by Sarah Rayne
She made her way to the bus station, taking the short cut the chemist had described, and it was just as she was halfway along Farthing Alley, which was not quite an alley but not quite a street either, that she saw Great-uncle Matthew. He was coming out of a tall, slightly seedy-looking house with furtively curtained windows and he was in company with another man whom Selina recognised as the other governor who usually gave Uncle Matthew a lift to the hospital meetings. They both looked a bit flushed of face and bright of eye and they were laughing together in a sly way that was so completely unlike Great-uncle Matthew that Selina had to look twice to make sure it was not his double.
But it was not. He was wearing his dark overcoat and the paisley scarf he had put on that morning, and carrying the rolled-up umbrella with the horse’s head handle. As she watched, the other man said something, fruitily, jokingly, and pointed, and Great-uncle Matthew looked down, and fumbled with a button on his trousers, and they both laughed again.
Selina was not entirely clear what the house with the peeling façade might be, but whatever else it was, it was certainly not the boardroom of Stornforth’s Hospital governors.
She thought about the house and Great-uncle Matthew’s curious behaviour all the way home on the jolting bus, staring through the window so that she would not have to look at him, so that she would not keep seeing that sly gleam and that furtive buttoning of his trousers.
Great-uncle Matthew did not think that Selina had balanced things out nicely by buying the Spruce soap from the unknown chemist’s shop at all.
Once they were home and Selina had made a pot of tea, he asked to see a list of her purchases and the receipts, just as he always did. He took them off to his study to check, and was shocked to his toes at the cost of the Spruce soap. He came into the kitchen where Selina was seeing to the fish they were having for supper, because Great-uncle Matthew could never stomach a large supper after eating lunch in the hospital dining room. While Selina was trimming runner beans to go with the fish, he told her she had wasted good money buying such rubbish.
‘I thought I ought to buy something in the shop as a thank you. I thought it would do as a Christmas present for the vicar. And the chemist was so nice, and so helpful. There was the arnica and the crêpe bandage as well. He didn’t charge me for either of those.’
Great-uncle Matthew hoped not indeed. If Selina must needs go stravaiging about Stornforth, falling down in the street, it was only Christian for her to be helped. He would call at the man’s shop the next time he was in Stornforth and thank him personally. That was all that was required, and there had been no need for Selina to go spending money like a drunken sailor.
As he went out of the kitchen, he said, apparently as an afterthought, that it was to be hoped that Selina was not making herself cheap by running after the vicar, as her Great-aunt Flora used to do.
When it was the Stornforth day again, he went off on the eleven-thirty bus as he always did, carrying the leather briefcase he always carried, dressed in his familiar overcoat and the paisley scarf. (Preparing to unbutton his trousers inside that slummy-looking house…?)
There was some cold lamb left over from Sunday’s lunch, so Selina minced it for shepherd’s pie. The dish could stand on the marble slab in the larder, and the potatoes could be added and crisped in the oven for supper later on. Great-uncle Matthew liked shepherd’s pie.
She made herself an early lunch, and washed up afterwards, and then she went upstairs and put on her school mackintosh and a felt hat with a deep brim. The Stornforth buses came through Inchcape several times a day: she would easily catch the two o’clock one.
It felt exciting in a peculiar and slightly disturbing way to be doing this: to be going secretly into Stornforth, and to be wondering what she was going to find inside the seedy old house in Farthing Alley. She kept her mackintosh well buttoned up and her hat pulled down, but even if anyone she knew saw her there was no reason why she should not be in Stornforth.
Farthing Alley was exactly as she remembered it: narrow, slightly run-down old houses that might once have belonged to quite prosperous merchants, but had now fallen into forlorn disrepair. Most of the buildings had grimy windows and doors which needed painting, and several of them had obviously been turned into lodging houses. The house where Selina had seen Great-uncle Matthew was halfway along, and it was larger than she had realised; there were three storeys and the upper windows were all firmly curtained. The vaguely uncomfortable excitement returned. What was going on behind those curtains? Was her uncle in one of those rooms?
There were not many people abroad in Farthing Alley; Selina thought it was not a place where you would linger. You would only come here if you had business of some kind–perhaps in one of the dark, dismal little offices on the ground floor of several of the buildings–and once you had conducted your business you would leave as quickly as possible. Or you would come here if you were unfortunate enough to live in one of the lodging houses with the dusty fig-leaf plants in the windows and the grey net curtains. Or, of course, if you were bound for the large three-storeyed house whose windows had drawn curtains at three o’clock in the afternoon…
No one was around as she went towards it, and the only movement was from a discarded newspaper, flapping in the gutter. Selina kept her eyes on the house. Her heart was still beating too fast, and she felt sticky with sweat under her arms. Did Great-uncle Matthew feel excited like this when he came here? It was difficult to imagine him feeling any emotion other than disapproval.
There was an empty building on the other side of the road with an inset doorway; it smelt of public lavatories and cats but it would provide reasonable concealment. Selina stepped into the doorway, trying not to notice the smell, and waited. She was not sure what she was going to do, but surely at some point someone was going to come out of the house or go into it? And providing she was careful, it ought to be possible to stand forward a bit so that she could see in. As long as it was not Great-uncle Matthew himself who came out, it might even be possible to walk briskly past the house and sneak a good look inside.
But it was a very long time before this happened, and Selina was beginning to think she would have to go back home, because she had got to catch an earlier bus than Great-uncle Matthew’s usual five o’clock one. She had to be back in Teind House when he got home, and look as if she had been there all day.
And then, just as she was thinking she would have to start walking along to the bus station, the door of the house was thrown open, and a group of men stood there talking and laughing. One of them looked like Great-uncle Matthew. Selina pressed back into the empty doorway, her mackintosh collar turned well up. She dared not lean too far forward in case she was noticed, but it would be infuriating if, after all this, she did not see anything.
But she did. The men were not looking into the street at all, and she was able to see straight into the wide hall beyond the open door. There were not only men in the hall; there were females as well. (But hadn’t she expected that?)
Three women were standing in the hall, clearly bidding farewell to Great-uncle Matthew and the two men with him. They wore silk dressing gowns–vivid scarlet or brilliant turquoise–sketchily tied at the waist so that their thighs showed when they walked, and their bosoms were half spilling out. The dressing gowns were nothing like any dressing gown Selina had ever seen: they were thin and clingy, and so revealing the females might almost as well not have bothered to wear them.
It was Great-uncle Matthew, of course; Selina could see him quite clearly. The woman in the scarlet silk gown was standing with him, and she was laughing in what Great-aunt Rosa would have said was a very common way, and even from here Selina could see that she had bright red lipstick on and blue stuff on her eyelids. It made her face look sharp and predatory.
She was smoking a cigarette–Great-uncle Matthew had always said he hated to see a woman smoking; he said it was a sign of very low breeding. He did not like lipstick, either; he said it was vulgar
and only fit for street women, but he did not seem to mind about the cigarette held between the woman’s thin fingers. Her fingernails were enamelled bright red. They looked like claws.
Claws…A shred of deep-buried memory uncurled itself. Thin hungry claws swooping out of a night sky, tearing at soft flesh, digging out eyes…Like a harpy. Selina knew about harpies; they were mythological creatures with the faces of women and the bodies of birds.
Great-uncle Matthew was bending his head to the scarlet-clawed, lipsticked harpy creature, laughing at something she said, and then looking at his watch and tapping it in the way he did when he said that time was getting on. Selina pressed back into the doorway because if he should look up and see her—
He did not look up. The harpy had wound her left arm around his neck, and her other hand slid under his overcoat and down between his legs. There was a burst of laughter from the other men and a shriek of mirth from one of the women, and the harpy said to Great-uncle Matthew, ‘Well, ye’re a randy auld devil,’ in an ugly Glaswegian accent.
None of them noticed Selina scuttling back down Farthing Alley, to catch the four o’clock bus back to Inchcape so that she would be safely home in time to cook the shepherd’s pie for supper.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
For several days after the furtive visit to Stornforth Selina felt quite ill every time she looked at her uncle. It was not that he seemed any different; in fact one of the grotesque things about the whole affair was that he looked and acted precisely as he always did.
The difference was within Selina herself. She kept seeing the falling-open scarlet silk dressing gown of the blowsy, sleazy woman, and she kept seeing the red-tipped hand that was really a claw sliding in between her uncle’s thighs.
She kept seeing the two of them together in a bed as well, Great-uncle Matthew’s trousers folded over a chair, his mouth smeary with lipstick from where he had kissed the woman’s jam-coloured mouth, his scrawny legs embarrassingly naked as he pressed his body up against her…
It was still only the late 1950s, and enlightened sex education was a thing of the future. The girls at Inchcape’s little school had been given the basic details about menstruation by an embarrassed but determined district nurse whose task it was to travel from school to school to talk to thirteen-year-olds, and then to return to tell the fifteen-year-olds how babies were conceived. It was not the nurse’s fault that by that time most of her audience had gleaned the necessary information from older sisters or cousins anyway, and passed it on to their friends, and it was certainly not her fault that the information she imparted was often surprisingly different from the whispered, giggled-over details exchanged in the playground or on the edge of the hockey field.
Selina had listened to the nurse’s talks along with the others, keeping her eyes fixed on the ground because it was dreadful, it was the most embarrassing thing in the world, to have to hear words and descriptions like that. ‘First the man has to be aroused…’ ‘Here is a diagram…’ ‘Here is what happens at the moment of conception…’
The woman in Farthing Alley had called Great-uncle Matthew a randy auld devil. Had he done that with her? It was worlds and light years away from the act described by the impassive-faced nurse and depicted by the carefully characterless diagrams, but when you boiled it down it was exactly the same thing. First, the man has to be aroused…Here is a diagram…This is what her body looks like…This is what his body looks like…
It was horridly easy to see the enamelled claws stroking that body, and to imagine the harpy crouching over Great-uncle Matthew, waiting for the moment when she would tear into his flesh with her claws. And all the while, the common voice whispering coaxingly that he was a randy auld devil…
Great-uncle Matthew, who drank a brew of senna pods twice a week to help his recalcitrant bowels, and who frowned if the clock in the hall lost time and tsk-ed if Selina tuned the wireless to the Light Programme—This was the man who was a randy auld devil who went to bed with prostitutes and harpies–who paid them to let him do those things to them. (First the man has to be aroused…)
He paid. After a while, it was this aspect of the whole thing that stuck in Selina’s mind, and kept nibbling at her. Great-uncle Matthew, who complained if the grocery bill was a shilling too much, and insisted that every scrap of leftover food was used up in hash and fishcakes and mulligatawny soup, had paid that woman to go to bed with him. The aunts always used to say that Matthew was careful with money, but in the aunts’ time he had not been as–as obsessional about saving money as he was now. Because he wanted to spend all his money on the harpy-woman? Was that why?
Selina looked up the word ‘harpy’ in the encyclopaedia in her uncle’s study after that extraordinary afternoon. He was in the bathroom and it had been a senna pod night, which meant he would be up there for a while, so it was safe to sneak into his study and find what she wanted. Selina rifled the pages, her heart racing with apprehension in case he came in and caught her, because she was not supposed to touch anything in this room. But she would hear him coming back downstairs; she would hear the creak of the fourth stair where the boards were worn. She flipped the pages over. Surely there would be something—Ah, here it was.
Harpies, said the entry, were monsters from ancient mythology. They had the faces of hags and the bodies and claws of birds. They tormented blind people, snatching their food away or even defecating on it, and cackling delightedly. In some of the myths they lived inside the storm-winds, and helped the storm-winds to sweep mortal travellers down to the underworld. There was an artist’s impression of a harpy; Selina thought you would only have to clothe it in a scarlet gown and paint its claws red for it to look like the woman in Farthing Alley. And if you placed it against a darkling sky on the top of an old black tower on an Indian hillside, would the harpy look any different from the ogre-birds who had eaten dead bodies…?
Directly under the entry was a description of harpy eagles. It explained about the harpy eagle’s predilection for killing animals much larger than itself: young deer, monkeys, sloths. Humans? There was a photograph of a harpy eagle; you could practically interchange it with the drawing of a female harpy in the entry above.
Selina closed the book and returned it to its place on the shelf. Harpies. Great-uncle Matthew was in the clutches of a harpy. Scarlet claws and talons. Greedy harpy-mentality. Not quite one of the ogre-birds who came swooping out of the dark sky and tore at flesh and bone, but near enough to it to be dangerous. That woman would not claw out his eyes or dig out his heart and lungs, but she would bleed him dry of his money.
Selina had never really thought much about money, but she thought about it now. She thought about what might happen if Great-uncle Matthew spent all of his money on the harpy, and about what might happen to Selina herself in that case. Might they have to sell Teind House? And move to another place entirely? Selina was seized with panic at the prospect. Teind had been a haunted place when she was small, it had been haunted by the terrible shades of her parents, but she had found a way to deal with those ghosts; she had created a shrine for them, and it had kept them safely at bay all these years. It did not precisely accord with the Religious Knowledge lessons Selina had learned at Inchcape’s school, but it was not so very different. The important thing was that the shrine seemed to have helped her parents to make their way into the afterlife, and it had stopped them from sneaking and creeping into the house under cover of darkness.
But what if Selina had to live in another house, where she could no longer walk across to the Round Tower and its secret room whenever she wanted, or put flowers in the little crystal vase for her mother, and take a newspaper cutting of foreign events for her father, and what if she had to live somewhere where it would not be so easy to set up another shrine? What if they even went to live in Stornforth itself so that Great-uncle Matthew could be nearer to the harpy?
For a few days Selina considered getting rid of the silly boring old man, but every time she tried to formulat
e a plan to do so, she came up against problems. The aunts had both died when Selina was very young, and their deaths had been thought accidental; it had not occurred to anyone that Selina had had anything to do with them.
But for Matthew to die in an ‘accident’ might make people look at her askance. It might make them start to ask questions. A third accidental death? they might say. Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it? And what about Teind House and the money? Selina thought that any money the aunts might have had would have gone to Great-uncle Matthew, and if anything happened to him it would come to Selina herself. She was not very well up on inheritances and wills, but she was reasonably sure that she would not be allowed to inherit anything in her own right until she was twenty-one. She thought some kind of guardian or trustee might have to be appointed, and the last thing she wanted was someone snooping and prying and telling her what to do, and perhaps even finding the shrine. It was not to be thought of, and neither was murdering Great-uncle Matthew; or, to be precise, it was not to be thought of for the next four years, until Selina was safely twenty-one.
But something had got to be done.
Selina went over and over the problem in her mind, but it was several weeks before she found the answer.
In the way of such things, the solution came to her when her mind was concentrating on something else altogether, and by a quirk of coincidence it happened on the day of a delivery from Mackenzie’s.
It was only six weeks after the astonishing, disgusting afternoon in Farthing Alley, but there were only three weeks to Christmas, and normally Selina would have gone along on the Stornforth trip because there were extra things to order for the holiday, along with the normal tea and coffee and sago and porridge oats. She would have enjoyed seeing Stornforth with the festive lights in the shops and the decorated tree in the little market square. She would have eaten her modest lunch in the friendly little café, and she might have spoken to Neil Mackenzie if he was in the shop and heard how the plans for the Kenyan trip were going.
