The Ghost Writer

Seraphina

Lord Edmund Napier liked every thing about him pleasant and agreeable, and since he was rich, handsome, unmarried, and possessed of a splendid town house in Cheyne Walk, the world made haste to oblige him. Indeed it had been hastening-with one disagreeable exception, as we shall presently learn-almost from the moment of his birth some forty years before the afternoon upon which we find him gazing at a blank space on the wall of his private gallery.

Though the main entrance hall and staircase of his house were adorned, as might be expected, with portraits of Napiers past, this gallery was known only to Lord Edmund's most intimate associates. It was a long, vaulted, panelled room, reminiscent in its proportions of a place of worship, but lit so as to draw in as much natural illumination as possible while excluding any direct glare. The merest glance around the walls, however, would reveal Lord Edmund to be, as the phrase goes, a devotee of the female form, lavishly and variously illustrated by over a hundred canvases running the length of the gallery on either side, and supplemented by numerous pieces of statuary in bronze, marble, jade, ebony, and other precious materials; all, I hasten to add, in the finest of taste; the finest, indeed, that money could buy. But to describe Lord Edmund as a worshipper at the shrine of Beauty would be, if not precisely untrue, at least a shade discourteous. A gentleman predestined to adorn the very pinnacle of society cannot but be conscious of his own perfections; and it would be fairer to say that Lord Edmund and Beauty had long been on intimate terms. And this, paradoxical as it may seem, was the source of a certain discontentment on his side, and the reason why the wall at the northern end of the gallery, farthest from the great double doors which opened onto its vaulted length, the very space in which the finest flower of his collection ought to have been displayed, remained obstinately blank. He had, over the years, tried any number of canvases in the place of honour, but none had ever quite sustained that pitch of perfection he had, almost unwittingly, come to require of its subject.

Lord Edmund himself could scarcely have accounted for his single state, which nevertheless remained a topic of lively interest to every fashionable hostess with marriageable daughters at her disposal. Many a matron had fancied her favourite as good as engaged to his lordship, only to discover, just as she thought him safely landed, that the catch had unaccountably slipped the net, and so adroitly as to leave her without even the consolation of an action for breach of promise. In truth his lordships heart had only ever been engaged on one occasion, and that many years ago, when he was but four and twenty. The match was impossible: Miss Eleanor Brandon, though undeniably beautiful and sweet-natured (and, it must be admitted, far more cultivated and better read than the youthful Edmund himself) possessed neither family nor fortune; worse, she nurtured artistic ambitions, accepting whatever was offered her in the way of scenery-painting and the like around the studios of Chelsea. She had, at the time of their meeting, an impoverished suitor some ten years older than herself, a portrait painter constitutionally incapable of fulfilling any of the few commissions offered him; to whom, nevertheless, she was on the verge of committing her affections. But youth and charm prevailed; so entirely that Edmund could not but be swayed by the force of her love for him. He did not-at least in retrospect-believe that he had explicitly pledged himself to her; but he did speak privately to his father, the earl, who forbade not only the match, but any further association with Miss Brandon.

Edmund was of age, and sole heir, and could have defied his parent, but severe financial constraint, and a great deal of unpleasantness, would certainly have followed. What was a fellow to do? He owed Miss Brandon, at the very least, the courtesy of an interview; but that would certainly upset her, and therefore him, so how could it benefit either? And if his father were to hear of it… no; a letter was the obvious thing; but it proved so devilish difficult to compose that he was forced to abandon the attempt. An emissary: now there was an idea; a good friend upon whose delicacy and discretion he could absolutely rely; indeed, he knew the very man for the task. But the very man was so far affected by Miss Brandon's distress as to charge his friend with cruel and unmanly conduct; which led, inevitably, to a breach between them, and left the matter still unresolved. Perhaps he really ought to see her, come what may… and if only his fathers temper, uncertain at the best of times, had not been so vile of late, he really thought he would have gone.

So the days stretched into weeks without anything decisive being done, until one afternoon, when he had just concluded a painful exchange with his father on the subject of his expenditure, and was about to set forth in search of new distractions, a footman informed them that there was a young person at the front door, refusing to accept that Edmund was not at home, and insisting upon an interview. With a sinking heart, he descended the stair, his father immediately behind him. Eleanor's pale, stricken face was terrible to behold; still worse, the momentary joy transfiguring her expression when she saw that it was he. She moved as if to embrace him; transfixed by the baleful presence looming at his back, he could only stammer and retreat, until the door was closed against her. That evening he learned that a young woman had flung herself off Battersea Bridge and drowned. It was Eleanor; and the coroners jury, hearing that she was with child, brought in a verdict of suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed.

Edmund's name was not connected with the tragedy. He was sent immediately abroad, where he remained for some months until his father resolved to settle all outstanding differences between them by dying of apoplexy. At first, his conscience troubled him sorely, but like other young men of wealth and title he learned to subdue it through the strenuous pursuit of pleasure, until everything about him was once again pleasant and agreeable. Eleanor's face, overlaid by so many others, faded from his memory, until he had only the vaguest recollection of her appearance. By the time of his fortieth birthday, she had not crossed his mind for years.

He would have counted himself the most fortunate of men, were it not for a certain restlessness, a-not precisely boredom, but a feeling that the world had lost something of its charm. Often, of late, he had found himself neglecting the manifest delights of his gallery in favour of the empty wall, as if by sheer intensity of scrutiny he could divine, beneath the faint sheen of panelled oak, those lineaments of face and form which yet eluded him. Such was his absorption in this pursuit that he would wake, as it were, to find that upwards of an hour had vanished, leaving him restless and unsettled, incapable of responding to the voluptuousness all about him, seeking only to escape from gallery and house alike and lose himself in the great city, walking away the hours until it came time to return and dress for his evening engagements.

So it was, on the afternoon in question, that Lord Edmund emerged from his front door, turned, as was his invariable custom, left into Cheyne Walk, and set off mechanically towards Royal Hospital Road, vaguely intending to stroll up Ebury Street and take a turn around Green Park. It was a bright, clear, spring day; a light breeze, cool and invigorating, ruffled the surface of the river. Still brooding on-he knew not exactly what-he had almost reached his turning when his attention was caught by a solitary figure on the other side of the Embankment, some fifty paces ahead of him and moving in the same direction. A tall, slender, female figure, evidently youthful to judge from a certain sinuous freedom of movement, clad in what appeared to be a soft pale gown, trimmed with dark blue or purple, and crowned by-plain even at this distance-an extraordinary cloud-no other phrase would do for it-an extraordinary cloud of auburn hair which seemed to swirl and float about her as she moved.

Not, it must be admitted, for the first time in such a circumstance, Lord Edmund abandoned his intended route and quickened his pace along the Embankment, meaning to come up with the young woman on his side of the road and then-see what might be made to follow. But despite his best efforts, and without any visible acceleration on her part, the distance between them unaccountably refused to diminish. She betrayed not the slightest awareness of his interest; such was the abundance of the auburn cloud that he could not tell where her attention was directed, but she certainly had not turned her head towards him. She maintained, to all appearances, the same easy, sinuous, unselfconscious gait, and yet by the time they passed Chelsea Bridge he was stumbling between a rapid walk and an undignified trot; flushed, overheated, and altogether captivated. So they continued all the way along Grosvenor Road to Vauxhall Bridge, onto which, to his surprise, she turned, proceeding across the river at the same deceptive pace, still so surrounded by the radiant cloud of hair that despite the altered angle of vision he could see nothing of her face.

Lord Edmund now crossed over, and made his way in turn onto the bridge, noting as he did so that the tide was very low. To his perplexity and dismay, he saw that the distance between himself and his quarry had, if anything, increased. Had they been alone, he would have broken into a run, but there were other persons on the bridge, and, indignity aside, the spectacle of a gentleman in hot pursuit of an unaccompanied young lady might lead to worse humiliations. Yet, even hastening as fast as he dared, he could see all too plainly that his cause would soon be lost. He was not half-way over, yet there was her dwindling figure almost at the far side; he absolutely could not reconcile her unhurried rhythm of movement to the speed with which she was now eluding him. And what on earth could prompt her to turn, as her choice of descent began to indicate, in the direction of Lambeth, surely a most unsuitable destination for one such as her?

The auburn cloud vanished from sight, and a bitter desolation, sharper and more painful than any emotion he could recall, overwhelmed him. No; it was not to be borne; he must and would see her face, would speak to her. He looked wildly around for a hansom, but there was none in sight. Heedless of curious glances, he began to run. As he crossed the farther bank of the river, he thought-no, he was certain-he saw her disappearing into Vauxhall Walk. Thus began a chase which drew him further and further into noisome lanes and unfamiliar alleys, lured ever onwards by what was surely a flash of pale muslin, a swirl of bright hair floating like flame upon the unwholesome air, but always deceived until at last, winded, footsore, and defeated, he found himself leaning against a blank wall at the end of a dim, cobbled cul-de-sac. As the pounding in his ears subsided, he became aware of an uncanny stillness around him. There was not the faintest sight or sound of any inhabitant, not even the distant barking of a dog; the ragged crowds through which he had lately forced his way might have been a hundred miles off. The doors and windows along both sides of the alley were barred and shuttered; all but one, on closer inspection: a dingy shopfront above whose recessed doorway hung the triple symbol of the pawnbrokers trade.

Wearily, he pushed himself upright and made his way towards the shopfront, hoping at least to secure a cab, and perhaps find something palatable to quench his thirst. His footsteps rang loudly on the cobbles; the silence was really quite uncanny. Coming up to the shop window, he saw that it was so heavily layered with grime as to be entirely opaque. The door, however, stood slightly ajar. He pushed, expecting the stillness to be broken by the scrape of a lintel or the jangling of a bell, but it swung smoothly and noiselessly open.

He paused, irresolute at the threshold, willing his eyes to penetrate the gloom within. In the light from the open door he could discern the outlines of chairs and tables and other articles of furniture crowded and heaped high, one upon the other, so as to fill both sides of the room, leaving only a narrow central passageway receding into darkness. Scents of ancient timbers and musty fabrics, of decaying paper and chill metal, of dust and rot and mould, floated about him. It was not as he had imagined a pawnbrokers shop should be; there was no counter, no sign of a proprietor; only the heaped and crowded furniture and the artificial passage, scarce wide enough to admit him, into whose Stygian depths he continued vainly to peer. Lord Edmund was, of course, a man accustomed to command; in his natural surroundings it would never have occurred to him that his smallest wish would not be instantly and silently gratified, with scarce need of utterance on his part. But this was not Cheyne Walk, nor Napier Hall, nor even one of those more boisterous parts of town where gold could buy the service of any man-or woman. He stood mute, incapable either of advance or retreat, unmanned by darkness and silence.

How long he remained thus he could not tell, but a light began to glow dimly at the far end of the passage, or tunnel, as he perceived in the brightening gleam, for the aperture was not only framed but roofed over by the heaped furniture. Like a man under mesmeric compulsion, Lord Edmund found himself drawn into and along the passageway, which extended a surprising distance, given the mean proportions of shopfront and alley. As he emerged from the confinement of the tunnel, he was at first dazzled by the light of a single lantern held aloft by a motionless figure a few paces off to his left.

"Pray step forward, sir," said a grave, unexpectedly cultivated voice, "and let me know how I may be of service to you."

The figure resolved itself into a man of indeterminate age, somewhat below Lord Edmund's height, and slighter of figure, clean shaven, clothed in a plain dark suit like a manservant's. The lamplight fell upon a long, pale, melancholy face, indefinably wasted as if by prolonged illness or suffering, the eyes shadowed beneath a high forehead, the nose thin and aquiline, the lips almost bloodless. It was evident, despite the encircling gloom, that the man posed no threat to his lordship, who was about to inquire after hansom cabs and refreshments when his attention was caught by a large rectangular structure, a little to his right and taller than himself. As if anticipating a request, the proprietor-for who else could he be?-bore the lantern towards it, making, as he went, some adjustment which caused the light to brighten further. Lord Edmund, following, saw that the object was in fact a canvas, resting upon a frame; indeed a picture at least six feet in height. As the light came full upon it he caught his breath.

It was not like any picture he had ever seen, for the illusion of seeing through the frame, exactly as one looks through an open window to the view beyond, was, in the lamplight, absolute. He was staring at, or rather into, a woodland pool surrounded by dense foliage, and from this pool, with arms outstretched towards him, was emerging a marvellous naked woman of that preternatural beauty he had long despaired of encountering. Still more marvellously, her hair, though damp from recent immersion in the translucent waters that swirled about her waist, and thus falling dense about her shoulders rather than floating like flame upon the air, was of the exact, miraculous shade he had but lately pursued and lost. Whether this was the very same woman he could not tell; that she was the woman he had so long sought he had not the shadow of a doubt. Her expression seemed, at first glance, solemn and spiritual; but subtly endowed with the faintest of smiles, a hint of tender mockery, almost of invitation. He felt that he could gaze for ever into the fathomless depths of those dark eyes, upon the light caught in the minute droplets of water clinging to her lustrous flesh-but surely she breathed? Was that not a faint pulse in the delicate blue vein at her throat? Aroused, entranced, and altogether forgetful of his situation, even of the silent presence bearing the lamp, he stepped forward to claim his prize-and found himself confronted by unintelligible swirls and textures of pigment. He stepped back, and the miracle repeated itself; approached once more, and again the vision dissolved before his eyes.

"Who is she?" he inquired in a tone of wonder, more of himself than of his companion.

"Seraphina," replied the sombre voice at his back. The lamp silently approached and descended, illuminating a small bronze plate set into the base of the frame and engraved with that name in plain italic lettering.

"And-in life?" asked his lordship, still unable to take his eyes from the picture.

"There I cannot help you, sir."

"But surely she must…who then is the artist?"

"There too, sir, I am unable to enlighten you, save that I understand him to be deceased, and this to have been his only finished work."

"Then how… pray tell me, is it for sale?"

Lord Edmund had meant to pursue his inquiries further before raising the matter of purchase, but anxiety and impatience, a dread that he might not after all take possession of his hearts desire, had overmastered him.

"It is, sir."

"And-the price?"

"Twelve guineas, sir."

His lordships jaw dropped in astonishment. He knew full well the dangers of judging a work by artificial light, but here was no question of authenticity, only an anonymous miracle of brushwork; had the man said twelve thousand, he would have called for an emissary to secure a draft from his bankers by return.

"Twelve guineas!" he repeated incredulously. "You are sure…? That is to say, yes, I will take it. Now, if you please; in fact I have that sum about me." Lord Edmund was not one of those noblemen who count it an indignity to bear the currency of the realm upon their person; he took, rather, the view that an adventurous spirit never knew when a little gold might not come in handy.

"Very good, sir. If you would care to step this way, perhaps you will allow me to offer you some refreshment whilst I make the necessary arrangements."

Scarcely able to drag his gaze away from the picture, Lord Edmund reluctantly allowed the man to conduct him, not via the passage through which he had entered, but in the opposite direction, over what he vaguely perceived to be a flagged stone floor, past various shrouded objects, down another corridor and into a small office, into which a little natural light was filtering by way of a dusty pane. There were, of course, a dozen, a hundred more questions to be put, but somehow he found himself alone, settled in a chair with a glass of brandy in his hand before he had done more than-at his own insistence-complete the transaction and take possession of his receipt. In a remarkably short time, as it seemed to him, his reverie was disturbed, not by the proprietor, but by a man of coarser aspect entering via the street door-it seemed that the establishment spanned the entire distance between one lane and the next-to inform him that his purchase was secured and ready for conveyance. Lord Edmund looked out through the other door, whence the proprietor had left him; called several times, but received no answer. The silence remained unbroken; no trace of light appeared in the darkness of the corridor. He called once more, took a few ineffectual steps into the gloom, retreated, and gave it up. He had the picture safe, that was the main thing, and would return to satisfy his curiosity on the morrow.

On the way home, however, Lord Edmund was beset by fear that the picture might prove a disappointment, or worse, a complete delusion, for the strangeness of the afternoons experiences did not fully manifest itself until they were jogging briskly along the Albert Embankment. It was only by an extreme effort of will that he restrained himself from signalling the cabman to stop, that he might tear the wrappings from the picture in full view of the street. By degrees he grew calmer, though he could not entirely rid himself of the sensation of having stumbled through a dream and back into the waking world, and it was with a pounding heart and a swimming sensation about his head that he watched the parcel transferred from the cabman's care into the gloved hands of his own servants. He had already resolved that, if he were not deceived, none but he would ever set eyes upon Seraphina again; she would be his, and his alone. Accordingly, he directed his men to hang the picture, still in its wrapping, in the place of honour at the head of his gallery, and withdraw, leaving him in sole possession-but of what? With trembling fingers he tore at the intervening knots, but was forced to employ a knife, in terror lest a slip of the hand should damage the picture. He was near fainting as he drew away the last of the wrappings and stepped away from the canvas.

He was not disappointed. Indeed, though he would have thought it impossible until that moment, the enchantment was stronger than before. All consciousness of his surroundings faded as his senses were once more ravished by Seraphina. Once more the sensation of gazing upon a living, breathing woman grew upon him; he could swear that the water rippling about her slender waist was actually moving; once again his senses impelled him forward; once again she vanished as completely as if a curtain had fallen swiftly and silently between them. He moved closer still, bewildered by the inscrutability of those ripples and swirls of pigment. On minute inspection, the surface of the picture was really quite uneven; in some places the weave of the canvas was plainly visible; in others the paint seemed to be thickly and crudely spattered in parti-coloured daubs, betraying no trace of the extraordinary, nay, the unprecedented skill that must have directed the artist's hand. How on earth was it done? He fixed his eye upon a dab of colour and moved slowly backwards. One pace… two… three, and the surface remained opaque; four, and the canvas seemed to dissolve seamlessly into rippling water, a verdant depth of forest, and lustrous Seraphina stretching out her arms as if to entreat him into her embrace with that faint but irresistible smile of invitation; Lord Edmund forced himself to take another pace back, and then another, but she did not vanish; the illusion of seeing beyond the frame as if a window had been let into the gallery wall remained as strong as ever, no matter how far, or at what angle, he retreated.

It was not until he stumbled and almost fell against a plinth, upon which stood a diminutive Aphrodite he had always thought especially pleasing, even by the exalted standard of his collection, that he was able to take his eyes from Seraphina and regain some awareness of his surroundings. One thing was instantly plain: she outshone everything else in the room as the full moon outshines the faintest stars. The canvases he had once admired were now revealed as drab and tawdry; beside the perfection of her flesh, his most delicate pieces of statuary, such as the Aphrodite he had nearly toppled, seemed coarse as sandstone. On the instant he knew what must be done. The gallery must be cleared, and forthwith. He would not look again upon Seraphina until it was done, until the last trace of her least rival (though even to speak of rivalry was absurd; as well ask whether a gas-lamp could rival the sun) had been effaced, and then, perhaps

… he knew not quite what… He shook his head in an effort to clear it. To shroud her again in those coarse wrappings was not to be thought of. He would call for a length of the finest velvet, drape her as reverently and securely as he might, then set his entire staff to work to clear the gallery with the utmost possible speed. But where should he instruct them to store the contents? Well, it hardly mattered; the ballroom would do for the present; he would not be giving any more dances now that… again his head seemed to blur and spin. Perhaps, after such excitement, he needed a little air; as soon as the picture was suitably draped, he would give his instructions, and take a turn along the river while they were carried out.

The cool evening air did, at first, clear his head wonderfully, and he was swept along on a tide of self-congratulation. But the prospect of the Embankment, and the tranquil river beyond, brought him back to the afternoons pursuit with the full force of recall. That flaming hair and sinuous grace; the uncanny speed with which she had eluded him…"she" must, surely, be the model for Seraphina, for how else could she have led him to the very place where the picture awaited him? Though he could not, on reflection, claim with any certainty to have been led; beyond the entrance to Vauxhall Walk he could not positively swear to having traced her. Was it after all, merely a strange coincidence? Or had he been, in some mysterious way, practised upon? No; that made no sense; he had the picture safe… though he did not seem to be thinking so clearly after all; perhaps his adventures had taken a greater toll of his faculties than he had yet realised. At any rate, the thing to keep in mind was that the picture, however miraculous in execution, was nevertheless no more than a canvas which must, indubitably, have been painted from a living, breathing model; yes, surely the woman he had followed that very afternoon. All that remained, therefore, was to find her, and the obvious beginning was-to do at once what should have been done before he carried away his prize: resume his interrogation of the proprietor. He stepped into the road and secured an approaching hansom.

Here, however, a difficulty presented itself. He had assumed that the address would be inscribed upon the receipt which he had folded, without a glance, into his pocket-book. But on inspection it proved to be a crudely printed docket, devoid of any particulars save "Received for: 'Seraphina'; The sum of: Twelve guineas"-to which was appended an entirely illegible signature. Lord Edmund's journey proved altogether fruitless, despite the expenditure of more gold than had been laid out upon the picture itself, the enlistment of, as it seemed to him, half the population of Lambeth in the search, and the cabman's express willingness to drive all night, and investigate every cul-de-sac in the district, if it would please his lordship. But as night wore on the futility of proceeding impressed itself more and more firmly upon his lordship until, thinking himself wearier than the long-suffering cab-horse, he instructed his driver to turn for home.

Some two months later, at a little before twelve on a mild midsummer's night, Lord Edmund might have been observed slipping quietly away from a palatial residence in Hyde Park, having made his excuses on the ground of headache and general indisposition. All too visibly true, but utterly inadequate to the haggard and ghastly countenance illuminated by the street lamp, the fixed, sunken glare of the eyes, the frame from which all flesh appeared to have been stripped. Seraphina still awaited him in his gallery, poised for the hundredth, or was it the thousandth time, to ravish his senses until he could not but believe she lived, could not but take the fatal forward step, like a man drawn by vertigo to the very brink of a precipice and over, betrayed once more by those indecipherable whorls and ripples of pigment. Again and again he would find himself drawn into this dance of torment, and yet no matter how often he was compelled to perform its steps, he remained wholly in thrall to the conviction that this time he would at last take possession of warm, breathing flesh, feel the pressure of those perfect lips upon his own; and so his senses were wrought to a pitch of raging deprivation that Tantalus himself could scarcely have endured.

Lord Edmund was not, of course, quite in the position of a man dying of thirst in a desert, but he might as well have been, for beside Seraphina, all other women had become hateful to him; at the mere recollection of some of his former conquests, he would shudder like a man racked by poison. And when at last he could tear his gaze from hers, and flee from his denuded gallery out into the Embankment, he would instantly be seized by the contrary conviction: that the radiant vision he had just quitted was a mere painted shadow of the flesh and blood Seraphina who was surely, certainly, to be found somewhere close by. Never again, in waking life, had he so much as glimpsed the sinuous figure with the flame-coloured hair whom he had so long ago-as it now seemed to him-pursued. Instead he had become a figure of ridicule, the butt of jests and the subject of wagers, on every thoroughfare in Lambeth. He could fairly claim to have quartered every inch of ground, questioned every stallholder, visited every pawnbroking establishment in the district and far beyond, in vain; as vainly he had scoured his memory in the effort to recall the route he had taken on that fatal afternoon. Only in dreams could he retrace his steps, and then always, at the very doorway in the dim and silent alley, he would sense her presence at his back, and turning as she vanished, resume the chase, until his cries of "Seraphina" called him back into the waking world-and to his gallery.

Even so, he could not hate her, for she was too entirely beautiful to hate; but the force of his desire was equalled only by his detestation of the crudely pigmented surface he had so often and so fruitlessly examined. It seemed to grow uglier and cruder by the day; to become ever more completely the antithesis of the radiant perfection it concealed. More than once, Lord Edmund had caught himself in the attitude of a beast coiling itself to spring, with fingers bowed like talons eager to rend and tear the canvas. Only the terror of losing her for ever restrained him, for all the extremity of his torment, but he knew that he must very soon go mad, or die.

On the Midsummer's night on which we rejoin him, some residual instinct of self-preservation had goaded him into fulfilling an engagement to dine, as he had not done for many weeks. In any ordinary sense, the evening had proved disastrous: he had felt himself to be the object of universal and horrified concern, even repulsion, and could scarce summon so much as a phrase on his own account; his head had begun to ache from the moment of his arrival, and by the end was pounding as if a band of steel had been clamped around it. Nevertheless, the occasion had so heightened his awareness of his plight as to spur him to a desperate resolution: he would go directly home, enter his darkened gallery and destroy the picture, for no matter what torments might follow, they could not, surely, be worse than those that now assailed him.

He had intended to take a cab, but the prospect of confinement proved intolerable to him, and so he set off on foot. The night was at first overcast, but as he turned into Royal Hospital Road the moon broke through the clouds, and by the time he reached the Embankment it was shining full upon the tranquil surface of the river. His headache had not so much diminished as changed character, as though the steel band clamped about his temples had been drawn into a red-hot wire, strung through a point just above his right eye and tautened until the inside of his head rang with a high, shrilling note. As he reached his front door, it rose to an intolerable pitch. Seizing an antique dagger from a rack in the entrance hall, he stumbled towards his gallery and, shielding his eyes with one upraised arm, pushed open the great double doors.

He had imagined that the gallery would be entirely dark, but beneath the shielding arm he could see moonlight gleaming on the marble floor. His knees trembled as he approached the dais set before the painting; knowing that one glimpse of Seraphina would be his undoing, yet more appalled with every step by the enormity of what he was about to do. No, he could not; one last glimpse he must have; he lowered his arm.

By moonlight, the conviction that he gazed upon a living woman was more instantly compelling than ever. He saw the slight rise and fall of her breast, the subtle change in her expression as she caught sight of him; he knew her outstretched arms were opening to embrace him. The waters parted at her waist; the dagger slid from his hand and clattered upon the marble floor; he stepped forward. As he did so the moon passed behind a cloud, or so it seemed to him; at any rate the light momentarily failed. Something caught his foot; he fell; scrambling on all fours, he threw himself, as he prayed, towards her. But yes, at last, he was through; the miracle had happened; there she was arising like Venus from the water, with no intervening frame between them, though further off than he could have imagined from the other side. Unable to take his eyes from her, he missed his footing and plunged down a rocky slope. No matter; she was still there, closer now; he could see moonlight rippling on the water all around her. The shrilling in his head had softened into a high, sweet note, like that of a violin perfectly sustained, exquisitely drawn out. Her smile had never been more entrancing. Ascending to the very peak of passion, he reached the edge of the pool and leapt, unhesitating, into her embrace. But what was this choking taste of mud, and why could he not breathe? He tried to ask her to release his arms, but cold black water filled his lungs, and drew him down into the waiting dark.

At the inquest, a cabman told the coroner that he had seen a gentleman racing, hatless, across Battersea Bridge, from which, about half-way over, he had vaulted into the river. The tide was running strongly, and by the time the witness had reached the edge of the embankment, there w^s nothing to be seen. The body was washed ashore several hundred yards downstream, entangled in a piece of netting. In deference to Lord Edmund's high position in society, the jury, despite some contrary evidence, accepted the argument that his lordship might have been deceived by moonlight into thinking he had seen some person in need of rescue, and returned a verdict of accidental death.

It only remains to add that, when his lordship's executors were ushered into his private gallery, they were quite bewildered as to why its late owner should have banished so many fine works in favour of a single canvas of no visible merit whatsoever. Certainly its title gave no clue as to its subject; indeed, it proved impossible even to determine what the artist had sought to depict. One member of the party ventured that it had been meant for clouds; his colleague said it put him in mind of a dense fog; the youngest and most suggestible of the trio thought that he could just discern, in the upper half of the canvas, the impression of a woman's features, with perhaps the faintest of smiles playing across her lips, but agreed that he could easily have been mistaken.

I read the story in an intense, nervous rush, crouched beside the open drawer, and went straight back to my room, as soon as The Chameleon was safely locked away again, to tell Alice about my discovery. But somehow the letter never got sent. Seraphina's resemblance to Alice as she had appeared in my dream was so disturbing that no matter what I wrote, it sounded as if I were subtly accusing her of something-I didn't quite know what-and the longer I left it the more difficult it became to explain why I hadn't mentioned the story before.

The morning after the dream, I had woken early and told Alice everything I could remember (except its sticky aftermath), and that I loved and adored her and could not live without the hope of seeing her as soon as I could earn the airfare and persuade my parents to let me go. And when, a fortnight later, I tore open the waiting envelope and saw 'Dearest Gerard' for the first time, I thought for a moment I had won. Dearest Gerard, Your dream of me was wonderful, I'm so glad you told me and there's more I want to say about how happy your letter made me and how much it means to me. And before anything else: yes, I love you too, I really do. And think about you, and dream of you-in fact I had a dream of you, like yours of me, only a little while ago, but I was too shy to tell you. Now I will, but first This always happens when I come to a difficult bit, I've been staring out the window for ages, at the last of last week's snow melting where the field slopes up towards our hill, the one where the pavilion would be if this really were Staplefield. From inside my warm room it looks wonderfully inviting this morning, blue sky and bright sunlight, you can see very fine mist floating just above the wet grass, and I can hear cows lowing-mooing always sounds so-I don't know-too dumb and farmyardy, I think cows have such expressive eyes Gerard you're forgetting I'll never be able to walk. I don't ever doubt your love for me but there's a girl riding a horse along the footpath, wearing really smart riding clothes, beautifully cut, all fawns and tans and creams, she's really good-looking which sort of leads in to what I have to say Sooner or later you're going to meet, I mean fall in love with a girl who can walk and run and swim and dance with you-and not just one, maybe lots of girls. I know you don't think so, you believe you'll always love me, but we have to be sensible, realistic. All those hateful words… If I were braver I'd try to pretend to feel less, to make it easier for you. But I'm not that brave. I do love you, Gerard, and I know I'll be jealous when you fall in love with someone else. In fact I'd rather you didn't tell me when it happens-see, I'm already preparing myself-because I don't want us to stop writing whatever happens, and if I knew you were in love with another girl I might stop writing out of jealousy. Now it sounds as if I'm telling you to lie to me, which isn't what I wanted to say I'll try again. If you could see me, you'd see the girl in the wheelchair, the paraplegic, the disabled person. All the labels. I don't think that's how you think of me now, but if you saw me you wouldn't be able to help it. It's not really sympathy I'm most afraid of. It's your disappointment. Us meeting and then breaking up. I couldn't bear that. Do you know what happens to the Lady of Shalott, in the poem? She lives alone in her tower, quite content, weaving her magic web of colours. But she has a magic mirror that shows her the road to Camelot, knights and ladies and young lovers coming and going, and one day she sees Lancelot riding by, the handsomest of all the knights, and falls in love with him. The magic mirror cracks, the web breaks, she lies down in her boat and floats along the river to Camelot, singing until she dies. Maybe my window is my magic mirror. I just think if we can be content with what we have, we might keep it for ever. You'll say-anyway you'll think-I'm a coward and maybe I am. But please try to understand, and go on loving me as we are. Now I'll tell you my dream. It was after lunch, I was really tired, so I lay down on my bed and went to sleep. Then I dreamed I woke up and could move my legs-I often can, in dreams-and you were lying beside me, looking so beautiful-that's the only word that feels right-and so overjoyed to see me. Then we started kissing, and suddenly I realised that neither of us had any clothes on. This is why I was too shy to tell you before, but in the dream I wasn't shy at all, it just felt absolutely right. It felt wonderful, to be honest, so wonderful I-well anyway, then I woke up and cried for ages because you weren't there any more. I do hope you'll understand. I'll always be, with all my heart, Your invisible lover, Alice.

P.S. My dream might even have been the same day as yours, only mine was in the afternoon and yours was at night. Wouldn't that be amazing?

And a fortnight later:…How silly I forgot to say, I was so worried about the other part of that letter. Yes it was, it was Tuesday the 3rd of March when I had my dream- our dream-and of course you're right about the time being different, three o'clock in the afternoon for me was about half-past one the next morning for you. That's just so magical. I truly am, with all my heart your invisible lover

Alice

At first I thought she was only waiting for me to persuade her. How could the wheelchair make any difference once we were lying together as we'd been in the dream? She must know how utterly I adored her. Gently, lovingly, she met every entreaty with the same reply. As things were, our love for each other was free, equal, and absolute, but if I were to meet the girl in the wheelchair it could never be truly equal; and if I ever fell out of love with her, I might stay, out of duty. And so on.

But in my daydreams and fantasies, Alice refused to stay in her wheelchair. It might begin at the door of her room; or I might come in through the formal garden, along the gravel path, up the front steps, between two great wooden doors standing open. There was never anyone else around: the house was always shrouded in tense, expectant silence. Along the echoing hall, up flight after flight of stairs until I reached her door, which like the front entrance was always open when I arrived. There I would see her sitting at her desk, which I knew was old and made of glowing red cedar, very like the colour of her hair, with a soft green leather top on which her typewriter sat. She would be gazing out of her window, a tall bay window with the desk in the centre of the alcove, wearing her long white dress with the embroidered purple flowers, her chin resting on the palm of her left hand, so absorbed that for a moment she wouldn't notice me standing quietly in the open doorway. And then she would push her wheelchair back from the desk, turn towards me with that enchanting smile I had struggled so often and so vainly to recall, and rise gracefully, effortlessly to her feet… and very soon, if I was safely alone in my room, we would be lying in each other's arms on the snowy white counterpane of her bed, her long legs entwined with mine in transports of bliss, and on to the inevitable solitary conclusion.

I tried everything, even blackmail. Didn't she long to see me and hold me and kiss me as much as I longed for her, to be lovers physically instead of only in dreams? Yes of course she did, but then we'd no longer be free, equal… and besides, she added, subtly turning the tables, did I really feel that we'd 'only' been together in dreams, when for her it was utter, blissful, ecstasy? Didn't I feel the same?

By the time I was seventeen she had taught herself a technique called 'directed dreaming': you started by learning to visualise your hands in dreams, and to do simple things like clasping them and touching your face, and gradually you developed the ability to move around consciously in your dreams, and eventually to fly wherever you wanted to go. It was like astral travelling, she said, only you didn't have to believe in silver cords or astral bodies or anything like that, you just practised the mental exercises whenever you were going to sleep until you could do them while you were actually dreaming. Soon she and I were making rapturous love in her dreams-in which she was always healed, moving with complete freedom – whereas I practised and practised and got nowhere at all.

With the dreaming, that is. Instead, I was using her dreams to script my sexual fantasies about the composite Pre-Raphaelite goddess I imagined as Alice-I had never been able to recall her as she had appeared to me that one magical night-meanwhile pretending that I'd learned to dream as she did. Not knowing what else to do, I modelled my letters on hers, which were never physically explicit, but tenderly, ecstatically, erotic. I dared not confess my abject failure at directed dreaming; I knew the words they used at school, and felt myself sinking into the coarse, fallen world of shame and guilt and bestial obscenities on lavatory walls, whilst Alice soared higher and higher into the golden light of heaven, in pure, innocent, orgasmic bliss.

Which she believed we shared. The thought of losing her trust was unbearable, yet I knew I no longer deserved it. Until then, my letters had flowed as effortlessly as speech: whenever I felt I hadn't said what I really meant, I'd just keep on writing until I had. Now I began to labour over them, re-reading anxiously, tearing up whole pages as I had never done before, my mind more and more frequently as blank as the sheet in front of me. And all too soon, she noticed. I feel there's something wrong, your letters aren't as long as they used to be, and they seem-I don't know-a bit stilted?-anyway something's changed in the feeling of them. Please tell me. I'd hate it if you felt there was anything you couldn't say to me-even that you'd fallen out of love with me-I do mean that, truly. Trust me. I'll always adore you with my whole heart. Your invisible lover,

Alice

I agonised over and destroyed one reply after another as the days slipped remorselessly by, and there was nothing left to do but tell the truth, at least as much of it as I could bear to confess. So I told her the dreams I'd been describing were really daydreams, though they still said how much I loved and adored her-I just hadn't been able to do the dreaming, hadn't dared tell her because I thought she'd think I didn't love her as much as she loved me, whereas I loved her truly, madly, desperately. And that I was unhappy because I really, really needed to be with her, couldn't go on living so far from her, and so-assuming she didn't decide to break it off right now, which I knew I deserved-if she did still love me would she please, please say that we could be together one day, I didn't care how long I had to wait. And so on, for several more scrawled, incoherent pages which I posted in utter despair, and dragged myself home in the spirit of a prisoner on his way to the condemned cell.

Over the next fortnight I learned the meaning of anguish. My face was numb and stiff with misery; I could scarcely speak. My appetite had vanished, my tongue sat in my mouth like some bloated alien substance, and yet the black gnawing hole in my stomach made me feel continuously sick. My mother pleaded with me to tell her what was wrong. My class teacher phoned my parents; the family doctor was summoned; I fended them all off with the adolescent's listless nothing', whilst wondering how I could find out how many aspirins you needed to swallow to die a painless death, and whether inhaling bottled gas would knock you out and kill you before the smell of it made you vomit. Alice's letters continued to arrive, even after she had answered the last of mine but one, wondering anxiously, tenderly, if I was sick or unhappy, telling me that she would always love me no matter what happened. Unable to write, I re-read all of her letters from the beginning several times over, waiting for the end.

When the letter finally arrived it took me an hour to summon the courage to open it. Dearest Gerard, I'm so, so sorry, I've been selfish and insensitive, too wrapped up in my own happiness-the happiness you give me-I should have realised. You're so brave to have told me, I would have done exactly the same if it had been the other way round. Can you ever forgive me? And I haven't been completely honest, either, because I haven't always been asleep. When I've imagined making love with you, I mean. I was afraid you'd be shocked. I'm such a coward, I should have trusted you the way you've trusted me. But now at least we know that neither of us needs to be shocked or embarrassed about wanting to make love. I really did mean what I said before, that nothing between us could ever be wrong, and to prove it to you… every day from now on, at half-past one, I'm going to lie down and close my eyes and imagine myself into my dream-body, and make love with you. And if you were to do the same, at ten o'clock at night, in your bed, then you can tell me exactly how you'd like to make love with me, on a special day, say in four weeks' time, so I can write back to you, and then we'll both know, on that day, that everything we've said is really happening. And then… well how much can distance really matter, when I'll be as close to you as your dreams, your heartbeat? Your invisible (but very passionate) lover

Alice

And so we became, in our strange and solitary way, lovers. She taught me not to be ashamed of what we were doing together-as she always insisted we were-but I lived in terror of my mother steaming open one of her letters until I discovered that for a few dollars a year I could have my own post office box with my own key. Gradually, subtly, tenderly, Alice taught me about her body-the body I had never seen-what she liked, what she loved, what she adored. Yet sometimes, afterwards, as I lay awake, staring at the side of Mr Drukowicz's shed, she seemed further away than ever. And no matter how eloquently I pleaded, she remained adamant that until she was healed-at least she had begun to say until'-we could not meet. I couldn't accept, or even understand, but I did come to see that my entreaties were only distressing her. I gave up pleading and kept my plan to myself. As soon as I had saved enough for my fare, I would be on the plane for England; I would search the length and breadth of Sussex until I found her. In my darkest imaginings, I would see myself being turned away with a stern 'Miss Jessell does not wish to see you.' But I went on saving every cent I could muster towards my airfare, and praying that I would not die without having seen Alice Jessell face to face.

Towards the end of my third year at Mawson University College, I set about applying for a passport. I was still living at home with my mother, banking the extra money I earned from shelving books in the college library, along with every cent I could save from my library studies scholarship, but still over a thousand dollars short of the sum that would take me to England and Alice.

For almost seven years now, my mother and I had maintained the pretence that Alice's letters were as invisible as Alice herself. At first, whenever I got home from school to find a letter waiting on the desk in my bedroom I used to examine the envelope closely for signs of tampering. (I had read about steaming open letters, though I'd never seen it done.) But I never found any. I knew that I was causing my mother pain, and if she had once broken her silence over Staplefield, I would have felt much worse about doing to her what she had previously done to me. Her 'nerves' had grown steadily worse, even before my father's sudden death. She hated being left alone after dark. Even now, if I got home more than half an hour late from my evening shift at the library, I would find her haunting the telephone table, wondering when to start ringing the hospitals.

Without Alice's letters, life at home would have been intolerable, but without Alice I wouldn't have been living there. Or in Mawson. My grades had been high enough to get me a place in one of the big eastern universities, but-apart from confronting my mother's pathological fears on my behalf-that would have made saving for England impossible. Whereas the Grace Levenson Memorial Library Studies Bursary paid all my fees and a living allowance, and would, I hoped, get me a job in England in just over a year's time.

And it pleased Alice to know that I hadn't abandoned my mother. Soon after we began writing, Alice and I had vowed that no matter what happened, we would never betray each other's secrets, or let anyone else read our letters: apart from the postman, no one outside our house even knew that Alice existed. She now had photographs of my parents, our house and its surroundings, and even, more recently, of me, to illustrate the day-to-day chronicle of my life in all its sameness and tedium; though Alice frequently assured me that nothing about me, however trivial, could possibly be boring to her. But she was troubled by the estrangement between my mother and me, and too perceptive not to see that she herself was partly the cause of it. At the same time, she understood my fear that if I broke the silence on my side, my mother would keep pushing and pushing until she had forced me into another confrontation. 'I know it's hard,' Alice had written recently, 'but you must cherish her, Gerard, you won't know how precious she is until she's gone. I only wish she could understand that I'm no threat: the last thing I want is to take you away from her.'

Alice was entirely sincere in this, because she still clung to her conviction that, short of a miraculous healing, we must never meet. But I had other plans.

Until I assembled my passport application, I had never seen a full copy of my own birth certificate. The short version I had used until then had told me nothing about my mother except that her maiden name had been Hatherley. Now I discovered that Phyllis May Hatherley had been born on 13 April 1929, in Portman Square, Marylebone, London Wl. Father George Rupert Hatherley, occupation Gentleman; mother Muriel Celia Hatherley, nee Wilson.

It ought not to have come as a shock. She had never actually said -at least I could not recall her ever saying-that she had been born at Staplefield, which after years of fruitless searching of atlases and reference books, I thought I might have found. Collins' Road Atlas of Britain showed a tiny village-the only Staplefield in the index-on the southern fringe of St Leonard's Forest in West Sussex. Just a minute black circle on a yellow byroad called the B2114, but it looked and felt right, though by no stretch of the imagination could anyone have expected to see ships at Portsmouth, fifty miles away to the south-west. Alice thought it would be quite common for a big country house to have the same name as the nearby village. Yet I still hadn't asked my mother about it-or anything else in her life before Mawson. Why had I always believed that her own parents had died when she was very young? Had she actually told me that, or had I simply imagined it? Why, above all, had I accepted her silence for so long? Didn't I have a right to my own history?

That evening, in our sitting room after dinner, I handed her the certificate. She took one look, and thrust it back at me.

'Why did you get this?' Her voice was ominously taut.

'I'm applying for a passport.'

'Why?'

'Because I'm going to England. As soon as I can afford to.'

My mother's attention was apparently fixed upon the unlit gas heater in our old fireplace. I could not see her face clearly because of the standard lamp between our armchairs, but its light fell upon her clasped hands, suddenly reminding me of old Mrs Noonan's, fingers clamped around swollen knuckles, blotched purple and livid white, the nails suffused with blood.

'You mean to stay,' she said at last.

'I don't know yet, Mother. If I did, I'd want you to come and live there too.'

'I can't afford it.'

'I could help.'

'I wouldn't let you. Anyway, I couldn't stand the winters.'

'But you hate the heat, Mother.'

'The cold would be worse.'

She was speaking mechanically, as if hardly aware of what she was saying.

'Mother, I didn't show you that to upset you. But it's time we talked-again. About your family. Because it's mine, too.'

The silence dragged out until I could bear it no longer.

'Mother did you hear what I-'

'I heard you.'

'Then tell me-' I broke off, not knowing what to ask. 'I-look, I still remember everything you used to tell me, when I was-before I-everything about Staplefield, and your grandmother, and I want to know-why you stopped talking about it, why I don't know anything-' I heard my voice beginning to quaver.

'There's nothing to tell,' she said after another long pause.

'But there must be. Your own parents. What happened to them?'

'They both died before-when I was a few months old. I don't remember anything about them.'

Her hands had dropped out of sight, below the arm of her chair.

'So-so did you live with your grandmother-Viola-was she your father's, or your mother's-'

'My father's. I told you everything I could remember, when you were a small boy.'

'But why did you stop after I-was it her picture I saw that day?'

'I don't remember any picture.'

Her voice sounded flatter and more disembodied with each reply.

'You must remember, Mother. You were so furious. The picture you caught me with, that afternoon in your bedroom-'

'You were always poking about in my bedroom, Gerard. You can't expect me to remember every single time I caught you in there.'

'But-but-' I could not quite believe this was happening. 'After that day you never mentioned Staplefield again-'

'All I remember, Gerard, is that as you grew older you stopped asking. And a good thing too. We can't live in the past.'

'No, but why won't you talk about it?'

'Because it's gone, ' she snapped. 'There was-there was a fire. After we left. During the war. The house burned to the ground.'

'You never told me that!'

'No… I didn't want to disappoint you. That's-that's why I stopped talking about it.'

'Well I wish you had told me, Mother. All these years I've been hoping, hoping to…' I couldn't go on.

'Gerard, you didn't think it was ours?'

'No, of course not. I just wanted to see it.'

But of course I had thought of Staplefield as mine, without ever quite admitting it to myself. The long-lost heir, stranded in Mawson, waiting for the family solicitors to call him home. Ridiculous, absurd. My eyes were stinging.

'I'm sorry, Gerard. It was very wrong of me. I wish I'd never mentioned the place.'

' No, Mother. I wish you hadn't stopped. Why did you leave? What caused the fire?'

'It was-a bomb. We-I was away at school. In Devon. Away from the bombing.'

For a moment she had seemed genuinely contrite. Now she sounded evasive.

'And Viola?'

'She looked after me. Until she died. Just after the war. Then I had to go out to work.'

'But it was a big house, you had servants. Wasn't it insured? Didn't Viola leave you anything?'

Another long pause.

'It all went in death duties. There was just enough left to pay for my typing course. She did everything she could for me. That's all. '

'Mother it is not all and you know it. What about "Seraphina"?'

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'Viola's story. In the drawer with the photograph.'

'I don't remember any story.'

I opened my mouth to object, and realised I couldn't push it any further.

' Why don't you want to talk about your, past?'

'For the same reason you never talk about your- friend, I suppose. It's no one else's business. Not even yours.'

For the first time in seven years, my mother had acknowledged Alice's existence.

'No, it's not the same. Alice isn't-she's nothing to do with you-'

'She's taken you away from me.'

'That's not fair! Anyway, I'm almost twenty-one, people leave home and get married-'

'So you're getting married? Well thank you for mentioning it-'

'I didn't say that!'

'Well are you or aren't you?'

'I don't know yet!'

We were both almost shouting.

'I don't want to talk about her, Mother,' I said more quietly.

'But you're going to see her.'

'I-I just don't want to talk about her.'

'Gerard,' she said heavily, after a long silence, 'I know you think I'm jealous. A jealous mother who won't let go. Nothing I say will make any difference. Just remember: I tried to keep you safe.'

'Safe from what, Mother?'

But all she said was, 'I'm going to bed now.'

'Tell me one thing, then,' I said, 'I won't ask you any more. Where exactly was Staplefield? The house, I mean. Was it in Staplefield village?'

Her chair creaked. She stood up and moved stiffly towards the door. I thought she would leave without speaking, but in the doorway she turned, light flashing from the lenses of her spectacles.

'Going to look for Staplefield would be a complete waste of money. There's nothing left. Nothing.'

She flung the last word over her shoulder. It hung in the air like the smell of charred paper as her footsteps receded along the hall.

I had always imagined the dead heart as a featureless, Saharan expanse of sand. From thirty-five thousand feet, I watched the patterns unrolling beneath the wing, fantastic whorls and cross-hatchings and striations, ochreous yellows and earth-browns and purples and deep rust-reds, until the hostess asked me if I would mind closing my blind so the other passengers could watch the movie. I did mind, never having been in a plane before, but I closed it anyway and sat holding my unopened book.

Twenty-two hours to Heathrow. I didn't seriously believe-did I?-that after eight years of undying adoration Alice would have me turned away at the door? Her letters were as tenderly passionate as ever. I had written to tell her I would be at the Stanhope Hotel, Sussex Gardens, London W2, which sounded leafy and grand, despite being called 'budget' in the brochure. Admittedly it was January, so there might not be many leaves, but there was sure to be a letter waiting when I arrived. From the hotel I would ring Penfriends International, who were bound to be in the phone book, though I still had only their box number. Maybe I should have written ahead to Juliet Summers, but I'd been over and over that. Much better to plead my case in person.

Since I had stopped pleading with Alice to change her mind, neither of us had mentioned the possibility of our meeting. Her view of my coming to live in England was seemingly unchanged: she would love to feel that I was so much closer, but only if I could persuade my mother to join me. Alice and I were pretending to believe that, while it would be wonderful to be in the same country at last, the purpose of my trip was to look around for places where my mother might be persuaded to settle. And to see Staplefield, assuming my mother really had invented the fire. But how could Alice possibly, doubt that I'd come looking for her? And since she hadn't made me promise not to, she must-mustn't she?-be waiting for me to find her.

The businessman in the seat next to me had put away his papers and fallen asleep. I knew already that I wasn't afraid of flying. So why did I feel so numbly apprehensive, as if something cold and leaden had lodged in the pit of my stomach and refused to dissolve, not just since take-off but for days beforehand?

Perhaps I was more anxious about my mother than I was willing to admit. She had been behaving as if I had a terminal illness rather than a three-week excursion fare to London. Not to mention a job as an assistant librarian at Mawson University College, starting in February. I couldn't imagine how I would tear myself away from Alice, but three weeks was all I could afford; I would have to come back to save more money and apply for permanent residence. If my mother couldn't bear the thought of life without me, she would just have to overcome her pathological fear of return, or travel, or whatever it was. It didn't matter how often I repeated that I was a thousand times more likely to die in a car than a plane crash; she treated all of my attempts at reassurance as irrelevant interruptions. I noticed that she had grown even more intolerant of noise; she could not bear the radio on, and reacted to the ringing of the phone as if it were a fire alarm. She seemed to be listening to-or for-sounds inaudible to anyone else.

Since the night, just over a year ago, when she told me Staplefield had burnt down, she had not once referred to Alice. Our day-to-day life had gone on as before, as if the no-go areas did not exist. I had learned to cook in spite of her protests, though she still would not let me near the washing-machine or the iron, or accept any money for board. But the balance between us had altered. Now it felt as if she was the one on the defensive. I won't mention your friend, again, her silence seemed to say, so don't ask me any more about my past.

I was shocked by my reaction to the loss of Staplefield. My rational self stood helplessly by while I grieved for the place as if I had watched it burn with everything I loved inside it. Knowing that these feelings were utterly illogical didn't seem to help in the slightest. Until one night, in the middle of a letter to Alice, it struck me that in all my happily-ever-after daydreams, we simply took over Alice's room, whereupon it was magically incorporated into Staplefield, to which I was of course the rightful heir. And now we couldn't live there, because it had burnt to the ground. Even after this disturbing recognition-which I did not mention to Alice-I was troubled by a kind of waking nightmare in which I stood alone at her window looking out at a charred, blackened landscape, feeling that I was somehow responsible for the devastation.

Yet at the same time-and this made my distress seem even more irrational-I still suspected my mother of inventing the fire on the spot, to block any further approach to Staplefield, for reasons I couldn't begin to fathom. Alice, for all her reluctance to join in any criticism of my mother, plainly thought I was right. 'Perhaps', she had written, there was some sort of family quarrel, after your great-grandmother died, and your mother was disinherited-of course she couldn't possibly have done anything to deserve that. But I know how it feels, having to let go of everything you love. Perhaps it's easier for your mother to say the house went up in smoke than to admit that other people are living in it. And surely she'd have said something about the fire, when you were little, so as not to get your hopes up? I mean, of living there one day. Perhaps when you were small she still hoped Staplefield might come back to you, and then something happened, something final that meant it could never be hers, or yours, and that's why she stopped talking to you. Actually that reminds me of something. Later: I've just been reading through your letters, the very first ones you ever wrote me, and I just found this: 'Mother said we can't go and live there because it was sold a long time ago and we don't have enough money to buy it back.' Perhaps she was still hoping, when she said that, that one day you might be able to afford it. Before whatever happened that made her abandon hope completely. What do you think?

I thought it made perfect sense. It also reminded me of the photograph I had found in my mother's bedroom. I'd always assumed that she had stopped talking about Staplefield to punish me. Perhaps the two things were unrelated: maybe the bad news just happened to arrive at about the same time. Maybe… but that Medusa-like fury… No, there had to be a connection. Perhaps catching me with the photograph had caused my mother to make some enquiry about Staplefield, something that brought on the bad news, whatever the news might have been? No point asking her. 'Photograph, what photograph?' More to the point: whose photograph? Not Viola's, surely: my mother had only ever spoken of Viola with affection. Wouldn't Viola's picture have been displayed on our mantelpiece, at least when we were still talking freely of Staplefield?

And I still hadn't said anything more to my mother about finding 'Seraphina', so I still didn't even know, for certain, that 'V.H.' was my great-grandmother. I had opened the drawer one more time and found it empty. Then as I learned more about the library, I realised I could order The Chameleon on inter-library loan, photocopy the story, present it to my mother as if I had no idea who 'V.H.' might be, and see how she reacted. Only one problem: there wasn't a copy of The Chameleon to be found anywhere in the southern hemisphere. From the British Library Catalogue I learned that it had run for just four numbers, from March to December of 1898. The only way to see them was to secure a reader's ticket; I had my letter of introduction in my pocket.

Seraphina's resemblance to Alice still sometimes troubled me. Rationally speaking, I knew there was nothing in the least uncanny about it. Of course Viola would have been to exhibitions of Pre-Raphaelite painting. She might perfectly well have seen the Lady of Shalott herself when the picture was first exhibited at the Royal Academy. Only Seraphina hadn't reminded me of the Lady, or any of the faces I'd borrowed from Burne-Jones, Millais, Waterhouse and company, but of Alice as I'd seen her in the dream. The memory had faded as quickly as it had come, but I had never quite shaken off a superstitious fancy that in opening the drawer for a second time I had accepted the terms of an inheritance, with no idea of what that might entail.

The plane shuddered and rattled like a bus crossing a stretch of gravel road. Twenty-one and a half hours to go. The dull weight of subdued, half-anaesthetised anxiety had not diminished. Maybe reading would dislodge it. I picked up Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Other Tales.

'Where, my pet, is miss Jessel?' The phrase repeated itself over and over, through the cramped, interminable night aboard QF 9. The engines played endless rhythmic variations on the words: dum dadadda dada, dum dadada dum, dum dadadadadada. They didn't care that Alice spelled her surname with two Ts. Every so often they would lift the tempo to Miss Jessel Miss Jessel Miss Jessel Miss Jessel, just to make sure I was still awake enough to hallucinate. Where, my pet, is Miss Jessel? Waiting in Alice's room of course. I knew I would never get the name out of my head. I had once looked it up in the Mawson phone book. Not a single Jessell, whichever way you spelt it. Alice would take one look at me and know that something was appallingly, irrevocably wrong. I wouldn't be able to look at her without thinking of Miss Jessel. Miss Jessel with her dead white face and long black dress. Like the man in the churchyard, tramping over my mother's grave, and were you aware sir, that your late mother was in a highly disturbed state, while out in the garage the trains still ran on time, round and round and round Miss Jessel and where Miss Jessel is my pet, waking with a thump to the runway lights of Heathrow and rain streaming over the wing.

I hadn't realised that it would still be dark when the Airbus deposited me outside Paddington station. Or that the Stanhope-when they eventually agreed to let me in-would be a claustrophobic warren, smelling of wet animal hair, stale fry-ups, and mould. The stairs creaked at every tread, and the only window in my room, or rather cell on the second floor, opened into a so called lightwell and a view of blackened walls and rusting fire escapes.

And no letter from Alice, though I had sent her the address a fortnight before I left. Struggling to shake off the depression which seemed to be gathering around me like thick black mist, I stumbled back down the stairs to the payphone in the foyer.

From Directory Enquiries I learned that Penfriends International had an unlisted number. There were dozens of entries for Summers, J., in the phone book, but none of them gave the Mount Pleasant box number as their address. And when it finally occurred to me to phone Mount Pleasant post office, they would only confirm that Penfriends International were indeed at Box 294. All other details were strictly confidential sir, I'm sorry there's nothing more I can tell you, more than my job's worth, sorry sir but there it is, can't help you any more.

I dragged myself back up the creaking staircase, lay down on the bed, and slipped head-first into a pit of darkness.

It was all true, everything my Mother had said, there really were mountains of black plastic bags spewing garbage on to the pavement wherever you went. Ragged beggars lined the underpasses, wrapped in sodden cardboard, lying in pools of unspeakable filth. I couldn't walk two blocks through the rain and sleet without getting lost, or stop to wrestle with my London A-Z without being jostled into the gutter by seething crowds. Half frozen but rabidly adhesive dogshit lurked beneath the slush. The chaffinches had all mutated into scrofulous pigeons.

Each morning until the postman arrived, I hovered in the Stanhopes reeking foyer, waiting for a letter which never came. Then I would set off for the British Museum in grey half-light, to haunt the Reading Room until closing time, searching for some trace of Alice. I knew that I ought to be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the Museum: the immense stone columns, the rainswept forecourt seething with tourists, the Babel of unknown languages rising from the front steps, the Reading Room itself, into which the whole Mawson College Library building would have fitted quite comfortably. I would stare up into the blue and gold dome above the tiered galleries and try to feel something, anything, but it was like looking at the sun through a thick pall of smoke. I would feel eyes following me up and down the aisles; several times I felt certain I had caught people staring at me with horror, as if they could actually see the fog of black depression that enveloped me.

Some of my fellow readers were in no better shape: the little old woman in the filthy grey raincoat who sat all day in row L, with half a dozen tattered shopping bags clustered at her feet, muttering at the partition in front of her; or the wild-eyed, white-haired man at the far end of row C, who shielded his book with both arms when anybody approached him. And once a tall, emaciated old lady, who smelt strongly of mothballs and wore a black veil so impenetrable you could not see even the outline of a face beneath, came and sat next to me for two hours while I worked my way through a pile of directories. She had The Times open in front of her, but I felt she was watching me all the time.

On the third day I braved the slush down Kingsway to Catherine House, where the records of births and marriages were kept. A gloomy concrete bunker, dank and cold, smelling of greasy folios and sodden clothing. The quarterly registers – huge steel-reinforced volumes, red for births and green for marriages (deaths were kept on the other side of Kingsway)-were housed in rows of battered metal shelves. Grim-faced searchers swarmed over every row, fighting for position, slamming the massive volumes on and off the shelves. Couples fought and shouted in the aisles; the noise was deafening. I hovered politely beside the 1960s for a few minutes before trying to insinuate myself into the scrum. Someone rammed the metal corner of a register into my kidneys; an elbow jabbed my ribs; an anonymous hand snatched 'J-L Jan.-Mar. 1964' from over my shoulder and carried it off. Finding Alice's birth certificate, I realised, would contribute absolutely nothing to my search for her. Cowed, shivering, I surrendered without a fight.

In the relative tranquillity of the Reading Room, I scoured directories for lists of nursing homes in Sussex and poured pound after pound's worth of coins into payphones: no Alice Jessell anywhere. Alice didn't want to be found.

On the fifth day I woke with a thick head and a rasping throat, but rather than lie staring into the darkness of the lightwell I dragged myself back to the Museum.

In a Sussex directory for the 1930s, I looked up the entry for Staplefield. There was a Staplefield House listed, but the owner was a Colonel Reginald Bassington. No Viola, or any Hatherley was listed as a resident, there or in any of the neighbouring villages or towns. There was no Viola Hatherley in the main catalogue either. I ordered the four numbers of The Chameleon, thinking as I did so how horribly prophetic 'Seraphina' had turned out to be.

But of the four numbers only the fourth and last was delivered: the slips for the other three came back marked 'Destroyed by bombing during the war'. Without much hope or even interest I glanced through the table of contents. The Chameleon. Volume I, Number 4, December 1898. Essay by Ernest Rhys. Story by Amy Levy. Poems by Herbert Home and Selwyn Image-and 'The Gift of Flight: A Tale', by V.H.