Both activities felt like postponements, and so did Toby’s hour of approved television, not to mention his bath. I did my best not to wish away the book he read to us at bedtime, though I grew uneasy when Alice wondered if she’d been changed in the night and found herself compelled to recite mutated words: “How cheerfully he seems to grin, How neatly spreads his claws…” I had to grin as well, since Toby did. Lesley eased the book out of his hands once his eyes stayed closed, and we tiptoed down to the front room. “So how is Desmond?” Lesley said.
“He’s caught a cough of some kind. I don’t need to tell you he’s blaming foreign bugs that he thinks immigrants have brought into the hospital.” I sank into a chair as Lesley did. “I shouldn’t mock him,” I said. “It isn’t helping his ribs.”
“Have you been to see him?”
“Yes, of course. How else do you think I—” In a bid to save myself from the verbal stumble I said “I went this morning. That’s why I wasn’t there to run the film if anybody asks.”
“Who’s going to?”
“Well, the vee cee rather seems to think you’re my keeper.” Her disconcertingly searching look had provoked the comment, which I wished I’d kept to myself. “I expect my father will be fine,” I said. “They’ve got him on antibiotics.”
“That’s one person cared for, then.”
“Are you saying someone hasn’t been?”
I hoped her question wasn’t meant to incorporate an answer. “What did you think of Toby’s story?”
“Just what I told him. I wouldn’t like to think you don’t trust what I say.”
“I gather Mrs Dixon mentioned he’d destroyed his other work.”
I hardly thought this was an answer, but said only “Let’s try and see he doesn’t destroy any more.”
“I don’t think I was responsible, Dominic. I think the way you kept on at him might have been.” As I strove not to respond she said “If he has anything we don’t like in his head, writing it down may help get rid of it.”
“I’m all for that. The more he puts on paper the better.”
“Perhaps we should ask Phoebe Sweet what she thinks.”
“When do you want to go and see her?”
“No need for that. One of us can phone her.”
I saw Lesley snatching back the chance to visit Safe To Sleep she’d inadvertently given us. “We can both talk to her on the phone,” I said.
“She won’t be at the house now, and I haven’t got her number.”
“Then we’ll have to when she is and we’re both free.”
The delay aggravated my impatience, not least with myself. How could I have panicked when I ought to have continued watching Safe To Sleep? Had I really let myself be scared off by a few molehills or even a good many, and some rotten trees with insects in them? Perhaps the sight of Christian Noble had made me feel like the nervous child I’d once been, but that was no excuse. That night I could hardly sleep for guilt, not just about the pathetic trepidation that had cut my observations short but over using my father for a subterfuge. Though I’d visited him in hospital, it had mostly been to give me a reason not to have been present while today’s film was shown, and I hadn’t known in advance that he’d contracted an infection. I felt guiltiest for deluding Lesley—as reprehensible as I had when I’d started lying to my parents. Even hugging her in her sleep felt close to dishonest, especially since her body was so stiff I could have thought she didn’t welcome my touch.
The call I made in the morning from the university was dishonest too. “Can you tell me when Chris Bloan will be at the hospital?”
“She isn’t here yet, but she’ll be in all day.”
My deviousness was growing defter. Brother Treanor and quite a few of his staff would have called it devilish, and I suspected my father might have as well. “Remind me,” I said, “her room is near one of the maternity units, yes?
“It’s just along the bottom corridor. Would you like to leave a message?”
“I’ll need to check my schedule. I’ll call back.”
I meant to call, hut not by phone. I was so anxious to be there that I had to struggle not to curtail that morning’s discussion. Our theme was resurrection, and I was incautious enough to suggest that the miracle Joel McCrea’s priest performed in Stars in My Crown—apparently raising his beloved from the dead—was handled with exactly the same sensitivity the director brought to voodoo in his earlier film I Walked with a Zombie. Alisha seemed not much less offended than Brendan, and when even Katy looked bemused I could only recommend them to track the other film down. “Never take for granted. Look for yourselves,” I said. “You can’t judge what you haven’t seen.”
Somebody who wasn’t there might have retorted that I’d done so at Safe To Sleep, but I’d seen Christian Noble, which was enough. As soon as I’d dismissed the students I hurried to my car. While the hospital was close enough to walk to, I wanted to save all the time I could. I regretted the decision well before I found space in the visitors’ car park, and once I had I sprinted into the hospital.
I’d readied an excuse in case anybody asked where I was going or why, but all the receptionists were busy with enquiries. As I strode along the ground-floor corridor I did my best to look purposeful rather than determined or worse, especially when I came face to face with a security officer. “First child,” I told him, “a son,” which apparently convinced him, perhaps because there was a room full of the newborn just ahead. He watched me come abreast of it, and I had to reassure myself that he might simply enjoy seeing my reaction to my supposedly new child. I was about to mime delight as I turned to the inner window of the room, but instead I lurched forward so abruptly that my forehead almost thumped the glass. Tina Noble was in the room.
She was pacing between two rows of cots with tiny infants in them. Although she had her back to me, I couldn’t mistake that sinuous darting swoop she made towards each child. I didn’t realise I’d clenched my fists until my hands began to ache. I managed to relax my fingers, and was wondering if I should dodge out of sight so as to catch her off guard when she bent more decisively towards a cot in the middle of the room. Her hands were clasped behind her, which I found suggestive of reptilian limblessness, but now she extended them above the cot and began to gesture in the air.
It could almost have been some form of blessing, at least to begin with, though I was put in mind of actions a magician might perform. Having passed her hands back and forth across each other in an increasingly rapid repetition that appeared to set her fingers quivering with eagerness, she cupped them gradually upwards as though pointing at if not beyond the sky. They could have represented flames or the tendrils of a carnivorous plant; they might have signified the energy they were drawing from a source, unless they were demonstrating their voraciousness. I found I couldn’t move until I knew where I’d seen some coaxing gesture of the kind, and then I remembered how Toby had raised his hands over Claudine on the lawn. Was I hearing Tina Noble’s voice, faintly through the glass or in my head? It felt as though her actions were rousing syllables in my skull, just three of them. If I opened the door of the room I should be able to hear anything she said. I’d managed to wrench myself out of my paralysis, which her gestures had produced somehow, when I noticed that the security man was still watching me along the corridor. “What’s she doing in there?” I blurted. “Quick, look.”
His slowness might have been rebuking my impatience or representing officialdom. “Quick,” I pleaded as Tina Noble mimed twisting or tying up an invisible item, if not both. “Did you see?”
He didn’t answer until I looked at him. His impassive flattened face might have been counselling calm. “That’s Dr Bloan,” he said.
“I know exactly who she is. I want to know what she was up to.
“She looks after the young ones. She’ll be checking up on them.”
I followed his gaze and saw Tina Noble moving down a row of cots, consulting the chart at the foot of each one. “She wa
sn’t doing that before. Didn’t you see anything she did?”
“What are you asking about, sir?”
Though the last word sounded like a gentle warning, I wasn’t about to be daunted. “It looked as if she was performing some kind of ritual. You must have seen what she was doing with her hands.”
“I think I did,” he said and stared at me as if I ought to know what was coming. “I believe she was saying a prayer. Don’t you have any time for it yourself?”
“It depends what you mean by religion.” I might have added more if not too much, but just then Tina Noble turned and saw me at once.
Her eyes widened, and so did her mouth in a gradual smile. However much this looked like pleased surprise and a greeting, I took it for a challenge. I kept my eyes on her as she crossed the room and eased the door shut without a sound. “Mr Sheldrake,” she said, “or is it Dr like your wife? What brings you here today?”
“Is he saying he’s a doctor, Dr Bloan?”
“He teaches at the university, Otis. I didn’t mean he’s claiming to be one of us.”
“He wanted to know why you were in there. I tried to tell him.”
“I expect you said I was attending to the children’s welfare.”
“Maybe praying for them too.”
“Why, Otis, I thought I’d kept that to myself.” She gave him the smile she’d used on me. “I hope it didn’t make you uncomfortable,” she said.
“Not when I teach it to my own kids. It’s a shame more of us don’t. Maybe it’ll come back.”
“I’m sure we’ll see more faith in the future,” Tina Noble said and turned to me. “I shouldn’t think you’re here to talk about religion, are you? Let’s chat in my office.”
I was tempted to confront her in front of Otis, but afraid that he would intervene too soon. Perhaps my savage indecision was apparent, because he said “Will you need me, Dr Bloan?”
“I can’t think of any reason, can you, Dominic? You don’t mind if I call you that. Don’t worry, Otis,’ she said, since he was lingering. “We’re professionals, me and the Sheldrakes.”
I managed to swallow my words until she ushered me into her office, a clinically white room where diplomas and certificates came near to covering a wall. They failed to lend the austere place much personality, and I thought they were as much of a disguise as the name they displayed. I sat on one of a pair of plump leather seats in front of the white metal desk, and as Tina Noble took the solitary place behind it I couldn’t keep my words back. “So what shall I call you?”
“If we’re using our first names it’s Chris.”
“Not Tina.” When she widened her dark eyes I thought I’d taken her unawares. “Tina Noble, to be absolutely accurate,” I said.
“Dr Sheldrake.” She sat forward, clasping her hands on a blotter like a flattened rectangular section of moss, a posture that put me in mind of a priest about to deliver a sermon—at least, a parody of both. “What is that supposed to achieve?” she said.
“Just letting you know I haven’t been deceived.”
“Is that how you see it?” She looked absurdly sympathetic, close to wistful. “What do you think you know?”
She sounded as if she were addressing a child, which enraged me almost beyond thinking. “I know your father brought you up to believe you could play with the dead.”
“What an odd way to put it, Dominic. How do you think it would sound to anyone who heard?”
“Like the truth. Don’t try to play with me.” I wondered if she meant to aggravate my rage, though her eyes looked as empty of guile as the blue sky beyond the window. “Don’t bother trying to persuade me it didn’t happen,” I said as calmly as I could. “I heard you and Christian calling up your grandfather.”
“When might that have been, Dominic?”
“Don’t you know? How often have you done it, for God’s sake?”
“I thought you said you didn’t want to play. If you’re fishing you need better bait than that.”
“I’m talking about when you weren’t even as old as my son. I’d like to hope you didn’t really know what you were doing.”
“I was never like that. We aren’t any more.” As I made to ask what she meant, despite suspecting that I wouldn’t like the answer, Tina said “It was you outside the house that night, was it? My father always thought so.”
“And what did he do about it?”
“Have you forgotten, Dominic? Did it bother you so much you can’t bear to remember?”
At once I recalled the cold clinging touch of the fog, which had solidified into the insufficiently insubstantial grasp of a misshapen pursuer. I had to dismiss all that from my mind so as to steady my voice. “That’s all, is it?”
“Wasn’t it enough? My father thought it seemed to be. If you don’t mind hearing the truth, he didn’t care that much.”
“Care about what?”
Her sympathetic look was back and more unbearable than ever. “He didn’t find you terribly important,” she said.
This came close to making me reveal why her father ought to care— because I’d destroyed the contents of the vault beneath his church. I managed to restrain myself enough to grasp how she’d admitted who she was. Had she abandoned the deception because nobody else could hear? Just as carelessly she said “What happened to your friends?”
“Happened in what sense?”
“Weren’t they involved in the old man’s death as well?”
The way she referred to her grandfather disconcerted me so much that I had to curb my answer. “Nothing happened to them. They said they didn’t even dream.”
“Who was the girl who tried to push me as high as I liked? Roberta, that was her name. Do you know what became of her?”
“Of course I do. She’s a journalist. I shouldn’t think your family’s over-fond of them.”
“It depends what they write and what they make happen. They don’t matter as much as they think, but that’s most people.” As I thought of Eric Wharton, Tina said “Maybe she does. I still remember the rapport we had.”
“Jim’s with the police, and he never liked what your father was doing.”
“We’ve no problem with the police.”
I had a sudden sense of how grotesque the conversation had become. I’d mentioned Jim’s profession as a warning, but Tina’s acknowledgement of her own identity seemed almost to have reduced me to reminiscing about the past. “Forget my friends,” I said. “Just tell me what you were doing in the babies’ room.”
“The neonatal unit, you mean.” She might have been correcting my immature usage. “My work,” she said.
“Even your friend Otis didn’t think that was all, but he isn’t here for you to lie to. Don’t tell me you’re still afraid to own up.”
“That isn’t why I’d be afraid.” For a moment her eyes grew so dark and deep that I could have thought I was gazing into a void. “I told you but you don’t seem to hear,” she said. “My work.”
I found I was nervous of learning “What work?”
“Preparing the children.”
It was harder still for me to ask “Preparing them for what?”
“The future.” With a hint of pride that I found worse than inappropriate she said “Making them more like me.”
I tried to laugh, though I wasn’t sure how much I should. “You think wiggling your fingers at them is going to make them believe all the stuff you believe.”
“There’s no need for belief when it’s the truth.”
If I’d been on the way to any kind of mirth, I wasn’t now. “You and the rest of you at Safe To Sleep try to put it into their heads, don’t you? I’m only glad Toby’s at school today and not there.”
“It won’t make any difference. When do we have him next?”
“Never if I’ve anything to do with it.” Realising how difficult it might be to persuade his mother provoked me to demand “How involved are you? Don’t you know who’s there when?”
“We
don’t see them as individuals.” As I made to protest, having bared my teeth, Tina Noble said “All of us are less than atoms of the future.”
I heard myself descending into banality as I retorted “Speak for yourself.”
“I am, and my father and son.”
“I think your father may rate himself a lot more highly.”
“Not as we see further.” She revived her sadly sympathetic look while she said “So you’re proposing to take your son from us.”
“More than proposing, believe me.”
“And what do you think that will achieve?”
“Getting him out of your hands and your father’s for a start.”
“You think that will help him. You think that will bring him back now.” Her sympathy was yielding to disappointment. “Why wouldn’t you want him to have an inkling what’s to come?” she said. “I’ve told you, it is preparing him and the rest of them. I can promise it makes you stronger.”
I could hardly speak for my mounting dismay. “That’s what Safe To Sleep is really all about, is it?”
“I suppose it’s a bit of a shock, but do you think you need to make quite so much of an issue of it? You saw a few hints of the way things are when I first knew you. You were young and you seem to have survived.”
I had a sense of listening to a mind utterly remote from mine or else deranged, or both. It took some effort for me to say “You mean Phoebe Sweet and the rest of you make them see that kind of thing.”
“They’re already seeing it. We’re helping them be at their ease with it.” Having revived the sympathetic look that I’d started to detest beyond words, Tina Noble said “Let me just say you wouldn’t have seen much when you were younger. Those were hardly even hints of hints. Once you see what they symbolise there’s no point in being terrified. However terrified you are, it can’t contain the truth. If you’re equal to it, it enlarges you till you won’t know yourself.”
I felt as though I was recoiling from some kind of brink as I said “You won’t be doing that to my son.”
“I’m sorry you’ve ended up like this, Dominic. My father used to say you had an enquiring mind. You almost make me wish I hadn’t gone to any trouble in the first place.”
Born To The Dark Page 10
