The safe house

by Nicci French

  ‘Well, did they?’

  ‘God knows. What I’m planning to do is to give a brief history of the condition, in which it was largely described by false analogies with recognizable physical traumas, and then I’ll analyse the amazing inconsistencies of diagnosis and treatment in the subject in Britain at the moment.’

  ‘Are you going to study me?’

  ‘No. And now let’s spend some money.’

  ∗

  We spent a delirious couple of hours drifting up and down the paved pedestrianized concourse in Goldswan Green’s shopping district. I tried on an absurd little pillbox hat with a veil, which would have gone perfectly with a black dress, black stockings and plain black shoes, none of which I possessed. But I bought a navy-blue velvet waistcoat and thought about some ear-rings until I realized that the point of the expedition was to kit out Finn rather than me and turned my attention to her. We found a large basics store and equipped her from the inside out: socks, knickers, bras, tee-shirts, two pairs of jeans – one black, one blue. My own tendency would have been to rush around and grab almost at random, and I was impressed by Finn’s gravity and exactitude. There was nothing frivolous or light-hearted about her choices. She selected clothes with the precision of a person setting off to climb a mountain, in which every surplus ounce would be a liability.

  As we drifted around the shop I noticed that another woman was eyeing us. I wondered if it was because we were buying so much and then forgot about her until I heard a voice behind me.

  ‘It’s Sam, isn’t it?’

  I turned with a sinking feeling of non-recognition. The woman was familiar, but I could see that I wasn’t going to be able to place her quickly enough.

  ‘Hello…’

  ‘It’s Lucy, Lucy Myers.’

  ‘Hello…’

  ‘From Bart’s.’

  Now I knew who she was. Christian Society. Glasses, which she no longer wore. Went into paediatrics.

  ‘Lucy, how are you? Sorry, I didn’t recognize you at once, it must be your glasses. Lack of.’

  ‘And I wasn’t really sure it was you, Sam, because of your hair. It looks really… really…’ Lucy looked for the right word. ‘Brave,’ she said desperately. ‘I mean, interesting. But I know all about you. You’ve come to Stamford General.’

  ‘That’s right. Is that where you’re based?’

  ‘Yes, for years. I grew up there.’

  ‘Oh.’

  There was a pause. Lucy looked expectantly at Finn.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘This is Fiona. Jones. We’re working together.’

  They nodded at each other. I didn’t want to prolong this.

  ‘Look, Sam, it’s great to see you. When you’re in the hospital we must, you know…’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I must get on with my shopping.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lucy turned away.

  ‘You weren’t very nice to her,’ Finn whispered to me as we inspected some cardigans.

  ‘She wasn’t a friend, we were just in the same year. The last thing I want is to get thrown together as soul mates out here in the middle of nowhere.’

  Finn giggled.

  ‘And I only like seeing people by appointment,’ I added. ‘Here.’ I brandished a grey cardigan at her. ‘I order you to buy this.’

  ‘Buy it for yourself.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  I lay in bed with my eyes open in the dark. The day after tomorrow was Valentine’s Day. Would Danny come with a red rose and a sarcastic smile, a cross word and a kind look? Would he ever come again, or had I lost him, carelessly, without really meaning to, just because I hadn’t been looking his way? I’d write to him tomorrow, I promised myself, I’d make things all right again, and on this resolution I fell asleep.

  Fifteen

  On Wednesday, when I had shuffled down the cold stairs wrapped in Danny’s dressing gown, which he’d forgotten to take in his hurry to be gone, a letter lay on the doormat. But it was too early for the postman to have been and the ‘SAM’ that was written in blue Biro on the envelope showed this was Elsie’s handiwork, not Danny’s. After I’d turned up the thermostat and put on the kettle, I slipped a finger under its sealed flap. She had stuck a pink tissue-paper heart on to white card. Inside the card was written, in tilted letters that belonged to Elsie but which had clearly been spelt out by Finn, ‘Happy Valentine’s Day. We love you.’

  The ‘we’ had bothered me, although it touched me too. In a moment of weakness, I had let Elsie stay at home with another of her not very serious colds, and we’d sat, me three of us, at the kitchen table, eating Rice Krispies and toast. Nothing had come from Danny – no card, no phone call, no sign that he was thinking of me. I wished that I had never sent him yesterday’s rather raw letter. Well, who cared about Valentine’s Day, anyway? I did.

  We’d drifted around in the morning, pottering. For a while, Finn looked through the bundle of letters that Angeloglou had brought over the previous day – letters that friends had written to her and left with the police for delivery. They made quite a thick parcel, which she propped rather secretively against her knees. I watched her very carefully to see if she became agitated, but she seemed strangely unaffected. It was almost as if she had no interest in them. After a bit, she pushed them all together again, and took them up to her room. She never mentioned them to me and I never saw her looking at them again.

  Finn had become fascinated with the subject of trauma, with herself, perhaps, and I told her about its beginnings, about railway spine and shell-shock, how the First World War doctors thought it was caused by the impact of the artillery. I was amused by Finn’s interest and just a little concerned whether such an absorption in her own condition was entirely healthy. We were planning to head out for a walk as soon as the rain eased. But the rain didn’t ease off. It grew heavier and more dense, and the windows were now almost opaque, as if we were living behind a waterfall.

  ‘It’s like being on an ark,’ I said, and of course Elsie asked what an ark was. Where should I begin?

  ‘It’s a story,’ I said. ‘A long long time ago, God – he had made the world, in the story, but he thought it had all gone wrong, that everyone was behaving badly. So he decided to make it rain and rain and rain to cover the whole world and kill everybody…’

  I stopped and looked anxiously over at Finn, who was stretched out on the sofa. Even the word seemed insensitive. How had she taken it? Finn wasn’t looking at me. She was looking across at Elsie. She rolled off on to the ground and scrambled over to where Elsie was seated by her box of toys.

  ‘But he didn’t kill everybody,’ Finn said. ‘There was a man called Noah and there was Mrs Noah and their children, and God loved them. So God told Noah to build a huge boat and to put all the animals on the boat, so that they could be saved. So he built the boat and put every animal he could find inside. Like dogs and cats.’

  ‘And lions,’ said Elsie. ‘And pandas. And sharks.’

  ‘Not sharks,’ said Finn. ‘The sharks were all right. They could look after themselves in the water. But the others, the family and the animals, they all stayed in the ark. And it rained and rained and the whole world was covered with water and they stayed safe and dry.’

  ‘Did it have a top?’

  ‘It had a roof. It was like a house on a boat. And at the end, when the water had gone away, God promised that he would never do it again, and do you know what he did to show his promise?’

  ‘No,’ said Elsie, her mouth gaping open.

  ‘Look, I’ll show you. Where are your felt-tips?’ Finn reached into Elsie’s playbox and took out some pens and a pad of paper. ‘See if you can guess what I’m drawing.’ She drew a crimson curve. Then she drew a yellow line along its top edge. Then blue.

  ‘I know,’ said Elsie. ‘It’s a rainbow.’

  ‘That’s right. That’s what God put in the sky as a promise that it would never happen again.’

  ‘Can we see a rainbow? N
ow?’

  ‘Maybe later. If the sun comes out.’

  Which it didn’t. We had a good old-fashioned rural ploughman’s lunch as invented by some flash git who lived in a city. Good fresh bread, bought half-baked from the supermarket. I unpeeled the polythene from a wedge of cheese. Some tomatoes from a packet. A jar of relish. Sunflower spread. Finn and I shared a large bottle of Belgian beer. Elsie chattered, but Finn and I didn’t say much. Beer and cheese and the rain on the roof. It felt enough for me.

  I got some logs from the shelter at the side of the house and made a fire in the grate in the living room. When the flames were shimmering, I got the chessboard and pieces and set them out on the rug. As I played through an old Karpov-Kasparov world-championship game, Finn and Elsie were on the other side of the chimney-breast. Elsie was drawing with fierce concentration while Finn told what sounded like a story in a conspiratorial, low voice. Sometimes Elsie whispered something back.

  I looked down at the board and lost myself in Karpov’s strategic spiders’ webs, turning the tiniest of advantages into an irresistible attack, and Kasparov’s heady plunges into awesome complication, confident that he would be able to emerge ahead. I was playing around with variations, so the games took a very long time to get through. After some time, I don’t know how long, I heard a clink of china and a warm familiar smell beside me. Finn was kneeling beside me with a tray. She had made tea and toast and a couple of hot-cross buns for Elsie.

  ‘How will I ever manage to go back to an office?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know how you can lose yourself like that in a game,’ Finn said. ‘Are you just playing through something that someone else has already played?’

  ‘That’s right. It’s like watching thought in action.’

  Finn crinkled her nose.

  ‘Doesn’t sound like much fun to me.’

  ‘I’m not sure that fun is exactly the right word. Who said that life should be fun? Do you know the moves?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That a bishop moves diagonally, that a king moves one square and all that.’

  ‘Yes, I know that much.’

  ‘Then look at this.’

  I quickly returned the pieces to their starting positions and began to play through a game I knew by heart.

  ‘Who wins?’ Finn asked.

  ‘Black. He was thirteen years old.’

  ‘Friend of yours?’

  I laughed.

  ‘No. It was Bobby Fischer.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘He became world champion. Anyway, his opponent was overconfident and neglected his development.’

  I played White’s seventeenth move.

  ‘Look at the board,’ I said. ‘What can you see?’

  Finn pondered the position for more than a minute with that grave concentration of hers that so impressed me.

  ‘It looks as if White is in a better position.’

  ‘Very good. Why?’

  ‘Both Black’s queen and his horse…’

  ‘His knight.’

  ‘His knight… are being attacked. He can’t save them both. So how did Black win?’

  I reached forward and moved the bishop across the board. I looked with amusement at Finn’s puzzled expression.

  ‘That doesn’t do anything, does it?’

  ‘Yes, it does. I love this position.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘White can do lots of different things. He can take the queen or the knight. He can swap off the bishop. He can do nothing and try to batten down the hatches. Whichever he chooses, he loses in a completely different way. Go on, try something.’

  Finn looked for a moment and then took Black’s bishop. In just four moves there was a beautiful smothered mate by the knight.

  ‘That’s wonderful’, said Finn. ‘How could he work out all that in his head?’

  ‘I don’t know. It hurts me just to think about it.’

  ‘It’s not my sort of game, though,’ Finn said. ‘The pieces are all out in the open. Poker is my game. All that bluff and deception.’

  ‘Don’t let Danny hear that or he’ll keep you up all night at it. Anyway, that’s the whole beauty of the game. Chess, I mean. Two people sit across the board from each other. All the pieces are in full view and they manipulate each other, bluff, lure, fool each other. There’s no hiding-place. Hang on a second.’ I reached for a book that was beside the board and nicked to the epigraph. ‘Listen to this: “On the chessboard lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in a checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.”’

  Finn gave an almost flirtatious little moue.

  ‘Sounds a bit scary to me. I don’t want to be laid bare.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘We need our little self-deceptions and strategies. In real life, I mean, whatever real life is. Chess is a different world, where all that gets stripped away. In the match I just showed you, a little boy lured a grown-up master chess player into destroying himself in the open.’ I saw that I was losing her attention. ‘We must have a game some time. But not today.’

  ‘Definitely not,’ said Finn firmly. ‘I don’t want to be at your mercy. At least not any more than I am already. More tea?’

  ‘I want to play chest.’

  It was Elsie, her drawing finished or abandoned.

  ‘Chess,’ I said. ‘All right. What is this piece called?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘How can you remember all those moves?’ Finn asked.

  ‘Because I’m interested in them.’

  ‘My memory is totally useless.’

  ‘I doubt that. Let me show you something. Choose seven or eight objects from the room and tell us what they are.’

  After Finn had done that, we sent her out of the room for a couple of minutes, then called her back. She squatted back down on the floor with Elsie and me.

  ‘All right, Elsie, what were they?’

  Elsie closed her eyes and wrinkled her forehead and her little round nose.

  ‘It was a chess piece… and a cup… and a lamp… and a picture of a sheep and a pink felt-tip and a yellow felt-tip… and Fing’s shoes and Mummy’s watch.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ I said.

  ‘That’s pretty good for a five-year-old, isn’t it?’ Finn said. ‘How did she do that?’

  ‘She practises,’ I said. ‘Centuries ago, remembering things was an art that people used to learn. The way you do it is to have a building in your mind, and you put things in different places in the building, and when you want to remember them, you go into the building – in your mind’s eye – and retrieve the objects.’

  ‘What do you have, Elsie?’ Finn asked.

  ‘I’ve got my special house,’ Elsie said.

  ‘So where was the chess piece?’

  ‘On the front door.’

  ‘And where was the cup?’

  ‘On the doormat.’

  ‘How did anybody ever think of doing that?’ Finn asked.

  ‘There’s an old story about that,’ I said. ‘A sort of myth. In Ancient Greece a poet was reciting at a banquet. Before the end of the feast, the poet was called away, and a few minutes later the banqueting hall collapsed and everybody was killed. The corpses were so badly damaged that the next of kin couldn’t recognize them and claim them for burial. But the poet was able to remember where everybody had been silting, and because of that he could identify all the bodies. The poet remembered all the guests because he had seen them in a particular location, and he realized that this could be a means of remembering anything.’

  Finn’s face was pensive now.

  ‘Memory and death,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t dare to wander in the house of my own mind. I’d be frightened of what I might find there.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ Elsie said proudly. ‘My house is safe.’

  I stayed up till late. No Danny.

  Sixteen

  The next
evening I went to what Michael Daley had called a social occasion when he invited me to accompany him. ‘You wanted me to launch you into local society,’ he said, so I had to be a sport and say yes.

  I pulled garments from their hangers and tossed them on to the bed. There was a long maroon woollen dress with a high waist that I liked, but it seemed too sombre. I rejected a couple of black miniskirts, the delicate blue dress with the soft neckline and three-quarter-length sleeves that I never threw away and never wore, the loose silk black trousers that had started to resemble pyjamas, and finally put on a black voile top and calf-length satin skirt. I pulled out my favourite black shoes with no heel (I tower over most men anyway) and a clunky silver buckle, and hung ear-rings on my lobes in a jangle of hot colour. Then I examined myself in the mirror; I didn’t look very respectable. I put on no make-up, except for a slash of red on my lips to match my hair. I pulled Finn’s trilby from the top of the wardrobe and jammed it on my head. I wished it was Danny taking me to this party; without him, I was dressed up and stepping on to the set of the wrong play. Where was Danny now? I had swallowed my pride and tried to telephone him, but there had been no reply, not even his voice on the answering machine telling me he wasn’t there but would ring me back as soon as he could.

  Elsie was already asleep in a nest of duvet. I knelt beside her and breathed in her clean fragrance: her breath smelled of hay and her hair of clover. My hat touched her on the shoulder and she grimaced in her sleep and curled up on her side, muttering something which I couldn’t catch. Her paintings were stuck all around her room, more every day. Rainbows; and people with arms and legs coming out of their bulbous heads, eyes askew; animals with five legs; daubs of violent colour. Finn had labelled each picture neatly with Elsie’s name and the date she had drawn it. Sometimes there was a title: one, a scribble of purple with eyes and hands adrift in the chaos of colour, was called ‘Mummy at work’. It occurred to me that if I died now Elsie would have no real memory of me. She’d miss Finn when the time came for her to go, but she’d get over it quickly.