The Woman In the Mirror

by Rebecca James

In a distant recess, he calls for me. The man I love calls for us both, Laura and me, and I sense him in another place, close by, far away, and I long for him to rescue me. My tears fall but often I get the better of them. I am stronger than this. My only rescue is here, in this room, with them. My only rescue watches me each day, and I it, contemplating which will move first. The life inside me is all that stops me climbing inside. You see, I think the women want it. I think they mean to take my child.

  Come to us. You will be safe.

  But my safety is with him.

  Jonathan…

  His name is a lost language, one I spoke for the shortest time. When I wonder at how he can keep me here, locked in this room, I tear my hair and batter the floor and howl like a dog. Do they hear my howls? They must, as I thrash the door, stupid girl, silly girl, thinking things that are not real. The creepers are real. The climbers are real. I could reach in and take one – there! I did it. It is heavier and greasier than I thought, wet as a snake and rough as rope. They would hear me if I did this.

  They would hear you then. And I take the weed in my hands and close my eyes and let it wind around my throat. I am ready. I will do what I must.

  In my mind I open the door that Mrs Rackstile locked. Then I am crawling through this big, big house, crawling as swift as clouds across a wind-blown sky. I try to catch one, my feet and palms flat on the floor, try to bite it; it skitters into a corner. Why so secretive? That is what they say about me. They keep me inside, all day, behind windows, a prisoner. Sky is purple. Bats swoop. Outside, a lone star blinks.

  In my mind I travel to the place where it happened, the place to which the girl Constance walks in her sleep, the hallway beneath the hook, and I look up at the hook and I see it clearly, as if it is real. I touch it, this special place. Where Laura died… In my mind I feel them pull me back, pull my ankles, but I will not let them take me. My fingernails dig into wood, scratch until they bleed. I see the blood and struggle from the ones that went before, the marks they have made, and mine fit perfectly into those grooves, feeling my way through a space I know well. It is where I need to be, deep down there in the wood where they can’t find me. And then I reach it. The dark spot, climbing up through the floor: it is beneath the floor, yet part of it, yet beyond it, all at once! It makes me spiral to think of it. I turn my head, winding it to the ceiling, like a cat with its neck twisted wrong. A storm is coming. I can tell by the sigh of the sea, its grey-green swell as it foams against the cliffs. It is a mad sea.

  In my mind, I climb. Quiet. Quiet. Listen again. They have gone. It is just you and me now. I had better hurry, before they catch me once more.

  I attach the rope to the hook.

  I stare down at my pale feet. The moon peers in. I am not in the hallway at all, but still inside my room as I always have been, bolted inside.

  Now, I will escape. I tighten the loop. It was always going to come to this. Just as Laura let go of her life, for the next would surely be kinder. She kicked the stool from beneath her toes and choked and bucked and kicked to her death.

  Years ago I wrote my fate – and now is the time to meet it.

  Chapter 35

  Alice, Warwick, 1936

  He was Head of English. He had taught me my favourite poems. ‘Crossing the Bar’. ‘The Raven’. ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’. It wasn’t supposed to happen, although, as I supposed often in those days, it was inevitable that it had.

  We lay in the music school on a Thursday night, his arms round me, his chest rising and falling and covered in the lightest sheen of sweat. We were surrounded by moon-bathed pianos and it seemed plausible that, against the drumbeat of my heart, they could start up together in chorus. Anything to drown out my thumping pulse, for that was what his proximity did to me: a seventeen-year-old virgin from Surrey who had only kissed one boy before and he was her second cousin.

  ‘I hope to see my pilot face to face…’

  That had been the moment. I had been sitting in English, gazing up at him reading Tennyson. We had all been excited at the arrival of the handsome young substitute teacher, Robert Francis, with his wavy golden hair and soft, melodic voice that could easily have belonged to Romeo or Fitzwilliam Darcy. Ginny Pettifer had worn a faint coat of lipstick, and crossed her legs and re-crossed her legs.

  He’d looked at me as he had spoken that last line. As if I was his pilot, and here we were, face to face, and the rest would happen whether we liked it or not.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ Robert said now, kissing me.

  For the first time, I believed him. I felt like a woman, not a girl. No more would I have to linger on the periphery of conversations between Ginny and her clique, listening to them sharing exploits of the boys they had sneaked out of Burstead to meet. Why did I know with certainty that I could never do such a thing – that, even if I dared, I would be discovered by the housemistress and hauled to judgement in my father’s court? Girls like Ginny would never be caught. They had the magic.

  Tonight, though, I had the magic. It was incredible to think of Ginny and her crowd in their dormitories, ignorant in sleep, while I lay naked next to Mr Francis in Practice Room 3, flushed and delirious after what we had done. The carpet was scratchy beneath my back. I kept thinking I heard a noise, a creak of steps or a tap at the window. Each time I startled, he stroked my hair. ‘What are you afraid of?’ he asked.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid?’

  ‘Not with you.’ His face was obscured by the night. Yet I felt his yearning like heat. He had so much more to lose than I did – his job, his reputation; he could go to prison for violating his position. But he was like Romeo, in that respect. He believed in love, as I did. Nothing could stand in the path of the real thing.

  ‘I wish we weren’t here,’ I whispered.

  Robert raised himself on one elbow; he resembled a marble statue of a nude one might find in an Italian piazza. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘It feels good to me.’

  ‘Have you done this before?’

  There was humour in his voice. ‘Does it seem as if I haven’t?’

  ‘I don’t mean that… I mean, with a student. A girl like me.’

  ‘There aren’t any girls like you, Alice Miller. And no, as it happens, I haven’t. Believe it or not, I’ve built my career on the utmost professionalism.’

  ‘I do believe it.’

  He stroked my knee with his thumb. ‘I’m not telling you off, Alice.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You sound contrite, as if I’m telling you off. I’m not.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I think you assume that everybody’s telling you off. I’m not your father. I’m here to care for you, not to punish you.’

  ‘He would punish me if he found out.’

  ‘Nobody will find out.’

  ‘How can you know?’

  ‘Because some things are divine, Alice. You’re divine. We’re divine.’

  ‘He’d kill me. He would. He’d sooner I was dead than this.’

  Robert’s head bowed. ‘I could strangle him,’ he said, ‘for what he’s put you through. Yet I must sit opposite him on parents’ evening and shake his dirty hand – hands I know have caused you pain. I’d hope for him to find out about us, if only to give him the heart attack he deserves.’

  The thought churned my stomach. ‘It would be terrible. My life wouldn’t be worth living. I – I’d have to leave. I’d have to run away.’

  ‘We could run away together. Shall we? After your exams are over?’

  I pulled him towards me and met his lips with mine. This was what love felt like, then, in a lifetime deprived of it. Burstead, for all its unhappiness, had at last delivered. All my hopes and imaginings weren’t nonsense, as my father liked to tell me. Robert was my hero, my confidante, but he was also my protest against the institution of Burstead and the institution of my parents, inside neither of which I had flourished. My affair with my teacher was my secret and I protected it at all costs,
enjoying the power it placed in my hands, power over my contemporaries and power over my weak mother and terrible father, with whom I was forced to reacquaint at exeats. When I was teased or taunted, I had only to think of being in Robert’s arms, his kiss on my neck, open to him, adoring him, and none of it touched me.

  What did he see in me? I tried not to wonder, tried not to ask, for I knew it made me unattractive. Robert said he was captivated by my flair for writing and invention, those very things my father had put down as the products of a nervous disposition, an ailment that needed to be cured. I shouldn’t have told Robert about the misery of my life at home but I had no one else to confide in. And the more I told him, the more he seemed to love me and protect me, which was what I craved.

  ‘I would like nothing more,’ I replied as he kissed me again. I was already dreaming of a train cabin in a far-flung mountain range, Robert at my side, thousands of miles from the house in Surrey or the clinical, corrective corridors of this austere boarding school. So long as we could keep our secret, the world could be ours.

  *

  I hated swimming. The stuffy, chlorinated pool was the scene of torturous galas, wicked clans of girls screaming from the sides with their polished ponytails and tightly clenched fists. Next week was the annual end-of-year swim race, an event I dreaded. I dreaded it more extremely this year because Robert would be watching, and I didn’t want him to see me come in last again. In order to alleviate the usual humiliation, I had taken to racing lengths against the clock in my evenings. I found the exercise a distraction from thoughts of Robert, wondering about his home five miles from here and when I might have opportunity to visit, wondering what he was doing or who he was with, though he assured me his life was uneventful away from me: he would be marking papers and trying not to think about our time together.

  I was so lost in these thoughts that it came as a shock when I surfaced at the deep end and saw Ginny Pettifer looking down at me from the poolside. Her arms were folded and she wore a triumphant smirk. I assumed she was anticipating my ritual embarrassment at the gala, and how her team would trounce mine ten to one.

  ‘Hullo, Alice Miller,’ she said.

  I felt vulnerable in my bathing costume. Now I had stopped, goosebumps appeared on my skin. The water lapped against the sides. Ginny’s eyes gleamed.

  Evening was creeping in outside. Normally I embraced the loneliness of having the pool to myself, everyone else in prep or gossiping in dorms, but with Ginny it felt ominous. I removed my swimming cap and waded to the metal ladder.

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ said Ginny. She stood with her weight on one hip, playful, victorious. ‘And you’ll want to hear what I have to say.’

  I climbed out and tried to move past her. But she grabbed my arm, hard.

  ‘Could we speak in the changing rooms?’ I said. ‘It’s cold.’

  ‘We can speak here,’ said Ginny.

  ‘At least – my towel—’

  ‘I would have thought you were used to being naked in public places.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Come along, Alice. I know. I saw you. With him.’

  Her expression was the very worst thing, utterly malignant. She tittered, let go of my arm because she knew I was rooted to the spot. She had me on a pin.

  ‘The gold bracelet did it,’ Ginny said, her lips parting so I saw her pretty white teeth. ‘You’ve been hiding it under your pillow. But I saw it. I knew it was from a man; I could tell. And I thought, who’d be interested in plain old Alice? I have to say you astounded me. I don’t know why he’s attracted to you. He could have anyone.’

  I said nothing, conceded nothing. I was frozen, but feared that shivering would be an admission. I thought of the times we might have been careless, his fingers brushing mine in class or his voice when he acknowledged me in the corridor. I should have known that Ginny was the type to notice. I’d always assumed I was invisible to her, too ordinary to bother with. But I was her sport. Of course I was visible.

  ‘Oh, Alice,’ she singsonged, ‘it’s all going to end so very badly, don’t you know? I’m going to tell everyone. I can’t wait to see their reactions. I wonder what Mr Prendergast will say? Or Miss Holkham? Ooh – and what about your parents?’

  ‘Ginny,’ I spluttered, ‘please—’

  ‘Please what? Don’t say anything? Well, I haven’t so far, and let me tell you it’s taken all I’ve got. I’m amazed I’ve been able to do it, in fact. It’s been very tempting to blurt it to the girls and have a nice chinwag at your expense. But I wanted to see what you had to say first. Whether you admit it. You do admit it, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s not what you think.’

  ‘What is it, then?’ Her eyes widened. ‘He didn’t force you, did he?’

  ‘God, no, I love him!’

  There it was: the consent. When Ginny said, ‘My, my, a love affair between a teacher and a student, what will everyone say?’ I didn’t have it in me to deny it.

  ‘I must admit,’ said Ginny, ‘I’ve quite enjoyed carrying this scandal around with me, privately, as I’m sure you have too.’

  ‘It will be the end of him,’ I forced out. ‘And the end of me.’

  ‘Which do you care about more?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you care about Mr Francis more than yourself?’ She sniggered. ‘Mr Francis, do you call him that? Or do you call him Robert? Oh, Robert!’ she trilled.

  I charged towards the changing rooms. My vision was distorted and I felt as if I would fall. Ginny couldn’t tell. I couldn’t let her. Robert was the only thing in my life that was valuable. My father’s anger was enough to make me vomit. I swallowed. I thought I would collapse. I put my hand out to one of the benches to steady myself.

  ‘Come back here, Alice.’

  I stopped, turned to plead with her. ‘Ginny, I’m begging you. I’ll do anything.’

  ‘Mmm,’ she smiled, ‘that does sound appealing. But listen, Alice, I’ve thought about all the things you could possibly do for me, and, well, there really isn’t anything that pleases me so much as the prospect of sharing your secret.’

  ‘Ginny, please—’

  ‘I’ve heard what a monster your daddy is. I wonder what he’ll do? It’ll be awfully fun finding out, won’t it? Unless you’d rather tell him yourself, which I suppose is your only option. But you’d better be quick about it, Alice.’

  I watched her. She was close to the edge of the pool, her back to the water, that unbearable look of glee scratched across her face. Your only option…

  Was it?

  I stopped shivering; my teeth stopped chattering. Perhaps Ginny sensed some change in me, some primitive part of her wise enough in all her stupidity to recognise that the authority in that moment had shifted. You’d better be quick about it, Alice.

  I was quick. I closed the space between us in three steps and pushed her in.

  I didn’t know what I expected to happen. All I wanted was to hurt her and to give her a shock. But my strength surprised me. I shoved her hard – harder than I’d intended. Later, I would rationalise that I expected Ginny to splutter through the surface seconds later, damp and furious, and that even if it all came out afterwards and my nightmares were realised, at least I had claimed my petty vengeance against the girl I detested. But it didn’t happen like that. It didn’t happen like that at all.

  She must have fallen wrong. She must have slipped, maybe in trying to resist me, because she didn’t fall straight in. Instead her head hit the side of the pool, and it must have been hard because I heard a crack before she tumbled backwards into the water. A fountain of red billowed from her head. She held one arm out for help, half-heartedly because she had lost command of it, and I did nothing. Her stunned eyes stared up at the ceiling, blinking slowly like someone trying not to fall asleep, until after a second they glazed over, like the milky eyes of a whole dead fish I once saw on a plate in a restaurant. Just like that, it was over. So quick, and even through my addled shock
I thought this seemed unfeasibly easy, to kill someone by accident.

  ‘Ginny,’ I whispered, but I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do what I ought to have done. I didn’t crouch down and put my hand out and help her. It was too late, anyway.

  I watched, transfixed. The clock above the pool continued turning. The ceiling lights continued their harsh buzz. I was dripping; I could feel cold water snaking down my back between my shoulder blades. My mind was blank. If I jumped in now, made an attempt, at least, to repent, it would work out better for me in the long run.

  But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  I can get away with this, I thought instead. Pretend I was never here. I had told no one I was at the pool, and my unpopularity ensured that no one would ask. I turned my back and went to the changing rooms and dried myself off slowly, thinking about how, tomorrow morning, when this shocking accident was revealed, I’d pretend to be as sad and scared and confused as everyone else. Poor Ginny. But she’d always been wayward, hadn’t she? Drinking with boys at exeat, stealing from her parents, defying the teachers… It had been only a matter of time before she came undone. Already I anticipated the discourse that would come out of her tragic demise. I was good at pretending, always had been. I returned to my dormitory and slept soundly that night.

  Chapter 36

  London, present day

  Paddington Station was busy, teeming with commuters and tourists. Rachel moved through like a swimmer against the tide, not quite in sync with the usual pulse and rhythm of things after her Polcreath quarantine. It seemed years ago, not weeks, since she had last been here. Travellers scrolled their tablets, watching the ever-flickering departure boards; echoey messages were read out over an announcement system; queues lined up at the ticket office; people babbled into phones or browsed card stalls.

  She took the Underground to King’s Cross and headed to the British Library. Inside it was quietly studious, with the lovely old smell of books and concentration, the richness of learning for learning’s sake. She hoped she would be learning today.