by Julie Kenner
“Look, Vivien, I can’t go into details. Something—Something bad happened to me when I lived here. Something bad, so bad—to me, and to someone else—I got out and sold the flat to Adelaide. I thought that her flawlessly unimaginative and stomping life would exorcise the place. Maybe it has. And maybe not. But I was dreading coming back here. And the statue…I don’t know if objects carry a stigma, but for my money that one does. The moment I got the interest from the movie people I knew it was too good a chance to pass up. And a real bonus to get rid of the thing while I was at it. I inherited that statue, Vivien. About all I did inherit. But that’s yet another story.”
“Why did you come here at all, if you dreaded to? Wouldn’t Lewis—”
“Yes, of course. But the dreams started again. I just thought, I have to do this, face it, finish with it, now and forever. I even armed myself with dear batty Cinnamon. I thought she would certainly quash any lingering darkness here. And then, you opened the door.”
Vivien blinked.
Connor looked down into the empty glass. “A girl in a cloud of hair, like a Waterhouse nymph in a bathrobe.”
What could Vivien say to that? Waterhouse was the pre-Raphaelite painter famous for his depictions of water nymphs and mermaids, so Connor was flattering her. Also he was telling her so much—yet telling her, really, nothing….
“I’m sorry I upset you,” she said quietly.
“I had no right to be upset by anything as graceful, lovely or wonderful as you, Vivien. But that was the trouble, I’m afraid. The unforgivable bloody trouble.”
Vivien got up. She carried the bottle to him and refilled his glass. He sat there looking at it.
“It’s all right, Connor. Thank you for explaining. It doesn’t matter. I promise—” again she smiled “—I really won’t sue.”
She didn’t expect it—but then she hadn’t been able to expect anything he had done tonight. He stood up in front of her, tall and symmetrically strong, a burning barrier between her and the light. Against the lamp, she couldn’t see his face, but she felt his hands come weightlessly to rest on her upper arms.
Though weightless, the heat of his touch carried a charge of the fiercest electricity. She was relieved she had put down the wine bottle, or she might have dropped it. She was glad they hadn’t touched before.
After all, she could see him. He was the only thing she could see in the room….
Vivien gazed upward into his face, which hovered over hers, so close now, she felt his warm breath on her lips.
Then he straightened abruptly away from her.
“No,” he said. The coldness in his voice she had heard before.
Vivien recoiled.
“Wait—” he said. He had let her go. He spoke softly. “I’m sorry, yet once more. You don’t want this. Not from me.”
But she thought, Oh, Connor, I do. I do….
An appalling alien noise exploded through the room. It was the doorbell.
“Your taxi,” he said.
“Yes…”
“Shall I—I’ll tell him to wait a minute.”
Vivien said lamely, “It’s all right. I’ll do it.”
She walked out of the room and down the hall, and opened the front door. The man outside presented an unfriendly face, apparently annoyed she hadn’t heard him sounding the car horn on the street, so he had had to walk a few feet to the house. He seemed very scruffy and had black sunglasses of incongruous fashionableness.
“I’m sorry,” she said. So many apologies tonight. “I won’t be needing your cab.”
“Is that right?” He appeared actually menacing.
It seemed prudent to add, “My friend just arrived.”
As if to assist, from the eight-sided room came the quiet clink of glassware.
She felt the glare through the shades. “Well, thanks a bunch, lady. You people—Next time call and cancel, all right?”
She gave him a couple of pounds, guilty to have misled him. Ungraciously he pocketed the coins and went off.
Vivien hesitated in the hall. What was she doing? Did she, after all, mean to stay in this place—the place where something so “bad” had happened?
Yes.
Connor was standing now by the French windows, looking out into the black garden. The second glass of wine, undrunk, sat on a table.
Again, time stopped.
Then he turned and looked at her. Turned and looked through her.
With a courtesy that scalded her now more than his abrasiveness had before, Connor Sinclair said, “You’ve been fantastic, Vivien. Thank you for so generously letting me off. I won’t forget it. Take care of yourself. I hope everything goes well for you, always.”
He walked past her. He walked out into the hall. She heard the front door open. Close. He was gone.
Sternly she held herself motionless, seeing before her the gaping abyss of her empty life, void of him, the life where he had wished her well for always.
Chapter 5
Exhaustion, physical and mental, sent Vivien to sleep almost the moment she lay down in bed. She hadn’t thought it could.
Somewhere, though, in the dark of night and slumber, she dreamed she heard a series of soft noises, passing up and down the apartment, now in the eight-sided room, now along a corridor—footsteps, a faint thud, like a cat jumping from a windowsill….
Even in her dream, Vivien took charge of herself. Don’t be stupid. There’s nothing there. All places make sounds, especially after a hot day when the night air is cooler. This time I’m not going out to see.
She woke near dawn and recalled the dream. She thought with great clarity, If I’m going to stay on, I need to pull myself together. Statues don’t move—it was rain or soil subsiding. As for the rose in the conservatory, Addie hasn’t looked after the frame, just as she’s left the garden to riot. There’s probably some tiny hole and something got in, some little animal (curious image of a mouse carrying a rose…). All my problems here, all of them, are to do with an overactive imagination.
The alarm clock woke her at seven-thirty.
She didn’t feel refreshed by her long sleep, but leaden. Even the shower didn’t help. Deciding on strong leaf tea in preference to coffee, she traipsed along to the kitchen with—despite her resolve—a slight feeling of apprehension.
But nothing was wrong. And out in the conservatory the rose had withered away.
She drank the whole pot, staring at nothing, tasting nothing.
She thought, Be glad he turned out to be a decent guy, Vivien. He tried to behave well. That’s got to be better, even if—
But, she thought, he had wanted to kiss her. He meant to kiss her—the very air of the room had been alight with his wanting that. Or was it only her wanting it that she had felt?
The last rejection, three years ago, had been far more simple. Her lover had used her—no other term was possible—once only, and discarded her after like a broken pencil. Her bewildered, tactful attempt to discover what she had done to offend him had met with, “Oh, come on, Vivien. Can’t we have a bit of fun without it turning into grand opera?”
She couldn’t imagine Connor Sinclair, even at his worst, behaving in such a way. She had sensed about him last night a quality more appealing even than his awareness, or his charm—a kind of loyalty. Yes, he could lash out with words, but he was ultimately honorable.
Then again, what did she know about him?
Next to nothing. And now, she never would.
Too sluggish for work yet, Vivien decided to clean the flat properly. This was something else Addie never bothered with. She periodically hired girls to clean and then sacked them, or had them walk out in disgust at Addie’s manner.
Housework, though, could take your mind off other things.
Vivien located a few dust cloths and took the deluxe Hoover from its cupboard. Then she walked into the eight-sided room.
“What—” Vivien stalled.
She stared. The fine hairs rose on the back of her neck,
and something icy trickled down her spine—
She had left the remainder of the wine in its bottle, uncorked. By it on the table, Connor had placed his undrunk second glass, and she her undrunk half glass.
Vivien knew this, had no doubts.
The bottle was empty and lay on its side on the carpet. Both glasses were empty also.
But this wasn’t the worst. Oh, no.
Every single long-stemmed rose had been removed from the vase, the heads cut off, and stalks and petals scattered over the carpet and the wooden floor beyond.
Last night she hadn’t drawn the drapes at the French windows, and now the garden lay outside, ripe and sunlit—innocent.
Vivien backed out of the room. Outside, she walked quite briskly down the hall to the telephone. And so passed the dining room on the right.
It was a somber room, done in maroon, and not huge in size. Even so, Addie kept in there, along with an oak table and chairs, her only bookcase. None of these things had yet been packed or sheeted over.
Vivien saw the book at once, lying where it hadn’t been yesterday, facedown on the table.
It had obviously been pulled out of the case—or had itself sprung across the room.
Vivien, feeling as though she had stopped breathing and never would breathe again, walked to the table and turned the book right side up.
She knew which page it would be open at.
How convenient for it—whatever it was—that Addie, who seldom read anything longer than five hundred words, kept the regulation show-off classics. There in the bookcase, a set of Jane Austen in leather and gilt, a purple-backed Milton and Shelley, and four volumes of Shakespeare in white cloth: Comedies, Histories, Sonnets—and Tragedies.
It was the Tragedies on the table, naturally.
Unable to resist, Vivien found herself reading the words on the page.
Oth:…A fine woman! a fair woman! a sweet woman!
Iago: Nay, you must forget that.
Oth: Ay, let her rot, and perish, and be damned to-night; For she shall not live; no, my heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand…
Vivien snapped the book shut. Somehow then she dropped it. Maybe not surprisingly—her hands weren’t quite steady.
It landed back on the table, open again. This time at the title page. An old photograph had been reproduced as a frontispiece. Vivien stared at it. A woman in a long pale robe, tightly belted at her narrow waist, her very dark hair unbound and springing, her large eyes gazing…The credit read: “The actress Emily Sinclair, in one of her most famous roles: Ophelia.”
Someone had written on the title page—slapdash, in bold yet feminine handwriting: To C with love from K. I bet you wish you could meet this gorgeous great-gran of yours! If you do, I guess I’d better leave!
K, then, was someone in Connor’s life, or had been. For C was definitely Connor Sinclair, since this was the picture of his great-great-grandmother, Emily—the faithless wife Patrick Sinclair had shot.
Connor’s book, then. Left behind. Like the statue. Like K?
Unwillingly, so unwillingly, Vivien’s eyes strayed back to the photograph. In her head she could hear a voice telling her, facing up to what Vivien herself didn’t want to face. For Emily Sinclair very, very closely resembled Vivien Gray.
No one else had called the flat after Lewis Blake had done so the previous evening. Vivien, as she pressed the required 1471 to see if his number had been registered, noted her hands were trembling. But the first hurdle was quickly passed. Lewis hadn’t thought to withhold his number.
Vivien stabbed at the buttons again.
After eight rings, a girl’s voice, very young, announced, “Hi, this is Scavengers. Can I help?”
Vivien asked for Lewis.
“Sorry, he’s out. Do you want to leave a message?”
Vivien faltered. All this while, standing here, she kept looking over her shoulder at the quiet sun-and-shadow hall.
“No. It’s all right, thank you.”
What a liar she was. It was far from all right.
Anyway, what would she have said to Lewis? Listen, I know you’re a gossip, your friend and business associate Connor told me so. So tell me what you wanted to before. Now I really need to know.
Something made a sound in the eight-sided room.
Vivien jumped.
After a moment, she pushed herself forward. Reaching the room, she stood in the doorway, staring around wide-eyed. But nothing seemed altered. The wine bottle and roses were still lying on the floor.
No, after all, she wouldn’t stay here. Whatever was going on was unbelievable, and deeply threatening. Vivien felt she had had enough.
Her bags were still mostly packed. She shoved back in whatever she had taken out last night. She had to fight with the folding easel. It didn’t want to go.
Thinking of Addie still, however, Vivien made herself do certain things. She replaced the Shakespeare in the bookcase. She cleared up the roses and the bottle, washed the glasses and dried them and put them away in the drinks cabinet of the octagonal room.
Everything she did was punctuated by turning constantly, to look over one shoulder or the other. Nothing happened. It was lulling her.
Outside the windows the summer had opened its generous wings. Birds sang in the private garden and from the public park; traffic murmured. All this informed Vivien she was being silly, had made a mistake.
She couldn’t call last night’s cab firm. Going on how the driver had reacted, they would refuse to send anyone. Two she found in the phone book said they had no cars to spare.
So, after she had checked every bolt and lock, Vivien let herself out of Addie’s flat and trudged with bags and easel towards the nearest tube station. Rather ironically, as she was leaving the square, she thought she actually saw the sunglassed driver from Cwick Cabs shoot past her in an unmarked car. If the recognition was mutual, he paid her no attention—she was now beneath his notice.
The tube was crowded and subject to delays. Altogether it took almost two hours to get back to her flat off the West Camden Road.
Her phone was ringing as she staggered in. She had a wild idea Lewis had found her number in the directory and called her back.
“Yes—Hello…”
“Good morning, and wow! You sound so together and collected,” said Ellie. “Whatever are you at, Vivien Gray?”
“Oh, Ellie—”
“Hey.” Concern sharpened the sparkling tones. “Take it slowly. You’ve really been on my mind. Did I sense something? What’s going down there?”
Vivien seated herself on the floor, her back to the wall, and told Ellie everything, over the blessed miracle of the transatlantic line.
Vivien had eaten lunch and drunk most of a two-liter bottle of water. She sat in the afternoon light, looking out of the window of her hot little front room, away through the traffic fumes, over roofs and between church steeples, to the fashionable end of Camden that lay opposite to her own.
Talking to an Ellie 8:00 a.m. fresh on a New York morning had calmed Vivien and cheered her. But Ellie invariably had this effect. Working as she did in quite a high-powered bookshop in downtown Manhattan, Ellie’s philosophy was deceptively straightforward. On her office wall was pinned a large black square with large pink lettering that read Carpe diem—its unflinching advice slightly offset by the cartoon of someone struggling with a fish, and the yellow print beneath which said, Seize the carp.
But Elliot Leiber did seize the day, every day. She had a gift for it.
“Listen, Vivien,” she had said over the phone. “First of all, what happened back there—I bet it has some ordinary explanation. Things like that—ghosts—maybe they do exist, but they’re never going to hurt you. That’s for books and movies. So even if there is a ghost, it just likes a drop of booze, gets high and spills the roses. Hey, it’s spent all its time in the backyard—what do you expect? House-trained?”
“It bit the flowers’ heads off, Ellie.”
“How d’you know? Maybe they just broke when they hit the floor. It didn’t break the vase, did it? Or the glasses and bottle? As for the photo of Emily—you’re pretty het up, girl. Maybe the likeness is less strong? Though, if you’re right, that could help explain why this guy turned into a monster when he saw you. You must have scared him half to death. Which brings me to this guy.”
Vivien said, “Well, there’s not much I can do now.”
“Oh, you English. Say, Vivien, take off the crinoline. From what you told me the man is drooling over you. Okay, he didn’t have the cheek to just kiss you, but honey, that means he has the guts to realize he acted like a louse before. So he rode off into the sunset. But you’ve got the number of his outfit now. Why don’t you call him?”
“I can’t, Ellie.”
“Chicken.”
“Ellie, he is in some awful trouble—”
“Then, give him some help, why don’t you. Yes, it’s a risk. He may turn on some more of his freeze-out repartee. But you have to take the risk now and then, because if you never jump those high fences, for all the times you jump them and land in the garbage, you are going to miss that one special time you land on the feather bed. And just think who might be sharing that feather bed with you!”
“I just don’t think—”
“Sure. You don’t. Call him.”
“What do I say?”
“Oh my lord—Say, ‘Hi, Connor, are you free for a coffee, a drink, a kiss?”’
“He will say no. To all three.”
“Right, it stinks. But what have you lost? Your dignity? Suppose he says yes?”
Vivien diverted the conversation after that. Ellie let her. They talked about other subjects for a laughing, dollar-eating half hour before Ellie had to hang up and go to work.
Sitting in her own front room, Vivien knew she wasn’t going to call Connor Sinclair. She didn’t have the courage.
On the other hand, she was going to call Lewis.
It was true, the…ghost hadn’t hurt her. If it was Patrick Aspen Sinclair…trapped in a marble statue…
