Sleep, Pale Sister

by Joanne Harris

  ‘Nor am I ill,’ interrupted Effie once more—and for that moment I believed it: her eyes were as sharp and bright as scalpels—‘In spite of everything you have said and done to prove me otherwise, I am not ill. Please, don’t bother to try to lie to me, Henry. We’re alone in the house; there is no-one for you to perform to but yourself. Try to be honest, for both our sakes.’ Her voice was dry and emotionless, like a governess’s, and for a moment I was twelve again, blustering falsely and naively to try and save myself from punishment, every word fixing my guilt deeper and deeper.

  ‘You have no right to talk to me like that!’ My voice sounded weak even to myself, and I strained to keep the authority in my tones. ‘There are limits to my patience, Effie, even though I make great allowances for your behaviour. You owe me respect as a wife, if nothing else, and—’

  ‘Wife?’ exclaimed Effie, and I was oddly reassured to hear a shrill note creep into her measured tones. ‘Since when did you ever want me to be a wife? If I were to tell what you…’

  ‘Tell what?’ My voice was too loud but it seemed the words were beyond my control. ‘That I’ve nursed you when you were sick, borne your tantrums, given you everything you have ever wanted? I—’

  ‘My Aunt May always said it wasn’t decent for you to marry a girl so much younger. If she knew…’

  ‘Knew what?’

  Her voice was a whisper. ‘Knew how you treat me…and where you go in the middle of the night…’

  ‘You’re raving, girl. Go where, for Heaven’s sake?’

  ‘You know. Crook Street.’

  I gasped. How could she have known? Could someone have recognized me? Could I have been followed? The implications of what she knew flooded over me. It couldn’t be. She was bluffing.

  ‘You’re mad!’

  She shook her head silently.

  ‘You’re mad, and I can prove it!’ Feverishly I reached into my coat pocket, dragging out Russell’s paper. I read it aloud in breathy snatches, sick euphoria coursing through my veins: “‘…that the patient, Euphemia Madeleine Chester…evidence too great to be ignored…mania, hysteria and catalepsy…dangerous to self and to others…hitherto recommend indefinite treatment…hands of…equipped to…” You heard what he said: I can have you sent to an asylum, Effie, an asylum for the insane! No-one will believe an insane woman. No-one!’

  There was no expression on her face, just a terrible blankness. For a moment I wondered whether she had heard me, or whether she had retired once more into her strange unguessed-at thoughts. But when she spoke her voice was very calm.

  ‘I always knew you’d betray me, Henry,’ she said.

  I tried to speak; but after all, she was right: there was no-one to perform to but myself.

  ‘I knew you didn’t love me any more.’ She smiled and for a moment looked almost beautiful. ‘But that’s all right, because I haven’t loved you for a long time.’ She tilted her head as if remembering something. ‘But I won’t let you sacrifice me, Henry. I won’t let you lock me up. I’m not ill and soon enough someone will realize that. Then maybe people will begin to believe what I say.’ She flicked me a glance which seemed ridden with malice. ‘And I could tell them so much, Henry,’ she added levelly. ‘The house in Crook Street and what goes on there…Fanny Miller wouldn’t lie for you, would she?’

  My breath was a mouthful of needles in my throat, my chest tightening unbearably. Suddenly, desperately, I needed my chloral. Heedless of Effie’s triumphant smile I grabbed the vial from around my neck and wrenched out the stopper. With shaking hands I poured ten drops into a glass and topped the glass with sherry. The glass was too full: some of the drink spilled, running down on to my cuff. A sudden, exquisite hatred welled up inside me.

  ‘No-one would believe such an outlandish tale.’ My voice was level again, and my relief was immense.

  ‘I think they might,’ she said. ‘Besides, think of the scandal just as your work is beginning to gain recognition. The very hint that you had tried to put your wife in an asylum to prevent her from exposing your secret vice…it would ruin you. Would you risk that?’

  I thanked whatever dark gods there were for the chloral; already it seemed as if the lid of my head had been lifted and a draught of cold air blown in, reducing my thoughts to the size of motes in the wind. I heard my voice speaking from a great distance.

  ‘My dear Effie, you’re overwrought. I think you should lie down and wait for Tabby to bring your drops.’

  ‘I won’t lie down!’ Realizing her advantage was somehow gone Effie lost her eerie composure and her voice had a sharp edge of hysteria.

  ‘Well, don’t lie down then, dear,’ I replied. ‘Far be it from me to coerce you. I’ll go down and see if Tabby has come back yet.’

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

  ‘Of course I believe you, my dear. Of course I do.’

  ‘I can ruin you, Henry.’ (Her voice wavered even as she tried to control it: ‘ru-in you, H-henry.’) ‘I can and I will!’ But the ghostly figure with the soft, cold voice and the verdigris eyes had gone, and the threat was empty. Tears silvered her face and her hands were shaking. I brushed the paper in my breast pocket and allowed myself the luxury of a smile.

  ‘Sleep well, Effie.’

  And, as I turned away into the gaslit passage, I felt a clenched fist tighten beneath my ribcage; tightening joyfully, cruelly. I’d never let her touch us, Marta and me. Never.

  I’d see her dead, first.

  I arrived at Crook Street twenty minutes late with the throat of the storm funnelled at my back. There was snow on the cobbles, melting into the winter rubbish to form a thick, oily sludge which made the hackney’s wheels slip and skid on the corners. I was oddly serene in spite of the evening’s confrontation with Effie—I had taken a second dose of chloral before setting off.

  With Marta at my journey’s end Effie was hardly in my mind: tomorrow I would arrange for her to be taken to a good nursing-home at some distance from London where no-one would listen to her ravings—and if they did, my exemplary public life would surely exonerate me from all suspicion: she was, after all, only a woman, and an artist’s model at that. I might be pitied for the failure of my marriage, but I would not be blamed. Besides…she was ill. Maybe more ill than any of us thought. On a night like this I felt that almost anything might happen.

  The door of Number 18 fanned open in a quarter of rosy light; shaking off morbid thoughts, I entered, leaving a trail of frozen mud behind me on the doorstep. Fanny was in magnolia silk and zephyr gauze; looking absurdly virginal, like a young bride, and I wondered uneasily about the limitless powers of women to appear as men wish to see them. Even Marta.

  Even Marta.

  What bleak secrets did her perfect flesh conceal?

  Wordless, I followed Fanny’s whispering train to the very eaves of the house: the attics, the box-rooms. As I realized where she was leading me I felt a sudden horror, as if she might throw open the door of the little attic bedroom to reveal the same scene; the toys on the floor, the white bed, the flowers on the bedstand and that whore’s child naked beneath her nightdress, unchanged but a little pale after all those years in her dark vault, holding out her arms and calling out to me in Marta’s blurred voice…

  My own voice was brittle as icing: ‘Why do I have to go right up here? Why can’t we go into one of the parlours?’

  Fanny ignored my incivility. ‘This is Marta’s own room, Henry,’ she explained reasonably. ‘She especially asked for you to be brought up here.’

  ‘Oh.’ My words were a tangle of wires in my mouth. ‘I…if she doesn’t mind, I’d rather not…isn’t it rather gloomy up here? And cold. It’s very cold in this part of the house. Maybe…’

  ‘The room is Marta’s choice,’ replied Fanny inexorably. ‘If you were to snub her in this, I don’t think she would accept to see you again.’

  ‘Oh.’ There was nothing more to say. I tried a jovial smile which felt more like a grimace. ‘I…I hadn’t
quite understood. Certainly, if Marta…’

  But Fanny had already turned away, her train dragging on the stairs. The floor looked as if no-one ever disturbed the dust by their passage. I looked at the door, almost expecting to see the blue-and-white enamel knob of my mother’s dressing-room. I shook the thought away before it could reach my precarious chloral-induced self-control. What nonsense. There was no blue-and-white knob, no pale little whore’s child with dark accusing eyes and chocolate around her mouth; there was only Marta, Marta, Marta, Marta…I put my hand on the knob, noticing the chipped white paint revealing the spectres of underlying layers…green, yellow, red…but not blue, I thought triumphantly, not blue. And beside my hand against the paint I saw the prints of small fingers, as if a child had paused there, pressing a palm and three fingers against the panels…Marta?

  Even her hands could not be that small. And the marks, sticky, blurred impressions, fresh against the white. Could they be…chocolate?

  My self-control collapsed. I screamed and pushed against the door with all my strength. It did not open. There was no room in my mind for thought: an insane logic compelled me, a sudden conviction that after all these years, this was how God intended me to pay for what I had done to the whore’s child…to pay with Marta. The image was dreadfully plausible to my disordered brain: the whore’s child with her hand on the door, listening; entering to find Marta waiting for me. Leaving again, her revenge taken…and Marta still waiting with her dress pulled up over her face…

  I screamed again and began to pound against the panels with my bruised fists. ‘Marta! Marta! M-m…’

  Then the door opened into darkness. My momentum carried me into the room and crashed me against the far wall as the door swung shut behind me. For a moment the darkness was absolute and I continued to scream, certain now that the ghostchild was in the room with me, so cold, so white, and still wanting her story.

  A light flared. For a moment I was blinded, then I saw her standing by the window, the lamp in her hand. My relief was so great that I almost passed out, great black blooms patterning my vision.

  ‘Marta.’ I tried to keep the relief from my voice. ‘I…I’m sorry. I’m…not quite myself today.’ I grinned weakly.

  ‘As a matter of fact, Mr Chester, neither am I.’ Her smile was small and mischievous, her voice a whisper of hay and summer sky. ‘Perhaps we both need a drink.’

  As she poured the drinks I watched her, feeling my heartbeat slow to almost normal, and before long I was able to look around.

  The room was quite bare. A narrow bed with a white coverlet, a bedstand with a ewer and basin, a small table and a shabby armchair were all the furnishings there and, by the light of the single lamp, everything looked all the more bleak. There were no rugs on the bare boards, no pictures on the walls, no curtains. And today Marta herself was like her room, dressed in a plain white nightgown, barefoot, with her hair loose and partly shielding her face. For a moment I began to feel uneasy once more—the similarities to that other night were too strong—as if this, too, were another of her disguises designed to push me off-balance into permanent insanity. But when she put her arms around me she was warm and lightly scented with simple, childish fragrances: soap and lavender and something sweet like liquorice; she who had overwhelmed me with heady, exotic sensations was now the most elementary of juvenile seductresses, a shy, eager virgin of fourteen, delightfully untutored, painfully sincere.

  And of course I knew that this, too, was one of her disguises: the essential Marta was as unknown to me now as it had ever been. But I gave myself up to the illusion of tenderness, and as we lay like children in each other’s arms she whispered a little story into my ear: the story of a man who falls in love with a dead woman’s portrait, who buys it and hides it in his attic for fear his wife might ask questions. Every day he visits the portrait, growing more and more melancholy, unable to give up the pleasure he feels gazing upon it. His wife begins to suspect and one day she follows him up into his secret place and watches him as he sits in front of the portrait. Seized with jealousy she waits until he has gone, then she takes a knife and goes up to the hated picture, meaning to slash it to pieces. But the picture is haunted by the soul of the dead woman and, as her rival comes at her with the knife, she leaps at her. There is a struggle, but the ghostwoman has the strength of desperation. The poor wife is driven shrieking out of her body into chaos and the ghostwoman, taking the other’s life for herself, calmly goes down the stairs to join her new lover.

  I shivered as the story ended. ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Marta?’ I asked.

  I felt her nod against my bare skin, and I thought she laughed softly. The laugh made me uneasy, and it was with a touch of anger that I replied: ‘There are no ghosts. People don’t come back to haunt the living. I don’t believe people go anywhere after they’re dead.’

  ‘Not even Heaven?’

  ‘Especially not Heaven.’

  ‘So…’ Her voice was teasing: ‘You’re not afraid of the dead?’

  ‘Why should I be afraid? I’ve nothing to be ashamed of.’ My face was burning and I wondered whether she could feel it. ‘I don’t want to talk about this.’

  ‘All right.’ Her acceptance was childlike. ‘Then tell me about your day.’ I laughed outright at that: hearing that wifely phrase in her mouth!

  ‘No, tell me,’ she insisted.

  So I told her: perhaps more than I intended. She was soft and childish in my arms, silent but for occasional little sounds of acquiescence. I told her about Effie and how I had come to dread her; my almost superstitious feeling of being a ghost in my own home; my decision to remove Effie to an asylum where she would no longer be a threat; my conviction that she could destroy me. Effie knew about us now—though how she knew I could not imagine—Effie, the enemy, the silent watcher from the shadows, the ghostchild…the ghost. Effie, who should have stayed asleep, who should have died: Effie, who should have been dead…

  After a while I forgot I was talking to Marta but imagined myself instead before God’s throne, bargaining desperately with Him in His sublime and stupid indifference, bargaining for my life…

  I had no right: I know that now. I took Effie before she was even old enough to understand what love was. I cheated her of her own chance at happiness. I twisted her to suit my own twisted appetites, then cut her away when I tired of her.

  I know what I am.

  And yet, with Marta in my arms, feeling the soft moisture of her breath against my skin, I seemed to glimpse another possibility, one which raised the hairs on my arms in a delicate, ecstatic self-loathing. The words I had spoken to Marta rang on in the hollow of my skull, sweet and taut as the invisible harp behind my eyelids:

  ‘There are no ghosts. People don’t come back to haunt the living. I don’t believe people go anywhere after they’re dead.’ I realized I had repeated the words aloud, interrupting the flow of agonized self-analysis. But I could not remember a word of what I had spoken.

  Marta was watching me, appraising. Her face was stone. ‘Henry.’

  Suddenly I knew what she was going to say and I flinched, caught in the beam of her deathly gaze. I began to speak, not caring what I was saying, anything to prevent her from speaking the words, the word I could hear resonating pitilessly…

  ‘Henry.’

  I turned. She was inescapable.

  ‘Do you remember the day you told me you loved me?’

  I nodded mutely.

  ‘You made me a promise. Did you mean it?’

  I hesitated. ‘I…’

  ‘Did you mean it?’

  ‘Yes.’ My head was pounding, my mouth flooded with a sourness like raw gin.

  ‘Listen to me, Henry.’ Her voice was low, compelling, intimate as death. ‘You don’t love her any more. You love me now. Don’t you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘For as long as she’s there I’ll never be yours. You’ll always have to hide. Always come in secret.’

  My breath fluttered t
hrough dry lips in an unspoken half-protest, but the terrible purity of her gaze silenced me.

  ‘You say she knows about us already: she knows she can ruin you. Even to lock her up—if you could do it—might not be enough. She might talk, might make people listen. Do you think her family wouldn’t believe her? There’d be a scandal, whether they did or not. Mud would stick, Henry.’

  ‘I…’ The knowledge of what she was going to say was like a wall of rushing fire in my brain. What was worse, I wanted her to say it, to loose the wolves inside my skull. Sweet Scheherazade! My head swam deliriously. She was talking about murder: she was talking about silencing Effie for ever…

  For a moment I gave myself entirely up to the images which fluttered through my mind and discovered within myself a kind of arousal at the thought of murder; a feeling so intense that it almost eclipsed my longing for Marta…then Marta’s enchantment reasserted itself and I flung my arms around her, burying my face in the sweetness and softness of her, the scent of lilac and chocolate…I think I was crying.

  ‘Oh, Marta…’

  ‘I’m sorry, Henry. I really have loved you, and you’ll never know what these nights together have meant to me…’

  From my abyss I felt my mind questioning frantically; what did she mean? It almost sounded as if…

  ‘…but after this I know that we can’t see each other again. I…’

  The numbness dropped over all my senses like a frozen blanket. Only the small helpless voice in my mind kept repeating stupidly: this is goodbye, this isn’t what she was meant to say, this is…No! It couldn’t be that! This wasn’t the word I was expecting from her! This wasn’t the promise I wanted to keep. Hysteria welled up in me. From a great distance I could hear my own voice beginning to laugh; a screaming, shrilling laughter like a mad clown’s.

  ‘No! No! Anything for you…anything…everything…’ The most terrible thing. ‘It doesn’t have to be this…’ O my Marta, my cold Gethsemane…‘I’ll do anything!’