by Nina Allan
Call it delusions of grandeur, temporary insanity, whatever, but I was not myself. The sight of the open cabinet door had unlocked something inside me, a mental anarchy I had not experienced before, except perhaps in the dreadful days immediately following Ursula’s vanishment. It did not occur to me to think about surveillance cameras, or alarm systems – not that I would necessarily have recognized such gadgets for what they were anyway. The point remains – I did not think of them. I could hear “Artist” laughing delightedly. My course was set.
I inched forward cautiously, inserting first my hand and then most of my right arm into the cabinet. My fingers brushed “Artist’s” skirt, then her shoulder. Beneath her dress her stocky, pliant body felt soft yet firm. I set both hands about her waist and lifted her free. She came easily, almost falling into my arms. A dozen images flew through my mind: trains departing from stations, lovers meeting. I saw these scenes as through a clouded window, barely registering my actions save through the fluttering of my breath against her hair, the rapid thudding of my heart, which would not be quelled.
I unzipped the holdall at my feet and thrust “Artist” inside. How fortunate, I thought dimly, that I had chosen to bring it with me after all, rather than deciding to leave it behind in the hotel’s storage room, to pick up later. With the bag finally closed, a curious calm descended. There was no trace now of the theft – the crime – I had just committed. All that remained for me to do was to leave the museum like any other visitor.
Suddenly I heard the sound of voices on the upper landing. They should not have been familiar, yet somehow they were.
“Dolls are boring. Indian canoes are much better than dolls.”
It was the boy I had glimpsed outside the museum, the noisy carrot-top with the twin sister and the wraithlike grandmother.
“Dolls aren’t boring for Angel though, are they, Squirrel? We can go back and see the canoes again afterwards, if you like.” The grandmother, her voice firmer and more confident than I would have expected from her frail appearance, the voice of a respected headmistress in a prosperous market town.
“Don’t call me Squirrel. I don’t like it.”
“I’m going to choose my favorite,” the girl said, unperturbed. “Both of you have to guess which one it is.”
They had appeared in the doorway now, the boy sulky with his hands in his pockets, the girl leading her grandmother eagerly by the hand. The boy slouched over to inspect a lively display of Bildnis girl-soldiers. I moved towards the exit, struggling with my holdall. The grandmother edged aside to let me pass. As she turned her head to look at me her eyes froze.
“Stay where I can see you, Squirrel,” she said. She raised her voice, as if to address a crowd.
“I’m sorry, I’m in your way,” I said. “It’s just this bag.” I stepped swiftly towards the doorway, raising the holdall as if to emphasize the annoyance it was causing us both. The grandmother pursed her lips, her redheaded granddaughter clinging tightly to her arm.
“Look at the little pixie!” squealed the boy. Lads of his type fear nothing. I hurried out of the gallery and along the landing. I kept expecting someone to stop me, but no one did.
I arrived at Exeter St. David’s with less than five minutes to spare. The train to Bodmin was a stopping service, calling at every station along the coast. It was packed with day-trippers bound for Dawlish and Teignmouth, and for the first part of the journey I was forced to stand. In many respects I was grateful – the cramped conditions made me much less conspicuous – though the temperature within the carriage became increasingly uncomfortable. After Newton Abbot the train emptied out and I was able to sit down. I lodged my holdall under my seat, praying that its precious cargo would not be damaged, terrified to check its contents for fear of attracting attention. My encounter with the grandmother and the two children had unsettled me – I felt certain that the boy especially would remember me, if it ever came to that.
My main preoccupation for the immediate future was to put as many miles between myself and Exeter as I reasonably could.
You have to understand that on some level I still did not properly believe in what I had done. Not only because it was out of character – until that day I had never so much as raided the stationery cupboard at Clark Cannings without asking permission – but because there was still no evidence of my misdemeanor in the outside world. No one was running or pointing, there was no sound of police sirens. Everyone around me was behaving as if nothing had happened, which allowed me to believe in my pretense that nothing had.
As the train rolled over the Royal Albert Bridge, Brunel’s greatest gift to the West Country and the point of magnificent transition from Devon to Cornwall, I even allowed myself to imagine that if I were to unzip my holdall then and there I would find nothing more remarkable inside than the clothes I had packed for my journey, Coastage’s English Almanac, and the battered “Laura Louise” doll I had purchased in Wade.
You wish, “Artist” murmured.
I did not wish her gone, though, for how could I? Here at last was the adventure I had longed for, the sense of a shuttered life becoming real. The Scotsman would be proud of me, I thought. He would chuckle, and call me Sir Galahad. Then he would raise his glass and wish me well.
West Edge House
Tarquin’s End
Bodmin
Cornwall
My dear Andrew,
There are times when this place frightens me. Not because of anything that has happened here – hardly anything happens here – but because of the memories it holds. What else is a house but a box full of memories? No one who ends up here ever intended to, not since West Edge House became a hospital, anyway. People come here to forget who they were and where they came from and what they have done. But the house remembers.
I expect you think it’s strange, an idea like that. I don’t know what’s put me in this mood. Sylvia Passmore, probably. She finally asked Dr. Leslie to go out with her and he turned her down. Not that it’s any of my business, but I happened to be in the office at the time and so I heard the whole thing.
Sylvia was waiting for Dr. Leslie in the corridor. She told him someone had given her two tickets for a concert in Truro and she’d been wondering if he might like to go with her.
“It’s a recital of piano music, by Chopin,” she said. She mumbled something about the pianist, a child prodigy who had just won an important music competition in Poland. I didn’t catch exactly what Dr. Leslie said in reply but a few seconds later Sylvia came barging into the office and slammed the door. I don’t think she realized I was in there because when she caught sight of me she blushed bright red, like someone who has been caught out in a lie.
“What are you doing in here?” she said. She sounded furious. Before I could think of anything to say in reply she turned away and pretended to look for something in one of the filing cabinets. A moment later she left the room without a word. The air seemed to rock from side to side, like water in a jam jar that’s been picked up and shaken. I could still smell her perfume, a sweet, flowery fragrance that always reminds me of the clothes she wears, the pastel cardigans and tailored skirts, the immaculate shoes.
I hadn’t intended to mention the incident to anyone, but later in the afternoon I found myself telling the whole story to Jennifer Rockleaze. I thought it might make her laugh but instead she seemed angry.
“Sylvia’s a fool,” she said. “Even if she got what she wanted, he would make her life hell.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She likes the idea of marrying a doctor because she thinks it sounds better than a plumber or a tractor driver but all she really wants is someone she can get dolled up for.” Jennie laced her fingers together and steepled them. Her nails were painted with a pale pink varnish that looked like mother of pearl. “Maurice doesn’t care about things like that. Sylvia could come into work dressed in a bin
bag and he wouldn’t notice. What on Earth would they find to talk about?”
Sylvia phoned in on Friday to say she was ill in bed with a cold, and after that it was the weekend. When I saw her again on Monday she seemed back to normal. She was wearing a pair of dark brown court shoes, the leather so smooth and so shiny you could see your face in it. She barely said a word to me all morning, but that was nothing unusual. She brought Dr. Leslie his coffee at eleven thirty, the same as always, with a buttered scone.
Dr. Leslie is like two different people, depending on whether you’re speaking to him as a doctor or just as himself. As a psychiatrist, he pays attention to everything you say, even down to the tiniest details of what you had for lunch or where you went on holiday when you were ten. I don’t know if his doctor’s memory is really photographic but it must be close to that. And yet if you happen to talk to him just in passing, in the office for example, you often have to say something twice to get his attention. It’s like what Jennie said about Sylvia’s shoes – Dr. Leslie simply wouldn’t notice a thing like that. He walks around in his own world, his own private bubble. I’ve known Dr. Leslie for almost twenty years but I don’t know what he’s like – him, I mean, the real Maurice. The food he likes to eat and the books he likes to read, that whole thing about whether he really was married or not. I just don’t know.
I’ve never thought about this before – it’s part of the way things are here – but coming to know you, the way we are with each other in our letters, has made me realize how little of themselves people give away. It’s like when you see a terrible crime reported on TV. The murderer’s neighbors and work colleagues all look stunned, and keep saying how normal the murderer seemed, how quiet he was, how he was always helping old ladies across the road. This is the moment when they realize they didn’t have a clue what he was really like, that the person they thought they knew was a total stranger.
When I first came to West Edge House I was supposed to have consultations with Dr. Leslie twice a week, although it usually ended up being more than that. Dr. Leslie insisted that I should keep going over the events of that summer until I came to accept what he always referred to as the facts of the case, as if it really was a crime that we were talking about.
I kept expecting him to ask me about my mother: Did I love her and did she love me? Did we have a row that day? How did I feel when I came home and saw the ambulance by the front door?
Did I still believe that my mother’s death – her suicide – was my fault?
I hate the word “suicide.” Not because of what it says but because of what it doesn’t say. “Suicide” is a Latin word, formed from the preposition sui, meaning oneself, and the verb caedere, meaning to cut, to strike or to kill. It is a snaky, sinuous word – that double “s” sound – a word that seems to squirm around the truth of what it means. For me it does, anyway. Don’t say suicide, I think whenever I hear it. Say what you mean. She killed herself. She decided she would rather be dead than keep on living in the world, in the house on Harlequin Road with my father and me.
How could she have been that unhappy? Did you know your mother was unhappy? I kept expecting Dr. Leslie to ask me, and I would imagine myself laughing, laughing into his face because of course I knew, how could I not know when being unhappy was not just something my mother did from time to time like anyone else, it was what defined her. Her unhappiness was so familiar it was part of the scenery, like the ugly green wallpaper in the downstairs toilet that my father kept meaning to paint over but never got round to. No one liked it but we were used to it. In some ways the house wouldn’t have felt right if it were no longer there.
Would you say your mother was depressed? I honestly couldn’t say, Doctor. I didn’t really know her all that well.
Dr. Leslie never asked me these questions though, or if he did I don’t remember. He seemed more interested in the other things that had been going on at the time: Edwin, and Helen, and my father’s illness. When he talked about the night my mother died, it was Rosamund he asked me about, the doll that looked like Helen and that I smashed to smithereens after Edwin confessed to me that it wasn’t me he loved, but Helen, even though he didn’t know Helen, he didn’t have a clue about her.
“Do you still believe you were doing harm to your friend by destroying the doll?” Dr. Leslie asked.
I shook my head and said no. “How could I?” I said. “It was only a doll.”
“A doll that looked like Helen.”
“Yes,” I replied, although the way he said it made it sound more like a piece of prosecuting evidence than an actual question.
“Do you know what a graven image is, Bramber?”
“A graven image is an idol,” I said. “A picture, or a statue that is supposed to represent the power of God.”
Dr. Leslie began talking then, about the power of the human image across all world religions.
“There are those who fervently believe that harm can be brought to a person, simply by destroying a model of that person, or by burning their photograph.”
I found him interesting to listen to, because I liked him, I suppose. Dr. Leslie is a gentle man, who works hard and gets tired. I knew he wanted to reassure me that what I did to Rosamund didn’t have anything to do with my mother’s suicide, but I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t expect him to understand, because he wasn’t there.
It was almost dark when I went out, past nine o’clock. My mother was upstairs in the bedroom, my father was in the living room with the TV on. I can’t explain what made me take Rosamund, what made me destroy her, only that I still loved her and that her presence had begun to distress me beyond endurance. I had no definite plan in mind when I left the house – only that I had to be outside, away from that place, and that Rosamund had to come with me.
“You must have been angry about Edwin’s interest in Helen,” Dr. Leslie said.
I told him no, not really, not at all. “I told him he was being stupid, that Helen didn’t care about him, or about anyone. All she wanted was to get away to London, to be an actor.”
“Did your mother ever hug you, Bramber?”
I laughed. “Why would she? We weren’t that kind of family.”
I carried Rosamund carefully downstairs, cradling her against my shoulder like a child. Her fair hair tickled my cheek and for a moment I felt an aching sadness at the thought of being parted from her. There was no one about, and when I reached the path that led to the viaduct I almost turned back. It was so dark, you see. I hadn’t thought about how dark it would be, not really. I remembered the times Edwin and I had talked about sleeping out on the allotments and thought what a ridiculous idea it was, once you really thought about it. The bushes crowded around me like—and I know it sounds silly to say this, but I kept imagining they were alive, the secret people of the woods, come down to take a look at what I was doing. I had never felt afraid of the dark before, but the lumpy, massed shadows of the trees and bushes made me feel I’d never properly understood how different night was from day, until that moment.
Every sound I made seemed vast. I held on tightly to Rosamund and spoke a few words to her. Her hair took on the glow of the moonlit sky.
I hadn’t been back to the viaduct since the afternoon I’d been there with Edwin. The place seemed different, too: stranger, and in the brittle, glassy light of the moon it was easy to imagine the stone viaduct as the dividing line between this universe and another one, as Edwin had said, a universe where trains still ran down to the quarry and where people believed in ghosts and where Edwin and I would spend next summer Interrailing in Europe, just as we’d planned.
Except now that would never happen, because I had been living in the wrong universe all along.
I lifted Rosamund high above my head to show her the moon. She is lovely, I thought, and once again I felt a terrible loneliness at the idea of her leaving me. When I dropped her from the bridge, she disa
ppeared from my sight almost immediately, slipping into the darkness like a stone slipping into deep water. After what seemed a long time later I heard a faint tinkling sound, like a summer breeze passing through wind chimes. For a moment I stood perfectly still, leaning over the parapet and staring down. There was nothing to see. The night yawned beneath me like a black pit, lukewarm and smelling of nettles. I buried my face in it, like an old blanket. I was alone.
I walked home after that. By the time I reached the house it was after midnight. When I think about that night now, I like to imagine it like this: I come in through the back door. My father is still in his armchair in front of the television. The late news is on. Dad has the gas fire turned on full, even though it isn’t cold, not at all.
“Where have you been?” Dad says. “I didn’t hear you go out. I was worried.”
“I went for a walk, that’s all,” I reply. “Are you OK, Dad? It’s boiling in here.”
“It’s my fingers, I can’t seem to get them warm, these days.”
I kneel beside him and take hold of his hands. His palms are damp with sweat.
“How long have you been feeling like this?” I stroke the clammy skin, desperate to switch off the fire.
“A couple of months,” he says. “About a year, maybe.”
“You should go and see the doctor. Tomorrow.”
“Oh Ba,” he says. “I worry about you sometimes. You are so like your mother.”
He releases one of his hands from my grasp and touches my hair and for a moment he seems almost all right again and so do I.
I had always believed it was Dad I took after, but perhaps I only thought that because I loved him. It was true, what I told Dr. Leslie: I barely knew my mother at all.
I never thought I’d say these things to anyone, except Dr. Leslie, but he doesn’t count. Dr. Leslie doesn’t care what I say, except for how it fits into some picture he has. Writing to you feels different. It feels like you’re really listening. I never believed that talking would help, but with you it really does.
