But one day, four weeks into his latest trip, there was no letter. There had been letters, as usual, on each of the previous days. Sometimes only a postcard dashed off in haste, but there was always something, to let me know I was in his thoughts, and that he wished he was here with me. That first day with no post from Antony was very strange. A step had been missed. There was a gap in the normal rhythm of life. But, I thought, it was wartime, and Antony was somewhere in Europe, stuck on a train perhaps, or otherwise unable to get to a postbox. No doubt the next day, or certainly in the next two days, there would be a long letter explaining the whole thing, with copious apologies for worrying me.
Next day there was still no letter, nor even a postcard, and the situation two days later was no better. After three days with no word from Antony, I felt a heavy cold stone deep inside me. I had words with the postmaster. I hardly ate. I took long agitated walks around the estate. Sleep became a stranger. Indeed, I hated going to bed (too many reminders of Antony), and if I slept at all I slept on sofas in the drawing room, in front of the fire.
Each morning the local postman would come to our door with the day’s post at around ten o’clock. My entire day revolved around the postman’s arrival. When, sometimes, he was as little as ten minutes late, I would be found waiting, heart racing, smoking thin cigars too quickly, nervous as a foolish schoolgirl despite my great pains to look calm and detached, next to the post slot in the house’s main door, prepared to intercept the day’s post as quickly as possible. The house staff, including Weatherton, the aged butler, tolerated this as they tolerated my other peculiar ways. The younger maids sometimes confided that they wished they had a gentleman who would write as faithfully and frequently as “Sir”. These were strange encounters for me: I could never recall a time when anything about my life had been the envy of anyone. Antony’s letters were always necessarily vague about what he was doing each day, but always vivid and specific enough when it came to what he was thinking about, and longing for.
But when that day came with no letter from Antony, and when the silence continued, first for days, and then weeks, with no word, no message — and when spending hours and hours, and days and days, going over the endless published lists of men killed or missing in action yielded no trace of him —
My life no longer made sense. When six weeks had passed, with no word of any sort, and I entered the time when ordinarily Antony would be home from his trip, my life broke open. I went over all his previous letters, searching for traces and clues, hidden signals and signs that something “funny” was going on, something he’d tried to tell me. I imagined terrible, mad things, things I dared not mention to anyone. The house staff were very kind, but did not know what to do with me. I did not know what to do with me, either. How could my husband simply disappear? I knew — everyone knew — that from time to time people did sometimes, for no apparent reason, simply vanish. Their families and friends would be left with nothing but a frustrated, endless ache inside them. Some of these later turned up dead, often murdered. But there were some who never reappeared. I was familiar from popular accounts and newspaper reports that such things happened. But they did not happen to me. They did not happen to people like Antony. He was assured. He knew the Continent of old. He spoke several languages fluently. He had money. He was not the sort of person simply to go missing like this. Therefore, I believed, or at least mostly believed, he must be dead. But if he had died, why had there been no word from the War Office?
The telegram from the War Office arrived the next afternoon. Antony had been missing — which was to say I had received no word from him — for almost two months. In those two months I had gone from a young woman simply missing her husband to a woman losing her mind. I had been sleeping too little, eating hardly at all, and I was wasting away. Almost two months. The time had dragged, yet it had also flown. It was confounding. The world was confounding.
I buried Antony in the Black family estate’s modest graveyard, amongst his ancestors. The weather was good; it did not rain.
I felt like a frame of film stuck in a projector’s gate, burning, charring and bubbling away to nothing. Time stopped. People whirred and hummed around me, doing things, arranging things, providing things. I observed it all, but saw nothing.
I slept too much. Sometimes I slept for three or four days. Sometimes I did not bathe for more than a week. For some reason the house staff allowed all this. I ate little.
It never occurred to me to lose myself in drink; I don’t know why.
One day, during a rare bath, it occurred to me to lie back and inhale the water. It could not hurt more than I already hurt, though what I felt was as close to a vacuum of feeling as I could imagine. It was a fire that burned cold. So I lay back in the water, and felt it rise up over the hollow planes of my face, over my lips, down my ears, up my nose. My hair drifted around my face like seaweed. Distantly, I heard traces of sound from the rest of the house: parts of voices; the flat crack of a dropped dinner plate; a private moment of laughter. My heart boomed like artillery. Soon I would need air. Through my hair, I could see the wavering image of the ceiling moulding and the antique light fittings. The ceramic of the tub pressed against my arms, my back, my legs. All I would need to do, if I were to do it, would be to inhale. Simply breathe it in, as if it were that first fragrant waft of morning coffee.
My heart boomed faster. Tension gathered in my belly.
Opening my mouth, water flooded in. I took my fatal breath. Never afraid in life to do something wholeheartedly, I took a deep breath.
The coughing! The panic! Suddenly I was sitting up, water streaming from my skin, and I was coughing up water, coughing to the point of vomiting. Weatherton appeared. I heard him calling out orders to the staff. He helped me out of the bath, even as I bent double, barely able to stand for the coughing. The taste of bathwater and bile shook me like nothing else had for a long time.
Later, I sat in the kitchen, shivering in a dressing-gown and slippers, wrapped in a thick woollen blanket, clutching in shaking hands the hottest cup of disgustingly sweet tea in all Christendom, while the local doctor, one Barbara Witcham, went over me from top to bottom. Weatherton supervised the rest of the household staff out in the hallway. Dr Witcham looked at me with sensible grey eyes. “You do know how lucky you were today, don’t you?”
I sipped my tea. My throat hurt.
“When was the last time you weighed yourself, Mrs Black?”
I never weighed myself. There was never any need.
Dr Witcham produced a hand mirror. She held it up so I could see my face.
Who was this person who looked like a starving Dickensian waif?
She arranged for me to stay at a certain health spa on the south coast for three months. The weather was mild; the view of the sea crashing against the rocky cliffs was unmatched; the sight of sea birds hovering in the cool updraughts was marvellous. They let me eat whatever I wanted — as long as I ate something, and as long as I kept it down. Others stayed there, too. Some told me about their “cases”; others did not, and spoke only about the weather. I read silly popular novels. I worked on crossword puzzles. I stared out the windows for hours and hours at a time, watching the sea.
The three months was not nearly enough time, but it was enough to get going. I bathed regularly, and slowly gained weight and shape.
I did not want to go home to the family estate. In my mind the entire property loomed like a vast mausoleum, with a howling Antony-shaped vacuum deep in its black heart.
But back I went. Every day I visited a “friend” of Dr Witcham’s, a Dr Faulkner. We talked. I told him how it felt being back in the house, about the lethal lack of my husband. He told me the feeling would eventually pass, so slowly that I would hardly feel the change. I would never get over it, he said, but I would one day find that it was bearable. The house would feel something like comfortable. Dr Faulkner and I talked a great deal, and not only about Antony. I told him about my surprise on learning that Ant
ony had left me an extraordinary sum of money in his will, and that his life insurance policy was also worth a substantial sum. I had never been poor, but now I was a woman of independent means.
Dr Faulkner asked me one day, as we sat in his cluttered office that smelled a little like a greengrocer’s shop because some of his patients paid in sacks of vegetables or fruit, why I never cried. Caught by surprise, I said, “I just don’t.”
“No, seriously, Mrs Black. I’d like to know.” He leaned forward in his overstuffed and rather disreputable-looking old chair.
I was holding a cup of coffee. Holding it very tightly. “Why do you want to know that?”
“It’s just, it’s a natural part of grieving.”
“I know. I … just … don’t.” I shrugged and affected a cheeky smile.
“Sometimes,” he said, after a long silence, in which he sank back into the comfortable recesses of his huge chair, “sometimes we can be so terrified of the consequences of losing control of our feelings, mmm? That … we keep them under such tight control that we wind up magnifying them. To the point that when they do break out — and they always do — they’re every bit as terrifying as we originally imagined, and even perhaps worse, mmm? Do you see?”
From outside I heard church bells, distant motor traffic. “I’ve been toying, recently, with the notion of becoming a sort of writer,” I said at last, to break the tension.
Dr Faulkner said he thought that sounded like a marvellous idea.
“I’m also thinking, and this is just at the level of being an idea, it’s nothing concrete, with specific plans and so forth, but I’ve also been thinking about leaving Britain.”
“Leaving?” he said, not looking too surprised. “Where would you go? Somewhere in Europe? Perhaps France? Strong literary traditions there.”
I nodded, and said, “Actually, I was thinking about the colonies, possibly Australia.”
He could not have looked more surprised. I smiled.
Again, I looked at the note.
WHO IS REALLY BURIED IN YOUR HUSBAND’S GRAVE?
I needed to sit. The rest of the day’s post could wait. Sally appeared. “Would you like some coffee, ma’am? You look like you could use it, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”
My thoughts were a blur.
Inside, my guts tangled in cold knots.
Sally reappeared, bearing coffee. She set it down on a minute lace doily and went away. I remember the piercing aroma of the coffee.
I kept seeing, in my mind, his burned remains in that temporary casket. The figure had been curled around on itself. The hands and feet were not there. The head was little more than a lump — with the suggestion of teeth.
I remembered saying, “That could be anybody … ”
The words rang in my head like a cracked bell.
Who was this person, this bastard, sending me these notes?
How could he possibly know that I had always, since that day, secretly wondered if that had really been Antony in that casket?
I started to think that the reason I had never cried for Antony was that, in the most secret, most suspicious corners of my heart, I had never believed in his death.
How could this person know that about me, when I had hardly been aware of it myself, until this moment?
How could this person know that and be here in Pelican River?
I checked the envelope. It was the same as the envelope from yesterday. The only difference: today the black swan stamp was the right way up. There was still no return address.
Up and pacing, clutching the note, I was alive with thought. Central in that tangle was this: If those had not been Antony’s remains in that casket, where was he?
17
Wait. Take a deep breath.
I looked at the note again. It was just a question typed out on a small sheet of paper. Despite its eerie specificity, it could all simply be a hoax, or a prank. Most people who knew me well would also know what I knew about Antony’s death, which, it must be said, wasn’t a lot. Thinking about it, it occurred to me that the list of people who could possibly know these things was quite extensive. Newspaper writers of a certain sort would probably have no difficulty extracting this sort of information from my former staff for a modest fee. And it would be exactly the sort of worry that would weigh on anyone’s mind. I had been shown a set of remains so damaged that even dental records were no help. One only knew they were one’s husband’s remains because one had been told so by the War Office. Why, I wondered, would they lie to a grieving widow?
All the same, why now? Antony died twelve years ago. Surely the time for such melodramatic intrigues was back when it was all still fresh, and when I had been in such a very fragile, suggestible state.
Then I thought about the previous note, and its effects on Julia. Somehow all this was tied up with some disturbing supernatural business. It made little sense.
And yet, there was that pool of icy doubt I felt about Antony’s death deep down inside. If only, and I hated to admit this even to myself, because it meant that one day I might be with him again …
I was shivering; I felt sticky. “Sally … ?”
She found me leaning against the karri table, head low, legs trembling. I forget what she said, but she soon organised me into bed. “I’ll call Dr Munz,” she said. Vicky, next to her and looking upset despite her best efforts to maintain professional poise, said, “God, what a day!”
Ignoring Vicky’s outburst, I told Sally not to call the doctor, but I did ask if she would arrange to pick up Gordon from his house.
Sally glanced at Vicky, then said to me, “Pardon me for pointing this out, ma’am, but none of us can drive a motorcar.”
I said, “Oh,” and was about to resign myself to my clammy fate when there was a quiet knock on my bedroom door.
Rutherford, back in his uniform suit, wearing his driving gloves and carrying his goggles, leaned around the door.
Before he could say what I knew he would say, I said, “No, Rutherford. You need your rest. The doctor was very firm.”
“Ma’am,” he said, coming into the room and looking like a reasonable, though pale, facsimile of his former self, “I insist. If I can be of service to you in your hour of need, please allow me to do so.”
It had only been about four hours or so since I had seen him unconscious in the driveway, surrounded by elves. I hesitated. Sally and Vicky said nothing, but looked between Rutherford and me. He added, “Mr Duncombe’s property is not far, and the roads should be quiet at this time of day. If I may be so bold.”
I felt dreadful. Perhaps a visit from Dr Munz would be a better idea, but I wanted to speak with Gordon. Of course, I could have simply telephoned him, but with the telephone one had always to worry about people listening in. With a bit of luck he would have recovered from yesterday’s excesses.
“Very well,” I said, shaking my head. “But you may not hurry, rush or in any way go briskly. There’s no prize for reaching Mr Duncombe’s house in record time. If you need to stop and sit for a while, please take the opportunity to do so. We’ll be fine back here.”
“We will, ma’am,” Sally said with a conviction that did not bear questioning.
In time, Rutherford ducked out of the room. Soon I heard the Bentley rumble to life and the crunch of the tyres on the gravel as he left. I realised I was listening for unexpected interruptions; I was listening for elves. So far, so good.
Sally fetched me a cup of sweet tea. “No coffee?” I said, looking at her.
“This is better for you, ma’am.”
I nodded and behaved like a good patient for her, but in my mind I was thinking that the only thing that would make me feel better right now was the truth about Antony, one way or the other.
If Antony was alive out there somewhere, I would find him.
And I would kill the bastard.
Gordon, when he arrived an hour later, looked better — or at least, less catastrophic. He made all the right noises, inquiri
ng after my condition. I was sitting wrapped in a Hepburn tartan-patterned woollen blanket in the drawing room, enjoying the fire roaring in the fireplace. Neither Gordon nor I spoke of his condition yesterday; indeed, he seemed to be making an effort to seem jaunty, and the effect was rather like a man on stage, playing the part of himself. Gordon asked after Julia’s health, too, and I was pleased to report that she was much improved, thank you for asking, making a pest of herself on the ward, and probably drinking far too much tea.
At length, the staff disappeared and set about their tasks for the afternoon. In their absence, Gordon fell quiet, and peered into his own cup of tea.
“I’ve been talking to Julia, actually,” I said.
“Oh yes?”
“Yes. It transpires she’s on good terms with a certain demon.”
Gordon blinked and looked at me. “I beg your pardon? ”
I explained the conversation I had with Julia about Ukresh Nor.
“I see,” he said, looking thoughtful, staring off to one side. “That’s very interesting.” He pulled out a scrap of notepaper and a pencil stub and made a note of the name, perhaps planning to “look up” Mr Nor in one of his dusty volumes of arcane lore. “Very interesting,” he repeated, speaking to himself, frowning now. “Did Miss Templesmith say anything else about him?”
“Only that they had had a lovely chat whilst she was comatose.” I could scarcely believe what I was saying. It was preposterous!
“My word,” he said, now looking at the floor, deep in thought.
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