by Lee, Tanith
‘No.’
‘Silly. Silly, silly girl. Make us some tea.’
She stood on the bus home. The vehicle was full of excited escapees.
The shop shut half an hour earlier on Saturday in order to allow Mr Gerard, also, and his employee the chance to rush away to a bacchanal. But she doubted he had one any more than she did. Mr Gerard remained as thankful a mystery to her as she remained a provoking mystery to him. He lived with a wife near Kennington. She could only visualize a Mrs Gerard who was a female version of Mr, in a Fair Isle woolly or sweaty dress and cardigan, eating custard creams or reading pieces out of papers over the telephone.
The fog hung on the green as intensely as ever, but Rachaela did not anticipate the man. She did not know what she looked for. Something unpleasant.
In the flat as she drank a glass of wine, the other half of Friday’s bottle, the door sounded.
No one called on Rachaela.
She thought of some sort of emergency. Perhaps an accident had happened in the street. She might not have heard a squealing of brakes over the storm of Beethoven, not to mention the rock music from the flat below.
‘Hallo?’
‘Miss Day?’
She did not recognize the voice, isolated and tinny in the receiver.
‘What do you want?’
‘Miss Day, this is Mr Soames of Lane and Soames. I wonder if you would be good enough to let me in.’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘But Miss Day, I’ve come out of my way to see you on this very urgent matter. It is an urgent matter, Miss Day—’
‘No, Mr Soames, I’m not interested.’
‘My client, Mr Simon, has authorized—’
‘Good-bye, Mr Soames.’
The door sounded three more times after she had replaced the entry-phone.
Rachaela paced her tiny room. Upstairs a tinier bedchamber, and a cupboard converted to a bathroom—this minuscule, expensive flat that mostly her mother’s savings had enabled her to choose, and when they were gone, what?
Perhaps it was money Mr Soames offered.
Money was remote to Rachaela. She partly feared it, it carried responsibilities, it caused such trouble and damage. But then.
The phone no longer made noises.
Mr Soames had gone away.
On Sunday she had a long bath, in the afternoon, with a radio play on.
She shaved her legs, as she did every third day, and the slender under-pits of her arms. She washed her hair, as every third day she washed it, and left it to dry in the artificial Africa of two electric bars. These habits were her own. As a child, her mother had washed her hair every fortnight.
Outside a fine drizzle penetrated the yellow fog.
She had a lamb chop for dinner and thought as she ate it of the beautiful white curled creature it had been. This did not sicken her, only made her sorrowful. She enjoyed the meat of the lamb even in some way more because she liked what it had been and pitied it.
She had once in her teens tried to become a vegetarian, but she had vomited and bent double with terrible pains in her stomach for weeks. She gave it up.
Her mother had mocked both her attempt and its failure. She had dragged Rachaela to a dish of burnt fish fingers. ‘Stop all this bloody nonsense.’
Her mother had had to bring her up alone.
She was thinking of her mother too much.
It did not hurt, but it unsettled her.
She had never said goodbye to her mother, that was the difficulty, perhaps. The freedom had only been spontaneous. Perhaps she should have kissed the embalmed corpse farewell, on the brow, as in one of the more sensitive old-fashioned horror films. The embalming had not looked like her mother. Something had gone wrong and they had pushed her mother’s rather large stomach up into the chest so that she appeared stout and matronly in a way that, in life, she never had. The rouge on her cheeks was patchy. Not dead but sleeping—no: decidedly dead.
She missed the cat, which had been used to sitting on the edge of Rachaela’s bath, sometimes pawing the water in surprise. Or on the table, decorous, begging for nothing.
Perhaps she should find a more lucrative job. Where? Who would take her on? She had no experience. She was twenty-nine. Should she work in a wine bar now? She thought of the noise and the hustling, the broken glasses and drunks. No, the bookshop was safe. It had paid for the chop.
Rachaela sighed.
Beyond the curtains the fog was giving way. She could see across the green to a gaudy Sunday bus moving sluggishly westward.
On Monday morning Rachaela walked down a clear grey Lizard Street and up to the black lions. She entered the building and went to the reception desk. Three minutes later she was in the efficient lift which tore her up into the building’s cranium.
Without the fog, it was possible to see, from a window, the bookshop cowering under its dirty roof five storeys down. It was dwarfed.
Mr Soames’s secretary greeted her brightly and took her at once into the office, like a valued client.
It was a sombre glassy room, whose window looked towards the park. On the trees there was one last faint wraith of lingering fog. The screen was gone. The hunter out in the open.
‘‘I’m here,’ said Rachaela.
‘Yes indeed. Let me say how glad I am that you reconsidered.’
‘It got rather frantic, didn’t it? Your call. That little man in the overcoat and wool hat.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know who that can be,’ said Mr Soames smoothly. He had never had eyes, only glasses. All his face had succumbed to them. ‘Won’t you sit?’
Rachaela sat in the leather chair. It did not please her to think it had once been a black bull rushing over tindered meadows. Maybe it was only a clever plastic.
She sat with her hands together, her legs crossed. Her heart beat uncomfortably, but Mr Soames seemed more nervous than she.
‘Miss Day—first of all, I believe that your name was, until a short while ago, something other. Am I correct?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘I don’t like to stress this, but my clients, the Simons, made rather a point of it. Your mother—a Miss Smith. And your father—well, these things happen.’
Rachaela waited.
Mr Soames twitched at his cack-handedness.
‘The Simons are a connection of your father’s family. Cousins, I believe.’
Rachaela waited. Her mother had never mentioned cousins, only the Scarabae family, obscure and artistic, darkly ominous, somewhere out of the city, inaccessible, wielding a whip of intent. ‘He never stayed with me because they would keep on and on at him.’ But of course he had never stayed with her because she had conceived Rachaela. Strange she had never flung that in Rachaela’s face. It would have been like her.
‘—And even after all this time, hope that you will be willing to visit them.’
She had not been attending.
‘Visit them? These Simons?’
‘Yes, just so. I have to tell you, Miss Day, a moneyed family.’
‘Is the name Simon?’
‘Yes, Miss Day.’
‘Then I don’t understand what they have to do with me.’
‘Perhaps you should agree to see them. Then you’ll discover. As I say, they’re prepared to pay your travelling expenses.’
She had not listened, and so did not know to where she was intended to travel.
‘I find all this very peculiar. I find it suspicious.’
Mr Soames was ringing for a file.
‘I shall show you the correspondence, Miss Day.’
She did not want to see it. She felt no curiosity. She felt threatened.
Their name was not Simon, and God knew where they lived or why they wanted to find her but it made no sense, this coincidence of the solicitors being so adjacent. Unless surely they had tracked her down previously, and then placed their business with the firm of Lane and Soames to give it a spurious orderliness and a handy quality. Easy to nab her when she was only nex
t door—it had been perfect for them. And that other one was their agent.
The file came with the glowing cerise-clawed secretary. She teetered in and out as if high on something.
‘The name,’ Rachaela said again. ‘Is it actually Scarabae?’
Soames did not twitch or flinch. He was impervious, a little irked.
‘The name I have is Simon, Miss Day.’
He opened the file before her and indicated a lengthy correspondence, lots of long sheets with neat dates and slightly faulty typing, and handwritten letters on featureless white paper. Rachaela could not read handwriting of any kind. Probably its intimacy repelled her. She glanced at the indecipherable address on the handwritten sheets and raised her brows, trying to convey to Soames an air of sensible concentration. She was not responding as he wanted. She felt cornered. The leopard was prowling round the room.
Had she always been afraid these people would one day reach out for her? Why was the idea so dreadful—for it was, it was horrific. Her mother had always maligned them but knew nothing of them. They had been a shadow at the back of her lover, she conveniently blamed them for his desertion. To the child she must have told horror stories now too recessed and entrenched to come forward to the light, embedded like black fossils in Rachaela’s subconscious. For she was afraid of the tribe of the Scarabae.
‘No, Mr Soames. I’m very sorry. I don’t think your clients are being honest, either with you or with me. If they’re relatives of my father’s there’s really no reason for them to be interested in me. I never knew him. I can’t help them. That’s all I have to say.’ Rachaela got up. ‘I hope now that I’ll be left in peace.’
‘I regret you take this view, Miss Day.’
He was pedantic and huffy, he had lost.
Rachaela went out and passed by the secretary who flooded into a terrifying fake smile all teeth and lipstick.
The lift descended.
It was raining in the street.
I must shrug it off now. But she could not. The leopard, invisible in light as in murk, still followed at her heels.
‘You’re late, Rachaela,’ said Mr Gerard. Three quarters of an hour. It’s too much. I had a rush, ten people, and where were you?’
‘I went to see Lane and Soames.’
‘Any joy?’ cried Mr Gerard.
Rachaela loathed the expression but expected nothing else of him.
‘There’s been a mistake,’ she said. The people are no one to do with me.’
‘What a pity. Hard luck.’
That week Rachaela continued in her usual way, moving between the bookshop and her flat, doing her slight shopping, eating at the little snack bar, going once to the cinema to see a colourful cruel film which bored her. She bought three books, some shampoo, toothpaste, and oranges, and over all the scent of the leopard was borne to her nostrils. It was still there.
She sensed a tightening cord like a string overwound on a guitar.
She could not appreciate the music which she heard. The noises heard from the neighbouring flats irritated her, and one night there was a party which went on until four in the morning, and she lay wakeful and could not read, the words jumping away under her eyes, the centres of sentences missing.
In the shop she had begun to dislike the entry of any customer. She expected the man in the overcoat or even the fool from the solicitors, or even Soames in person. For some reason she did not visualize one of the awful tribe of the Scarabae. No, they carried on their business from afar. That unknown country written so finely and illegibly on the white paper.
I am waiting for something more.
But what? What could happen. She had refused. It was finished.
On Friday morning she found a letter for herself on the dusty table, one of six identical envelopes from the landlord. Opening this letter she learned that the street was to be widened or renovated or turned inside out in some way. That in six months she would have to find alternative accommodation.
She did not think in terms of coincidence, or even now of destiny. She felt a wave of fright. She stood with her pale hands knotted below her pale face. The complications of the situation, rather than her loss, appalled her.
Then she went to work, late, for she had missed the bus, and Mr Gerard drew her back into the musty inner room.
‘Rachaela, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to let you go.’
She almost laughed at the exquisite counterbalance of her woes.
‘You mustn’t think it’s anything to do with your, well, your rather erratic timekeeping. We’ve rubbed along all right. Trouble is, this place doesn’t pay. I’ve been thinking about it some time. Saw the old accountant yesterday. No other thing I can do.’
He offered her a biscuit by way of consolation and she took it.
She imagined the agent of the leopard coming in to Mr Gerard with a silken knife, threatening him. She thought perhaps agents had set to work on the landlord of the flats.
She bit the biscuit and ate its tastelessness.
‘Stay on the month. I’ll give you an extra month in lieu, anyway. I realize it’s a bit much. You’ve been here a year, haven’t you? I’ll miss you.’
She knew he lied, that secretly he was glad to tread on her spine. All those times he had tried to learn things about her and she had not let him. All the jokes she had not giggled at, the untrue rushes of book-buying customers she had missed by being late. Her lack of apology.
He was well rid of her.
But what was she to do?
She knew what she was supposed to do. It was quite obvious. The leopard sat there, awaiting her, its inky form wrapped in a garment of fog and night.
She picked up a fragile broken book, a dead black moth. Opening its pages she read: ‘Her heart lifted at the prospect of this happy reunion.’ And shivered. It was inevitable, and had been so from the first. She would have to give in.
None of the other tenants communicated with Rachaela about the proposed dissolution of their homes. Perhaps they did not care. Two of the flats changed hands regularly, and even the rock music enthusiast had only been installed a few months. She had previously avoided contact with all of them. But they would probably know themselves as defenceless in the face of bureaucracy as she judged herself to be.
She went into work on time, and did not linger over her lunch hours now. She was scrupulous.
Mr Gerard crowded her at the till. He had come out of hiding to serve the customers, to get used to it. He no longer made his telephone calls, but he ate vast quantities of biscuits. As the week ended and the end of the month drew near, Mr Gerard became embarrassed, making awful little extra jokes and asking Rachaela to sweep up, which generally he had not troubled with before. He did not send her for sandwiches but chewed slabs of bread and pickle.
She did not like his proximity. She was seldom alone now in the shop. She began to long for the month to be over.
She would have to look for another job. It would be best to try one of the agencies. They were smart and brisk. She hated them.
It was raining fiercely and she hurried over the green and almost collided with the overcoated man in the woollen hat.
‘Miss Day. I was asked to put this directly into your hands.’
She took the envelope. It was typed. They stood in the downpour confronting each other, both creatures of the jungle who might ignore the rain.
‘I don’t want this.’
‘You must take it. Read it.’
‘I thought all this had stopped.’
‘Please, Miss Day.’
‘All right. Very well.’
She moved away with the letter, the rain thick on her wonderful hair as broken glass.
In the hall she shook herself with a little grunt of defiance. The closed outer door was a barricade. The demon locked outside.
One of the other tenants came clattering down the stairs. A girl in a red coat. Rachaela considered stopping her, discussing the downfall of their house. But the girl did not look r
eal. So young and contemporary she was hardly on the plane of existence, an egg-shaped face, smooth, not a line or an expression to show she had lived, was alive. Rachaela let her pass on, and opened the door to her flat.
The light was bizarre, greenish and electric from the rain. The walls danced. She longed for the warm round body of the cat, to wake her and press her face to the smoky fur with its inner smell of herbs and being. But the cat was gone, only the ghost, conjured by tired eyes, remained to haunt her, indifferently.
Rachaela took off her coat and hung it up. She pulled off her boots. She sat down on the edge of a chair and slit the letter open with a bronze paper knife resembling a dagger.
It was thick white paper.
The letter was typed, as if they knew she could not read their calligraphy, or would not. No chance of a blindfold. Too short to be avoided.
Dear Miss Smith,
By now you will know that we have traced you and are eager to meet with you. Please give us this opportunity. Your mother knew very little of the family and your father, we understand only too well, abandoned you. Give us this chance to make possible amends. The familial connection is complex and we will not attempt to describe it here, but hope to do so before you, in person, at some future date.
Our name is not, evidently, the one given to our agents, but as you have correctly guessed, ‘Scarabae’. That name to which you yourself are entitled.
As Mr Soames will have told you, any travelling expenses or expenses entailed in tying up your affairs will be borne by us.
We trust that we shall hear from you soon.
The letter was signed boldly ‘Scarabae’. Not even any initial. A dynamic collective which told nothing.
There was no address. The letter was headed solely by the words ‘The House’ and the winter’s date.
Rachaela glanced intuitively towards the unlit electric fire. Her impulse was to burn the letter.
Instead she sat with it in her hands for three quarters of an hour, in the chilly flat, while the rain danced on the windows and the walls, erosively.
‘Yes, I’ve changed my mind.’
‘I really am delighted, Miss Day,’ gushed Soames. ‘I’m sure you’ve made the wise decision.’
When Rachaela had finished this phone call, she called Mr Gerard.
