by Rosie Thomas
Jinny was drinking hard. The mask that had stayed in place since the terrible hour at the skating rink was beginning to slip. She passed from one friend to the next, letting herself be supported. Her eyes swam with tears and she wobbled as she held on to Nancy’s arm.
‘I need to get drunk. Will you see Ann’s parents to their train for me? I can’t deal with them any more. I’m not Ann’s bloody flatmate, I’m her husband. Her lover for more than ten years. Why can’t they let us be what we are?’
Nancy thought briefly and bitterly that Jinny and Ann’s relationship was more openly acknowledged than hers with Gil. Her lover had already quietly gone on his way, after they had exchanged only the briefest of words outside the crematorium. She kept her sadness to herself.
‘Hush, darling. They don’t understand what you and Ann meant to each other. Of course I’ll take them to the station.’
Nancy begged Cornelius to stay close by Jinny and to see her home safely to Shaftesbury Avenue. His face turned dark red and he frowned at her.
‘You don’t need to ask me. As if I would leave her.’
The funeral and the wake were an ordeal for him but he would stay with Jinny as long as she needed him.
The Gillespies were waiting like a pair of small shadows against the wall. Nancy could feel their contained grief, tight and chill as a Scottish Sunday. They would have done better to get as drunk as Jinny, she thought.
Mr Gillespie kneaded the brim of his hat as they sat in a row on the bus.
‘Look at all these folk. However did Annie manage in such a place?’
They gaped at the dark crowds that came flooding out of shops and offices only to be gobbled up again by the underground or the groaning trams.
‘She loved her work. And her friends loved her,’ Nancy offered.
‘Aye,’ the old man grimly said.
So children move out of their parents’ orbit, she reflected. Work and war and love take them away from you.
At King’s Cross she led the way to the platform for the Edinburgh train. Smoke collected under the vast roof and the stink of smuts and steam and the din of engines made the station seem a foggy and mundane version of hell. Nancy found two second-class seats, wishing that the old people didn’t have to sit upright all night. She imagined them with their heads lolling in exhaustion as the train shuddered north through the darkness.
She said goodbye and shook hands, but Mrs Gillespie crept after her to the carriage door. As Nancy stepped down she whispered, ‘Tell that girl, your friend, I’m sorry for her loss.’
‘I will,’ Nancy promised.
The year that had begun in such a sombre way gathered its own dim momentum. The people who came to Nancy’s seances were looking back less than they were peering into an uncertain future.
‘Is he there? Ask him, what shall I do?’ they begged from the Palmyra gallery.
The Uncanny tugged at her. She felt physically jostled by it, her elbows and hips jarred by the pressure of multitudes, her brain seething with the unspoken and the effort of articulating it for public consumption.
‘I can’t advise you. I can only tell you what I am hearing,’ she answered.
She had to fall back on the anodyne.
‘He is here. He wants you to be brave.’
‘You can’t eat bravery,’ a woman shrieked at her.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nancy whispered. Two or three seats banged as people left the auditorium.
The Palmyra also pressed on her, a physical weight composed of fraying velvet curtains and mouldering floorboards. She thought more often that her job was becoming impossible and sometimes she wondered if she might be going mad.
Well. Mad or not, she told herself in the wake of the visions of bombs and burning that had started to trouble her as they had when she was a girl, there was nothing to be done except keep on doing it.
At Shaw’s Exotics Jinny tried to anaesthetise herself with work although business was slack.
‘If you are feeling short of readies, the first thing you don’t buy is a pineapple,’ Lizzie said. ‘Unfortunately.’
It was too early for Jinny to seek the extra balm of physical work in the garden at Waterloo Street. The veget-able beds were still shrouded in their thermal layers of sacking and the cold frames contained only brittle twigs. Even so, she came regularly to the house to play chess with Cornelius or to listen to the wireless.
‘I don’t like being at home on my own,’ she confessed. ‘I suppose Ann would tell me to pull myself together, wouldn’t she?’
‘Who?’ Devil asked.
‘Ann,’ Jinny repeated.
Devil’s wits were increasingly scattered, although he was usually benign in his confusion. Most of his time was spent pottering with old Gibb. Cornelius had framed Charlie Egan’s drawing of Eliza behind glass for him and his eyes often turned to it.
‘Do you know my daughter Zenobia?’ he asked Jinny suddenly one evening when Nancy was out at a perform-ance. Cornelius took off his spectacles and polished them with a handkerchief.
‘Yes, she is my friend,’ Jinny said gently.
‘Is she? Is Nancy a lesbian nowadays?’
All three of them laughed.
The Uncanny came closer. As always the stinks affected her. The drains at Waterloo Street gave up a reek of rotting cabbage stalks and bad meat, the Palmyra was foul with damp and on the underground she could hardly endure the stench of unwashed clothing and mothballs and human breath. She lost her appetite to the point that Sylvia Aynscoe tried to bully her.
‘You must eat,’ she said, when Nancy put aside untouched the poached eggs she prepared for her after the evening show.
‘I’m all right,’ Nancy insisted. Until she blinked it away, the London skyline blazed with inexplicable fire.
Sylvia should have retired long ago on the small pension Nancy and Desmond had guaranteed for her, but she insisted that she would rather stay at the theatre.
‘What would I do if I didn’t come to the Palmyra?’ she shrugged. Sometimes she even slept there, on a truckle bed in an alcove off the stage-door passageway. She was the guardian spirit of the old place, overseeing its hours of darkness as Jake Jones had done decades ago.
Gil worried that Nancy seemed tired. She insisted that she was fine, putting on her most cheerful face for him because that was what he looked for. Celia’s afflictions were enough to absorb any man’s stock of sympathy, and for her own part she wanted always to offer him strength, happiness and no cause for concern. She didn’t mention the increasingly powerful swirl of the Uncanny, even though once she had hurried to confide all its nuances to him because she loved his reassuring acceptance. Although he never claimed to understand her gift he had developed his own interpretation over the years. Once, at a recital of Messiaen organ music he sat rapt and motionless as a marble statue. When they emerged from the concert hall he was blinking and disorientated.
‘I know there are ways in which the human spirit can be transported. If it happens to a dull economist like me through listening to a piece of music, what must it be like to experience another realm through senses as fine as yours, Nancy?’
He had kissed her hand, and she had seen that it was with a kind of awe. He made her feel invincible, and not remotely flawed.
Yet lately, from being the one person in the world she could most easily confide in, he had somehow become the opposite. She couldn’t define exactly when the change had come about but it had begun, almost imperceptibly, after they had faked the Uncanny to deceive Celia at Fifteen. They hadn’t acknowledged the bad turn and it had become scarred by the ordinary accretions of life. The buried damage left them shy of exposure, and so their old honesty around the Uncanny had infinitely decayed.
Perhaps that was the way of human relationships. Perhaps the deepest intimacy always contains its own destruction, she sadly thought.
In the end it was Freddie, possibly at Sylvia’s instigation, who turned up backstage one evening and insisted on taking Nancy ba
ck to Whistlehalt for three days before her next performance.
‘I’m not leaving here without you. You can have a rest and let Guillaume feed you up and you’ll be doing me the biggest favour at the same time. I get quite blue when Jake’s away for months like this.’
Sylvia told her, ‘Go on. Your pa’s got Jinny and Cornelius to look out for him and the Palmyra’s got me and Desmond.’
‘We’re not too bad at the box office,’ Desmond put in. ‘They like Norah Vaughan. I think we should offer her an-other two weeks.’
Miss Vaughan was a singer and comedienne who resembled Gracie Fields just closely enough.
‘All right,’ Nancy said in the end, putting too many concerns aside. Gil was in Manchester dealing with a threatened strike at the Maitlands mill. ‘I’ll be at Whistlehalt if you need me.’
Freddie drove along the familiar route out of London. The traffic dwindled and the ribbons of street lamps fell behind them until at last they were winding up the dark lanes to the house. The lights were blazing and a couple of windows stood open. As she stepped out of the car the sweetness of the air and the faint ripple of music fell on her.
She tilted her head to gaze up at the arch of stars.
‘Thanks, Freddie. You were right.’
She slept more soundly that night than she had done for weeks and in the morning Guillaume brought up a breakfast tray. Wearing a blue kimono and the remains of last night’s eye paint he plumped himself against the pillows to flip through the gossip columns in the morning’s paper.
‘People, people, people,’ he muttered restlessly as they sipped their tea. ‘Endless people. Look, Elvira Steele is engaged to be married.’
‘Who’s she?’
‘Exactement,’ he crowed.
That afternoon Nancy was reading in the drawing room when she heard someone at the door. A moment later one of the other young men looked in on her.
‘There’s a person to see you,’ he said.
‘Me? Who is it?’
Although she already knew.
Freddie had gone out to lunch. Mrs G would have bi-cycled away an hour ago. Nancy could smell a savoury waft of cooking which meant that Guillaume was busy in the kitchen. She couldn’t remember who had been in-vited for dinner.
Lawrence Feather’s hair and beard flowed over his shoulders and down almost to his chest. His layers of clothes were quite possibly the greenish and decaying relics of the priestly black he had once worn. He stepped forward with an extended hand. She hesitated before brushing the tips of his fingers.
‘I heard you were here. I have called in the hope of per-suading you to visit us, Nancy.’
‘Us?’
He smiled at her. ‘My friends and I live simply in the fields, but we follow the true path. We acknowledge no barriers between this world and the next.’
‘Ah.’
He smiled again. ‘Our last encounter was not a happy one, Nancy, and that troubles me. Of course I felt for many years that you wilfully interposed yourself between Helena and me, although mercifully that is in the past now.’ His smile broadened, beatifically. ‘She is with me, you know. I believe that your denial opened a direct channel between us, so it may even be that I owe you thanks. Even so, my dear, you accepted my guidance and then you took my followers and turned your back on me. Yet I bear no grudge. I have my group of disciples these days and I look for no others. We have shared much, you and I, so I would like to show you what we are doing in our little circle. You will be interested.’
He was mad, she realised.
‘No, thank you.’
Still faintly smiling he studied her with the knowing insinuation she had always hated.
‘I hope you are not afraid to pay us a visit, Nancy? After all we have experienced together?’
She thought of the handful of tents and the dilapidated caravan, and the forlorn waft of smoke. It was a sad place and the memory of it did make her fearful. Anger like a crisp curl of flame suddenly energised her. The man had sidled at the margins of her life for too many years and she wanted him gone, mad or otherwise. She wouldn’t allow his proximity to affect her happiness at Whistlehalt.
‘Afraid? Not in the least.’
Feather sensed the angry energy and he slyly seized on it.
‘Shall we go, then?’
He held out an arm in its rusty sleeve.
He wanted to rekindle his influence over her. He was as vain and self-regarding as always. I despise you, she thought. You are a psychic first and a faker second, just like me, but I am the better at our game.
He cut into her thoughts. ‘That’s the attitude. You have your mother in you.’
‘Please leave my mother out of this.’
He only smiled more broadly, showing his ruined teeth.
Defiance held the upper hand in her as she followed him along the ridge path to the camp. She would confront whatever it was he wanted her to see, because if she did not it would be allowing him to subdue her. They walked in silence and soon the column of smoke smudged the sky as the caravan and tents came into view. Feather bowed as he opened the five-barred gate and beckoned her through.
From beside the fire half a dozen pairs of eyes watched them approach over hummocks of dead grass. Behind the tarpaulin shelter a row of dead creatures hung on the wire fence. There were two pheasants, a rabbit and some smaller birds.
‘Mr Templeton’s man turns a blind eye if we help our-selves to something for the pot,’ Feather murmured.
The members of his cult perched on logs or makeshift tripod stools. There were five men and a woman, their faces blackened with soot, sacks draped over hunched shoulders for warmth. Four of the company were wretched creatures, tramps or derelicts with drinkers’ beaten features and hopeless, averted eyes. The other two were a couple, wizened and emaciated but far more alert than their fellows. They fixed her at once with greedy stares and she knew she had seen them before.
They had accompanied Feather on his last visit to the Palmyra.
Where was the soaking girl? These two were somehow connected with her. Instinctively Nancy searched along the hedge for a sight of the ghost child.
‘As some of you already know, this is Miss Zenobia Wix, the medium. Make room for her to sit down.’
Feather spoke with curt authority. There was a rustle as the followers shifted to stare at her. Their sullen hostility was uncomfortable but Nancy stood her ground.
At last the man of the couple shuffled up from his seat. Unwillingly she took his place, folding her skirt out of the way of the mud. An old black kettle was suspended over a smouldering log and a thin tongue of steam curled from its spout. The Uncanny was gathering.
The man who had given up his stool now hovered beyond the fire. Her eye went to something dangling from his fingers and she saw it was the leather sling of a catapult.
‘That’s Lenny. No one knows how to set a trap for a rabbit or bring a bird down better than Lenny does. You recognise him and Peg, Nancy, don’t you?’
She could smell tar and salt water, the very reek of the Queen Mab. A cold finger of dread pressed into the nape of her neck.
She demanded, ‘Why have you brought me here?’
The camp was a horrible, sinister place. These followers of Feather’s were more pathetic than they were threatening, but she was uncomfortably conscious of the hundreds of yards of empty countryside that lay between her and Whistlehalt. In the fading light rooks were coming to roost in the tall trees at the lip of the ridge.
Lenny stepped closer with his catapult and his little wife moved at his side.
‘Don’t you know us?’ Peg whispered. Her head was wrapped in a torn scarf and her eyes were like sloes in her walnut face. She turned from Nancy to Feather.
‘Where is she? You told me this woman sees her. You promised me she would come to us if this woman was here.’
Her voice was wheedling, hoarse with desperation.
One of the derelicts produced an apple from his torn pocket, rubbe
d it on the corner of his coat and bit into it. Juice and pulp smeared his chin and he sniggered. These poor men enabled Feather to imagine he had a retinue, but in reality they were only here for the meagre shelter and whatever food he might offer.
‘Stop that,’ Feather snapped at him.
Lenny and Peg were different. They hungrily waited.
Feather stood tall, a black scarecrow at the heart of the circle.
‘I have told you that my poor powers are limited and my links to the spirits are weakening. Our guest is a far more powerful channel and Emmy has always been drawn to her through my shallow mediation. Now I have brought Nancy to you, and we must open the channel directly. Shall we join hands and begin? Who will give me a message for you, Nancy? Your mother? Or perhaps your friend Ann Gillespie?’
She clenched her fists in the pocket of her coat. He would know about Ann’s death because it was his business to do so. The man was ridiculous, but he was a stage medium and he had taught her the identical tricks.
‘Do you remember the beach, Nancy? The day the Queen Mab went down?’
‘Of course.’
‘I unleashed your gift, didn’t I?’
The Uncanny pulsed around her, but it was hers. Never his. Without warning the campfire became a roaring pillar of flame, twenty or thirty feet high. Nancy lurched backwards, arms flying up to shield her face from the threat of searing heat. When there was no burning sensation she looked through her fingers, to see that the fire was only a few red embers and Lenny and his wife had drawn still closer.
Feather murmured in his insinuating way, ‘What’s there? Who do you see, Nancy? Not Helena, because she is with me. Perhaps you have a message for one of us?’ His gaze slid over his meagre audience. ‘We have a powerful conduit here, as I told you.’
Feather needed his followers and he must have retained Lenny and Peg’s allegiance by making claims and promises about their drowned daughter. Nancy had always known, in the recesses of the Uncanny, that the poor little wraith was the child with the posy basket from the Queen Mab. She could only guess at how Feather summoned her, or by what means he had controlled her parents. Now it seemed that they had challenged his influence and forced him to bring her here.
