by Nina Allan
I rang the bell. The familiar, harsh buzzing, then silence. I tried to compose myself, to be the person I was pretending to be – the person who had turned up on this same doorstep eighteen months ago with two bulging holdalls and a broken suitcase, in fact. It was only then that I realized that person no longer existed, that whatever happened in the next forty-five minutes she was gone for good.
Then the door burst open and there she was, my aunt, wearing a beautiful hand-finished trouser suit and smiling like a movie star.
Her hair looked as if it had been recently styled, the wispy auburn curls both softer and brighter. She looked radiant. If I’d had any doubts about how things stood between her and Wil, those doubts were gone now.
I wondered if Wil knew what she was, if he even cared.
“Sonia,” she cried. She threw her arms around me, kissed my cheek. “You look lovely, dear. Come inside.”
She didn’t even sound like her old self: mildly sardonic, wryly amused, cautious and consistent. It was as if she believed the whole world must now share her happiness, a joy so pure that its origins in deception no longer mattered.
* * *
—
The truth is difficult, isn’t it? I want to tell you how this story ends, but I’m not sure how to do that. I could tell you about how we sat down together in Aunt Lola’s living room with the photographs and the books and that ugly bronze beetle of hers, how Lola talked and talked, insisting that when she first went for a drink with Wil it was just that – a drink – because they’d enjoyed each other’s company so much the previous evening.
“You have to believe me, Sonia, I didn’t plan any of this.” She even blushed. “I think I might have been a little crazy for a while.”
Just for a while? I thought, but didn’t say. I kept my smile on and said it was all right, I understood, that’s what love does to people. She leaned forward in her chair then – the same chair Wil had been sitting in the night he met Lola – placed her hand on my arm and said yes, that was it exactly, and I did understand, didn’t I, that she loved Wil, that it was the real thing, that she wouldn’t have dreamed of coming between us otherwise.
“I still feel ashamed,” she said. “Not of Wil and me, but of the way it all happened. You finding out like that. I can’t tell you how dreadful I feel. I wish I’d found the courage to tell you properly.”
She was shaking all over by then, trembling like a harvest mouse, steaming with the ecstasy of self-disclosure. That’s not my phrase, it’s Lola’s – from the scene in Cousins where Petya is confessing to Hanna that he killed her father.
I patted her shoulder and said she should stop blaming herself, that Wil and I had been on the rocks and that the past didn’t matter now anyway because I was with someone else, a jazz drummer named Marco I’d met when his band played the Maraschino three months ago.
“Really?” gasped Lola. “Oh Sonia, that’s wonderful. When do I get to meet him?”
She sounded genuinely pleased for me, too, suggested we should come round for dinner as soon as possible, me and the nonexistent Marco, who I think I might actually have fancied if he’d been real. If Lola thought she had a monopoly on creative invention, she was wrong. I smiled and smiled, all the time thinking that if she said one more word about her and Wil and how maaahvellous they were together then I might just have to kill her.
Which was funny really, because I was going to kill her anyway.
“Let’s have tea,” she said at last. “And you can tell me all about Marco.”
She hurried off into the kitchen. I heard the sounds of running water and the rattle of crockery and at one point I even heard Lola singing although I might have imagined that. I got up from my seat and moved slowly around the room, running my fingers over the spines of the books in the bookcase, gazing at the framed photographs of film stars just as Wil had done and wondering if any of these things would pass down to me when my aunt was dead.
She came back at long last, placed the tray on the low coffee table between us. As well as the tea things there was a plate of the elegant sweet confections – Viennese wafers and iced petit fours – that I knew she must have bought specially from Süssmayr’s Pâtisserie, which was quite a hike from the Merkelgasse and way past the mini-mart. I should be so honored.
We waited while the tea brewed, talking of nothing. Lola finally plied the pot, the liquid falling in a perfect amber arc, making that inimitable sound tea makes as it flows into a cup. It was only once she’d finished pouring that Lola realized she had forgotten the milk. Lola always took her tea black, in the Russian fashion, with a lump of sugar. Normally she would have remembered that I prefer mine white. Either she was just nervous or, what with me being out of her life for so long, she had genuinely forgotten.
“How silly of me,” she said. “I won’t be a moment.” She hurried back to the kitchen. It was now or never. I hadn’t practiced the maneuver at home because I was afraid it might jinx me. Perhaps I was just lucky, but I needn’t have worried. The whole thing went perfectly, as if I was used to poisoning people’s beverages for a living. A quick movement forward, press with the thumb, a tiny sound – plink! – like a solitary drop of water falling from the tap into the bath. The tablet dissolved so quickly I barely saw it happen. Which made it easier to tell myself afterwards that the horror of what occurred next was not my fault.
Zivorski had warned me that it might be upsetting to see Lola die, to watch her agony, though in fact it was not. Rather I beheld it, as I might have observed something that was happening on a television screen, or the final day’s rushes from whatever film project I was currently working on. Assessing them for bungled lighting or muffed lines.
I think I would be right in saying that this was a perfect performance. Lola raised her cup to her lips, blew gently on the liquid to cool it as was her habit, took one quick sip and then another, grimaced slightly then replaced the cup in its saucer. I had just enough time – a second or so – to curse myself for not asking Zivorski how much of the liquid had to be consumed before the poison was effective, before Lola began to die.
A look of terrified surprise came into her eye, an expression I can best describe as acute awareness. Then her muscles went taut, all of them, at once. She jerked bolt upright in her seat, as if she’d been turned into a line drawing of herself, all points and angles. Her fingers gripped her knees like the talons of birds. I could see how she was trying to unclamp one of her hands, to reach for me, for the table, for anything, but her joints were locked tight. She couldn’t speak either, or scream.
Instead, a terrible gurgling, the only sound her constricted throat could now produce.
I sat and watched, gazing at her as the knife-bright awareness in her eye changed to the dull fog of delirium, as her spine bent itself backwards in a paroxysm of desperation – I heard it crack – and her bent knees beat against her chest like demented drumsticks.
Blood coursed from her mouth, together with some other substance – bile, probably – streaming down her chin and flooding the gold-flecked front of her expensive pantsuit as the room filled with the mingled aromas of her shit and piss.
Someone’s going to have one hell of a cleaning up job on their hands. The thought floated through my brain, light as air and blue as a robin’s egg, as a stray piece of confetti.
The whole process took less than two minutes. A brief interlude, I suppose you might call it, unless you were Lola. When it was over her whole skeleton seemed to fold in on itself, a bunch of twigs wrapped in soiled rags, that’s what she looked like, her head lolling crazily off to one side like a broken doll.
Suddenly I needed the bathroom. I reached the toilet just in time, my bowels voiding themselves in a mess of stench and heat, as if in some bizarre tribute to what had just happened in the room next door. I remained crouched there for several minutes, breathing hard, and gradually the churning in my stomach seemed to
subside. I knew I still had the teacups to deal with and I couldn’t afford to relax or even think much until that was done.
When I felt able to move I returned to the living room, where I lifted the two cups carefully from the table and carried them through to the kitchen. I emptied their contents down the sink, chased them down with hot water. Then I washed the teacups and carefully dried them, returning my own to the correct cupboard and replacing Aunt Lola’s in its previous position on the tray. I poured her another cup of tea, then dusted the handles of all receptacles with a clean cotton handkerchief I had brought specifically for the purpose.
There would be other prints of mine, everywhere throughout the flat, but then why shouldn’t there be? I had lived there for more than a year, after all. I had visited my aunt this very afternoon, and found her quite well.
* * *
—
You wanted that to happen, didn’t you? That was the ending you were hoping for, don’t try and deny it. You can’t have a decent murder story without a gruesome death scene, whatever Lola might say. Have a think about your own secret wishes before you go pointing the finger at women who happen to write crime novels.
Now have another think, about how you’d feel if I were to tell you that this wasn’t the ending after all, that it was all in my head. Would you feel disappointed, or relieved? You could have your cake and eat it then, couldn’t you? A horrific murder, followed by a happy ending. You decide.
I did buy the ring, but after a couple of sleepless nights I trudged all the way back to Zivorski’s and asked if I could have a refund. Zivorski said she didn’t do refunds, that she’d be leaving herself open to all sorts of abuses if word got around. Which it would, she said – word always does. But she offered to buy the ring back from me at sixty percent. I agreed on the spot, and after she’d shut up shop we went for a drink together in the Spider Monkey, a joint near the Old Market that looked dubious from the outside but that was actually a hangout for students and chess players.
“I’m buying, and no arguments,” said Zivorski. Her first name was Catherine. Clearly everyone in the Spider Monkey knew her – her appearance at the bar didn’t turn even a single head. I liked her a lot, I realized. She had a way of being herself that I sorely envied. When she came back with the drinks I asked her how she’d ended up in the jewelry business.
“I took over from my dad,” she said. “I grew up over the store and I guess you could say the gem trade is in my blood. Us dwarfs are good with loot, or hadn’t you heard?”
The shock must have shown on my face because she burst out laughing. “Oh come on,” she said. “I don’t give a shit what folk call me, so why should you?”
I think that was the moment I realized I could love this woman. Love her, and be in love with her. She seemed everything I wasn’t. “What about the other side of the business?” I asked. “Did you learn that from your dad, as well?”
“We don’t talk about that,” she said. She folded her arms across her chest. “My granddad on my dad’s side was a changeling and he taught me stuff, introduced me to people. My dad always warned me to keep away from that side of the family, but business is business, that’s what I say. And it would be a shame to let the old knowledge die out.”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
She shook her head decisively then changed the subject. “What made you change your mind?” she asked. “About your aunt, I mean?”
I considered her question for several long moments before replying. Why had I changed my mind? There were so many reasons I could have given her but what it came down to was that I didn’t have the stomach for it. I wasn’t a murderer. Not this time, anyway. And I really did want to move on.
“Too messy,” I said to Zivorski. “I never could stand getting muck on me.”
Zivorski laughed until there were tears in her eyes and then asked me if I fancied supper. “They do a mean dumpling stew here,” she said. “Or we could go somewhere else?”
“Here’s fine,” I said. “I like it.” And it was true, I did. I wondered what Lola was doing and then stopped wondering. I had better things to think about and, after all, in a funny sort of way she had done me a favor.
9.
I FOUND IT DIFFICULT TO sleep after reading “Happenstance.” Once again, the peculiar coincidences between the story and real life – the way Wil in “Happenstance” had betrayed Sonia, for instance: was that not a darker, stranger version of Edwin’s betrayal of Bramber? And that was before I even considered the starker, still more disturbing coincidence of Wil’s name. Wilson Krajewski the playwright, Wilson Crosse the collector of automata, the pederast? I felt ripe with coincidence, shaky with it, as if I were being manipulated somehow without my knowledge. As if – and I know how this sounds – I were myself a character in one of Chaplin’s stories.
Yes, you can laugh, as I know I would be laughing myself if this hadn’t really happened, if these coincidences hadn’t unfolded before me on the page in black and white. As it was, I lay awake for a long time, listening to the hotel winding down for the night and trying to make sense of it all, and when I finally did drift off to sleep it was only fitfully, a rest repeatedly punctuated by some fresh vision, imaginary noise, or my own thudding heart.
When I opened my eyes to find the hotel’s bedside clock – a flickering digital anomaly amidst the analogue splendor of the White Hart’s more skillfully chosen accoutrements – displaying 6:55, a reasonable hour at last, I felt a disproportionate relief, the relief of a prisoner becoming alive to the rattle of the keys that would precipitate his release from torment into the outside world. It was all just fiction, after all. What’s in a name?
I went down to breakfast at half past eight and then checked out. I had originally planned to spend the whole day in Exeter as well as an additional night at the White Hart, but such a delay to my journey now seemed pointless, a waste of time. The Scotsman’s insistence that I not leave Bramber alone, coupled with the destabilizing effects of a seriously disturbed night, had put me into a state of nervous tension. For my own peace of mind I knew I needed to keep moving westwards, to reach Bodmin before nightfall.
But I did still want to pay another visit to the museum. I would have my luggage with me this time – an inconvenience – but seeing as the museum was directly en route to the station I did not want the greater inconvenience of backtracking to the White Hart to collect it before I left.
I want to stress that what happened next was not part of my plan. I intended to take one last look at the Ewa Chaplin doll, buy some postcards for Bramber and then head for the train. Which goes to show how our lives, much more than we know, are governed by chance.
I arrived at the museum just after it opened. An elderly woman was hauling herself up the steps to the entrance, a carrot-headed child on either hand. The children resembled each other in looks as much as the Ibsen twins, but were twice as lively. They hurried the old woman forward, as if presenting her as a prize.
“I want to see the dollies,” said the little girl. She tugged at the old woman’s arm, yearning towards the poster tacked to the railings.
“We’re going to see the crocodile,” the boy insisted. He began hopping up and down on the steps, thrusting his face in close to his sister’s and snapping his teeth. “Crocodiles eat dolls up.”
The sun shone on his hair and on the turquoise T-shirt he wore, rendering their vivid colors strident as poster paint. By contrast the old woman shared the pallor of a ghost. I assumed she was the twins’ grandmother, although she bore them no likeness whatsoever.
The foyer was full of Americans, clearly a coach party. They milled around, exclaiming in loud voices over the architecture, before streaming into the café. A large man stood aside to let them through, and I recognized him as the security guard from the evening before. I hurried past him up the stairs, hoping vaguely that he wouldn’t notice me, though what I had to fear
from him I could not have said. Not then, anyway. The upper floor seemed deserted. Then, just as I reached the entrance to the Albert Galleries, the fire alarm went off. A member of the museum staff – a woman – hurried out of the exhibition space, looking harassed.
“It’s done that twice already this morning, would you believe?” she said. She smiled, raising her eyebrows, then headed quickly downstairs.
The gallery was empty. I was alone with the dolls. I moved at once towards the central aisle, towards Chaplin’s “Artist.” When I arrived in front of her cabinet I discovered something extraordinary, not to say impossible: the glass door was standing open. I looked about myself, bemused – surely someone would come running? – but there was no one in sight. I realized then that the museum worker, in her hurry to deal with the fire alarm, must have left the cabinet open by accident.
What are you waiting for? said “Artist.” Some accidents are meant to happen.
An odd feeling swept over me then, a kind of quiet frenzy. It came to me that here was my chance to do something, to prove myself to Bramber, to show her that even if I could not give her the world, I could give her the thing in the world that she most desired.
“Artist” was right, I realized – the open cabinet was an omen, a sign. I remembered the last time I had been in the room: the golden afternoon light, the way “Artist” had seemed to urge me to set her free. Then the security guard had intervened, but now the security guard was downstairs and it was just the two of us. Laughter bubbled up inside my chest and throat. I choked it down only with difficulty. I was in a state of near-hysteria. The only thing keeping me from throwing myself around the gallery in a paroxysm of joyful derangement was the knowledge that for my crazy scheme to stand even a hope of succeeding I would need to stay quiet.
