More than with a polished canvas, you could imagine her hurrying to find her pad, making each mark on the paper, scribbling down some vision before it faded.
It was like looking inside Lizzie’s mind.
Natasha studied one flimsy little sketch, then another, sliding the previous ones into the lid of the box: a pencil outline of the figure of a girl lying on the ground, a phantom raising from her body. Another of her standing in a boat, drawn with frenzied lines.
The poems were underneath the sketches. They too were mounted and framed. The writing varied, reflecting with startling clarity Lizzie’s erratic health, her varying mental states and the influence of laudanum. Two of the pages were pasted side by side, both pieces edged in black. Lizzie had written one of her poems on mourning paper.
I lie among the tall green grass
That bends above my head
And covers up my wasted face
And folds me in its bed
Tenderly and lovingly.
Like grass above the dead.
The writing was particularly scrawled, trailing off at an angle across the page. Natasha had the fragment of paper from Dr Marshall tucked safely in a small board envelope in the back of her notebook, but she didn’t need to take it out for comparison. The truth was right in front of her.
Lizzie Siddal had taken her own life. She had left a note.
But one piece of the puzzle still didn’t fit. Bethany, Lizzie’s descendant Natasha now knew, had somehow written down the same words without having seen the original.
She was about to put everything back when she saw at the bottom of the box, beneath the poems, a larger, completed painting. She lifted it out. It was a watercolour entitled Madonna and Child. Only the child wasn’t the baby Jesus, but a little girl, held up to a window outside which flowers bloomed. The child was reaching out her hand, her small fingers extended to pluck a rose. It was a picture of innocence, yet there was something troubling about it. The Madonna’s hands were under the little girl’s arms, which were outstretched to form the shape of a cross. But the most striking thing about the child was that she had the brightest red hair.
Natasha wondered when the picture had been painted, if Lizzie had been pregnant at the time. She gently lifted it up to read the picture’s history.
Collection of WM Rothenstein
Exhibition at Leicester Square Galleries
June 1946, purchased by JN Bryson. Bequeathed in 1977
There was no other date.
But also revealed beneath the frame was the place where the artist had signed her initials in the bottom right hand corner of the picture. EES.
Natasha stared, her mind returning to the weathered gravestone in Highgate. EES. Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal. Of course. All this time she’d been preoccupied with the naming of the Marshall children, the similarities between the names of Lizzie and Bethany. Yet Dr Marshall’s choice of name for the baby who was raised as his youngest child was obvious and touching. Or another way of securing a piece of Lizzie for himself?
Eleanor was named after her mother, not after Ellen Marshall senior, the doctor’s wife, nor Ellen Jeanette. Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal.
Forty-Seven
NATASHA CALLED ANDREW Wilding. She asked him if, as well as calling Adam, he’d get in touch with her too when Bethany showed up.
‘Of course.’
She gave him her phone number.
‘I didn’t realize how popular my daughter is,’ he commented. ‘Another fellow called by just after you and Adam left the other day, said he was a friend of Bethany’s too.’
‘Jake Romilly?’
‘That’s right.’
She tried to keep her voice normal, chatty. ‘What was he after, then?’
‘Just wanted to know if I’d heard from her lately. If I knew where she was. If she was all right. Funny, I asked him how he knew where I lived and he said Bethany told him. That must be a first.’
Bethany had told him nothing. He must have followed them. He’d got better at it. But then, she’d not been looking.
Andrew Wilding read back the phone number Natasha had just given him. ‘Where’s that then?’
‘Snowshill. The Cotswolds.’
‘A lovely part of the world. Elaine’s mother lived in Kelmscott. You probably know it.’
‘Very well.’
‘Bethany loved it there. To tell the truth I’ve never cared for it myself but I kept the house on after May died, for weekends and Christmases. For Bethany’s sake.’
‘Who lives there now?’
‘Nobody. It’s up for sale.’
* * *
Natasha was travelling into darkness. She’d set off in daylight, but the winter dusk descended swiftly as she drove.
She concentrated on the road, the red tail lights of the cars in front growing more prominent as evening approached, the cats’ eyes starting to wink.
Patches of mist drifted across the nut-brown fields, twisting themselves around the naked trees, like smoke from sporadic forest fires. The signs for Kelsmcott loomed out of the greyness and she took a sharp left.
She slowed as she came to the outskirts of the village. She remembered Kelmscott from a summer visit as a student. A genteel, straggling little place, surrounded by water meadows, picturesque in a disorderly way.
She wound down the window to see better, a blast of cold air snatching her breath. In the dimness she could make out grand houses along one side of the main lane, interspersed with ramshackle farm buildings. On the opposite side of the road at the heart of the village, were areas of scrubby paddocks and meadowland, where sheep and cows would graze. They were partially flooded now, the sheets of water glittering with spangles of silver in the darkness.
Among the farm buildings were some fine Queen Anne and Jacobean houses, typically Cotswold, with undulating stone roofs and gables. Natasha had presumed that it would be one of those that Bethany’s grandmother had owned, but she wished she’d probed Andrew Wilding for more details. Still, she’d only have to ask one of the residents which of the houses were on the market and where May had lived. If she could find anyone, that was. It was eerily deserted.
She passed the church on her left, a small, unpretentious little building with a square tower and a small graveyard where, she remembered, William Morris was buried, as well as Jane and their daughters. The road curved to the left, past a quaint inn, The Plough. The lights were on. If she had no luck finding the house or anyone to ask, she’d come back.
The road ahead was flooded, after which it forked, with a sign to the Manor House and the Thames Path. It looked as if there’d be nothing else up that way so Natasha backtracked.
Beyond the village hall was a house, with an estate agent’s board dug into the garden, the only one she’d seen. The house was detached, of medium size, with mullion windows and a stone porch over the front door. She drew up outside an iron gate that led to an overgrown front garden with a mossy brick pathway.
No lights showed at the windows and the curtains, if there were any, were all open. The place looked utterly abandoned.
When she opened the gate the rusted iron screeched on its hinges. In a little recess beside the front door was an antiquated bell pull. She dragged on it and heard the responding peal, then silence. She tried once more. Still nothing. She noticed a nameplate screwed to the wall. Magdalene Lodge. She pushed open the heavy letterbox and crouched down to look through it, but could only vaguely make out a hall, with a wide staircase sweeping up from it.
She went back to the Alpine for the torch. Again she peered through the letterbox, shining the light around inside. In more detail now she could see the entrance and stairs, the threadbare carpet, flocked wallpaper discoloured with age or damp. She pushed against the door but it was firmly secured.
Angling the beam of light at her feet she walked round the side of the house. There was a stone gateway with an arched wooden door from which a large rusted padlock hung loose. The back garden was even more o
vergrown, large as a paddock, dotted with what looked like fruit trees.
By the back door was a crumbling patio with weeds between the stones. This door was also locked but a ground floor casement window to the right was open a couple of inches. She gave it a push and the window swung wide on its hinges, probably just about big enough for her to squeeze through.
She hesitated. She couldn’t just climb in.
Who’s going to stop me? She lifted a foot onto the ledge to lever herself up, gripping the inside of the frame with both hands and heaving. She twisted herself sideways so that her upper body was through the gap, then bent double, pulling her legs after her, and dropped down the other side.
She found a switch on the wall and flicked it. No light. She cast the beam of the torch around. She was in a large kitchen. There was a strong smell of damp. An old house smell. Not unpleasant. Aga. Belfast sink. Toaster on the dresser, utensils suspended from a game hook in the celing. Everything neat, disused. There was no sign of obvious habitation.
In the hall she tried another light just in case the bulb had blown in the kitchen, but that didn’t work either. The electricity must be disconnected. Then she noticed that the ceramic of the sink was stained beneath the tap, as if it had suffered a persistent drip. It was dry now. She turned it. No water came.
The house was clearly, officially, uninhabited. It must be the house Andrew Wilding had talked of.
Her breath was coming fast, vaporising in front of her face, making her realise how cold it was. It felt several degrees lower in the house than it was outside. Surely no one could be living here.
Natasha turned back towards the window. There was a loud clatter at her feet. She flashed the beam of the torch round, creating wild shadows, and saw that she’d kicked over a tin waste bin, its few contents scattered on the floor. An empty plastic mineral water bottle, two chocolate bar wrappers and a banana skin. She looked at the skin for a moment. It was still yellow and soft, not blackened as it would have been if it had been there for even a couple of days.
She went out into the hall. There was another door directly opposite the kitchen. She pushed it open, flashed the torch around. A living room. It had a bulging lathe and plaster ceiling with cracks running adjacent to a thick black central beam. A door led off to another room, a little parlour or dining room, with a mahogany oval table, polished but covered with a film of dust. An old dolls’ house stood on it, like a scene from an earthquake, with the front ripped away.
The stairs creaked and groaned alarmingly as Natasha trod on them, so that she expected someone to appear at the top at any moment. She was wrong to be here, an intruder, but anyone staying in a house with no electricity or water was also here illegitimately. It didn’t make her feel a whole lot better.
The door at the top of the landing was open, showing, in the glare of torchlight, an empty room with white walls, a frayed rag-rug over bare boards. A single heavy curtain in the corner by the stairs revealed another flight, twisting and narrow, leading to what must be an attic. Across the landing was a further door which revealed a bathroom. There was one door left, firmly closed, with an iron handle. Natasha paused outside it, almost considering knocking. She seized the latch and pushed it down.
The figure lying on the iron bed was so slight it would have been easy to believe there was no one there at all. She lay on her back on top of a faded pink candlewick counterpane, with only a rough grey blanket over her. One arm was flung up over her head, the other resting on the cover. As the torchlight flashed across her face, casting her skin a deathly white, she didn’t flinch, her closed eyelids registering not even a flicker.
Natasha stood looking down and whispered ‘Hello.’ When there was no response she raised her voice. Still Bethany didn’t stir.
Gingerly, Natasha reached out, slid the cover back a little. Bethany was wearing a black top in some flimsy, slippery fabric, a black crocheted cardigan over it. Natasha forced herself to touch her hand. It was icy. She felt for a pulse, didn’t find one.
She remembered the discarded banana skin, thrown into the bin surely just a matter of hours ago. Then Adam’s face and the face of Andrew Wilding flashed across her mind.
Keeping the beam angled towards the floor now, Natasha inched closer to the bed. I spend every day of my life with the dead but I’ve never actually seen a dead body.
She remembered something you were supposed to try, grabbed a small mirror from the wall, held it in front of the girl’s face. Then looked at it. She saw her own reflection, gaunt in the uplight from the torch. And a faint mist that had formed on the glass.
She dragged back the thin blanket. There were bruises around Bethany’s neck and on her arms, faded to yellow-purple, not that recent.
Natasha knelt, lifted her own hair away from her ear, laid her head on Bethany’s chest.
There was the slightest lift and fall.
Her mobile phone was in her pocket. Fortunately, there was a signal. Taking off her coat and heaping it on top of Bethany, Natasha dialled 999, asked for an ambulance, gave detailed directions, then went downstairs to unbolt the front door.
Shivering, she watched the minutes pass on the carriage clock on the mantelpiece above the small iron fireplace. It was clockwork, which meant that recently, someone – Bethany? – had taken the trouble to wind it.
She called Andrew Wilding and told him to come to where she was sure Bethany would be taken, the John Radcliffe Hospital. Incredibly, he was almost breezy, not wanting to hear or believe any of it. After she’d hung up, Natasha had a sharp image of him, packing a clean pair of socks and his shaving kit, cancelling the milk, locking the front door behind him, driving towards Stow in his gleaming Audi. Even in his distress, making sure he remained within the speed limit at all times. Then reality slowly dawning on him, slamming his foot too hard onto the accelerator, the grief he’d taken such care to hide for his daughter’s sake for twenty years finally exploding.
She’d made the call standing by the bedroom window, her back to the bed and its silent occupant, shifting the position of the phone until she had the strongest signal. The window gave a view of the tangled garden. It would have been beautiful once, when Bethany played there as a child.
Natasha sat on the edge of the bed, looked down at Bethany. She couldn’t quite shake off the feeling that she’d acted according to some pre-ordained design, that discovering her this way was not entirely accidental. A shadowy chamber with a single iron bed, a perfect Pre-Raphaelite setting.
She wondered if Bethany had any sense that someone was there.
Film and TV doctors always gave instructions to talk to unconscious patients as if they were awake. Did it really do all that much good? Or was it just a device to increase dramatic effect, to give the characters the opportunity to voice their innermost thoughts? Natasha reached out and took Bethany’s hand in both of hers. It felt small and light, like a child’s hand. Natasha almost expected her own fingers to pass right through.
She looked so peaceful. Natasha shuddered and forced that word from her mind, such a clichéd way of describing death.
And death was near in the room; a sweet, sickly smell; a presence, hovering, waiting. The ghosts gathering to claim another. Lizzie, Eleanor, Bethany. Their identities had become so mixed up Natasha couldn’t be sure of whose hand she held.
She’d heard a theory that those who came into contact with death early in life remained for ever close to it, as if a part of them had already passed over to the other side. She thought of Bethany as a child, crying because her mother had left her alone. She held the hand tighter.
As she chaffed it gently, it was possible to believe a little warmth gradually returned to the skin.
She thought of Gabriel Rossetti reaching into Lizzie’s coffin, doing the same thing, convincing himself that the blood was still pumping through her veins.
I have a bad heart.
The bruises on her body. Yellow-violet: old bruises, made a week or so ago perhaps. Before Chris
tmas.
The beam of the torch flickered, like a candle in a draft. It steadied but the light was weakened, the battery running low.
On the floor beside the bed was a box of matches and a half-used candle in a wooden pricket holder. Natasha prayed the torch would last. She didn’t fancy waitng in eerie candlelight. If there were ghosts watching, there were plenty of places to hide.
‘You have to wake up. You have to be all right,’ she whispered.
Eventually, there was the sound of an ambulance siren in the distance, then the strange, silent flashing of the blue light when the siren was turned off as the vehicle entered the village.
A rap at the door was followed by the sound of it being pushed open. A man’s voice shouted, ‘Hello?’
‘Up here.’
Shadows loomed in the stairwell before being diminished by the two bright torches of the white-uniformed paramedics, a man and a woman.
With almost casual efficiency and speed, they began assessing Bethany’s condition, at the same time firing a host of practical questions in Natasha’s direction. Are you a relative? Do you know how long has she been like this? Is she on any drugs? Has any allergies to drugs? Do you know if she has any previous medical conditions?
Natasha felt completely useless.
She said she’d called Andrew Wilding, gave them his number but told them he’d be already on his way. All she could do was stand back, out of the way, and watch as all kinds of monitors were produced from cases and bags and pockets. Bethany’s shirt was unfastened, revealing tiny childlike breasts, a thin ribcage and bony shoulders. More yellowing bruises. The paramedics shared a glance. A stethoscope was placed against her chest, her eyelids were pulled up, the lights shone into her eyes. Wires and sticky pads were attached to her body, what looked like a large digital watch was strapped to her arm to read her blood pressure. ‘One hundred over fifty’, the woman paramedic said. Natasha knew that was low, didn’t know if it was dangerously so.
Pale as the Dead Page 27
