by Peter James
Oh. Oh. Oh. She was gasping. Oh. So good, So good. She pulled at his shoulders, touched his face, his hair, tugged his ears, feeling him further in, further in, pumping. A million pumps working inside her, his breath in her ear, his tongue, panting.
She screamed. Then again. She exploded, howling in wild ecstasy into the night.
Then silence.
Saw his eyes, close, staring, his lips smiling. Except they weren’t his lips. It was a woman. Looking down at her.
‘Charley? You OK?’
A soft American voice.
‘You OK? You were pretty far gone, eh?’
Charley said nothing. Her whole body was burning with embarrassment and perspiration trickled into her hair.
The American woman’s face was large like the rest of her, and heavily made up. It was encased in a shock of rusty hair, and clusters of silver balls the size of Christmas baubles hung from her ears. She was smiling encouragingly.
‘Who were you, Charley? Who were you with? What were you doing?’
‘I —’ There was a minty taste in Charley’s mouth. ‘I was chewing gum,’ she said.
She was lying on a bed. A red bulb burned overhead in a paper globe. She heard faint strains of a musical instrument which sounded like a sitar. The woman’s tongue curled inside her painted lips like the stamen of a rose. Flavia. Charley remembered her name now. Flavia Montessore. She stared around the large dim room. Tapestries on the walls. Bookshelves. Sculptures. A rather grand, ornate room, eastern feeling.
‘You were making love, right?’ Flavia Montessore asked.
Charley hesitated, then nodded.
‘That’s terrific!’ Flavia beamed. ‘You know something? You’re my first ever orgasm!’
Charley’s hands were beneath the blanket covering her. She found she was still wearing her underwear.
‘Don’t look so worried,’ Flavia Montessore said. ‘You were having a good time. Going into past lives can be fun!’
‘I — I’ve never had an erotic dream before.’
Flavia Montessore shook her head and the earrings jangled. ‘It wasn’t a dream, Charley, it was happening.’ She had green eyes and bright green mascara. Her fingernails were green too. ‘You were there. It was real. You regressed. You were reliving it. Boy, were you reliving it!’
‘It was just a dream.’
‘You were in a deep trance, Charley. You weren’t dreaming. You were reliving something from a past life. Tell me about it, it’ll help you remember too. Where were you?’
‘I was in a car.’
‘What sort of car?’
‘A sports car.’
‘What period? Nineteen twenties?’
‘No. Later.’
‘Do you know the make?’
‘I was inside it all the time. I didn’t see the outside. I don’t know what it was.’
‘Where were you? Which country?’
‘England,’ she said reluctantly. ‘I was in the countryside.’
‘Can you remember your name?’
‘No.’
‘The man you were making love with. What about his name?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You were chewing gum. What flavour was it?’
‘It was Wrigley’s Doublemint. I can still taste it. I took it out of my mouth and put it under the dashboard.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Young. My teens.’
‘Have you ever been regressed before?’
‘No.’
‘You’re a good subject. I think you could remember a great deal if we worked on it. When I come back from the States this winter I’d like to do some more work with you.’
‘I thought past lives were hundreds of years ago, not this century,’ she said.
Spangles of light danced in Flavia Montessore’s earring. ‘There are no rules, Charley. Some people have gaps of hundreds of years between lives, some thousands. Some have only a few years and some come back immediately. It depends on your karmic situation.’ She smiled again.
Charley was finding it hard to take her seriously. She had always found it hard to believe in the idea of reincarnation, in spite of Laura’s enthusiasm. The hypnotist’s heavily made-up face reminded her of a seaside fortune teller. Deep inside was a feeling that she had somehow been tricked, conned.
Chapter Six
‘This would go well.’ Charley shook the silk square out to show its full design, then draped it around the woman’s shoulders. The woman held it by the corners as if it were a grubby sack and stared at herself in the mirror. Her face was taut, like her hair. Charley winked at Laura. Laura gave her a cautionary frown.
‘Cornelia James?’ The woman looked down at the corner for the signature.
‘Of course, madam,’ Charley said.
‘Does rather suit me, wouldn’t you think?’
‘Absolutely. And it gives you two outfits.’ Charley removed the scarf with a conjuror’s flourish. ‘Without it, a simple day dress.’ She draped the scarf back around, arranging it more strikingly. ‘With it, you dress up. Perfect for a cocktail party or the theatre. You’ll find it wonderfully cool to wear when it’s hot.’
‘And you think this blue really is my colour?’
Charley performed a ritual walk of approval, like a Red Indian round a totem pole. ‘It definitely suits you. Your husband’ll love it.’
‘Boyfriend,’ the woman said.
‘He’ll love it too.’
She paid with a platinum card that matched her hair and swept out into the Walton Street drizzle, the rope-handled carrier bearing the emblem of Laura’s boutique rubbing against the crocodile scales of her Chanel handbag.
Laura closed the door behind her and tossed her imaginary hair back from her face, still not used to the fact that she’d had it cut short. She was attractive, with rather boyish features, and her cropped brown hair made her look even more masculine. A rack of linen jackets swayed in the draught behind her. The summer displays looked bright but uninviting against the June rain.
Charley clipped the American Express slip into the till. ‘Lady Antonia Hever-Walsh, my dear, no less,’ she said. ‘What a cow.’
‘She’s a good customer,’ Laura said tartly.
Charley wondered what had happened to Laura’s sense of humour recently. She was normally far ruder than Charley about customers she did not like, which was understandable, since she had to put up with them for six days a week while for Charley, helping out in the boutique was a hobby.
A horn blared from the stationary traffic in the street. Someone under a red umbrella peered in through the window, then hurried on. Ella Fitzgerald’s voice drifted from the speakers; Charley did not think it suited the gloomy afternoon.
‘It wasn’t a dream, Charley, your regression. No way. It would definitely have been a past life.’
‘It was bloody embarrassing, I tell you. Having the only erotic whatever-it-was of my life in front of this woman.’ Charley entered the sale in the ledger and flicked back a couple of pages. ‘You haven’t had a bad couple of weeks. Perhaps you’ve turned a corner.’
‘Flavia Montessore’s famous. She’s rumoured to have regressed Nancy Reagan. She practices all over the United States. She’s one of the top regressive hypnotists in the world.’
‘How can you tell something’s a past life and not a dream?’ The traffic crawled forward. A warden walked past with her satchel. ‘Didn’t you say you were a Crusader in one life? How do you know it’s not some story you read when you were a child and have forgotten about?’
‘Because it was too vivid. There was detail I couldn’t possibly have got from reading a school book.’ Laura began to straighten out the pile of clothes Lady Antonia Hever-Walsh had tried on and discarded. ‘I know people who’ve spoken languages they’ve never learned under regression.’
‘And screwed people they’ve never met?’
Laura hooked the straps of a skirt onto a pine hanger. ‘I’ve never got laid in regression.�
� She slipped the size cube over the hook.
‘I wasn’t in the past at all,’ Charley said.
‘You said you were in an old car.’
‘Not that old. I’d say it was post-war.’
Laura was silent for a moment. ‘The window’s wrong. I think we should change it.’ She hung the skirt on the rack. ‘You don’t know much about your past, do you? You don’t know anything about your real parents, about your ancestors?’
‘My real mother died in childbirth,’ Charley said; the thought always disturbed her.
‘How did your real father die?’
‘He died of a broken heart.’
‘What?’
‘It’s what my adoptive mother’s always told me,’ Charley said defensively.
‘Do men die of broken hearts?’
‘They can do.’ Broken heart. Throughout her childhood that explanation had seemed fine, but the scorn on Laura’s face made her doubt it and she wanted to change the subject. ‘You know what I think the regression thing was? It was a horny dream, that’s all. Tom and I have had sex once in the last two months, after we got back from seeing the house for the first time. These things come out in dreams, don’t they?’
‘What’s your acupunturist hoping to achieve by making you celibate?’
‘He’s trying to get the balance in my body sorted out so I’ll be more receptive. Don’t laugh, Laura. You’re the one who suggested acupuncture.’
‘They have weird ideas sometimes. Want some coffee?’
‘I’m not meant to have any. Another of his things.’
‘Tea?’
‘That’s a no-no too. Have you any juice?’
‘Aqua Libra?’
‘Sure. Have you ever heard of a couturier called Nancy Delvine?’
‘Nancy Delvine? Rings a bell. Why?’
‘She lived in Elmwood Mill.’
‘Elmwood Mill? Oh, the house, right! Any news on it?’
‘We should be exchanging on Wandsworth this week, and if we do we’ll exchange on Elmwood.’
‘Excited?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t sound it.’
‘I am. It’s just — it’s a big change.’
‘I love the countryside. I’d move there if this place wasn’t such a tie.’ She went into the little room at the rear of the shop and emerged a few minutes later with a mug of coffee and a glass. She handed the glass to Charley and stirred her coffee.
‘Flavia Montessore’s worried about you,’ she said at last. ‘She rang me before she went to the airport this morning. I didn’t really know whether I should tell you or not.’
‘What do you mean, worried?’
‘I don’t know. She wasn’t very precise. She said she was picking up some bad vibes.’
‘What about?’ Charley said, suddenly alarmed.
‘She thinks she ought to give you more regression when she gets back.’
‘Sounds like a good con-trick.’
‘She’s not like that. She only regresses people she genuinely believes have had past lives.’
Charley smiled. ‘The way I could only sell a dress to someone if I genuinely believed it suited them?’ Like wallpaper over a crack, her smile masked her unease. She walked over to the window. Shapes passed outside blurred by the rain sliding down the glass. Blurred like her own past.
The unease had begun when she’d awoken on Flavia Montessore’s bed. It had stayed with her through the night and throughout today. As if sediment deep inside her had been stirred and would not settle.
Chapter Seven
Charley changed the flowers in the vase in her adoptive mother’s room, as she did every week. It was all she could do for her.
She shook the water from the stems of the carnations and dropped them into the waste bin. The sun streamed in through the window. It was hot in the room. Stifling. Charley paid the nursing home extra for the view over the park, a view her mother had never noticed and was unlikely to.
The white-haired woman lay silently in the bed that she refused to leave these days, the regular blink of her eyes every thirty seconds or so virtually the only sign that she was alive.
‘Your favourite flowers, Mum. They look lovely, don’t they?’ She touched the cold cheek lightly with the back of her hand and held the roses up. There was the faint twitch of an eye muscle. Until a few months ago her mother might have uttered some incoherent words, but now Alzheimer’s disease had claimed even those.
Small and functional, the room contained few of her mother’s possessions. A couple of armchairs from her flat, a chest of drawers and the television that was never on. Two three-winged picture frames were on the bedside table, one showing Charley taking her first bath, Charley with a monkey on Brighton seafront, Charley in her wedding dress grinning exuberantly and Tom, subdued in a morning suit. There was a faint tang of urine, and stronger smells of disinfectant and fresh laundry.
Charley lifted the roses to her nose. Their scent brought a memory from childhood of her adoptive father pruning the bushes in the garden, and then another: they were in his greenhouse and he picked a ripe tomato and gave it to her. She bit into it and the seeds squirted on to his shirt and down her dress and they both laughed.
He had died when she was seven, of cancer. She remembered his eyes best, his large watery eyes that always looked so gently at her, eyes she could trust implicitly. They had looked out from his skeletal figure as he lay dying, and they looked out now from the other frame beside the bed.
Sadness welled for the frail woman who had worked so hard for many years to look after her, and was rewarded with Alzheimer’s for her efforts.
All their money had gone in caring for her father, and after his death they had moved from the house to a flat. Her mother had etched a living making soft toys at home for a company in Walthamstow, and Charley had gone to sleep to the whirring of the sewing machine in the living room. In the holidays she had earned them extra money, sitting on the floor packing hair bows into plastic bags for the same company. There was a white van that came round twice a week to bring work and collect it. Their lives were run by the van’s timetable.
After her mother had been admitted to the nursing home Charley had gone to clear out the flat in Streatham. She had listened to the rumble of traffic outside and the bawling of a baby on the floor above as she sifted through the drawers, pulling out tights that smelled faintly of perfume, a Du Maurier cigarette tin filled with hairpins, a brown envelope stuffed with early love letters between her adoptive parents. She had been searching for something, she wasn’t sure what; some small affirmation of her past, some hint about her real parents, maybe a newsclipping of a death notice, or an obituary. But there was nothing.
She arranged her roses, their crimson and white petals like satin in the brilliant sunlight.
‘Pretty, aren’t they, Mum?’ she said, then sat and held her mother’s limp, bony hand, gripping it tightly, trying to find some warmth in it, wishing she could again snuggle into her arms.
Life seemed sad, finite and pointless when you could fit a person’s possessions into a suitcase or a trunk or a crate. When you could simply pack away a life. A life that had probably once, like her own, been filled with hope and endless possibilities (expressed in the love letters), and gone nowhere.
She blinked away her tears. ‘We’re moving, Mum,’ she said brightly. ‘We’ve bought a house in the country. Elmwood Mill. Doesn’t that sound romantic? It’s got an old mill in the garden, and a real millstream, or race as it’s called, and a barn, and an Aga in the kitchen, and we’re going to have our own hens. I’ll bring you eggs. Would you like that?’
Her mother’s hand was trembling; it seemed to have gone colder, clammy.
‘What’s the matter, Mum? You needn’t worry — it’s only forty-five minutes on the train. I’ll still see you just as often.’
The trembling was getting worse.
‘You can come and stay with us. We’ve got plenty of room. How about
it?’ She looked at the old woman, alarmed. She was shaking, her face had gone even whiter and perspiration was streaming down it. ‘It’s OK, Mum, don’t worry! It’s no distance away at all! It won’t take me any longer to get here from Elmwood than from Wandsworth.’
The door opened and a nurse came in, a beefy girl with a bucktoothed smile. ‘Would you like some tea, Mrs Witney?’
‘My mother seems a bit feverish,’ Charley said standing up.
The nurse hurried over, felt her pulse then pressed the back of her hand against her forehead. ‘She’s on some new medication. I’ll ask the doctor to come in.’
Charley lowered her voice. ‘I think I’ve upset her. I told her we are moving to the country and maybe she thinks it means I won’t be visiting her so often.’
The nurse gave her a reassuring smile. ‘No, I really don’t think she’s able to register anything these days. I’m sure it’s just a chill or a reaction to the medication. We’ll get the doctor as quickly as we can.’
The nurse hurried out and Charley waited anxiously. In the park a woman was pushing an infant in an old black pram; the traffic rumbled and hooted. Charley turned. Her mother’s eyes were closed, the trembling was subsiding. She was sleeping.
Chapter Eight
They moved on Wednesday 12th September.
Charley felt an air of unreality about the drive down from London. All her life she had wanted to live in the countryside, yet she could not quite tune into the fact that today, unlike the half-dozen previous occasions when Mr Budley had loaned them the key, she was no longer coming as a visitor.
The Citroën’s engine drilled loudly, the air of the baking late summer day barely cooling her face through the sunroof. She overtook a tractor then slowed as she crested the hill, glancing in the mirror, waiting for the removals’ pantechnicon to catch up. Tom’s Audi, in front, slowed too.
