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A confusion of feelings assailed Cal. He felt elated, seeing the land, yet fearful of what he would be asked to give (was already giving, perhaps, without quite knowing it) in return for this peep-show. Shadwell had harm in him, for all his smiles and promises.
‘Tell me …’ the Salesman demanded.
Cal tried to keep an answer from coming to his lips. He didn’t want to give his secret away.
‘… what do you see?’
The voice was so hard to resist. He wanted to keep his silence, but the reply rose in him unbidden.
‘I …’ (Don’t say it. the poet warned), ‘I see …’ (Fight it. There’s harm here.) ‘I … see …’
‘He sees the Fugue.’
The voice that finished the sentence was that of a woman.
‘Are you sure?’ said Shadwell.
‘Never more certain. Look at his eyes.’
Cal felt foolish and vulnerable, so mesmerized by the sights still unfolding in the lining he was unable to cast his eyes in the direction of those who now appraised him.
‘He knows,’ the woman said. Her voice held not a trace of warmth. Even, perhaps, of humanity.
‘You were right then,’ said Shadwell. ‘It’s been here.’
‘Of course.’
‘Good enough,’ said Shadwell, and summarily closed the jacket.
The effect on Cal was cataclysmic. With the world – the Fugue, she’d called it – so abruptly snatched away he felt weak as a babe. It was all he could do to stand upright. Queasily, his eyes slid in the direction of the woman.
She was beautiful: that was his first thought. She was dressed in reds and purples so dark they were almost black, the fabric wrapped tightly around her upper body so as to seem both chaste, her ripeness bound and sealed, and, in the act of sealing, eroticized. The same paradox informed her features. Her hair-line had been shaved back fully two inches, and her eye-brows totally removed, which left her face eerily innocent of expression. Yet her flesh gleamed as if oiled, and though the shaving, and the absence of any scrap of make-up to flatter her features, seemed acts in defiance of her beauty, her face could not be denied its sensuality. Her mouth was too sculpted: and her eyes – umber one moment, gold the next – too eloquent for the feelings there to be disguised. What feelings, Cal could only vaguely read. Impatience certainly, as though being here sickened her, and stirred some fury Cal had no desire to see unleashed. Contempt – for him most likely – and yet a great focus upon him, as though she saw through to his marrow, and was preparing to congeal it with a thought.
There were no such contradictions in her voice however. It was steel and steel.
‘How long?’ she demanded of him. ‘How long since you saw the Fugue?’
He couldn’t meet her eyes for more than a moment. His gaze fled to the mantelpiece, and the tripod’s shoes.
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.
‘You’ve seen it. You saw it again in the jacket. It’s fruitless to deny it.’
‘It’s better you answer,’ Shadwell advised.
Cal looked from mantelpiece to door. They had left it open. ‘You can both go to Hell,’ he said quietly.
Did Shadwell laugh? Cal wasn’t certain.
‘We want the carpet,’ said the woman.
‘It belongs to us, you understand,’ Shadwell said. ‘We have a legitimate claim to it.’
‘So, if you’d be so kind …’ the woman’s lip curled at this courtesy. ‘… tell me where the carpet’s gone, and we can have the matter done with.’
‘Such easy terms.’ the Salesman said. ‘Tell us, and we’re gone.’
Claiming ignorance would be no defence, Cal thought; they knew that he knew, and they wouldn’t be persuaded otherwise. He was trapped. Yet dangerous as things had become, he felt inwardly elated. His tormentors had confirmed the existence of the world he’d glimpsed: the Fugue. The urge to be out of their presence as fast as possible was tempered by the desire to play them along, and hope they’d tell him more about the vision he’d witnessed.
‘Maybe I did see it,’ he said.
‘No maybe,’ the woman replied.
‘It’s hazy …’ he said. ‘I remember something, but I’m not quite sure what.’
‘You don’t know what the Fugue is?’ said Shadwell.
‘Why should he?’ the woman replied. ‘He came on it by luck.’
‘But he saw,’ said Shadwell.
‘A lot of Cuckoos have some sight, it doesn’t mean they understand. He’s lost, like all of them.’
Cal resented her condescension, but in essence she was right. Lost he was.
‘What you saw isn’t your business,’ she said to him. ‘Just tell us where you put the carpet, then forget you ever laid eyes on it.’
‘I don’t have the carpet,’ he said.
The woman’s entire face seemed to darken, the pupils of her eyes like moons barely eclipsing some apocalyptic light.
From the landing, Cal heard again the scuttling sounds he’d previously taken to be rats. Now he wasn’t so sure.
‘I won’t be polite with you much longer,’ she said. ‘You’re a thief.’
‘No –’ he protested.
‘Yes. You came here to raid an old woman’s house and you got a glimpse of something you shouldn’t.’
‘We shouldn’t waste time,’ said Shadwell.
Cal had begun to regret his decision to play the pair along. He should have run while he had half a chance. The noise from the other side of the door was getting louder.
‘Hear that?’ said the woman. ‘Those are some of my sister’s bastards. Her by-blows.’
‘They’re vile,’ said Shadwell.
He could believe it.
‘Once more,’ she said. The carpet.’
And once more he told her. ‘I don’t have it.’ This time his words were more appeal than defence.
‘Then we must make you tell,’ said the woman.
‘Be careful, Immacolata,’ said Shadwell.
If the woman heard him, she didn’t care for his warning. Softly, she rubbed the middle and fourth fingers of her right hand against the palm of her left, and at this all but silent summons her sister’s children came running.
II (#litres_trial_promo)
THE SKIN OF THE TEETH (#litres_trial_promo)
1
uzanna arrived in Rue Street a little before three, and went first to tell Mrs Pumphrey of her grandmother’s condition. She was invited into the house with such insistence she couldn’t refuse. They drank tea, and talked for ten minutes or so: chiefly of Mimi. Violet Pumphrey spoke of the old woman without malice, but the portrait she drew was far from flattering.
‘They turned off the gas and electricity in the house years ago,’ Violet said. ‘She hadn’t paid the bills. Living in squalor, she was, and it weren’t for want of me keeping a neighbourly eye. But she was rude, you know, if you enquired about her health.’ She lowered her voice a little. I know I shouldn’t say it but … your grandmother wasn’t entirely of sound mind.’
Suzanna murmured something in reply, which she knew would go unheard.
‘All she had was candles for light. No television, no refrigerator. God alone knows what she was eating.’
‘Do you know if anyone has a key to the house?’
‘Oh no, she wouldn’t have done that. She had more locks on that house than you’ve had hot dinners. She didn’t trust anybody, you see. Not anybody.’
‘I just wanted to look around.’
‘Well there’s been people in and out since she went; probably find the place wide open by now. Even thought of having a look myself, but I didn’t fancy it. Some houses … they’re not quite natural. You know what I mean?’
She knew. Standing finally on the doorstep of number eighteen Suzanna confessed to herself that she’d welcomed the various duties that had postponed this visit. The episode at the hospital had validated much of the family suspicion regarding Mimi. She was different. She could give her dreams away with a touch. And whatever powers the old woman possessed, or was possessed by, would they not also haunt the house she’d spent so many years in?
Suzanna felt the grip of the past tighten around her: except that it was no longer that simple. She wasn’t here hesitating on the threshold just because she feared a confrontation with childhood ghosts. It was that here – on a stage she’d thought to have made a permanent exit from – she dimly sensed dramas waiting to be played, and that Mimi had somehow cast her in a pivotal role.
She put her hand on the door. Despite what Violet had said, it was locked. She peered through the front window, into a room of debris and dust. The desolation proved oddly comforting. Maybe her anxieties would yet prove groundless. She went around the back of the house. Here she had more luck. The yard gate was open, and so was the back door.
She stepped inside. The condition of the front room was reprised here: practically all trace of Mimi Laschenski’s presence – with the exception of candles and valueless junk – had been removed. She felt an unhappy mixture of responses. On the one hand, the certainty that nothing of value would have survived this clearance, and that she’d have to go back to Mimi empty-handed; and on the other, an undeniable relief that this was so: that the stage was deserted. Though her imagination hung the missing pictures on the walls, and put the furniture back in place, it was all in her mind. There was nothing here to spoil the calm good order of the life she lived.
She moved through from the parlour into the hallway, glancing into the small sitting room before turning the corner to the stairs. They were not so mountainous; nor so dark. But before she could climb them she heard a movement on the floor above.
‘Who’s there?’ she called out –
2
– the words were sufficient to break Immacolata’s concentration. The creatures she’d summoned, the by-blows, halted their advance towards Cal, awaiting instruction.
He took his opportunity, and threw himself across the room, kicking at the beast closest to him.
The thing lacked a body, its four arms springing straight from a bulbous neck, beneath which clusters of sacs hung, wet as liver and lights. Cal’s blow connected, and one of the sacs burst, releasing a sewer stench. With the rest of the siblings close upon him. Cal raced for the door, but the wounded creature was fastest in pursuit, sidling crab-like on its hands, and spitting as it came. A spray of saliva hit the wall close to Cal’s head, and the paper blistered. Revulsion gave heat to his heels. He was at the door in an instant.
Shadwell moved to intercept him, but one of the beasts got beneath his feet like an errant dog, and before he could regain his equilibrium Cal was out of the room and on to the landing.
The woman who’d called out was at the bottom of the stairs, face upturned. She stood as bright day to the night he’d almost succumbed to in the room behind him. Wide grey-blue eyes, curls of dark auburn hair framing her pale face, a mouth upon which a question was rising, but which his wild appearance had silenced.
‘Get out of here!’ he yelled as he hurtled down the stairs.
She stood and gaped.
‘The door!’ he said. ‘For God’s sake open the door.’
He didn’t look to see if the monsters were coming in pursuit, but he heard Shadwell cry out:
‘Stop, thief!’
from the top of the stairs.
The woman’s eyes went to the Salesman, then back to Cal, then to the front door.
‘Open it!’ Cal yelled, and this time she moved to do so. Either she distrusted Shadwell on sight or she had a passion for thieves. Whichever, she flung the door wide. Sunlight poured in, dust dancing in its beams. Cal heard a howl of protest from behind him, but the girl did nothing to arrest his flight.
‘Get out of here!’ he said to her, and then he was over the threshold and into the street outside.
He took half a dozen steps from the door and then turned around to see if the woman with the grey eyes was following, but she was still standing in the hallway.
‘Will you come on?’ he yelled at her.
She opened her mouth to say something to him, but Shadwell was at the bottom of the stairs by now, and pushing her out of the way. He couldn’t linger; there were only a few paces between him and the Salesman. He ran.
The man with the greased-back hair made no real attempt at pursuit once his quarry was out in the open. The young man was whippet-lean, and twice as fleet; the other was a bear in a Savile Row suit. Suzanna had disliked him from the moment she’d set eyes on him. Now he turned and said:
‘Why’d you do that, woman?’
She didn’t grace the demand with a reply. For one thing, she was still trying to make sense of what she’d just seen; for another, her attention was no longer on the bear but on his partner – or keeper – the woman who had now followed him down the stairs.
Her features were as blank as a dead child’s, but Suzanna had never seen a face that exercised such fascination.
‘Get out of my way,’ the woman said as she reached the bottom of the stairs. Suzanna’s feet had already begun to move when she cancelled her acquiescence and instead stepped directly into the woman’s path, blocking her route to the door. A flood of adrenalin surged through her system as she did so. as though she’d stepped in front of a speeding juggernaut.
But the woman stopped in her tracks, and the hook of her gaze caught Suzanna and raised her face to be scrutinized. Meeting the woman’s eyes Suzanna knew the adrenalin rush had been well timed: she had just skirted death. That gaze had killed, she’d swear to it; and would again. But not now; now the woman studied Suzanna with curiosity.
‘A friend of yours, was he?’ she finally said.
Suzanna heard the words spoken, but she couldn’t have sworn that the woman’s lips had moved to form them.
At the door behind her the bear said:
‘Damn thief.’
