Читать книгу The Black Charade - John Burke - Страница 7

CHAPTER THREE

‘Death for you,’ said the woman sprawled on the sofa. ‘And a sterile life for that creature you leave behind. Unless I take care of her, too.’

‘You wouldn’t dare touch her.’

‘You touched her. You dared. And never came near me again. That’s why you’ll die, and I’ll still be here, watching over her for you. Waiting for her to die too, in her own way, at her own pace.’

First her laugh, then his.

And he said: ‘I think you’d better look more carefully at the table, and see where you went wrong.’

Then her scream. Not, thought Elaine Mancroft seven or eight yards away, a particularly convincing scream.

‘What have you done to me?’

‘It’s what you’ve done to yourself,’ said the man by the sofa. ‘The poison’s in you, Madeleine, not in me.’

Another scream: really, the poor dear would have to do better than that on opening night. Elaine stood in the wings and tried to subdue her own agitation by deriding the performance of the two on stage. In a few minutes’ time she would show them what power and passion really meant. All their inept fumblings would be overshadowed by her final entrance and the long, vibrant closing speech.

She shivered. She could not stop shivering.

The play had a compelling theme, and a leading part that would have been coveted by any actress. But it had not been fashioned for any actress: it was Elaine Mancroft’s, hers and hers alone.

She could not afford to bungle it. Not again; not now, at dress rehearsal.

As she stood in the wings, she murmured the closing lines over and over again to herself, a thing she had not had to do for years. The wrong words kept swimming up in her mind. Worse, they kept swimming up in her throat. She tried to swallow, and gagged on them.

Somewhere Adelaide was laughing at her.

She tried to blot out the sound with the sound of those crucial last lines.

‘You must make your last entrance very steady,’ Daniel had exhorted her. ‘It should be doom-laden, implacable. But when you speak, you’re very quiet. Make them wait for you—and don’t say one word until you’re at a standstill. Then make it final, despairing...beautiful. You can do it, Elaine. If only you’ll do it as I’ve written it.’

He must by now be as scared as she was that she would do it quite another way.

Down there in the stalls he was sitting and waiting for her to make a mistake. Her head echoed not only with his advice but with his barely concealed scorn.

What possessed her?

And what possessed Daniel? Did he, in his heart, want her to ruin everything so that he would have an excuse to be done with her? He wanted her to leave, she was sure of it. To go as Adelaide had gone. Or, if not as violently as Adelaide, still to go.

The air whispered with Adelaide’s thin, vengeful laugh.

Nonsense. Adelaide was dead. She would never hear Adelaide again.

She heard her cue. ‘The lies will have to stop.’

It was impossible to set one foot in front of the other. Out there on stage she would meet Adelaide again: face to face this time, perhaps.

Roderick Grenville glanced over his shoulder. Ten more seconds, and the pause would be too noticeable.

She forced herself forward. But she was moving too quickly. She slowed, and made her way deliberately to the sofa on which the wife of the drama was now crumpled in death.

Grenville turned with a melodramatic start. He had always been one for the grand manner and the violent gesture. Today in the Green Room he had been overpoweringly histrionic even before starting rehearsal: flexing his muscles for the grandiloquence, which his little claque of faithful followers would expect on opening night.

Elaine spoke; and saw the shock in his face.

What had she said wrong?

She tried to grasp the lines and hold them steady. But they were coming out of their own accord, and they were not the lines Daniel Clegg had written. Adelaide was taking over. Adelaide was forcing her to say things unrehearsed and unuttered before. She found herself leaning across the sofa, haranguing Grenville and the unresponsive corpse beside him. Her voice was soured by the whining accent she knew to be Adelaide’s.

‘It’s the wrong ending, it wasn’t like this, you know it wasn’t. The wrong ending....’

‘We will not say goodbye.’ Grenville struggled gamely, absurdly.

‘The wrong ending,’ she shouted. ‘Why are you afraid to write the true one?’

The sofa appeared to be tilting up to meet her. A face swam across her vision and became two faces; three. The back of the sofa caught her across the stomach, and she doubled up over it.

When she was pulled upright, it was by Daniel, his fingers biting into her arms.

‘What the devil are you playing at?’

‘It’s too close,’ she sobbed.

‘Too close? To what?’

‘To reality. But not quite. Not honest at the end, is it?’

‘What are you raving about?’ When she did not reply, because her throat was too choked with fear for any reply, he insisted: ‘What is it—what’s got into you?’

‘Adelaide. Adelaide’s got into me.’

He let go of her arms and stepped back.

The other two edged their way uncomfortably yet gloatingly around the sofa. They would have so much to gossip about later. It would all add splendidly to the Clegg-Mancroft legend.

‘Adelaide’s gone,’ said Daniel. ‘You know that as well as I do.’

‘I know she’s waiting for me. Waiting to get into me.’

‘Go home. For God’s sake—’

‘That’s where she’s waiting now. At home. And she comes at night when you’re not there. And on stage she slides her way in between me and my lines, she won’t leave me alone.’

‘You want everyone to hear you?’

‘Everyone will hear you—your version. On stage. In a string of falsifications.’

He tried to steer her across the stage, away from the attentive group in the wings.

‘Go home.’ he said again.

‘I won’t let her destroy me. And I won’t have you helping her, do you understand?’

‘It was a good rehearsal, it was wonderful right to the end. We all get frayed at this stage. When you’ve slept it off—’

‘Sleep is death, and I won’t die. I won’t, I won’t.’

‘No, you won’t die.’ He attempted a laugh. ‘You’re immortal.’

‘You don’t care, do you? You’ve written all your hatred of me, all your real hatred, into—’

‘Immortal,’ he shouted in a sudden blaze of fury. ‘The only sort of immortality you’ll ever get—in my plays. Now will you go home?’

She went home.

Mrs. Wraxall heard her arrive, as she invariably did. There was something unnerving in the precision with which that woman timed her tap on the door of the small drawing room, her little nod so undeferential in its brusqueness, and the setting down of the silver tea tray at Elaine’s elbow. Once or twice Elaine had childishly tried to catch her out by creeping in and closing the door without, she could have sworn, the faintest sound; or lingering, at night, in her room an extra fifteen minutes or so in the hope that when she got down, the coffee or cocoa would be cold, and she could draw attention to the fact. It never worked.

‘A trying rehearsal, miss?’

And always the significant, gently emphasized miss.

‘Very trying.’

‘Perhaps you’d care for a small brandy, Miss Mancroft?’

She shook her head. Surely the old harridan wasn’t slyly tempting her down the same road which Adelaide had trodden—towards those steps down which Adelaide had pitched to her death?

Poor lost Adelaide. Nothing to be afraid of. There had been nothing to fear when she was alive, incapable of keeping up with her husband on his ascent to success, such pitiful competition as a woman, and so pitiful in defeat when she had laid her hands—and her lips—on too much gin. So much less to fear now she was gone.

As the door closed behind Mrs. Wraxall, Elaine raised her teacup. ‘Rest in peace.’ She tried to deliver the line with the brittle offhandedness she would have given to some line from a new Pinero comedy.

Not that she had ever been given the chance of appearing in any of Mr. Pinero’s successes. Daniel had long since claimed exclusive rights over her.

Perhaps he was now anxious to relinquish the claim. She began to shiver again. After this afternoon’s débâcle, what could she be sure of?

Hazily she tried to think herself back into her role, to declaim the lines that had eluded her this afternoon.

‘We have shown our honour to be more truly honourable than theirs. But don’t you see how she has tainted us? Her disease has run its course. Ours may be just beginning....’

All Daniel Clegg’s plays had been autobiographical: so much so that it had become a favourite game among those-in-the-know to guess just what domestic conflict he was exposing this time, what bitterness he was squeezing from his system, and what scandal might be expected next. Acting his leading roles, as she had done since the year before she moved into his life and then into his bed, Elaine felt herself more and more acting out a cruel parody of the most intimate moments of their life, acting as if in a shop window under the gaze of every prurient passer-by.

This time the story had been twisted to display his own self-justification over Adelaide’s death—Adelaide, wife and goad, whose coarse antagonism had inspired some of his best scenes and most telling lines. The character written for Elaine was that of a woman who, watching the man she loved plunge into a disastrous marriage with just such a foul-tongued shrew, stood by him and gave him the courage to fight each battle of his political career, though this meant she had no life of her own and was shunned by society. The climaxes of each scene were provided by the stratagems through which her selfless motives were turned against her by the self-righteous wife, unscrupulously feeding lies to friends, and paving the way to a murderous conclusion. In the last act came retribution: attempting to kill her husband, the wife brought about her own death. But Daniel had chosen to end his drama not with a promise of happiness, but with a farewell speech in which the woman who had remained faithful through every adversity now renounced the man she loved, denying the hope of any future for the two of them after so much had been contaminated.

Again it nagged at her: was it Daniel’s prediction for the future, that she should follow Adelaide out of his life?

Not, surely, the same way. Not like Adelaide, too full of gin, sliding down the steps of the steep terrace onto the crazy paving, which she herself had insisted should be laid there. Food for malicious gossip and speculation; but an accident. It could have been nothing else but an accident: no other ending was conceivable.

‘You know it’s not right.’ The flat Midlands voice whined through the faint whistle of the gas fire.

‘Leave me alone.’

‘Elaine, you know he has cheated on the ending. Always cheating, our Daniel. Always.’

A shadow curled under the mantelpiece. Elaine tried to out-stare it but lost it in a mist, which ran along the wall and reassembled in a corner, tantalizing the corner of her eye.

‘Go back where you came from.’

Back, she thought, to the dank grave and dissolution. To the earth and darkness and the worms. In spite of her resolves and in spite of Mrs. Wraxall, she went to the wine cupboard and found the brandy decanter. Burning spirit cut a swathe through the congestion in her throat.

She conjured up a picture of Adelaide’s grave, with the earth above it become suddenly transparent, so that she could see Adelaide’s thin body swarming with maggots. They ran into unseeing eyes, but the brain hadn’t died: it still felt every writhing movement of each and every maggot, taking the flesh to pieces.

Adelaide lay there, knowing that sooner or later Elaine would be dragged down to join her.

‘No.’ She could not die, she must not. Death would bring her face to face with Adelaide again—for eternity.

She drank, and refilled the glass. The nightmare of Adelaide’s vengeance wove itself into her other, most repetitive nightmare: the torment of being buried alive, of trying to struggle out but being weighted down, trapped forever while the mind still went screaming on and on. How can we know we die at once? How can we know the mind isn’t immortal, still feeling and understanding everything, but impotent in a decaying body, which at last refuses to answer further commands?

Or a mind strong enough to escape now and then, roaming, disembodied, mocking....

‘Go back!’

‘What was that, miss?’

Elaine started, and slopped brandy over the rim of her glass.

‘Do you have to creep in on me like that?’

Mrs. Wraxall glanced at the level in the decanter. ‘Will Mr. Clegg be in for dinner, miss?’

‘I’ve no idea what Mr. Clegg’s plans are.’

Elaine knew suddenly that she, in any event, would not be dining at home. ‘I shall be going out,’ she said, as much to herself as to the housekeeper. A summons lying dormant in her mind was all at once active.

She must insist on fulfilment of the promise. It must surely be her turn soon, very soon now.

To the end—you will not turn back?

When she was in her bedroom, changing, she said, ‘I shall not turn back,’ and said it aloud so that Adelaide should be left in no doubt.

* * * *

Laura Hinde was halfway down the staircase when she heard the rustle of wheels on the gravel drive. She stopped, putting a hand on the banister rail to steady herself. She was still there, incapable of finishing the descent or of hurrying back upstairs out of sight, when her father came in and slowly took off his silk top hat.

He said flatly: ‘I see your gig is waiting outside.’

‘Yes, father.’

‘Obviously you were intending to go out this evening.’

‘Didn’t you say you would be in Stoke for the night?’

‘And that is why you made arrangements to slip away to some assignation?’

‘Certainly not. It was decided before that.’

‘What was decided, Laura?’

‘Please, father. If I don’t leave now I shall be late.’

‘Late for what?’

She found the courage to continue the descent and tried to pass him in the hall. He stepped back, and his arm barred the doorway.

‘Please, father, you’ll make me late.’

‘You will tell me what this important assignation is?’

‘I can’t.’

‘You’re ashamed.’

‘No.’

‘Then speak.’

The baize door beside the stairs swung open, and Sedgwick bustled through. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr. Hinde, I didn’t hear the carriage. Wasn’t expecting you.’

‘Quite all right, Sedgwick.’ Mr. Hinde let his arm fall to his side, then began to divest himself of his coat. ‘Nobody was expecting me.’

His hat and coat were taken away. When the door plopped gently shut again, Laura said: ‘Father, I can’t keep people waiting.’

‘What people?’

‘I object to this catechism.’

‘Do you, miss? Do you, indeed?’ It was impossible for her to pass that gaunt, accusing figure. He spoke softly but there was a steely edge to his words. ‘For your own sake, my dear, will you not realize that I want only to act in your best interests?’

She stared past him at the door.

He said: ‘Please go to your room, and let us talk later.’

‘No, I can’t. I must go.’

‘You will stay here.’

‘I can’t. I’ll die. Do you understand? I shall die.’

‘Go to your room. And keep your voice down. I don’t wish the servants to be privy to your hysteria.’

She looked again at the door and tried to make a move towards it. Her father stood unyielding. After a moment her shoulders drooped and she said only: ‘I tell you, father, I shall die.’

* * * *

The window would need rearranging. These new packages contained some truly enticing volumes, the covers discreet but sufficiently tempting to coax the knowledgeable into the shop to buy, Others would have to be locked away in the back room, ready for special clients who knew exactly what they wanted or who could be persuaded to want things they had not yet contemplated.

A Lexicon of Parisian Diversions, superbly printed and with especially fine plates: Edgar Wentworth turned over a page, and then another. The execution of that arm was very fine; the twisted head and the expression on the girl’s face had been caught to perfection; and one could almost imagine the buttocks moving.

He turned a further page, studied a few paragraphs of the text, and was tempted to lock the shop door and go upstairs to Annie. But there was work to be done. He must not let his mind wander, above all not let it wander over such alluring contours. With an effort he closed the book, and set it on his shelf of items for the connoisseur. He would not sell it for a day or two, though.

The bell over the shop door set up its cracked little clangour. Mr. Wentworth tugged his coat straight, assumed his most pious expression, and went to the counter.

His customer was the same build as himself and probably about the same age, somewhere in the middle fifties. He, too, had the sober mien of a man who deals seriously with serious matters; but his greying beard did not quite conceal the slackness of his plump lower lip.

‘Thought I’d drop in on my way to the British Museum. Doing some anthropological studies, you know.’

‘Yes, sir. A pleasure to see you again, sir.’

‘And to see you, Mr. Wentworth. I must congratulate you on that erudite article in the Antiquary.’

‘Most kind, sir.’

‘And what pleasures might you be able to provide today?’

Wentworth slid a volume from a cardboard slipcase and laid it on the counter.

‘Ah, Cythera’s Hymnal. Yes. I already have that. A most engaging collection. I particularly care for that little poem....’ He chuckled. ‘The Reverend Pimlico Poole, eh?’ He hummed rather than recited a few lines, as one might tentatively hum the first few bars of a hymn to make sure that the key was right.

Wentworth nodded approval. In this trade one needed to catch the subtlest nuances of a client’s mood. He now knew what state his present visitor was in.

‘If you’ll wait just a moment, sir. No more than a moment.’

In the back room he lifted from its package one of the new edition ot Choicest Facetiae, carried it reverently through to the shop, and set it also on the counter. Turning the pages, he stopped casually at a plate that had already caught his fancy.

He had chosen rightly. He could see that from the slight distension of the customer’s eyes, the would-be offhanded, man-to-man chuckle.

‘Yes. My goodness, yes. Exquisite.’

‘I thought you would think so.’

‘Completely free from—uh—vulgarity.’

‘Completely.’

Wentworth closed the book. The other man could not take his eyes off the cover as it fell into place. He dabbed at a smear of moisture on his beard, near the corner of his mouth.

‘What would you be charging for it, Mr. Wentworth?’

‘To you, sir, five guineas.’

‘That’s a bit steep, isn’t it?’

‘To a less valued customer than yourself I’d charge more. We’re having a lot of troubles. Expensive troubles. Our special consignments from France have been intercepted more than once—terrible loss.’

‘Terrible.’

‘And when we have translations printed over here, we get some remarkably meddlesome printers. One firm has been known to complain to the authorities. I hear poor Vizetelly’s in a spot of bother, for one. Need a lot of care. And that means a lot of money.’

‘Disgraceful interference.’

‘I couldn’t agree more, sir. Why, there’s two Members of Parliament talking this very week of tightening up regulations, of closing down shops which offer the cream of intellectual society like yourself the intelligent reading matter it has every right to demand. What do we send these men to Parliament for: to represent us, or to persecute us?’

They shook their heads over the evils of the administration.

‘Five pounds, you said?’

‘Five guineas, sir.’

A minute later Wentworth was wrapping the volume up.

When his satisfied customer had gone, he turned his attention back to the window. Some titles could be moved to one side to make room for the newer ones. One had best be taken out altogether: A Primer for the Pleaser, Issued by a Gentleman’s Personal Attendant, which, for some reason, was hanging fire. Perhaps it would attract more notice if it were left on a shelf inside, where it could be picked up and opened at random.

In the back room, in packing three more French novelties, he let his eyes stray again to the book of plates he had set on the shelf. He turned a page; thought of Annie in such a posture; looked at the clock and saw that twilight was closing in.

Across the courtyard the lamplighter raised his pole. Framed in the entrance of the alley to the Strand, stooping into a pool of light, a boot-black rubbed vigorously at a gentleman’s high-buttoned shoes.

Wentworth went to stand in his open doorway for a few contemplative minutes.

He had stood here so many times waiting for Annie to pass with her father’s barrow, wanting to be sure of not missing her. Now he had no need to fret, to count the minutes. All he had to do was close the door and make his way upstairs.

He closed the door and bolted it.

Annie leaned, slender and wilting, against the window frame. She must have heard him opening and then closing the door, and had propped herself there to look dreamily down into the courtyard. She was like a slender young boy, idling as a lad would, gawky and languid and uncommitted. The room was untidy, very much as he had left it this morning, but with a torn skirt dropped on a chair and two unwashed teacups added to those already on the table. Tidy in himself and in his household, Edgar Wentworth ought to have reproached her. But one cheeky, gamin smile from her, and he was incapable of anything but gratitude that she should be here.

‘You’ve closed early, aintcher?’

‘Got to go out this evening.’

Her face became petulant at once: because she thought he would expect it of her, or because she was genuinely vexed?

‘You’re not goin’ down there again?’ The Cockney rasp was shrill and threatening.

‘I’m merely going to visit a client with...er...a valuable collection for sale.’

‘Oh, yes?’ She mimicked a fierce scowl, which puckered up her little button face. ‘Lor, yes, I’ve heard that one.’ She paused, pushed herself upright and ran her hands over her hips. ‘I’ll give yer the strap if yer late.’

‘Yes,’ he said happily.

She looked at the large, flat book under his arm. ‘You an’ yer books.’

He pushed cups to one side, flicking away a few crumbs with his free hand, and put the book on the table. Annie approached as he opened it. From the far side of the table she stared at the engravings upside-down, then edged round to his side and rubbed against him, giving off a stale warm smell as warm and animal as that of the trim little donkey she had once accompanied.

‘Coo,’ she said. ‘Fancy them putting that sort of thing in books.’ She studied the fine interlocking lines and interlocked bodies. ‘Well, then. Is that what you fancy?’

He managed a nod.

‘Thought you was going out.’

‘There’s time,’ he said hoarsely, ‘before I go.’

‘And that’ll make sure yer don’t fancy anyone else while yer gone, eh?’

Her voice coarsened, and her laugh was harsh. This was how he loved her most. Her stubby fingers began to pluck at his buttons. When her hand, still rough and sandpapery from the work she used to do but did no longer, reached his flesh he let out a moan which abruptly cracked, making her shriek with laughter and attack him even more violently. Then her slim nakedness twisted away from him. A red glow of firelight ran up her leg into the shadows of dark enticement. She spun slowly, steadied herself, and stooped. ‘Like this?’ Her growl was the slow, preliminary flick of a whip. Her mouth quivered, her hands opened like claws. And when he was drawn on to her, torn by her teeth and claws and then drowned in her, she goaded him with words he had read in the books on his shelves but never heard sung like this, never known as such a wildness of flailing, biting ecstasy.

When they had finished, she was content to lie where she had rolled from him, limbs spread lax and wide on the floor, her mouth still open and murmuring away into silence, while he went to wash. He came back with a clean shirt and dressed by the sitting room fire while she watched him through half-closed eyes, occasionally letting her tongue make a drowsy exploration of her bruised lips.

He adjusted his cuffs. ‘Well, I must be off.’

‘Mmm.’ She yawned, and stroked her thigh indifferently. She was so slight, she looked little more than a child. But he remembered the strong grip of her legs; and the lacerations in his back were beginning to sting.

‘Have you had any further thoughts,’ he said, ‘about going to school?’

She pouted. ‘You want to get rid of me?’

‘I only want you to be occupied during the day. Some day establishment for young ladies, now—how would that suit?’

She sat up slowly. Between such tiny breasts the fire cast only the faintest line of shadow. ‘Suits me awright the way things are.’

She picked at the corner of a toenail. ‘What’s wrong wiv just bein’ here?’

‘But what do you find to do all day?’

‘Just knock about. Could start working me way through them books of yours, I s’pose. That’d be what you might call an education, wouldn’t it?’

‘Mind you don’t get them dirty,’ he said fondly.

‘I’d say they was pretty dirty already.’

Her laugh followed him and went on ringing in his ears as he left the house. He wanted to stay. But it was for her sake, and for his own love of her, that he was going out. The paradox would have amused her if she had known; and if she had understood.

She had never so much as set foot in a ragged Sunday School. It would take careful education and a lot of application on her part before she could grasp what their life together might be, and what she must contribute.

There was time.

With luck there would be a long, long time. He would be changed and renewed. That was the promise.

He crossed Kemble Court, glancing up once at the lighted window over the shop. She was safely inside, now. Safely lodged where she belonged, instead of crossing the courtyard only at intervals, flitting unpredictably in and out of his life.

* * * *

She must have come in from one alley and gone out by the other several times before Wentworth noticed her. It was a short cut from the bustle of Covent Garden to the bustle of the Strand, and the costermonger was not going to dawdle here, trying to sell his wares to folk who themselves lived so close to the market: until he found a ready customer in the bookseller.

His daughter must have been about fifteen. Boyish, with a boy’s jacket and torn trousers, she aped her father and swaggered like a boy. In rainy weather she wore a cap jammed down on tangled black hair. When it was fine, the hair itself formed a sort of tea-cosy tangle over her head and far down her neck. Once he had noticed her, Wentworth looked for her again. Soon he looked for nothing else. He would have recognized her across the most crowded thoroughfare, in the most fleeting glimpse. For the first time in his life he was under the spell of a girl’s movements—for the first time finding they caught at his breath more than the movements of a boy’s hips and shoulders. She was boyish, but not a boy. He did not know why this should have happened to him; but it had happened, and now there was nobody else in the world. He gazed out of the window for hours on end, attending automatically to customers, but not daring to look away for too long in case the barrow and the donkey and the man and his daughter should pass and be lost again. When they came in view, he would hurry out to buy vegetables from the barrow, although his housekeeper had a long-standing arrangement with one of the stallholders in the market itself. If the man served him, the girl would stand back a few paces and give a complacent little grin every few seconds. If she were the one to serve, she would raise dark olive eyes to his face and then lower them provocatively whenever he spoke. Her own face was invariably dirty, but the skin had a darkness that was not mere grime: under her eyes, stains the colour of an over-ripe plum suggested something Italian or maybe Portuguese in her blood. Wentworth found himself stumbling into whimsicalities with her. She answered readily, cheeky and knowing, until her father told her to pipe down; and when Wentworth said he enjoyed it, and such natural charm ought not to be suppressed, the father regarded him suspiciously and the girl with full understanding.

Then she stopped coming.

The first time, he found he could not ask where she was. There was something too surly in the coster’s attitude. The second time, the restraint had increased. But the third time, aching for news of her, he asked as casually as possible: ‘What’s happened to your little helper? Haven’t seen her with you recently.’

‘Not much of a helper, she wasn’t. Except,’ said the coster meaningly, ‘in attracting customers, you might say.’

‘She found the work too arduous?’

‘She found herself a reg’lar.’

‘A regular?’

‘Settled in with her own feller. Got themselves a room down Clerkenwell. Let’s see what ’e can make of ’er. Fancies his chances at moving off the barrers and settin’ up as a greengrocer somewheres. And he ain’t got himself a decent pony and trap, let alone a shop. Finish up in a dosshouse, both of ’em, I wouldn’t be surprised.’

‘Couldn’t you have stopped it?’

‘Suits me. Makes a bit more room at home.’

‘They’ll get married?’

The coster spluttered a wide guffaw, emitting sour breath through a gap in his yellowing teeth. ‘Married? No gilt in getting’ married. Leastways, not as I’ve ever heard tell.’

Alone, Wentworth paced in memory the streets of Clerkenwell. It would not be too far a drive from the hall of the Young Men’s Self-Improvement Association where he lectured. But of course he wasn’t going to be such a fool as to go there. A fine fool, at his age. He’d probably get mauled, as he had been on one occasion in those parts after walking home with a boy from his lecture class. So many times there he had been smitten—the slant of a young apprentice’s head, the full lips of some spellbound or sulky lad. It was unseemly to want so desperately that slip of a girl because she looked like a boy, but not like a boy. He would forget her.

He did not forget her. On the evening of his next talk to the society, he gave them less than their usual quota of his time and escaped into the streets. He recollected the name on the barrow—Tucker—and asked about the family from a chair-mender in one street, a shellfish seller on the corner of another. And about the girl in particular. He made it sound as casual as he could, but encountered some odd looks, and backed away and went home, though not to sleep.

It took two weeks to find her, and by then it was no use telling himself that tomorrow or the next day he would abandon the humiliating chase. He knew he must go on until he had found her.

Finally he came to her in a room, which could be reached only by squeezing past three beds and a landing window draped with sacking. The building had once had a central yard, now obliterated by a piling up of sheds and lean-to’s. Once in the middle of this warren, you would be lucky to get out safely if anyone had a mind to stop you.

She showed no surprise at his arrival. She was even grimier, her hair even more matted, than when he had last joked with her. But the wicked sparkle was still in her eyes, and she was immediately on her feet and moving towards him with just the faintest twitch of her hips.

‘I intend to take you away from this place,’ he said.

Two faces, one wizened and one pale and surprisingly unmarked, peered around the doorpost.

The girl said: ‘Not until he gets back.’

‘‘Perhaps it would be better if we just—’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t be better. Not bloody likely it wouldn’t.’ She grinned, very close to him. ‘Don’t worry, he’s only gone round the corner. He’ll be back in five minutes.’

Wentworth was sure that he had done one of the maddest and riskiest things in his life. But he could not have called off the pursuit; and he would not forsake her now, no matter what her ‘reg’lar’ made of his presence.

The lad came back. He had large hands, which clenched when he set eyes on Wentworth and remained clenched as Wentworth tried to find a way of saying that he wanted to take the girl away and give her a good home. He had expected questions—what sort of a home, what would she be expected to do when she got there, what was all this leading up to?—or outright curses. But the lad kept his scowling gaze fixed on the floor, and asked only one question at last:

‘’ow much?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You can ’ave ’er for ten quid.’

‘Disgraceful.’

‘Seven, then. Call it seven. But not a penny less.’

His eyes widened when Wentworth took out a five-pound note and crackled it between his fingers.

‘Not a penny more,’ said Wentworth.

It was all done within two or three minutes.

As they shuffled along the landing past the beds and down the rickety stairs, out across the noisome yard and at last into the street, Wentworth asked:

‘‘What’s your name, child?’

‘Annie, sir.’

‘Annie Tucker.’

‘Not rightly, mister. Used to be Annie Johnson, but my mum shifted abaht a bit, so I don’t know if it still is.’

‘Never mind. Annie will do.’

One person for whom Annie, however, would not do was his housekeeper. Mrs. Burnett had primly and uncommunicatively kept the rooms above and behind the shop tidy this ten years, herself sleeping in the tiniest attic of all under the roof at the back. She gave no sign of disapproving, or indeed of having any opinion whatsoever, of his stock in trade; and if from time to time he brought some young boy home for a night or two, she was invisible and inaudible. But somehow a girl like Annie would not do. When she left, she brought herself to say: ‘Well, I only hope that young lady can look after you as well as I’ve done. I only hope so, that I do.’

Meaning, thought Wentworth with amusement rather than resentment, that she hoped just the opposite.

In fact, if there was any dusting and tidying and making of beds to be done, he found he had to do it himself. It was not that Annie was unwilling: when he suggested that with so much time on her hands she would surely be happier making herself useful about the house, she smiled and said yes, that was all right, she’d do her best and glad of it; but when he came up from the shop he would usually find her squatting in the middle of the floor, sometimes with the morning paper or a few magazines crumpled beneath her, heedless of the litter she had created.

He had managed well enough before Mrs. Burnett came on the scene, he could manage now that she had gone. What he could not have managed now was to live without Annie.

‘Mind yer not late, now. I’ve warned yer.’

She had pushed up the window over the shop and was leaning out, ghostly in the dusk, again tempting him back. He waved, not trusting himself to answer, and walked away.

He had spent so many dull years, depressing and often shameful. Now he had something to live for. There was so much to come.

Perhaps this very evening it would be his turn to be beckoned on to the next stage.

* * * *

‘So,’ concluded Sir Andrew Thornhill, ‘in a world which is daily yielding up more of its secrets and fitting old beliefs into new contexts, in which ancient and supposedly dead organisms produce the fuels to warm our life and drive our engines, in which medicine shows man’s dependence on the products of the earth and of the very air, in which so-called discoveries prove frequently to be only a revaluation of matters with which our forebears were perfectly familiar under less scientific names, we must increasingly turn our attention to the relationship between apparently inanimate matter and our own life forces.

‘What some would superstitiously cling to—or, at the other extreme, contemptuously dismiss—as sympathetic magic may, after all, be revealed as a valid scientific relationship whose further exploration will make possible the development of powers which man has hitherto misinterpreted and feared to investigate. This is not mysticism: it is the logical extension of the natural sciences.’

He allowed twenty minutes for questions, but replied with less than his usual expansiveness. His mind was already reaching on ahead.

Anticipation mounted as he approached the chapel in its quiet street, a dark shape set back from its neighbours so that no light fell on it. Each time he arrived he was surprised by its existence, and surprised that he of all people should be entering such a place. Somehow it ceased to exist between visits, and if asked about it in the middle of an otherwise ordinary conversation, he would not have been able to recollect what place was being referred to, or where it could be found. But now, just for an evening, it was the only reality.

He went up the chipped, tiled path and pushed the door open.

Inside, the darkness was leavened only by feeble light from an oblong window beyond the pulpit, as sooty as the glass of a railway station roof. He paced up the aisle. On either side the old horse-box pews were stacked with shrouded objects, some reaching halfway to the rafters. Only the front few ranks of pews remained uncluttered. He stood with his hand on the latch of the one he had been assigned, the top of the door coming to his shoulder. His eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom. Yes, there was the expected shape in the pulpit: the outline of a veiled head.

‘You are the first,’ she said.

It was an opportunity for speaking his mind to her, without challenging her authority in front of the others.

‘Do we really have to sit in the dark all the time? Why can’t we sit and talk in normal conditions, seeing one another, sharing our experiences and working things out between us?’

‘Because for what we are exploring, the dark is a normal condition. Our procedure will function only in accordance with its own specific laws.’

‘I can’t see why a little light on the scene would impede it.’

‘You do not ask gravity to reverse itself just to fit a personal whim. If you find that some experiments work only in the presence of water, and others in a vacuum, you don’t insist on testing them over and over again in the wrong conditions—except to prove that they are the wrong conditions. The phenomena we seek will not flourish in the glare of daylight for anyone to see.’

She was, he realized, soothing him with his own kind of terminology. There was nothing to do but accept.

Respectfully he said: ‘When do I move on to the more advanced studies...to the transformation itself?’

‘Your time will come.’

‘This long-drawn-out procedure—’

‘Again, you must consider it in your own scientific idiom. Certain chemical reactions require certain times and temperatures. Hurry or delay the process, and it is ruined. So with us.’

‘“Us”,’ he echoed. ‘Somehow I get the impression that the others aren’t in the same mould—I’m not sure we belong together.’

‘I assure you that you’re all part of one pattern. You must all partake in the same rituals. You may not understand the necessity for this, but for century upon century it has been proved to work.’

Thornhill laughed. The sound ran away into the dusty recesses of the chapel. Again the woman had struck the right, shrewd note for him. He felt she had invited him closer, acknowledging in spite of what she had said that he was distinct and apart from the others in the group.

All at once she said: ‘Are you beginning to doubt?’

‘No,’ he said hastily. ‘No, I wouldn’t want you to think that.’

‘You’ll not turn back?’

‘I’ll not turn back.’

Behind him the door creaked. He stepped into his pew and sat down. Footsteps came up the aisle and moved into the pew immediately below the pulpit. The steps had been those of a woman. Then came another—and was that the sound of a third?

There was silence.

Thornhill counted. One fewer than last time—or was it two? One of course had moved on since last time: the fortunate, chosen one who had gone ahead. But still they were short.

Something was wrong.

The silhouette in the pulpit was as motionless as if it had been carved from the woodwork.

At last she spoke. ‘Someone is missing. One has failed us.’

Thornhill cursed silently. Behind him a woman let out a pitiful little moan.

‘One has turned back.’ The voice from the pulpit was steady, but thrummed with a fearsome condemnation. ‘We shall have to recall her. Or eliminate her from our calculations—cancel her out.’