. A man can think, can’t he? And anyway…I swear I would never have thought of it if I hadn’t half believed she was already dead. Don’t think I didn’t feel a pang for my poor little Effie; I was very fond of her, you know. But you have to admit that her death would have been very convenient for all of us. Almost as if it had been meant, somehow. And so poetic, don’t you think? Like Juliet in the tomb.

52

Silence shrouded me as I made my way slowly back to Cromwell Square; an immense silence like death. Effie’s pitiless eyes had purged me of all thought and I walked mindlessly through the blank, drifting snow.

Stubbornly, I tried to force myself to suffer: I told myself brutally that I had murdered Effie; imagined her, still alive, inside the vault; waking, screaming, crying, scraping her fingers to bloody bone as she struggled to escape…but my most lurid imaginings failed to rouse the slightest shiver or the smallest stab of remorse. Nothing. And as I walked home I became aware of a kind of resonance in my mind, which gradually resolved itself into a single joyful, one-note anthem vibrating against my eardrum in time to the cadence of my heart: Marta, my black mass; my requiem; my danse macabre. I could feel her calling me through the night, wanting me, wanting my soul, her voice inaudible but close, intimate…

I reached my house and she was already there: her black cloak drawn around her so that I could only see the pale oval of her face as she beckoned me in, wordlessly. Without even stopping to light the lamps I reached for her. Why she had come; how she had entered the house were questions which did not even occur to me: enough to take her in my arms-how light she was, almost insubstantial through the heavy woollen folds of the cloak!-to bury my face in her hair and smell the acrid scent of the night on her skin: something like jasmine and lilac and chocolate…

My lips were burning against hers, but her flesh was searing cold; her fingers traced spirals of cold fire on my skin as she undressed me. She whispered in my ear, and her voice was like the whispering of the cypresses in Highgate cemetery. She slipped the cloak from her shoulders and I realized she was naked beneath it, ghostly in the greenish darkness, with the light from the snow reflected back on to her livid skin…but she was so beautiful for all that.

‘Oh Marta, what I have done for you…what I would do for you…’

When it was over, I remember picking up my clothes and making my way down the passageway to my room. She followed me, still naked, her feet making no sound on the thick carpets. I left my clothes on the floor and slipped between the sheets of my bed: she followed me and we lay together like tired children until, much later, I fell asleep.

When I awoke at eight the following morning she was gone.

53

All right, all right. I had more than a couple of drinks. Well, it was warm in the Beggar’s Club. I met a few friends who were playing cards and they bought me a drink. I bought a round myself, then we ordered a bite to eat, and with the cold and the walking and the drink, well, I was…delayed. Perhaps not delayed, exactly, but understand that I had been thinking hard as I walked and I had reached a difficult conclusion.

No need to look at me like that. Don’t think it was an easy decision to take. In fact, it was partly to forget what I had been obliged to do that I started on the brandy in the first place, and, well, one thing led to another and I had almost managed to forget her altogether. I remember looking at my watch at five in the morning with something like shock; but by then, of course, it was too late. The decision was out of my hands.

I was too castaway to think of going home at that time; instead I gave the old harpy in charge of the club the last of my money in exchange for a room and crawled into bed in my shirt, intending to sleep until daylight then make my way home, but I had not been between the sheets for five minutes-I was already dozing comfortably-when something jolted me half-awake. I heard it again, a light, almost furtive scratching at the door, as of pointed fingernails just whispering against the uneven surface. Probably another customer, I thought, drunk as a wheelbarrow, wanting to share my room when he found all the others were full. Well, I had no intention of letting him in.

‘Room’s taken,’ I called from beneath the blankets. Silence. Perhaps I had imagined the scratching. I began to drift almost immediately towards sleep again. Then my attention was snagged again by the sound of the doorknob turning. I began to feel annoyed. Damn the fellow, would he never leave me in peace? The door was locked anyway, I thought. Once he realized that I meant what I said he would go away.

‘I said the room’s taken!’ I called loudly. ‘Clear off, like a good chap, and find somewhere else, won’t you?’ That should do it, I decided, and turned over, savouring the warmth of the blankets and the smoothness of the linen.

Then the door opened.

For a second I thought it was the door of the neighbouring room, but as I glanced over my shoulder I saw a wedge of greyish light from the nearby window and, outlined momentarily, a woman’s figure. Before I had time to react the door had closed again and I heard the small sounds of the woman’s footsteps approaching the bed. I was about to say something-my brain was still rather fuddled by all that brandy-when she stopped beside me and I realized that she was undressing.

Well, what do you think I did? Did you expect me to pull the sheets over my head and call for the landlady? Or play the prude and say: ‘Oh, miss, we hardly know each other’? No, I didn’t say anything at all; I just waited: the little I had seen of the girl told me she was young and had a good figure. Maybe she had seen me in the club and thought…You needn’t look so surprised, it’s happened to me before. It also occurred to me that she might have inadvertently come to the wrong room, in which case I would be wiser to hold my tongue; besides which, I wasn’t feeling half as tired as I had a minute previously.

She said nothing as her clothes slid to the ground in a rustle of silk: in the gloom I saw her pale figure move towards me, felt the weight of her on the coverlet and then beneath it as at last she slipped between the sheets with me. As she touched me I flinched. She was so cold that for an instant I had the disturbing illusion that her touch would tear my skin; but then her arms crept around me, teasingly, erotically, so that, in spite of the cold which sank into my limbs, I began to respond, to appreciate the voluptuousness of her freezing caresses. I could feel long hair falling over my face as she straddled me, hair as light and cold as cobwebs, her legs slim and strong, locking tightly around my ribs. And yet in spite of the novelty of it all I could have sworn she was familiar…Pointed fingernails gently raked my shivering shoulders. I heard her whisper something, almost inaudibly, against my face; instinctively I turned to hear her words.

‘Mose…’

Even her breath was cold, raising the hairs on my chest; but more than that was the sense of unease, growing now; the knowledge that I had met her before.

‘Mose…I looked for you for so long…oh, Mose.’

A moment, which was almost recognition.

‘I waited, but you never came. I’m so cold.’

There again: almost…but not quite. And somehow I didn’t want to ask who she was: just in case…I shifted uneasily, the fumes of the brandy clouding my thoughts; a memory blinked almost inconsequentially through the haze-myself at that long-past table-rapping party (I’m so cold) watching a glass which seemed to move across the polished surface on its own.

‘I’m so cold…’ Her whisper was forlorn, distant; a memory’s voice. I tried the jovial approach.

‘Not for long, darling. I’ll soon warm you up.’

As a matter of fact, I could feel my arousal waning. Her flesh was like clay beneath my frozen fingers.

‘I waited, Mose, for such a long time. I waited. But you never came. You never…’ Another long sigh, like echoes in a cavern.

Then a thought so absurd that I almost laughed aloud; my laughter catching in my throat as I considered the implications…

‘Effie?’

‘I…’

‘Oh God, Effie!’ Suddenly there could be no doubt. It was her: the scent of her skin, the feel of her hair, her lost voice whispering in the dark. My head was spinning and I cursed the brandy; from a distance I could hear my voice repeating her name, stupidly, like a broken doll.

‘But how did you get out? I…’ Lamely: ‘I meant to come, you know. I really did.’ Hastily inventing a reason: ‘There was a policeman on duty outside the cemetery when I came back so I couldn’t get in. I waited and waited…I was frantic with worry.’

‘I followed you,’ she said blankly. ‘I followed you here. I waited for you to come. Oh, Mose…’

The reality of my betrayal echoed between us, louder than words. I forced myself to speak, with counterfeit sincerity: ‘God, Effie, you don’t know. The damned flatfoot was there for hours…When I finally got past him, you were already gone. I must have missed you by minutes.’ I kissed her, with counterfeit passion. ‘For now, let’s just be grateful that we’re here together and you’re safe. All right?’ I forced my arms around her although I was shivering. ‘Just warm up now, darling, and try to sleep.’

‘Sleep…’ Her voice was almost inaudible now, her breath the tiniest whisper in the ear of the night. ‘No more sleep. I’ve slept enough.’

When I awoke four hours later she was gone and I could almost have believed that I had imagined the whole incident; but as if to prove that I had not dreamed her she had left her calling-card on the bedstand beside me: a silver brooch shaped like an arching cat.

54

Tabby came back from visiting her family early on the morning of Christmas Eve: I awoke to the sounds of activity from below stairs and dressed in haste. I met her on the stairs, carrying a tray of chocolate and biscuits for Effie.

‘Good morning, Tabby,’ I said, smiling and taking the tray. ‘Is that for Mrs Chester? I’ll take it.’

‘Oh, it’s no trouble at all, sir…’ she began, but I cut her short, saying affably:

‘I dare say you’ll have a lot to do today, Tabby. Do see if we have any letters this morning, then come to the drawing-room and I will tell you what Mrs Chester and I have planned.’

‘Very good, sir.’

I ran upstairs with the tray, tipped the chocolate out of the window and ate two of the biscuits. Then I unmade Effie’s bed, rumpled her nightdress and threw it on the floor and drew the curtains. I left the cup on the bedstand-it was the kind of disorder Effie liked to live in-and, feeling well pleased with my ingenuity, went back downstairs to deal with Tabby. I was feeling very much more in control this morning; I found I could look at Effie’s room, her things, touch her nightdress and the cup from which she had taken the drugged chocolate without as much as a qualm. It was as if my meeting with Marta the previous night had infused me with a new, indomitable spirit. The daylight had banished the night’s demons for good and in the drawing-room I took care to adopt a jovial tone with Tabby.

‘Tabby,’ I said with brisk good cheer, ‘today Mrs Chester has decided to surprise her mother with a Christmas visit. While she is out, you and I will surprise her.’

‘Sir?’ said Tabby politely.

‘You will go and buy enough holly and mistletoe to trim the whole house, then you will begin to prepare the finest Christmas dinner you have ever made. I want everything: quail’s eggs, goose, mushrooms…and, of course, the finest chocolate log-you know how partial Mrs Chester is to chocolate. If anything can bring her back to her usual happy self, that will, don’t you think, Tabby?’

Tabby’s eyes gleamed. ‘Oh, yes, sir,’ she said happily. ‘I’ve been so worried about the poor young lady. She’s that thin, sir, she needs feeding up. Good honest feeding, that’s all she needs, never mind what that doctor says, and-’

‘Quite,’ I interrupted. ‘So, Tabby, not a word. Let it be our secret to surprise Mrs Chester. If you go out immediately you will be back in plenty of time to decorate the tree.’

‘Oh, sir!’ beamed Tabby. ‘My young lady will be pleased!’

‘I certainly hope so.’

As Tabby left the house with a jaunty step, I allowed myself the luxury of a smile; the worst was done. If Tabby could be convinced that all was well, then my troubles were over. I was almost looking forwards to the day’s shopping!

At about eleven o’clock I took a hack into Oxford Street and spent an hour or so looking at the shops. I bought a bag of chestnuts from an Irish costermonger and ate them with more relish than I had had for any food since I first met Marta, dropping the hot shells into the gutter and watching them float away on the grey river of melted snow. From one vendor I bought an ell of gold ribbon, from another a pair of pink kid gloves, from a third an orange. I almost forgot that I was acting a part and found myself carefully considering what kind of presents Effie would most like: would it be this pretty aquamarine pendant, this tortoiseshell comb, this bonnet, this shawl?

I went into a haberdasher’s and found myself in front of a display of nightwear, idly looking at nightgowns, caps, petticoats. Then I froze. On the display in front of me was the wrap, my mother’s peach silk négligée just as I remembered it, but new, the lace standing out from the thin silk like sea foam. I was filled with an immense, furious compulsion: I had to have it. Impossible for me to have walked away and left it, glorious trophy of my victory over guilt. I bore it away with a sense of dizzy exhilaration.

Before long I was carrying a dozen or so small packages along with the precious parcel; in my enthusiasm I had bought more presents than I had ever bought before-and among them was a small package I intended for Marta: a beautiful ruby pendant which glowed and pulsed like a heart. My last purchase was a fifteen-foot Christmas tree which I arranged to have delivered and, with a sense of perilous satisfaction, I began to make my way back to Cromwell Square.

It was then that I saw her: a small slim figure in a dark cloak, the hood pulled so that it partly covered her face. I glimpsed her long enough to see a white hand clutching the wool, and streamers of her pale hair stark in the shadow of an alley…then she was gone.

In an instant all my carefully built pretence was down, folding as completely as a house of cards. I struggled with the insane desire to run after her and tear the hood from her face. But that was ridiculous. Ridiculous even to think she might be Effie; ridiculous to imagine Effie with the mud of the grave still clinging to her skirts and that look of terrible hunger in her eyes…

In spite of myself I found my own eyes darting furtively down the alley where the girl had disappeared. It wouldn’t do any harm to look, I told myself, just to see…The alley was narrow, the cobbles greasy with melted snow and weeks of accumulated rubbish. A thin brown tabby cat was nosing in the gutter after a dead bird, and the girl was gone. Of course she had gone, I told myself angrily. Did I expect her to wait for me? There were houses in the alley, shops for her to enter; this was no Gothic revenant to torment me.

And yet, I was cold, so cold…and as I turned resolutely from the alley into the lights and sounds of Oxford Street I could have sworn that all the doors in that lonely alley were boarded shut; yes, and all the windows too.

55

I awoke to the sound of bells: great clanging, discordant bells which rolled across my dreams, forcing them into sharp, brutal recollection. Outside the club the street was white; the air white. In the distance I could see a small group of people struggling through the haze towards the church. I rang for coffee and, ignoring the maid’s cheery ‘merry Christmas’, I drank it and found that, as the warmth coursed through my veins, I could begin to face the previous night’s events with my usual detachment. Don’t think I wasn’t rattled; the night had taken its toll in dreams and uneasy imaginings, but they were only dreams.

That’s the difference, you see, between me and Henry Chester. He turned his terrors upon himself like hungry demons; I see my own for what they are, fictions of a restless night-and still somehow they duped me, as neatly as we duped poor Henry…But it isn’t in me to be bitter: a gambler has to know how to lose with grace-I just wonder how they did it.

I dressed in my clothes of the previous night and began to consider my next move. God knew what Effie had told Fanny by now; last night I hadn’t been able to guess whether she even understood that I had abandoned her. But Fanny would know; and Fanny could make a great deal of trouble if she set her mind to it.

Yes, Fanny was the woman to see before I even thought of paying my visit to Henry.

So I pulled on my overcoat and made my way on foot to Crook Street. My head cleared as I walked-the air was sharp and tinselly and pungent with the scents of pine and spices-and by the time I arrived at Fanny’s door I was ready to confront her with the most dangerous hand of bluff I had ever played.

I knocked for minutes on the door and received no answer. I was beginning to think that no-one was home when I heard the latch click and Fanny’s face looked out at me, as white and expressionless as the face of the clock in the hall behind her. My first thought was that she had been to church because she was in black. Great folds of soft velvet swathed her from throat to ankles and, against the opulent fabric, her skin was startlingly white, her agate eyes more catlike than ever, but reddened as if she had wept. Strange and somehow uncomfortable to imagine that. In all the years I had known her I had never seen Fanny Miller shed a tear. I shifted uneasily, my smile stretching, grotesquely mobile, across my face.

‘Fanny, merry Christmas!’

Unsmiling, she beckoned me to enter. I knocked my boots against the step and hung my coat in the hall. There was no sign of any of Fanny’s girls and for a moment I had the eerie impression that the house was derelict. I could smell dust-or the illusion of dust-an inch thick on the rotten floorboards. For a fleeting instant I heard the ticking of the hall clock amplified into a deafening pounding like a giant heart…then it stopped abruptly, hands frozen stupidly at a minute to twelve.

‘Your clock’s stopped,’ I said.

Fanny did not answer.

‘I…I came as soon as I could,’ I went on doggedly. ‘Is Effie all right?’

Her eyes were unreadable, the pupils tiny. ‘There is no Effie,’ she said, almost indifferently. ‘Effie is dead.’

‘But…last night I…’

‘There is no Effie,’ she said again, and her voice was so distant that I wondered whether she, like Henry Chester, had developed too much of a taste for her own potions. ‘No Effie,’ she repeated. ‘Now there is only Marta.’

That bitch again.

‘Oh, I see, a disguise,’ I said lamely. ‘Well, it’s a good idea; it means she won’t be recognized. Ah, about last night…’ I shifted uneasily from foot to foot: ‘I…well, the plan went…I mean…Henry fell for the whole thing. You should have been there.’

No answer. I could not even be certain she was listening.

‘I was worried about Effie,’ I explained, ‘I was going to come back for her straight away, but-Effie must have told you, I ran into some difficulties. There was a policeman at the cemetery gates. Must have seen the lantern and come to get a closer look…I waited hours. I went back at last but Effie had already gone. I was worried sick.’

Her silence was more and more unsettling. I was about to speak again when I heard a sound in the passageway behind me; a whispering of silk. Unnerved, I turned abruptly and saw a shadow, grotesquely elongated, flicker across the painted wallpaper: in the dimness of the passageway I could hardly see her. I half guessed at her features in the pale oval of her face, the folds of her grey dress falling softly to the ground in a perfect curve, her black hair loose and straight…

‘Effie?’ My voice was hoarse, attempting joviality.

‘I’m Marta.’

Of course. I tried a chuckle, but the sound was lost, grotesque in the silence. Her voice was bleak, bloodless: the sound of snow falling.

Lamely I said: ‘I just called to see if you were all right. Ah…not sickening for…anything, you know.’

Silence. I thought I heard her sigh; her breath the rasping of skin on frozen grass.

‘I’m going to visit Henry later today,’ I continued doggedly. ‘You know, a business visit. Talk money.’ My words were unbearable in my throat, like ulcers. I felt physical discomfort in speaking. Damn them, why didn’t they speak? I saw Effie’s mouth open-but no, it wasn’t Effie, was it? It was Marta, that bitch Marta, black angel of Henry’s desires, temptress, torturess…She had nothing to do with Effie, and though she might be a fiction born of ochre and powders I realized she was all the more dangerous for that. For she was real, damn her; real as you or me; and I could sense her passive delight as I stumbled through broken phrases in search of the explanation which had seemed so clear to me a few moments before in the snow. She was going to say it: I knew what she was going to say. Suddenly I could hardly breathe as she stepped forwards and touched me. Her rage was searing but her delicate touch against my skin was anaesthetic-I felt nothing.

‘You left me, Mose. You left me to die in the dark.’ The voice was hypnotic; I almost admitted it.

‘No! I-’

‘I know.’

‘No, I was telling Fanny-’

‘I know. Now it’s my turn.’ The voice was distant, almost expressionless; but my raw nerves were quick to sense that rage-and with it a kind of humour.

‘Effie-’

‘There is no Effie.’

Now, at last, I could believe that.

I took my leave as best I could; at the last fighting for breath as I struggled through fathoms of thick brown air with the smell of dust in my mouth, my nostrils, in my lungs…Fanny did not speak another word as I grabbed my coat and staggered out into the snow. Glancing fearfully over my shoulder, I caught one last glimpse of them, standing side by side, hand-in-hand, fixing me with their silent feral gaze. They might have been mother and daughter in that moment: their faces were identical, their hate mirrored. Panic slashed me and I fell in the snow, damp seeping into my clothes at the knees and elbows, my hands numb…

When I looked back again, the door was closed, but their hate remained with me, cruelly, delicately feminine, like a breath of perfume on the air. I found a gin-shop and tried to force my nerves into submission, but Marta’s rage followed me even into drunkenness, souring my warmth. Damn them both! Anyone would think that I really had murdered Effie. What did they expect? I’d helped her to escape, hadn’t I, even though the plan might have miscarried just a little? I’d fooled Henry, and I would be the one to get them the money-I was sure that they would have too much delicacy to dare to confront Henry themselves. Yesterday it was ‘I need you, Mose, I’m counting on you, Moses’ but today…No use wrapping it in clean linen, I told myself; they’d used me. I certainly didn’t need to feel guilty about my own behaviour. I looked at my watch; half past two. I wondered what Henry was doing. The thought immediately cheered me somewhat. Soon it would be time to pay my little visit to Henry.

56

My euphoria lasted until I reached Cromwell Square. Then I saw the wreath of holly and berries on the door and a kind of lassitude crept over me, a numbing of the senses at the thought of the part I would have to enact with Tabby when, inevitably, Effie did not come home. My hand was on the door when it opened abruptly and Tabby’s face appeared, smiling and radiant with excitement and pleasure. A quick glance took in the parcels in my arms and she gave a little crow of delight.

‘Oh sir,’ she said, ‘Mrs Chester will be pleased! The house looks a treat, too, and I’ve got the cake just cooling in the oven. Oh my!’

I nodded, rather stiffly. ‘You have been busy. Could you take these parcels and put them in the parlour?’ I held out my purchases. ‘Then, maybe a glass of brandy?’

‘Of course, sir.’ She bustled off with the presents, eager as a child, and I allowed myself a sour smile.

I was drinking brandy in the library when the Christmas tree arrived. I watched the porter and Tabby put it up in the parlour, then I watched Tabby hang it with glass balls and tinsel, sticking little white candles on to the ends of the branches with wax. It was oddly compelling. Sitting by the fire with my eyes half-closed and the pungently nostalgic scent of pine needles in my nostrils I felt a quite pleasant sense of disorientation, as if I were some other, younger Henry Chester waiting on Christmas Eve for a magical surprise…

Night was falling; Tabby lit candles on the mantelpiece and put more logs on the fire; the room had acquired a homely warmth, a sparkle which, though ironic in the circumstances, was oddly potent: the reality of last night seemed as distant as the events of my childhood and, as I turned to speak to Tabby, I found myself almost believing my own fiction.

‘Tabby, what time is it?’

‘Just left four, sir,’ replied Tabby, applying the taper to the last of the tree’s candles. ‘Perhaps you’d like a cup of tea and a mince pie?’

‘Yes, that would be very nice,’ I said approvingly. ‘In fact, you had better bring up a pot: Mrs Chester said she would be back at four at the latest.’

‘I’ll bring her a slice of my special cake,’ said Tabby kindly. ‘She’ll likely be cold.’

Well, the pot of tea and the pies and cake stayed on the sideboard for nearly an hour before I allowed myself to feign unease. It was simpler than I thought. The fact was that with the approach of night my earlier indifference had begun to fade; I was restless without quite knowing why. I felt thirsty and drank brandy, but I found that the brandy made me hot and dizzy. My eyes kept turning towards the parcel containing the silk wrap, lying at the foot of the Christmas tree. I could not keep still.

Finally I rang for Tabby.

‘Has there been no word from Mrs Chester?’ I demanded. ‘She did say she would be back by four, and it is past five now.’

‘No word, sir,’ said Tabby comfortably. ‘But I wouldn’t worry. Likely she’s stopped for a chat somewhere. She won’t be long.’

‘I hope there hasn’t been an accident,’ I said.

‘Oh, no sir,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’m sure she’s on her way.’

I waited until the Christmas candles had burned to stumps on the mantelpiece. The ones on the tree were long gone and Tabby had already replaced them for when Effie returned. I drank coffee to steady myself and tried to read a book but could not concentrate on the dancing print. Finally I brought out my sketch-book and began to draw, focusing my thoughts on the lines and texture of the paper, of the pencils, my head a hive of silent bees. I looked up as seven struck on the mantelpiece clock and stretched out my hand for the bell-pull. The gesture stopped halfway; my hand left in mid-air like a puppet’s as a movement by the tree caught my eye. There. The curtain moved, very slightly, as if plucked by invisible fingers. Straining my ears I thought I could hear a kind of resonance, like the wind blowing across a wire. A draught ruffled the bright wrapping on the presents under the tree. A glass bauble spun on its own, throwing an arpeggio of light on to the nearby wall. Then silence.

Ridiculous, I told myself, in subdued rage. It was a draught, an ill-fitting window-frame, an open door somewhere else in the house. Ridiculous to imagine Effie outside that window, Effie with her long, pale hair loose around her white, hungry face…Effie come to take her present…and perhaps to give one too.

‘Ridiculous!’ I spoke aloud, my voice comfortingly solid against the background of night. Ridiculous.

Still, in spite of that ridicule I found that I had to go to the curtain, twitch aside the heavy brocade, look through the thick glass into the street. In the light of the gaslamps the street was deserted, white: no footprints marred the glowing snow.

I rang the bell.

‘Tabby, has there been any word from Mrs Chester?’

‘No sir.’ She was less ebullient now; Effie was three hours late and the snow had begun to fall again, stifling the night.

‘I want you to take a hack to Cranbourn Alley and find out if Mrs Chester has set off home. I will stay here in case anything has happened.’

‘Sir?’ she queried doubtfully. ‘You don’t think she might have…I’m not sure I-’

‘Do as I say,’ I snapped, thrusting two guineas into her hand. ‘Hurry, and don’t stop for anything.’ I tried a rueful smile. ‘Maybe I am being over-cautious, Tabby, but in a city like London…Go on. And hurry back!’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said, still frowning, and from the window I watched as, wrapped from head to foot in shawls and cloak, she hurried out into the unbroken snow.

When she returned she had two policemen with her.

I could hardly suppress a guilty start as I saw them come in through the gate, one tall and thin, the other as squat as Tabby herself, lumbering ponderously through the dense snow to my door. Even as panic hammered down my spine I found myself stifling laughter as bitter as it was compelling. With one hand I fumbled for the chloral bottle on its chain and shook out three grains, which I swallowed with a last mouthful of brandy. I felt the rictus of my sour mirth relax. I forced myself to sit and wait.

When I heard their knock I leaped from my chair, almost tripping on the stairs as I ran to open the door. I let my face slacken in appalled comprehension as I saw them, Tabby’s face puckered with half-shed tears, the officers of the law deliberately neutral; hatless.

‘Effie!’ My voice was ragged; I allowed all the desperate suspense of that evening to permeate the two syllables. ‘Have you found her? Is she all right?’

The tall officer spoke, keeping his voice carefully flat. ‘Sergeant Merle, sir. This’-indicating the other figure with a long, bony hand-‘is Constable Hawkins.’

‘My wife, officer.’ My voice was raw with disguised laughter-no doubt it sounded desperate to Sergeant Merle. ‘What about my wife?’

‘I’m afraid, sir, that Mrs Chester did not arrive at Cranbourn Alley. Mrs Shelbeck was out, but Miss Shelbeck, her sister-in-law, was most distraught. It was all we could do to prevent her from coming herself.’

I frowned, shaking my head in bewilderment. ‘But…’

‘Could we come in a moment, sir?’

‘Of course.’ I hardly needed to play the part; I was light-headed, almost reeling from drink, chloral and nerves. I grasped the lintel of the door for balance. For a moment I almost fell.

Merle’s thin arm was surprisingly strong. He grasped me as I toppled, leading me to the warmth of the parlour. Constable Hawkins followed us, with Tabby bringing up the rear.

‘Mrs Gaunt, perhaps you might bring a cup of tea for Mr Chester?’ said Merle softly. ‘He looks unwell.’

Tabby left the room, looking back over her shoulder at the two policemen, her face pinched with apprehension. I sat heavily upon the sofa.

‘I’m sorry, sergeant,’ I said. ‘I have been ill recently, and my wife’s condition has put me under some strain. Please do not be afraid to tell me the truth. Did Miss Shelbeck seem surprised that she had planned to go to Cranbourn Alley?’

‘Very surprised, sir,’ said Merle neutrally. ‘She said she hadn’t had any word of it from the lady.’

‘Oh, God.’ I put my head in my hands to hide the capering grin I could feel aching to show itself behind my slack features. ‘I should never have left her! I should have gone with her, whatever the doctor said. I should have known.’

‘Sir?’

I looked up at him wild-eyed. ‘This is not the first time my wife has suffered…lapses,’ I told him dully. ‘My friend the nerve doctor, Dr Russell, examined her not ten days ago. She is a victim of…hysteria, believes herself persecuted.’ I allowed my face to warp and twitch as if I were close to tears. ‘My God,’ I cried in an impassioned tone, ‘why did I let her go?’ I stood up abruptly and seized Merle’s arm. ‘You must find her, sergeant,’ I pleaded. ‘There’s no knowing where she thinks she is going. Anything…’ My voice cracked obligingly. ‘Anything might happen to her.’

And then I was crying, really crying, tears streaking down my face, choking me. I shook with great, hysterical sobs, releasing grief and poisoned laughter in alternate gusts. But as I wept, my face in my hands, I could not help being conscious of a kind of glee, a cold, mechanical capering in the chambers of my heart, and a knowledge that my grief-if grief there was-was not for Effie, or for anyone else I could think of.

57

It wasn’t till after seven that I decided to pay my delayed visit to Henry; I caught a cab to the High Street and walked up from the cemetery to Cromwell Square. I passed a group of children singing carols-among them a girl of about twelve who radiated an unearthly, crystalline beauty: I slipped a wink to the pretty child and a sixpence each to her friends-after all, now I could afford it-and, whistling, I made my way towards the Chester household.

He answered my knock almost at once, as if he had been expecting callers. From his expression I guessed that I was far from welcome but, after a furtive glance across the street, he ushered me in. I saw no sign of the housekeeper and presumed she was out. All the better: it would make my dealings with Henry the easier.

‘Merry Christmas, Henry,’ I said cheerfully. ‘The house is looking very festive tonight. Then again,’ I added winningly, ‘we do have quite a lot to celebrate, don’t we?’

He looked sharply at me. ‘Do we?’

I raised my eyebrows quizzically. ‘Come, come, Henry, don’t be coy,’ I said. ‘We both know what I mean. Let’s say that this Christmas we have both managed to contrive a solution to certain…embarrassments, shall we say? Yours, I believe, were marital, whereas mine are merely financial. We shall deal very well together.’

Henry was no fool: he was beginning to understand. Last night had seen him fuddled with guilt and chloral, but tonight he had a cooler head than I would have given him credit for, and he merely stared at me in that haughty way of his.

‘I don’t think we shall, Harper,’ he said coolly. ‘In fact, I doubt whether we shall even meet very often at all. Now, I was rather busy…’

‘Not too busy, surely, for an old friend to share a Christmas drink?’ I said with a smile. ‘Mine’s a brandy, if you please. I never discuss business with a dry throat.’

Henry didn’t move, so I helped myself from a nearby decanter. ‘Won’t you join me?’ I offered sweetly.

‘What do you want?’ he asked, through gritted teeth.

‘Want?’ I said aggrievedly. ‘Why assume that I want anything? I fear you have misunderstood me, Henry: I would never be vulgar enough to ask for anything…If, of course, you were to offer-in the name of our friendship-let us say a mere three hundred pounds to pay off my creditors-a Christmas bonus, so to speak-I wouldn’t think of refusing.’

His eyes were narrow with hatred and understanding. ‘You can’t blackmail me! You were a part of it too. I’d rub your face right in it.’

‘Queen’s evidence, dear chap,’ I said lightly. ‘Besides, I have friends who’d lie for me if needs be. Have you?’

I let that sink in for a while. Then, downing the brandy in one gulp, I said: ‘Why not simply join in the Christmas spirit a little? One good turn deserves another. Think about it. What’s three hundred to a man like you? Isn’t it worth it, if only to see the back of me?’

Henry was silent for a minute. Then he turned on me, his expression ugly. ‘Stay here,’ he ordered, spun on his heels and left.

He came back a few minutes later with a small metal box which he thrust into my hands as if he wanted to hurt them.

‘Take it, you wretch. The money’s there.’ He paused, his lips thin to the point of invisibility. ‘I should never have trusted you,’ he said softly. ‘You planned this from the start, didn’t you? You never had any intention of helping anyone but yourself. Get out of my sight! I don’t want to see you ever again.’

‘Of course you don’t, dear chap,’ I said gaily, pocketing the box. ‘But who’s to say you won’t? Life, after all, is variety. I daresay we may meet again…at an exhibition, or a club…or in a cemetery, who knows? It would be a pity to lose touch, wouldn’t it? I know my way out. Merry Christmas!’

Half an hour later I was at one of my favourite haunts in the Haymarket, the precious box carefully hidden in my inner pocket, drinking fine brandy in front of a warm fire and eating chestnuts boiled in cider from the hand of a fifteen-year-old charmer with hair like sable and a mouth like a slashed peach.

I never did have much time for guilt. Henry’s discomfiture had put me in a good mood, and between that and the girl and the box of banknotes I admit that any lingering thoughts of Effie had long ceased to disturb me. There were other, more pressing things on my mind.

I drank to the future.

58

When he had gone, I paced the hall in a delirium of fury. Oh, I had been prettily duped; I saw it all now. Everything he had said about my art…the hours spent in my house, drinking my brandy, looking at my wife…all that time he’d been waiting for the moment to trip me, laughing behind his hands at my bumbling, ignorant kindness. Damn him! In the heat of my fury I could almost have confessed the whole sorry affair to the police for the satisfaction of seeing him hang…But I would have my revenge; not now, when I had to remain calm, when I had to seem in control if I was to deal with the police. But I would.

I made my way to my room and a little chloral diluted in brandy sank my rage to the sea-bed: numbness came quickly and I was able to sit in my winged armchair, forcing my trembling hands to be still, and wait.

But the night was full of sounds: here the sharp crack of a log in the hearth, there the whisper of bubbles in the gas-jet, so like the light uneven breathing of a sleeping child…I sat close to the fire and listened, and it seemed to me that behind the normal creakings and whisperings of an old house in winter I could hear something else, a sequence of sounds which finally resolved themselves in my torpid brain as the sounds of someone moving quietly from room to room around me. At first I dismissed it (the caress of a woman’s skirts against the silk wallpaper) because it was impossible for anyone to have entered the house without a key and I had locked the door as soon as Harper left (the padding of light feet on the thick pile of the carpet, the creaking of a leather armchair as she rested there awhile). I poured myself another glass of brandy-and-chloral (a tiny sound of china from the parlour as she tasted the cake-she always had an especial liking for chocolate cake).

Suddenly I could bear it no longer. I leaped to my feet, throwing the door open, reflecting a long ladder of light from my room into the passageway. No-one. The parlour door was ajar-had I left it that way? I couldn’t remember. Compelled by a bleak desire far stronger than fear, I pushed it, allowing it to swing gently open. For a moment I saw her: a girl of leaves with her leaf-cat in her arms, their eyes like mirrors reflecting me, my face pinprick-small in the wells of their pupils…then nothing. Nothing but the reflection of a weeping-willow etched in white against the darkness of a window.

There was no girl. There had never been a girl. I quickly scanned the room: the cake was untouched, the china as I had left it, the folds of the curtain mathematically precise. Not a breath of wind disturbed the candle-flames, not a shadow fell against the wall. Not the slightest scent of lilac. And yet there was something…I frowned, trying to place the change: the cushions were unruffled, the ornaments untouched, the tree…

I froze.

Under the tree, a small triangle of torn wrapping-paper lay on the carpet. Just one. Stupidly, I tried to think where it could have come from. Taking two clumsy steps forward I saw that the topmost present-the peach silk wrap-had slipped from the pile and fallen to one side. Automatically, I bent to straighten it and I saw that the string had been cut and the parcel loosened so that folds of silk and lace showed through the stiff brown wrapping.

The sense of what I had seen refused to connect with any part of my rational mind and while a part of me gibbered and cried, another simply stared calmly at the opened present as a great blankness settled over me. Maybe it was the chloral, but my mind was infinitely slow, moving from the wrap, to the torn paper, to the cut string, back to the wrap with imbecile detachment. There was a huge silence all around as I stood there alone with the wrap in my hands, the torn paper slipping from it and falling with dreamlike slowness to a floor miles below me. The silk in my hands was hypnotic; I could see into it with inhuman accuracy, testing the weft and warp of it, delving the intricacies of scrolled lace, of spirals within spirals…The wrap seemed to fill the whole world so that there was no room for thought, simply awareness, infinite awareness, infinite contemplation…

From my abyss, I realized that I was laughing.

59

It’s amazing, isn’t it, how money disappears? I paid my debts, the ones I could not delay paying, though by no means the whole, and for a few days I began to define the style of living to which I thought I might like to become accustomed. I ate well, drank only the best. As for women, there were more than I could clearly remember, all beauties, all delightfully eager to see the colour of dear Henry’s money. Don’t think I wasn’t grateful to him: I made sure I drank to his health every time I opened a new bottle, and when Beggar Maid ran at Newmarket I made sure I put ten pounds on her-I won too, at fifteen to one. It seemed as if I couldn’t lose at anything.

Not that I didn’t keep a close watch on events from my little hotbed of debauchery. Effie Chester’s disappearance was reported in The Times with the possibility of foul play mentioned-it seemed that she had set off on the morning of Christmas Eve to visit her mother in Cranbourn Alley and had never arrived. The lady was ‘of frail and nervous disposition’ and police were concerned for her safety. I reckoned Henry had played his part well enough; the paper described him as ‘distraught’. But he was unstable, I knew that: chloral and religion in equal quantities had upset the equilibrium of his free will and I guessed that, after the first few weeks of subterfuge, he would very likely sink into a kind of stupid despondency and imagine all kinds of retribution to be heading his way.

I felt that there was a chance of his eventually giving himself in to the police in an ecstasy of remorse-at which time, of course, there would be no more tarts for poor Jack. I supposed that Fanny had intended that from the beginning, though I couldn’t think why. The only logical reason was that she intended Henry to be arrested and ruined-but I still couldn’t understand why she had chosen such an unpredictable method of arranging it. I was safe enough in any case. The chilly reception from the ingrates at Crook Street had convinced me that I had no further obligation towards them; if Henry tried to accuse me I would tell the truth-as much of it as was needed. Let Fanny explain her own motives and answer the possible kidnapping charge; let Effie explain about Marta. I was well rid of them both. No-one could accuse me of anything more than adultery or possibly blackmail and any attempt to produce the supposed corpse was doomed to ridicule; the ‘corpse’ was at this very moment wandering through Fanny’s house with dyed hair and a bellyful of laudanum.

Fanny! I admit she was still an enigma to me; I’d have liked to pay her a visit, if only to learn what she was doing. But I wasn’t eager to meet that bitch Marta again, or ever. So instead I decided to pay another visit to Henry.

It must have been…let me see…about 30 December. Henry had had nearly a week to deal with his various affairs and I had almost run out of money. So I ambled over to his house and asked to see him. The housekeeper looked down her nose and told me Mr Chester wasn’t at home. Not at home to me, most likely, I thought, and told her I would wait. Well, she ushered me into the parlour and I waited. After a while I grew restless and began to look around: the parlour was still decorated for Christmas and under the tree were a number of parcels, still waiting to be unwrapped by a girl who would never come home. A poignant touch, that, I thought appreciatively-the police would have liked it. Additionally, Henry had covered all the paintings on the wall with dust-covers: the effect was disturbing and I wondered why he had done it. I idled in the parlour for nearly two hours until I realized that the housekeeper was right: Mr Chester wasn’t at home.

I rang the bell for brandy and when she came up with the tray I slipped her a guinea and gave my most winning smile.

‘Now, Mrs…I’m afraid I don’t know your surname.’ I don’t suppose anyone had called her ‘Mrs’ anything for years and she bridled.

‘Gaunt, sir, but Mr and Mrs Chester-’

‘Mrs Gaunt.’ The smile was at its most charming. ‘I am, as you recall, an old friend of Mr Chester. I am aware of the distress he must be suffering at the moment-’

‘Oh sir,’ she broke in, dabbing her eyes, ‘the poor young lady! We’re so worried some man-’ she broke off, visibly moved. I tried not to chuckle.

‘Quite,’ I said soothingly. ‘But if-God preserve us-the worst has happened,’ I continued piously, ‘then our thoughts must be with the living. Mr Chester needs friends to help him through this. I am aware that he may have instructed you to turn away, or otherwise misinform visitors’-I looked at her reproachfully-‘but you and I both know, Mrs Gaunt, that for his own good…’

‘Oh yes, sir,’ she agreed. ‘I know. Poor Mr Chester; he won’t eat, he hardly sleeps, he spends hours in that studio of his, or just walking about the cemetery. He was that fond of the young lady, sir, that he won’t have her mentioned…and you can see that he’s covered up all of his lovely pictures of her: can’t bear to look at them, he says.’

‘So you don’t know where he is today?’

She shook her head.

‘But you won’t prevent me from giving him what comfort I can if I call again?’

‘Oh, sir!’ Her reproach was apparent. ‘If I’d known, sir…but there are people, you know, who wouldn’t be…’

‘Of course.’

‘Bless you, sir.’

I grinned. ‘I’ll just leave a message, shall I? Then I’ll go. Maybe it would be better if you didn’t mention I was here.’

‘All right, sir.’ She was mystified, but game.

‘I’ll let myself out, Mrs Gaunt.’

When she had disappeared again I opened the parlour door and made my way quietly to Henry’s room. From my pocket I took out Effie’s brooch-the one she had left on the bedstand that night-and pinned it to his pillow. It gleamed in the semi-darkness. Above the bed I saw another shrouded picture and divested it of its shroud. Now Effie floated above the bed like a pale succubus. Henry would sleep well tonight…

When I left Cromwell Square I made my way to Henry’s studio. The light was failing-it was already late afternoon-and by the time I arrived it was dark. The studio was in a block of apartments and Henry’s was on the second floor. The outer door was open, the stairs poorly lit by a single sputtering gas-jet. I had to hold tightly to the banisters to avoid falling on the uneven steps. When I reached the door marked chester it was locked.

I swore. That was that, then. But, as I turned to leave, a sudden curiosity grasped me, a desire to see the inside of that studio, and maybe to leave another calling-card. I inspected the lock; it looked simple enough. A couple of turns of a small-bladed pocket-knife and it clicked open; I lifted the latch and pushed the door. It was dark in the studio; for a few minutes I fumbled with the gas-jet in almost complete obscurity. I could hear the sound of paper crunching beneath my feet as I moved, but could not see the cause. Then, as the light flared, I was able to look around at the room.

My first thought was that I had broken into the wrong studio. I knew Henry to be a meticulously, almost obsessively tidy person: the last time I had been here there had been framed canvasses hung on the walls, unframed canvasses in a large file to the left of the room, a trunk filled with costumes and properties at the back, a few chairs and a table pushed against the wall. Now a manic disorder reigned. The paintings had been torn from the walls-in some cases taking paper and plaster with them-and stacked higgledy-piggledy in front of the fire. Unframed paintings were strewn across the floor in all directions, like a hand of spilled cards. And everywhere, on every available piece of floor or surface, there were sketches, crumpled, torn or whole, sketches on parchment or canvas or wrapping-paper-some breathtaking. I never knew Henry had such talent. The fireplace was choked with them, half-charred, pitiful remnants, and I spent some minutes on my hands and knees exploring the carnage, turning the pictures in my hands, trying to find some reason for the mutilations.

After a while my head began to spin. There were so many pictures of her, pictures in watercolour, in chalks, in pencils, oils, tempera: outlines of unspeakable purity, studies of eyes, lips, cheekbones, hair…profiles, full-face, three-quarter profiles…all stark and poignant and true. I’d been wrong about Henry all these years: the wan decadence of his paintings, the contrived symbolism of all those earlier works had hidden the bleak, almost Oriental purity of his vision. Each stroke of pen or pencil was exquisite: cruelty and tenderness subtly merged…and these masterpieces, every one, discarded with who can guess what rage and love, every one an infanticide…I couldn’t understand it.

In a way I could almost find it in me to envy Henry Chester. I’d always known, of course, that an artist has to suffer to become great. But suffering exquisite enough to produce that…maybe that was worth knowing…this passion which transcends everything.

For a few minutes I sat among the wreckage and mourned like a child. But then my mind turned to more prosaic things and I was myself again. There was still the business of the money.

I stood up for a moment and tried to think logically. Where was the man? I turned over the possible alternatives in my mind…and then I knew. Of course! Thursday. It was Thursday. Marta’s day. I glanced at my watch. Five past seven. Wherever he was now, walking the streets of London in whatever cold circle of hell now possessed him, I knew that at midnight he would be there, in Crook Street, for his tryst with his lady. Whatever the risk, whatever she made him suffer, he’d be there.

For an instant my eyes rested upon the drawing I had picked up at random from the hundreds on the floor: a stiff rough-edged piece of watercolour paper with a blurred outline in brown chalk from which her eyes smouldered endlessly, promising endlessly…A man could fall in love.

I shrugged and dropped the sketch back into the fireplace.

Not me, Henry. Not me.

60

From the moment I saw the opened present underneath the Christmas tree I understood that Effie had at last come home. I heard her footsteps in the passageway, her breathing in darkened rooms; I smelled her perfume in doorways, found strands of her hair on my coats, her handkerchiefs in my pockets. She was in the air I breathed, the shirts I wore; moving beneath the surface of my paintings like a drowned girl just beneath the water so that at last I had to cover them with sheets to hide her face, her accusing eyes. She was in the chloral bottle, so that however much I took I gained no peace from the drug but only managed to make her image clearer in my mind…And when I slept-and in spite of all my attempts to cheat sleep I sometimes did-then she stalked through my dreams, screaming at me in a voice as shrill and inhuman as a peacock’s: ‘What about my story? What about my story? What about my story?’

She knew all my secrets. Night after night she came to me with gifts: the bottle of jasmine perfume, the blue-and-white doorknob, and once, the little white disc of the Host, marked scarlet by the touch of her lips…

Night after night I awoke drenched in the bitter sweat of terror and remorse. I could not eat: I tasted Effie in every morsel I brought to my mouth and she looked out through my haunted eyes every time I looked in the shaving-mirror. I was aware that I was taking far more chloral than was good for me, but I could not bring myself to reduce the doses.

And yet for her sake I endured it, for Marta, my Scheherazade. Does she know it? Does she wake in the night and whisper my name? Even without tenderness, does she whisper it? Does she love, my pale Persephone?

I wish I knew.

I waited until Thursday as I had promised. I dared not do otherwise-my Scheherazade was not kind, and I could not bear the thought of her rejection if I deviated at all from her instructions. On Thursday night I waited for Tabby to go to bed-I even drank her hot milk before I pretended to retire-and I made my way to my room to wait. As soon as I opened the door I sensed the change: a fleeting scent of laudanum and chocolate in the cold air, the flutter of a lace curtain in a half-open window…Clumsily, I fumbled with the spluttering gas-jet, my hands shaking so that it took nearly a minute to light it; and all the while I could hear her in the dark behind me, the Beggar Girl, the sounds of her pointed nails against the silk coverlet, and her breathing, dear God, her breathing. The light flared and sputtered. I turned wildly, and she was there: for an instant her eyes met mine and held them. I was paralysed, mouth open, choking, my sanity unravelling like a ball of twine into a bottomless well. Then I saw the dust-sheet on the bed and relief swept over me in a great, hot wave. The picture. It was the picture. The sheet had slipped somehow and…Dizzy with relief, almost laughing, I ran towards the bed…and the relief froze in my throat, turning my legs to water. On the pillow, pinned to the pillowcase, was a silver brooch I remembered. Effie had worn it that night-I recalled the gleam of it as she moved in the snow, the arch of a silver cat’s back as she fixed me with her own catlike, silvery gaze…

Stupidly I fingered the brooch, trying to slow the vertiginous fall of my thoughts. Below my left eye a banner fluttered a signal of uncontrolled panic.

(what about my what aboutmy whataboutmy story)

If I had heard her say it I know I would have lost my mind, but I was aware that she spoke only in my thoughts.

(whatabout my whatabout whataboutmy)

I used the only magic I knew. To silence the pitiless voice in my mind I spoke aloud the one magic word: I summoned the enchantress with all the yearning intensity of which I was capable.

‘Marta.’

Silence.

That, and something almost like hope. Almost like quiescence.

I waited in that undersea silence for what seemed like hours. Then at ten o’clock I rose from my chair and washed in cold water, dressing carefully and meticulously. I crept, unseen, out of the house and into the breathless night. The snow had stopped falling and a dreamlike stillness crept over the town; with it came fog so thick that even the gaslamps were eclipsed, their greenish globes lost in an endless haze of white. Beneath the fog, the snow seemed to have a radiance of its own, a kind of unearthly cat’s-eye luminescence which made walking corpses of the rare passers-by. But chloral and the proximity to Crook Street had subdued my ghosts; no little Beggar Girl followed me, holding out her thin bare arms in frozen entreaty; the ghosts-if there were ghosts-dared not leave Cromwell Square.

As I made my way through the snow, bracketed from the fog by the light of my lantern, I began to feel strong again, confident in the certainty that she was waiting; Marta, my Marta. I had brought her a present, tucked underneath my coat: the peach silk wrap I had bought on Oxford Street, repackaged in bright red paper and tied with gold ribbon…As I walked, my hand crept almost furtively to the package, testing its weight, imagining how the peach silk would look against her skin, how provocatively it would slip from her shoulders, its fine, translucent grain sliding against the rougher grain of her hair…

It was almost midnight when I reached Crook Street, and the flare of excitement and anticipation at knowing her to be so close was such that I was at the door before I realized what was wrong: the house was dark, no windows lit, not even a lantern at the door. Puzzled, I stopped in the snow and listened…but there was no sound from Fanny’s house, not the faintest tinkle of music or laughter; nothing but that dreadful, buzzing silence which engulfed everything.

My knock echoed dully through the house and suddenly I was convinced that they had gone, Marta and Fanny and all of them, that they had simply packed their belongings and disappeared like gypsies into the uncertain snow, leaving nothing but regrets and a whiff of magic on the air. The conviction was so great that I cried out aloud and beat against the door with my fists…and the door swung open silently, like a smile, as from inside the house I heard the hall clock begin to strike the passage of day to night.

I paused on the doorstep, a faint smell of spices and old incense in my nostrils. There was no light from the hall, but the snow’s luminous reflections were enough to cast a faint, ethereal glow on to polished floorboards and shining brasses, so that my shadow was startlingly clear in the moonlight, falling crookedly across the threshold and down the passageway. A tepid exhalation of scented air touched my face, like breath.

‘Fanny?’ My voice was intrusive, too shrill in the muted intricacies of the house: at last, after so many years of visiting, I realized its immensity, passage after passage of carpeted labyrinth, doors I never remembered passing before, pictures of languid nymphs and satyrs with ravaged, knowing faces; screaming Bacchantes with thighs like pillars, pursued by grinning dwarves and leering goblins; demure mediaeval handmaidens of Pandaemonium with narrow hips and cryptic, penetrating eyes…As I passed through dim galleries of explicit, gilt-framed lechery, the dark robbed me of all perspective. I speeded my step, hating the dull and somehow menacing pounding of my stockinged feet against the deep pile of the carpets. I tried to locate the stairs but managed only to turn into another passage, and turned handles only to find the doors locked and whispering as if some mystery crouched half-awakened behind.

‘Fanny! Marta!’ By now my disorientation was complete: the house seemed to stretch out for immeasurable distances in all directions; I felt I had been running for miles.

‘Marta!’ The silence reverberated. A hundred miles away I thought I could hear a tinkling of music. After a moment I recognized it.

‘Marta!’ My voice cracked on a high note of panic and I began to run blindly down the passageway, striking the walls with my hands as I went, calling her name in desperate invocation. I turned a corner and ran straight into a door which abruptly brought the passage to an end. The rush of panic dissipated as if it had never been and I felt my heartbeat slowing down almost to a normal rate as my hand closed around the porcelain doorknob and the door opened into the hall.

There were the stairs-I could not understand how I could have missed them the first time I passed that way-and I could see moonlight from a little stained-glass window casting reflections across the burnished wood. The light was so bright that I could even distinguish colours: here a splash of red across the banisters, a couple of green lozenges on the stairs, a blue triangle on the wall…and higher on the stairs a naked figure, the subtle line of her flank and thigh etched in purple and blue and indigo, the rippling fall of her hair a darker veil drawn against the night.

Moonlight caught one of her eyes from the shadowed face, coaxing the iris into opalescent brilliance. She was poised like a cat, ready to leap; I saw the tautness of her white throat, the muscles corded like a dancer’s, saw the arch of her foot on the stair, tension in every nerve of her body, and I was filled with an overwhelming awe for that unearthly beauty. For a moment I was too absorbed even to feel lust. Then, as I moved towards her, she sprang away from me with a soft laugh and fled up the stairs with me in pursuit. I almost touched her-I remember how the fronds of her hair brushed my fingers, flushing my whole body with a hot shiver of desire. She was quicker than I, evading my clumsy embraces as I pounded behind her. As I reached the topmost landing, I thought I could hear her laughter through the door, teasing me.

I gave a little moan of anticipation, the exquisite tension of the moment driving me to her door (the doorknob was blue-and-white porcelain, but there was no time for the fact to register). I had begun to shed my clothes even before I opened the door, leaving a trail of discarded skins (coat, shirt, neck-cloth) on the landing behind me. Indeed, when I opened the door I was absurdly half clad in socks, hat and one trouser-leg, and was almost too preoccupied with ridding myself of the rest of my clothes fully to take in the surroundings. With the benefit of hindsight I know that I had been there before: it was the room of my dreams, her room, my mother’s room, transported by some ironic magick to Crook Street; in the dim light of a shielded candle I could make out the details I remembered from that first, terrible day, diluted almost into insignificance by the nearness of Marta: here was her dressing-table, with the flotilla of little jars and bottles; there was her high-backed brocade chair, a green scarf draped carelessly over the back; on the floor another scarf lay discarded; across the bed dresses lay tumbled in a splash of lace and taffeta and damask and silk…

If I noticed any of this, it was with the eyes of desire alone. There was no sense of danger, no foreboding; simply a childish feeling of rightness and a joy which was purely physical as I leaped on to the bed, where Marta was already waiting for me. Together we rolled among the gowns and furs and cloaks, crushing antique lace and ravaging costly velvets in our silent struggle. Once my outflung arm struck a side-table, sweeping rings, necklaces and bracelets to the floor as I laughed madly, burying my face in the sweetness of her jasmine-scented flesh and kissing her as if I could not bear to leave an inch of her skin unconquered.

As the first uncontrollable madness fell from me I was able to think clearly again, to relish her in ways which the urgency of my need for her would not have allowed. I realized she was cold, her lips pale as petals, her breath a thin, freezing draught against my face as I held her.

‘Poor love, are you ill? You’re so cold.’

Her answer was inaudible, icy against my cheek.

‘Let me warm you.’ My arms were around her, her forehead nestling in the hollow of my throat. Her hair was slightly damp, her breathing feverish and too rapid. I drew a blanket around us both, shivering in the aftermath of passion as I reached for my chloral bottle on its chain about my neck and shook out ten grains. Swallowing five myself, I gave Marta what was left, watching as she grimaced at the taste, her parted lips drawn down in an oddly childish expression which made me smile.

‘There, you’ll see,’ I told her gently. ‘I’ll soon make you warm. Just close your eyes. Shh. Close your eyes and sleep.’

I felt her flinch against me and I flushed with tenderness; she was so young, after all, so vulnerable in spite of her apparent self-control. I allowed my hands to move softly through the tangled web of her hair.

‘It’s all right,’ I whispered, as much for my own reassurance as hers. ‘It’s all right now. It’s all over. Now we’re together, my love, we can both rest easily. Try to rest.’

And, for a time, we did, as the light dimmed and dimmed and finally went out. And for a while, God slept too…

Maybe I dozed; difficult to remember in the haze of impressions. I floated in jasmine and chloral, my mind adrift, and when I awoke I realized that though I was quite warm beneath my blanket, Marta was not with me. I sat up, squinting against the light which filtered in from behind the curtains-the candle had long since burned out. Dimly I could distinguish details of the room, the richness of lace and velvet frozen to silver ash in the moonlight, the vials and bottles on the dressing-table twinkling like icicles against the dark wood.

‘Marta?’

Silence. The room waited. Something moved by the cold hearth; I twisted round, my heart pounding…Nothing. Just a loose piece of soot in the chimney. The fireplace grinned toothily from its brass fireguard.

I was suddenly sure that I was alone in the house. Panic-stricken, I leaped to my feet, the blanket trailing from my shoulders, and cried her name in a voice of rising hysteria. ‘Marta!’

Something clutched at my leg, something cold. I cried out in loathing and pulled away from the bed; the thing held fast and I felt dry, brittle scales against my skin. ‘Ma-ar…aah!’ I twisted violently while pulling at the thing with my frozen fingers…I heard the heavy crack of tearing fabric, felt shredded lace in my trembling hands and began to laugh sickly: my legs had become entangled in the folds of a gown which had been lying on the bed and now lay on the floor in a heap of dismembered petticoats, the sequinned bodice torn fairly in half.

I muttered to myself in derision: ‘Dress. Fighting a dress,’ but I was shocked at the way my voice trembled. Closing my eyes in sudden nausea, I listened as my heartbeat slowed back to normal in time to the ticking of my left eyelid. After a time I was able to open my eyes again and, forcing myself to think rationally, I went to the fire to try and light it. Marta would be back soon, I told myself. In a moment she would come through the door…and even if she didn’t, there was no reason to think that this room-this room, for God’s sake-might want something of me, as my mother’s room had seemed to want so many years ago…and want what? A sacrifice, perhaps? A confession?

Ridiculous! It wasn’t even the same room.

And yet there was something in the silence, something almost gloating. I fumbled in the fireplace, fighting the urge to look back over my shoulder at the door. For an instant the room flared with red light as I struck a match. Then it flickered and died. I cursed. Again. Again. At last I managed to coax the flame into flickering life; the paper caught, then the wood. I looked round as giant shadows bloomed on the walls, then stood with my back to the hearth, feeling the tentative heat of the new flames with a sense of victory.

‘Nothing like a fire,’ I muttered softly. ‘Nothing like…’ The words turned to paper in my throat.

‘Marta?’ For a moment I almost said ‘Mother’. She was sitting on the bed with one foot curled under her body, her head slightly to one side, watching me expressionlessly. She was wearing Mother’s wrap. No, she must have found my present, opened it and put it on to please me. Perhaps she had been waiting for me to notice her all the time.

‘Marta.’ I forced my voice into its normal range and tried a smile. ‘Lovely.’ I swallowed. ‘Quite lovely.’ She tilted her head coquettishly, slipping her face into shadow. ‘Your present,’ I explained.

‘Present,’ she whispered.

‘Indeed,’ I said more jovially. ‘As soon as I saw it I thought of you.’ That wasn’t quite true, of course, but I thought she would like me to say so. ‘And you do look very lovely.’

She nodded reflectively, quite as if she knew.

‘Almost time for your present now,’ she said.

‘Once upon a time…’ Her breath was cold against my throat, her fingers tracing tiny circles against my bare back as she whispered in the dark. I could feel silk and peach lace beneath my moist palms and a scent of jasmine, heavy and soporific, rose from her feverish skin along with a darker, sharper scent…A sudden image of wolves passed through my torpid mind.

‘Once upon a time there lived a King and Queen who had one son.’

I closed my eyes and sank into the blissful half-light of the jade underworld. Her voice was a scattering of random bubbles at my feet; her touch a cool current from the deep.

‘The Prince loved both his parents, but his mother had his heart-he never left her side. The Prince had everything he could wish for…but for one thing. In the castle there was a single room in which he was not allowed entry, a room which was always locked, and the key was kept safe in his mother’s pocket. As the years went by the Prince began to think more and more about the secret room, and longed to see what was inside. Then one day, when both his parents were absent, the Prince happened to pass that secret door and found it ajar. Impelled by curiosity he pushed it open and went in.’

The air was dark with jasmine; Marta, I know.

‘The room was gold, but the Prince had all the riches he could ever want. The room was scarlet and purple and emerald, but the Prince had damasks and velvets by the bale with which to clothe himself.’

Oh Marta, reaper of my dreams, child of my innermost dark…I saw her story-which was also mine; I saw the secret chamber and my fourteen-year-old self at the door with the reflections of a million gems in my black eyes.

‘The room was scented with the essence of a thousand flowers; but the Prince lived in a garden where winter never came. There was nothing here to merit such secrecy, he thought.’

Scheherazade spread her long white fingers, the palms of her hands like scarlet orbs in the firelight.

‘And still, the Prince could not bring himself to leave. A great curiosity gnawed him as, almost idly, he searched through chests and wardrobes until suddenly he came upon a small and very plain wooden casket which he had never seen before.’

My heart began to beat faster, my temples tightening painfully.

‘Why keep this ugly old casket, thought the Prince in surprise, when everything else in the palace is so rich and fair? And he opened the box and looked inside.’

She paused-I saw the glimmer of her crimson smile-and I realized at that moment that she knew the Mystery, had always known it. Here was the woman who could lead me beyond the doomed posturings of sin and flesh: she understood my yearning, my hopeless regret. This was her ‘present’: this revelation.

‘Go on, please; go on.’ I could feel sweat trickling down my cheeks at the thought that even now she might withhold it. ‘Marta, please…’

‘Shh, close your eyes,’ she whispered. ‘Close your eyes and you’ll see. Sleep, and I’ll show you.’

‘What did he see?’

‘Shh…’

‘What did I…’

‘Sleep.’

Imagine the sea-bed under a fathom of brown ooze.

Imagine the peace…

‘The Prince rubbed his eyes: for a moment he saw nothing in the box but a dark blur, like smoke, but as he strained to see what was there he was finally able to make out a wand of hazel wood wrapped in a stained black cloak. “How strange,” said the Prince, “to keep such old and ugly things so secret,” and because he was young and curious, he lifted the two objects out of the box. Now what the Prince didn’t know-what no-one knew-was that the Queen was a witch who had come from a far Northern land beyond the sea, a long, long time ago. By enchantments she had made the King love her, and by enchantments she kept her nature secret. The cloak was magic, and so was the wand, and only the Queen could control them. But the Prince was her son, and the witch’s blood was in his veins. When he put on the magic cloak and held the wand in his right hand he felt a sudden upsurge of power. He lifted the wand and power glowed in him like a sun…but the spirits of the wand, seeing that the invoker was only a boy, saw their chance to rebel and escape bondage. They tore free, screaming with triumph, raking the Prince’s face with their claws and breathing their vile breath in his face so that he fell to the ground in a dead faint.

‘When the Prince awoke, the spirits were gone and the wand lay broken beside him. When he saw this, the Prince was afraid. He replaced the wand and cloak in the casket and fled from the room. When the Queen returned she saw at once that her wand had been tampered with, but she could not mention it because no-one knew she was a witch. So she waited for the night of the dark moon and set a curse on the meddler, a terrible curse; for in breaking her wand he had broken her power, and from now on she would be fated to grow old even as mortal women. She put all her hate into the curse and waited, knowing that soon it would begin to take effect.

‘That very night, the Prince awoke screaming in the aftermath of a terrible dream, and in the days and weeks which followed he grew pale and ill, sleeping little at night, unable to rest or to eat by day. Months passed. The King ordered all the greatest physicians in the land to see his beloved son, but no-one could find a cure for his slow and dreadful malady. To add to the King’s despair, his wife too fell ill, growing weaker and more wan day by day. The whole country was ordered to pray for their recovery.

‘Now one day an old Hermit came by the palace, a very holy man, and demanded to see the King. “I think I may be able to find what ails your son and your wife,” he said, “if only I may see them.” The King, mad with grief, agreed, and the Hermit made his way first to the Queen’s room, then to the Prince. Without a word he looked into the Prince’s eyes. Then he dismissed the guards and spoke severely to the Prince.

“‘You have been cursed, my son,” he said, “by the witch Queen, your mother. If you do not act soon then you will die and she will recover.”

‘The Prince wept, for he loved his mother dearly.

“‘What must I do?” he asked at last.

“‘You must go to her room and kill her,” said the Hermit. “Nothing else can lift the curse.”

‘The Prince shook his head and wept again, but the Hermit was cold as ice. “The Queen has no other children,” he said grimly, “and your father is an old man. Would you see a witch in command of your country for ever?”

‘So the Prince agreed, with a heavy heart, and that night he rose from his bed and made his way softly down the long passageways of the palace to his mother’s chamber.’

The door was open, I know. I see it from my bed of salt slime: the knotholes in the white wood, the blue-and-white china doorknob-how easily all this comes back to me! There is a notch in the side of the second panel where once I accidentally struck it with a cricket stump. The house is dark and somewhere far behind me I can hear Father in his toy workshop, a few bright notes from the mechanism of the dancing Columbine scattered in the dark. I am carrying a stump of candle in a flowered dish; the scent of tallow sharp in my flared nostrils. A thick white tear crawls down the side of the candle and on to the china, pooling across one of the blue flowers. My breathing seems very loud in the thick air.

The carpet is soft and yielding beneath my feet but in spite of this I can hear the sounds of my footsteps. Around me the candlelight catches the glass of her bottles and jars, throwing a thousand prisms against the mirror and the wall. For a moment I am not certain whether or not the baby is in the room with her; but the crib is empty-Nurse has taken it in case its cries awake my mother. Raising the candle behind the glowing red shield of my hand I look at her face in the rosy light with a rapture all the more precious for being forbidden. A laudanum vial glitters on the bedstand beside her: she will not wake.

A sudden wrenching tenderness overwhelms me as I watch her face: her thin blue eyelids, the perfect curve of her cheekbones, her cascade of dark hair covering the pillow and spilling down the folds of the coverlet on to the floor…she is so beautiful. Even so wasted, so pale, even now she is the most beautiful woman in the world, and my heart aches with a desperate, hurt love, poignant beyond my fourteen years. My child’s heart feels as if it will burst with the strain of all these adult emotions; the tearing jealousy, the loneliness, the sick need to touch her, to be touched by her, as if her touch might erode the cancerous invasion of the serpent in my stomach, her arms ward away the night. Asleep, she is approachable and I almost dare to stretch out my hand to her hair, her face; I might even brush her pale lips with mine…she would never know.

Asleep, she is nearly smiling; her eyes blurred and softened beneath the violet eyelids, the mauve shadow of her collarbone a perfect Chinese brush-stroke against the pallor of her skin…her breasts a scarcely perceptible swelling through the linen of her nightdress. My hand moves almost by itself, a disembodied starfish in the dim brown night. I watch it, mesmerized, as the fingers touch her face, very gently, with miraculous daring slipping to her throat…I pull away, blushing, all my skin tingling with guilt and excitement. But it is the hand moving all on its own, drifting down the coverlet with languid purpose, now twitching the coverlet aside to reveal her sleeping form, the nightdress drawn up to her knees, showing her taut calves, the soft curve of a thigh.

There is a bruise there, just above the knee, and I feel my eyes drawn to its mauve delicacy. My hand stretches out to touch, and she is powdered satin beneath my fingertips, she is endless mystery, endless softness, drowning softness like undersea sand…Her jasmine scent hides another scent, like salt biscuit, and without even knowing it I bring my face against her, burying my face in the warmth and sweetness of her, taut with yearning and excitement. My hand finds her breast with a leap of savage joy; my arms curl around her, my lips suddenly ravenous for hers…Her breath is faintly sharp, like sickness, but now my body is a single tendon taut as a harp-string, filling the atmosphere with a resonance of unendurable purity which rises and rises in pitch to the point of insanity and beyond…I have no body; I see my soul drawn out like a fine silver wire, vibrating shrilly to the spheres’ ringing…I hear laughter and realize it is my own…

Her eyes snap open.

I feel the line of her mouth tauten beneath my lips.

‘Mother…’ Helplessly, I curl away, stomach a fist of ice.

Her eyes are cruelly sharp; I know that she sees everything. Everything. Years fall from me; a moment ago I felt old, now I am falling backwards into my childhood; thirteen, twelve, eleven, and as I shrink she grows, monstrous…eight, seven…I see her mouth open, hear the distorted syllables: ‘Henry? What are you…’

Six, five. Her teeth are pointed, impossibly savage. Blood hammers in my temples. A scream breaks from my lungs; her rage is enormous. Worse still is her contempt, her hatred, like a tidal wave filled with the floating dead. I can barely hear her voice above the rushing in my ears; there is something soft in my hands, something which struggles with monstrous strength against me. The tide tosses me to and fro like jetsam; I tighten my eyes into knuckles so that I do not have to see…

A sudden, miraculous silence.

I lie on the black sand as the tide retreats, its breath like heartbeats in my eardrums; the return to consciousness is like a million pinpoints of light on my retina, my mouth full of blood from a bitten tongue. I crawl to my knees on the spinning carpet, a rope of bloody spittle dragging to the floor, the pillow still in my convulsed hands.

‘Mother?’

Her glazed eyes stare at me, still hard, as if outraged by the indignity of her posture.

‘Mo-other?’ I feel my thumb creep up to find the corner of my mouth, my knees curling to join my elbows. In some part of my mind I understand that if I can curl up into a tiny enough ball I will be able to go back into that half-remembered place of safety, the salty place of darkness and warmth. Smaller…smaller. Three, two, one…

Silence.

Far above me the sound of laughter, the huge troll-like bellow of God. The black angel picks up her scythe and the Furies fly screaming up out of the pit to find their new plaything; and I know all their faces. The whorechild, with a smear of chocolate on her cheek…Effie’s seawater eyes and foaming hair…my mother, so long forgotten in the merciful blindness but now recalled for ever, dragged back on to her dark pedestal, her fingers like blades. Closer now, the voice of the enchantress, Scheherazade, her wolves at her feet…her unearthly laughter. From my half-sleep, struggling, I try to call her, to invoke her name against the coming nightmare.

‘Marta!’

I open bloodshot eyes, feel the firelight against my frozen limbs. The rogue muscle in my cheek pins my eye closed in a series of fluttering spasms too rapid to calculate. The memory, newly recalled by Marta’s story, is a marble sepulchre from some grotesque fairy-tale, reaching higher than the clouds. I reach out for her comfort…

The light is suddenly, mercilessly bright. I raise my hands to shield my eyes, and I see her, Scheherazade, my golden nemesis, laughing.

‘Marta?’ The voice is barely a whisper, but even as I speak I know that she is not Marta. She is Effie, pale and triumphant; she is my mother, lewd and venomous; she is the ghostchild. All three speak as one, stretching out their hungry arms to me and as I fall backwards, striking my back against the bedrail and hardly feeling the pain as my vertebrae crunch against the angle of the post, I realize at last what she is, what they are. Tisiphone, Megaera and Alecto. Avengers of matricide. The Furies!

A tremendous bolt of agony drives through my body; razors sever my spine and a tremor grips me all down my left side.

As I pass into friendly oblivion I hear her voice, their voice, bright with venom and mockery: ‘What about my story, Henry? What about my story?’ And, in the far distance, the savage laughter of God.

61

The snow began to fall as I left Henry’s studio. By the time I reached Crook Street the night had an ethereal clarity which illuminated my steps and touched my clothes with powdery phosphorescence. As I glimpsed Fanny’s house from the corner I noticed that the lantern which usually hung from the door was dark. Moving forwards I saw that the windows, too, were dark, the curtains drawn, with not a chink of light shining through the heavy folds. I noticed that the snow was scuffled at the doorstep, though no light shone from the stained-glass of the porch. Thinking that maybe there would be someone in one of the back parlours of the house, I went up to the door and knocked. No answer. I tried the door: predictably, it was locked. I knocked again, shouted through the letter-box…but no answer came.

Puzzled, I tried the side door, with as little success, and I was about to leave, shaking my head in bewilderment, when I saw something dark and bulky lying in the shadow by the side of the house, half covered by the rapidly falling snow. At first I thought it was a discarded coal-sack; then I saw the heel of a man’s boot poking out of the snow. A vagrant, I thought, looking for a place to shelter and caught by the cold, poor devil. I had a flask of brandy in my pocket and, pulling it out, I waded through the drifting snow and reached for the body-maybe there was still life in him, I thought. I dragged him from his hollow by the wall and as I brushed away the frozen mask from the twisted, petrified face, I recognized Henry Chester.

One eye was open, staring; the other drooped oddly. The muscles in his left cheek and temple were strangely distorted, like melted wax, and his left hand was a claw, his shoulder hunched grotesquely, his hip dislocated, the leg thrown out at a gruesome angle. Until he moved, I could have sworn he was dead.

A sound escaped his lips; a long, guttural moan.

‘Aaa-daa. Aah-a.’

I pushed the brandy flask between his clenched teeth. ‘Drink it, Henry. Don’t try to say anything.’

Brandy trickled down both sides of his mouth and a rictus seized him as again he tried to form syllables. The intensity of his need to speak was agonizing.

‘It’s all right,’ I said uncomfortably. ‘Don’t talk. I’ll get help.’ There were lights in the windows of nearby houses; surely someone would take care of him while I called for a doctor. Besides, the last thing I wanted was to stay alone with Henry.

‘Ma-a. Maaah…’ The right hand clenched against my sleeve; the head lolled, drooling. ‘Ma-ahh.’

‘Marta,’ I said softly.

‘Ahh.’ His nod was convulsive.

‘You came here to see Marta?’ I coaxed.

‘Ahh.’

‘But she wasn’t in, so you waited. Is that right?’

Another spasm; the head lolled again, obscenely, his one open eye turned up to the white. ‘Nnn-ah. Mm-aah-a. Ahhh. Aahh…’ His right arm flailed helplessly and tears trickled from his right eye, though the other stayed frozen, a knuckle of stupid flesh.

Unbearable, sick pity jerked me to my feet.

‘Can’t stay, Henry,’ I said, trying to avert my eyes. ‘I’m getting help. You’ll be all right.’

An animal moan, in which I could still distinguish the chilling accents of the human voice; words struggling through dying flesh. Words? One word. One name. I couldn’t bear the sound, the dying sound of his obsession. Cursing myself, I turned and ran.

It was easy enough to find someone to help; a woman from a nearby house accepted a guinea to call for a doctor and give shelter to the stricken man: two hours later the doctor arrived and Henry was transported back to Cromwell Square. It was a stroke, the doctor had said; a massive seizure of the heart. The patient must be kept quiet if there was to be a chance of recovery, and a dose of chloral mixed with water, patiently forced drop by drop between the patient’s rigid lips, served to calm him. When I finally left them, certain that I could do no more, Henry had subsided into a thick stupor, his breathing almost imperceptible, his eyes glazed. That was enough, I decided; I was no sick-nurse. I had saved the man’s life, most likely; what more could anyone expect? When no-one was paying attention I left, quietly, by the back door and disappeared into the deserted streets.

To save us both a little time, I took Henry’s wallet with me as I left: anyone could see that the poor fellow was in no condition to talk business that night.

62

A soft current bore me to a silent world of muted shapes and uncertain perspectives. The darkness was deepest emerald; but in the middle distance I could see figures, featureless, shapes without line or definition and, in the foreground, a face, grotesquely disproportionate, swimming like a bloated fish in and out of focus. For a moment it swam out of my field of vision and I tried to turn my head to follow it but found myself oddly prevented from doing so. I tried to recall the terror and urgency which had forced me to the safety of the sea-bed, but I was strangely serene, as if regarding events through a dark crystal. A shoal of foetuses paddled clumsily through a reef of green coral where a pale girl floated, her long white hair rising like seaweed into the murky grey of the undersea sky.

The face mooned into my field of vision once more, its mouth opening cavernously…syllables oddly distorted beneath the water burst like bubbles in my face in a series of shapeless sounds. In some way the sounds were meaningful, but I could not recall why. I drifted for a while, as the face receded once more. But the sounds persisted, and more and more I began to hear meaning in their persistence. The face, too, was somehow familiar; the keen eyes, sharp nose and small pointed beard. I had once known that face.

The mouth opened and I heard my name, spoken from a great distance.

‘Mr Chester. Mr Chester.’

For the first time since my retreat I saw the bookcases behind the face; the door, the open window with its velvet curtain, the painting on the wall…reality yawned in my face with pitiless clarity.

‘Mr Chester? Can you hear me?’ The voice was Dr Russell’s. I tried to answer, but found that my tongue lolled at the doctor with a gleeful life of its own and a sound came from my mouth, a gargling noise which appalled me.

‘Please, Mr Chester. Will you nod if you can hear me?’ I felt my neck jerk convulsively.

‘You’ve had a stroke, Mr Chester.’ His voice was too loud, too arch, as if he were addressing a deaf child: I noticed that his eyes steadfastly avoided mine.

‘You’ve been very ill, Mr Chester. We thought we might lose you.’

‘Haaa…’ The braying sound which was my voice startled me. ‘Haa…How long?’ That was better. I was still hardly able to control my clenched jaw, but I could at least form words. ‘How long…since…’

‘Three days, Mr Chester.’ I could feel his embarrassment, his impatience at my laboured attempt at speech. ‘The Reverend even gave you the Last Rites.’

‘Aaah…?’

‘Reverend Blakeborough, from Oxford. I sent word, to your brother William, there. He suggested that the Reverend should come.’ For the first time I noticed the unobtrusive little man with a mild childlike face seated in the corner of the room. As he caught my glance-he was not afraid to meet my eyes-Reverend Blakeborough smiled and stood up: I saw that he was a rather small man.

‘I took over the parish when your father died,’ he said gently. ‘I was very fond of Reverend Chester and I’m sure he would have wanted me to visit you, but until now I never knew where you lived.’

‘Ahh…I…’

‘Now, then, please don’t exhaust yourself,’ chided Reverend Blakeborough. ‘The doctor-and, of course, your good Mrs Gaunt-have told me everything. You really must rest now-killing yourself is no way to bring back your poor wife.’ He looked at me with a compassion which tore at me; I felt my mouth gaping in silent laughter and my right eye shedding tears-but for whom, I did not know. Reverend Blakeborough took a step forwards and put his arm gently around my shoulders. ‘The doctor feels you need a rest, Henry,’ he said kindly, ‘and I do agree with him. A change of scene, the country air would do you more good than to stay in this dreary place. So come with me to Oxford. You can stay at the vicarage with me and your housekeeper can come and look after you if you like. I can recommend an excellent doctor.’

He beamed at me. I could smell mint and tobacco on his breath and a comforting, familiar smell, like old books and turpentine, from his clothes…A sudden nostalgia overwhelmed me, a terrible longing to accept the innocent little priest’s invitation, to live in my old village again, to see the vicarage where I was born. Who knows, maybe the room with the blue-and-white china doorknob would still be unchanged, with my mother’s oak bed beneath the stained-glass window. I began to weep in earnest, with a shameless self-pity and a searing regret for the man I could have been.

It was too much for Dr Russell: from my frozen eye I saw him turn and quietly leave the room, his mouth warped with disgust and embarrassment…but the priest’s kindness was unflinching; he held me as I wept for myself, for Effie, for Marta and for my mother, for wakened memories best left sleeping, for the cold little ghostchild, for the red room, for the silk wrap, for Prissy Mahoney’s first Communion, for the Christmas tree, still glittering with fake icicles…and for the fact that I wanted to go to Oxford.

I wanted this little man’s kindness, the peace of his simple life, the sound of the birds in the cypresses, the college spires in the evening mist…More than anything I had ever wanted, I wanted those things; I wanted Reverend Blakeborough’s universal love. I wanted absolution.

I drooled and wept and, for the first time, someone who was not a whore held me in their arms and rocked me.

‘Then it’s settled,’ said Reverend Blakeborough.

‘N-no!’

‘Whyever not?’ The priest was bewildered. ‘Don’t you want to come home at last?’

I nodded, not trusting my voice.

‘Then why?’

I struggled to keep my words clear; my mouth felt as if it were filled with mud. ‘Have…to…confess,’ I said painfully.

‘Well, of course,’ said the priest cheerfully. ‘But we’ll wait until you’re feeling better, shall we? Surely it can wait.’

‘No! N-no…time,’ I said. ‘Ha-as to be…now. In case I…You…have to…know. I…couldn’t come home…with you…unless…’

‘I see.’ The little priest nodded. ‘Well, if it makes you feel better, of course I’ll take your confession. How long has it been?’

‘Tw-twenty years.’

‘Oh!’ Reverend Blakeborough looked momentarily startled, but soon regained his composure. ‘I see. Well…ah…Take your time.’

My story was long and laborious. Twice I stopped, too exhausted to continue, but the knowledge that I might never again find the courage to speak urged me on. When I had finished night was approaching, and Reverend Blakeborough had long since fallen silent. His round face was pale and shocked and when I ended my narrative he almost leaped from his chair. I heard him splashing in the bowl of water in the washstand behind me and when he came to face me again he was almost livid; his mouth was wry as if he had been sick and he could not meet my eyes. As for myself, I realized that my destructive impulse to confess had done nothing to alleviate my guilt; I carried it still, untouched and triumphant in the black shrine at my heart’s core.

The Eye of God was not deceived. I sensed its inescapable malice-I had not evaded God. Worse still, I had corrupted this innocent little man; I had betrayed his confidence in the essential goodness of the world and its inhabitants. Reverend Blakeborough could hardly bear to look at me and his self-assurance, the impulsive kindness was gone from his manner, to be replaced by a look of bewildered confusion and betrayal. He did not repeat his invitation and he left by the next train.

After that events were random things, threaded across the chasm of my life like beads on a string. My studio was emptied and the oil painting of The Triumph of Death presented at the Academy. Dr Russell came and went, accompanied by several specialists who proceeded to disagree strongly over what had happened to my heart. What they did agree upon, however, was the fact that I would most likely never walk or move my left arm again, although I did regain some control over my right arm and my head. Tabby hovered anxiously over me with my medicine-I was taking chloral every two hours now and I would begin to shiver and sweat if the dose were not regularly administered. A gentleman from The Times came to visit and was summarily dismissed by Tabby.

And at night, as I lay in my bed, they came, my darling Erinyes, laughing softly in the dark, cold and triumphant, tender and merciless, their claws and teeth infinitely loving, banefully seductive. Together they explored the cavities of my brain, with a mother’s tenderness, tearing, slicing with exquisite delicacy…By day they were invisible, barbed gossamer beneath my skin, a mesh of finest steel tightening and contracting on to my heart’s bloody core. I prayed-or tried to pray-but God wanted none of my prayers. My suffering and guilt were tastier morsels. God fed well on Henry Chester.

A week, seven days of obscene delirium at the hands of my darling succubi. Like God, they were hungry; vicious now in their desperation.

I knew what they wanted, snapping at the leash, snarling and foaming for a glimpse of prey. I knew what they wanted. The story. My story. And I wanted to tell it.