The Other Side of Midnight

by Simone St. James

  Those are some of the longest nights of my memory, stretching until three or four o’clock in the morning. We went to nightclubs and late-night supper clubs; we danced with people we didn’t know; we mixed gin with champagne. I grew used to the sophistication of Gloria’s social circle, their shallow jokes and ridiculous pretensions, and though the experiences were foolish and ultimately meaningless, they had one salient quality: They were fun. We were young, the war was over, and we dealt in death day after day, the faces of the dead haunting both our waking lives and our dreams. So fun was its own reward, a virtue in and of itself. And although we were usually in a crowd, I always felt that between Gloria and me alone there was something different, some recognition and understanding of the desperate need we had for those endless riotous nights.

  And then one night I stupidly took a taxi home instead of sleeping on Gloria’s horrible sofa, arriving home drunk at three o’clock in the morning and waking my mother out of bed.

  It was a moving scene, straight from a stage melodrama or a two-reel film. My mother was bewildered, then tearful, then angry; I was sullen, rebellious, and finally sick. Before I passed out, my head already aching, I confessed that Florence was a hoax, and I gave my mother Gloria’s name.

  The next day, as I alternated between moping in the kitchen and lying prostrate on my bed, my mother called off her afternoon’s appointments and marched out the door, handbag in hand. Through my fog I was able to feel the sheer, horrified embarrassment that my mother was going to Soho. She came home two hours later, white faced and unspeaking.

  I stared at my mother over our silent supper that night, watching her pick at her food. “What is it?” I managed, overcoming the shame that had kept me silent. “What did Gloria say to you?”

  She set down her fork and looked at me. She wore a faded day dress under a black cardigan, her hair tied at the nape of her neck, and in that moment she looked like any other housewife on our street, a woman who had seen a war and buried a husband and raised a daughter. The anger had faded from her eyes, but something else had replaced it, something deep and terribly torn.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about her?” she asked.

  I swallowed. “I thought you’d disapprove.”

  “The drinking? The strange men?” She shook her head. “Of course I disapprove.”

  My cheeks heated. “I don’t do anything with strange men.”

  “Well, there’s that, at least.” She sounded weary. “But that isn’t what I meant. Why didn’t you tell me about her? About Gloria?”

  She meant Gloria’s powers; she’d almost certainly sensed them from the first moment, just as I had. What had happened when they met? What had they talked about? Had they discussed me? I was seized with jealousy, sharp and overwhelming. I hadn’t told anyone about Gloria because Gloria was mine.

  “I don’t know,” I managed, sullen.

  My mother put an elbow on the table and pressed her fingers to her chin, her gaze leaving me. She had long, elegant hands, the fingers tapered, the nails oval. I’d only partially inherited those hands; mine were nice enough, but my mother’s had a beauty I’d always envied. Now she sat thoughtful, the thin circle of her wedding ring dull in the evening light.

  “I feel sorry for that girl,” she said at last.

  I gaped at her. “Sorry for her? She’s beautiful and rich.”

  “She’s lonely,” my mother said. “This is a lonely business. Do you know she actually offered to contact your father for me?”

  “What?”

  “Oh, yes. It was a clever offer, you know. Contacting one’s own family . . . It’s unthinkable. I could never have done it myself, though I’ve thought about it more times than I can count.”

  I swallowed. “You’ve thought about contacting Father?”

  “Every day. Don’t look so shocked, Ellie. Someday, when you have a husband, you’ll understand what the cost is to lose him.”

  She looked tired again, and I closed my mouth. She almost never talked about my father, who died in the war. A shell hit him in Gallipoli, and he never came home. My father had always been kind and loving to me, but the center of his life had been my mother—a sentiment I understood, because she was the center of my life, too. My own grief at his death had been suffered in silence, subsumed by the fact that my mother had nearly fallen apart. My parents had never been showy or romantic; it was only after the loss of my father that I began to understand how truly in love they had been, in their quiet way.

  “Gloria Sutter,” my mother had said, “knew within seconds just what to offer me, and she had no second thoughts about speaking of it. She called it an offer to atone for how the two of you deceived me. I turned her down, but I won’t lie—I was horribly tempted. I considered it more seriously than I’d like to admit before I said no.” Her gaze focused on me again, and she sighed. “I’m still angry with you, and perhaps this is stupid, but I’m not going to forbid you to see her again. You don’t have very many friends your own age—possibly the two of you can help each other in some way. But I don’t want you drinking in public. And stay away from any of the men she introduces you to.”

  It was generous, but I defied her, even in that. It was 1921, and hedonism was the height of fashion in London. I stayed out late dancing; I had my hair bobbed. We had another fearful row. I continued to see Gloria, and I continued to follow her into anything she told me was fun. I kissed a few different men who seemed to want me to, but they tasted like alcohol and cigarettes, and the thought of taking off my clothes for them was humiliating. Still, I tried the kissing at least, and we laughed about it afterward. Something about me was jagged and off-kilter; I felt like a stranger inside my own skin, a person I didn’t recognize. And somewhere in that fog of late nights and arguments, the stranger I had become met James Hawley, and watched from under her lashes as he removed her shoes, her heart squeezing in her chest in longing and disappointment as the room spun.

  My mother and I did sessions during the day as we always had, with Mother in her beaded dress and scarf in the sitting room and I behind the plum curtain with my eyes closed, the back of my neck itching, summoning the dead. They always came. My mother grew tired more often, and sometimes she went to bed after supper and slept without pause until I roused her in the morning. I watched her grow paler, the smudges under her eyes becoming larger, and something inside me wanted to climb into bed with her at night and curl up next to her as I’d done as a child. But I never did.

  One day, after our last appointment had left, I found her sitting in the kitchen, still wearing her dress and scarf. She held a letter in her hand.

  “I’ve made an appointment,” she said. “For a test.”

  I stared at her. She couldn’t be sick—she couldn’t possibly be. “A medical test?”

  “No.” She put the letter on the kitchen table. “A test for the New Society for the Furtherance of Psychical Research.”

  I blinked at her. It was early spring, the air raw and damp, and I pulled my oversize cardigan closer over my chest. “What are you talking about? Are you mad?”

  Her lips thinned and she didn’t answer me.

  I pulled back a kitchen chair, the legs scraping loud in the silence, and dropped into it. “Gloria has done tests for them for a year,” I said, trying not to think of James Hawley. “She laughs about it. It’s a lark to her. The tests she describes are horrible—demeaning and useless.”

  My mother raised her gaze to mine. Outside, the sky darkened as the supper hour approached, the faint, dismal gray that had lingered over the day finally fading. “It was Gloria who asked me to participate.”

  “What?”

  “She wrote me.” My mother traced one long, beautiful finger along the edge of the letter on the table. “She told me the work was important, that the New Society was fighting for recognition for people like us. She said it would mean a lot to her if I’d sub
mit.”

  “And you believed her?”

  “Of course not. I may not know her as you do, Ellie, but I know enough. She wants something, or she thinks she does. I think she believes that by convincing me to do this, she’s winning some sort of game.”

  It isn’t personal, Gloria had said the first day she met me, but I’m afraid I’m rather competitive. In all those drunken evenings, I’d never confessed to her that it was I who managed all of my mother’s séances. Part of me had always known better. I’d had no idea she was planning something like this, and I couldn’t fathom why; I was only glad, for the moment, that I wasn’t the one in her sights. “You shouldn’t go,” I told my mother, panic in my voice. “Say no.”

  “I could,” she said, “but I won’t.”

  “Mother, you can’t.”

  She leaned toward me, her eyes tired as they always were now. “My sweet girl,” she said so softly that tears sprang unbidden to my eyes. “My sweetling, my precious one. What do I have to prove to anyone anymore?”

  “Fine.” I swiped the tears from my eyes, letting them soak into the sleeve of my cardigan. “Suit yourself. Go ahead—I don’t care.”

  “But, darling, you’re coming with me.”

  I stared at her, her face breaking into stars through the tears on my lashes. “What?”

  “They want both of us,” my mother said. “Gloria requested specifically that you be part of the test.”

  She knew. That was the only thing it could mean. She knew.

  “Mother, we can’t,” I protested.

  But The Fantastique smiled at me, the jet beads on her dress clicking softly. “Oh, yes,” she said, her voice low. “We can.”

  * * *

  We did the tests, and it went worse than I could have imagined.

  We were taken to the back room of the offices of the New Society. There were three chairs in the middle of the room and three more chairs lined along the wall. “Our simplest experiment,” Paul Golding told us. “No gadgets, no tricks. You need do nothing except answer our questions. However,” he continued as two men came into the room, “it is sometimes customary for a psychic to have an accomplice giving her signals and signs. For the experiment to be pure, we have to ensure there is no chance of it. Please take a seat, Mrs. Winter, Miss Winter. This is Mr. James Hawley, my assistant.”

  He was even more handsome than I remembered, now that I saw him in plain light, not in the dimness of a bar or the darkness of Gloria’s flat. He wore no hat and his short, dark blond hair was neatly groomed. He moved with the grace I recalled, even in a jacket and tie, and he nodded formally at me as if he’d never met me, his blue-gray eyes shuttered. I realized, with a shock, that he was carrying ropes and a blindfold in his hands.

  Mother and I sat in two of the chairs in the center of the room placed back-to-back. I watched in dismayed silence as James Hawley knelt before me—without a word to me—and tied my ankles to the legs of my chair, the motion pushing my knees apart. His hands were warm and competent. I flushed, watching the strong column of the back of his neck as he bent to his work between my knees, the neat line where his hair ended against the skin. I felt shame and dread and a creeping, self-loathing outrage as his fingers brushed the backs of my calves, just as they had on that night that now seemed a million years ago.

  “What is this?” I finally choked.

  He moved upward, gently taking my hands and tying them together at the wrists. Behind me, I could hear the other man tying my mother in a similar fashion. “No foot taps,” James said softly, his voice low and familiar from my many heated daydreams. “No hand signals. No body signals at all. We have to make certain.”

  “Then just send me from the room,” I pleaded, my blood pumping, to my horror, as his fingers grasped my wrists.

  He shook his head. “This is part of the experiment.”

  My throat closed in panic. I was part of the experiment. They thought it was me summoning the dead. The only person who could have told them was Gloria.

  “Did you pay her?” I asked him, my voice a vindictive hiss. “Don’t tell me she did this for you for free.”

  But he only shook his head again, rising and sliding the blindfold through his large, supple hands. The sound of the cloth against his palms made me shake in fear.

  He paused for only a moment. “This won’t take long,” he said. I searched for the sound of apology in his voice, and found none. “Just hold still.” And he slipped the blindfold over my eyes.

  He lied; it did take long. It took hours and hours, Mother and I tied to our chairs, blindfolded, while Paul Golding sat in the third chair and James and two others observed from the side of the room. The tests themselves, I learned, were the most basic ones they gave to people with supposed psychic powers. What is printed on the card I’m holding? What word have I just written on this piece of paper? What name am I thinking of right now? Can you move an object in this room? Take your time, Mrs. Winter.

  She failed, of course. Sometimes she guessed wrongly; other times she sat wordless, or whispered, “I don’t know.” I seethed with silent anger in the darkness in my chair. She had made me promise. On the journey here, she had made me swear, to the bottom of my love and loyalty to her, not to help her with the tests. She had told me, quiet and confident, that she wanted to do them on her own. If I helped her, she said, she would never forgive me. There was nothing I could do; she was all I had. And so I sat there, in an agony of humiliation suffused by a red wave of anger, and listened to her fail.

  Inevitably, they asked me the same questions, but by then it was obvious that The Fantastique, who had been in business for decades, could not perform even the simplest psychic task. To use my powers and answer correctly—the ones I could answer, since it was absurd to think a psychic could tell you what card you were holding—would only expose her further. And so, when they asked me their questions, I had no choice but to grit my teeth, follow her lead, and say I didn’t know.

  My fury burned itself out sometime in the second hour, and by the time they took the blindfold off, it was wet with tears. I could have shouted at all of them, shouted that The Fantastique was not a liar, the tests were unfair, and my mother was tired. But I said nothing. She wanted no defense; she wanted only to do the tests on her own terms, pass or fail them as she would, though I did not know why. When James untied my hands and feet at last, I jumped from my chair and faced all of them, the tears smearing my cheeks.

  “This is finished,” I said, taking my mother’s hand in mine. She was unresisting, her skin cool and clammy. “You’ve bullied and humiliated two women for an afternoon, and you’ve done enough. We’re going home. Do not contact my mother again.”

  In the taxi, I looked at her exhausted face and said only, “Why?”

  To my amazement, she smiled. “It’s over,” she said. “It’s over. After all these years—all of my life—it’s finally over.”

  “They’ll write about it,” I said, my voice still tight with anger. “They’ll write that we’re liars, frauds. And then where will we be?”

  I felt her stroke the back of my hand with her beautiful fingers. “I’d have you live a different life if I could. Do you understand? This isn’t a good life—the right life—for a girl. Sometimes I think I should have done it years ago.”

  “But this is our livelihood,” I replied, fighting panic. “This is what keeps us independent. That’s what you’ve always taught me.”

  She shook her head, and I thought she would say something else, but instead she closed her eyes. “I’m so tired,” she said. After a moment she leaned into me, her head on my shoulder like a child. I put my arm around her and held her tight for the rest of the ride home, my anger forgotten, my mind spinning. I had never known, never suspected, that my mother wanted to be free.

  She never worked again. She grew sicker and sicker—cancer, the doctors finally admitted.
By the time the New Society’s report came out, neither of us cared about losing clients. She was too sick to work, and I was too busy caring for her, and too grief-stricken, to take over. The months went by and the money dwindled. A numbness came over me, growing around me like a shell. The world disappeared.

  Five months after the tests, she was dead. I held her hand in those last moments, all of our arguments forgotten. And when she was gone, and I sat hollow and empty and helpless, I had no luxury to take up another life as she’d wished. I salvaged what clients I could and I found new ones—there are always people looking for answers who have never read obscure reports—and I started up business as The Fantastique. I stopped doing séances and I consoled myself with the fact that, despite how badly Gloria had wanted it, she’d never proven that I had been the power behind my mother’s curtain. My mother and I had won that much dignity, at least.

  It isn’t personal, Gloria had told me.

  But it was. It was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Davies’s disappearance had left me at loose ends, unsure of what to do. It had also left me, I soon realized, in the company of George Sutter’s agent, the man in the houndstooth jacket.

  I glimpsed him briefly in the reflection on a shop window as I wandered the crowds of Piccadilly Circus. He vanished into a doorway across the street, but before he disappeared I noticed his jacket and almost got a good look at him. He was tall, narrow shouldered, built very thin, wearing a hat that was the worse for wear. He did not have a mustache, which eliminated him from being the man I’d seen at the Gild Theatre.

  If he was an MI5 agent, he wasn’t overly discreet, especially in his distinctive choice of jacket pattern. If MI5 had employed women, I would have dressed more blandly and done a much better job. However, it was likely that he saw me, a blithely unaware girl, as the easiest—and possibly most demeaning—of assignments, and my futile attempt at escape that morning had done nothing to alter his impression. It had been obvious that I’d been carted away from my home by a Scotland Yard detective, for example, and it would have been a simple matter to linger outside the Yard and wait for me to leave. And now here I was, oblivious again.