Last Act of All
Page 25
Her lovely blaze was dying now, and with it her brief pleasure. There had been a strange comfort in the leaping flames, and she would have loved to go on feeding its ravenous appetite, but somehow she did not quite dare. What if her father noticed the bare tree, or asked to see her present? She didn’t think he would, but she cast a lingering glance at the ashes of her fire then drifted aimlessly out of the room.
Her purged stomach was empty and uncomfortable, so she went to look for food. Breakfast lay, in a pool of cold fat, on the kitchen table, so, though it was not yet ten o’clock, she went to the oven and took out the Christmas lunch which had been left for her. It was burning round the edges already, gluey gravy baked on to the plate, turkey dry and brussels sprouts brown, but she ate it indifferently, and the plum pudding with thick custard.
When it was finished, she rose to wander restlessly about the house. Upstairs, her own room felt cold and unfriendly; even the familiar Raggedy Ann doll that always slept in her bed seemed to look back at her with a dead, fixed stare.
On her little desk by the window, there was a book, covered in pale blue suede. ‘My diary’, its cover said in gold, and it had been in her Christmas stocking last year.
She opened it and looked at the entries, frequent to start with, then more sporadic, then, eloquently, missing. She took out the gold pen from its slot at the side, sat down and turned to the date which was burned in her mind.
‘Mommy died on this day,’ she wrote in her unformed hand,’ and I wish I could be dead too.’
She wrote for some time, with concentration, over several pages. But then there was nothing more to say, and she put back the pen and closed the book.
It was ten forty-five when she settled down in front of the television. She did not move. She did not smile at the massed talents of British television comedy. Perhaps she did not hear. The telephone rang, once; she listened to it echoing through the empty house but did not try to answer it, and soon it stopped.
Somehow the hours passed. Once she fetched biscuits and milk, then sat down again to watch the flickering black-and-white shadows that helped keep panic at bay.
For outside, it was getting dark. All day it had snowed, and now the wind was howling in earnest. The house was stirring and muttering to itself in the gale.
As the light faded, the shadows in the corners of the big room seemed, eerily, to thicken and encroach, and although she was not cold, she felt a shiver run up her spine. Was there someone – something – over there, behind the big armchair?
Suddenly, into her head came the vicar’s words to her on that dreadful day when they had put Mommy in a box in the ground. ‘Your mother isn’t really gone,’ he had said, patting her shoulder. ‘Your mother will always be watching over you.’
For the first time, she thought of her mother, not as an aching absence in her life, but as a dead person, a creature with strange powers she had not possessed in life. What if she came now, dead and with long bony fingers, to carry away the daughter she had loved to be with her for ever in some place of blackness and shadows where everyone else was dead too?
She shoved her knuckles into her mouth to stop herself from screaming. It was better to be silent, motionless, in the weird glow of the television screen than to get up to turn on the light. Light might chase away the shadows – but what might remain when the shadows fled? Cramped and rigid, barely daring to breathe, she sat huddled in her chair, glassily unseeing in an interminable torture of terror.
It seemed a long, long time later that at last she heard a taxi coming up the drive. With frantic energy she leaped from her chair, ran out of the room and downstairs to see, miraculously, her father, not Mrs Beally, climbing out.
‘Daddy, Daddy!’ she shrieked, throwing herself at him as he opened the front door, desperate for his protection and assurance that now everything would be all right.
But Daddy hardly seemed to see her. Looking over her head he detached the clinging arms and put her inexorably aside.
‘For God’s sake, not now,’ he groaned, and reaching his study like a wounded animal crawling to its lair, he shut the door on the stricken child.
***
It was from Mrs Beally the next morning that she learned of her brother’s death in an avalanche.
‘Your pa went off to Austria first thing. You’ll need to be good now, because there’ll be a lot to do, people coming for the funeral, I don’t doubt.’
She did not mention the day before. The child could not.
The night before Gervase’s funeral, Giles sat at his desk with his papers before him, but gazing over them unseeing to the framed snapshots of his son, his hair tousled from running, and his wife, her mouth in its sweet curve, her blonde curly hair springing back strongly from the smooth brow. The picture of his daughter as a baby he did not even see.
As he looked bleakly at Melody’s smiling face, his hand dropped from the side of his chair and rested, for an incredulous moment, on her soft curls. He came to himself with a cry, and looked down on a smaller head, then into the pleading upturned face of his daughter.
It was too much; he could not bear it.
‘Get out!’ he said with barely suppressed violence. ‘Get out, and for God’s sake never do that again.’
And the child fled.
She was only nine years old, but she had learned already the futility of tears. She had learned that nothing was too bad to happen, and that she could trust no one. She had learned, too early, the frightful truth that we are all of us, in the end, alone.
She had not learned yet that life went on, and they could patch you up so effectively that no one would realize that inside, somewhere, you had been warped and twisted to destruction.
She seemed entirely calm by the time she reached her room. She went over to the desk and picked up, once more, the blue suede diary. Sitting in her chair she read, quite slowly, what she had written, and took up the pen again to add another half page. Then she picked up a crayon, and solemnly, meticulously, coloured every remaining page black until she reached the end of the book.
***
Time passed and agony faded, as it does. She worked hard at creating the shell to cover her scars, pretty and smooth and fragile as a robin’s egg. She grew up, she found friends, and she had a step-mother – another doctor – who was kindly, if detached. She married young.
She left Missy behind, long-forgotten in the mists of a childhood she never chose to recall. But Missy did not go away. Missy waited, silent in the shadowy corners of her mind, for the crack made by some blow of fate through which she could emerge, full-fledged, in a form older, stronger, and more evil still.